There has been a growing trend in recent years toward the attribution of adultlike syntactic categories to young, language-learning children. This has derived support from studies which claim to have found positive evidence for syntactic categories in the speech of young children (e.g., Valian, 1986). However, these claims contradict the findings of previous research which have suggested that the categories underlying children's early multiword speech are much more limited in scope (e.g., Braine, 1976). The present study represents an attempt to differentiate and test these models of early multiword speech: focusing on the syntactic category of determiner, we investigated the extent to which 11 children showed overlap in the contexts in which they used different determiner types in their early multiword corpora. The results demonstrated that, although children do use determiners with a semantically heterogeneous collection of different noun types, there is very little evidence that they know anything about the relationship between the different determiner types, and thus there is no real case for the attribution of a syntactic determiner category. Indeed, this pattern of determiner use seems perfectly consistent with a limited-scope formula account of children's early multiword speech, as proposed by Braine (1976). These findings suggest that the development of an adultlike determiner category may be a gradual process, one involving the progressive broadening of the range of lexically specific frames in which different determiners appear, and are broadly consistent with a number of recent constructivist models of children's early grammatical development.

The word recognition processes of proficient bilinguals were examined in their mother tongue (Greek) and in English in relation to the linguistic and syntactic characteristics along which the two languages differ. Their processes were then compared with those of monolingual readers.The following issues were addressed: the nature of bilingual functioning, whether it is language specific, and the factors that affect second language reading development. These issues were examined within the context of a letter cancellation paradigm. The results indicated that bilingual readers performed differently in each of their two languages, conforming more the monolingual patterns in their mother tongue than to those in their second language. This discrepancy was interpreted as a lack of coordination of different word recognition skills in the second language.

A new procedure called single-word shadowing was applied to the study of lexical access in context. Subjects listened to word pairs or sentences recorded in one voice and were asked to repeat the target word signaled by a voice shift. This technique yielded rapid and robust priming effects in normal adult subjects in word pairs and in a sentence context. Regression analyses showed that the semantic priming effects were large and significant, even when several additional factors believed to affect lexical access were controlled. Evidence was found for robust semantic priming in the healthy elderly and in children from 7 to 11 years of age, and there was also evidence for a change in the size and nature of context effects across the lifespan. Because single-word shadowing works across a broad age range and does not require reading, secondary tasks, or metalinguistic judgments, it is a promising tool for the study of lexical access in a range of different populations.

The relationship between pragmatic referential communication skill and the cognitive ability to assess and assume another person's conceptual viewpoint was investigated in the autistic population. Ten high functioning autistic adolescents and young adults were matched for age and sex to normally developing controls and given referential communication and perspectivetaking tasks that had been previously demonstrated to be of comparable complexity. The groups were selected to be similar in terms of language skill.But despite their intact, elementary perspective-taking skills, the autistic subjects displayed significant communicative dysfunction. This suggests that factors other than a deficiency in the development of a “theory of mind” are significant contributors to the social communicative disorder associated with autism.

Preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) and two groups of children developing language normally (age-equivalent and MLU-equivalent) described motion and change-ofstate scenes while viewing a video program in a controlled experimental setting.Patterns of verb use were then analyzed across the three groups of children. Two findings were of particular interest. First, while the children with SLI relied heavily on the use of general all-purpose (GAP) verbs while describing the video scenes, the normally developing children produced an even higher percentage of CAP verbs. Second, the children with SLI made significantly more semantic errors in verb use. Unlike the normally developing children, the children with SLI were much more likely to produce a change-of-state verb. Hence, they produced cross-domain errors for motion-eliciting scenes (e.g., a moving figure was said to be “cracking” or “changing color”) and within-domain errors for change-of-state-eliciting scenes (e.g., a figure changing shape was said to be “changing to green”).

This article introduces, illustrates, and discusses a method for measuring the attrition of communicative competence using data from spontaneous, freestyle, multiperson conversations. The illustration is based on speech production data of Spanish L3 subjects' from Ghana. The method involves the creation of a multiple-factor (composite) index using defined temporal variables, frequency counts of selected verbal behaviors, and grammatical information; it can be used to measure either the rate of attrition or its reverse, which, for lack of a better term, is called the “accumulation of competence.”