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This study investigates the development of metalinguistic skills, particularly ambiguity detection, and whether training accelerates this development for prereaders in kindergarten (5;5-6;6). It is the first to compare homophone detection with lexically ambiguous sentence detection in which the same homophones appear. The experimental group received ambiguity detection training; the control group received vocabulary training. Results showed that there is a spontaneous development of homophone detection abilities at the end of kindergarten, and training may accelerate this trajectory. The development of lexical ambiguity detection is not apparent in kindergarteners. However, explicit training improves this trajectory significantly. The knowledge of both meanings of a homophone is not sufficient to report both meanings of a sentence that contains that homophone. We propose that detecting the dual meanings of an ambiguous sentence involves sentence processing operations and an ability to think flexibly about language that may be enhanced with training.

There is general agreement that stuttering is caused by a variety of factors, and language formulation and speech motor control are two important factors that have been implicated in previous research, yet the exact nature of their effects is still not well understood. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that sentences of high structural complexity would incur greater processing costs than sentences of low structural complexity and these costs would be higher for adults who stutter than for adults who do not stutter. Fluent adults and adults who stutter participated in an experiment that required memorization of a sentence classified as low or high structural complexity followed by production of that sentence upon a visual cue. Both groups of speakers initiated most sentences significantly faster in the low structural complexity condition than in the high structural complexity condition. Adults who stutter were over-all slower in speech initiation than were fluent speakers, but there were no significant interactions between complexity and group. However, adults who stutter produced significantly more disfluencies in sentences of high structural complexity than in those of low complexity. Educational objectives: After reading this article, the learner will be able to: (a) identify integral parts of all well-known models of adult sentence production; (b) summarize the way that sentence structure might negatively influence the speech production processes; (c) discuss whether sentence structure influences speech initiation time and disfluencies. (Contains 4 tables.)

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the stories, overt pronouns in same-reference were redundant, and null pronouns in switch-reference rendered reference ambiguous. Adult participants preferred null pronouns in same-reference contexts and overt pronouns in switch-reference contexts, demonstrating an avoidance of redundancy and ambiguity. Children demonstrated a tolerance for redundancy well into adolescence. A tolerance for ambiguous reference declined at age eight/nine and then progressively decreased with age. We interpret the tolerance for ambiguity as an indication that children have difficulty with perspective taking when faced with complex structures and tasks. (Contains 1 figure, 8 tables, and 20 footnotes.)

Conflicting reports of language ability in Williams syndrome (WS) are confusing and may hinder accurate clinical decisions with respect to therapeutic services and educational placements for children with WS.This longitudinal case study examined the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense verbs in a child with WS. The development of regular and irregular verbs was monitored using an elicited production task, supplemented with informal language samples and a grammaticality judgment task. The authors found an unusual profile of regular and irregular past tense use that both approximated and diverged from normal expectations at various stages. The unusual pattern of past tense acquisition is presented in its relation to other language problems known with regard to WS. Clinical implications for assessment and intervention are discussed. (Contains 4 tables.)

Purpose: To test the hypotheses that adults who stutter will be slower in producing syntactically complex sentences than fluent adults and will benefit more from sentence-structure priming than will fluent adults. Method: Adults who stutter (n = 15) and fluent adults (n = 15) participated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, adults in both groups were administered a task that required memorization and production of sentences that varied in syntactic complexity. The same individuals who participated in Experiment 1 also participated in Experiment 2. The second experiment required all participants to create and produce sentences under primed and unprimed sentence-structure conditions. Results: Relative to adults who do not stutter, the speech initiation time of fluent utterances of adults who stutter became increasingly slower as syntactic complexity increased, and they exhibited greater facilitative effects of sentence-structure priming. In addition, adults who stutter showed a significant correlation between syntactic complexity and priming facilitation. Conclusion: Data from these experiments confirmed both hypotheses and provided evidence that a subgroup of adults who stutter have grammatical encoding differences when compared with adults who do not stutter.

This study was designed to determine the contributions of metalinguistic skill and psycholinguistic processing ability to children's ability to detect the ambiguity of sentences and the relationship among all three factors to early reading ability. A total of 20 first graders and 20 second graders were given tasks testing the following abilities: ambiguity detection, conservation, lexical processing, and reading comprehension. Although intercorrelations among all four tasks were highly significant, regression analyses indicate independent contributions of processing and metalinguistic skills to ambiguity detection, which is, in turn, the sole predictor of reading comprehension. A developmental sequence is hypothesized. The authors suggest that ambiguity detection can be used to identify children who are at risk for reading failure and that training in ambiguity detection can be used in reading-readiness training and as an intervention tool. (Contains 2 tables.)

An experiment examined whether metalinguistic awareness involving the detection of semantic ambiguity can be taught, and whether this instruction improves students' reading comprehension. Lower SES third graders from a variety of cultural backgrounds (M = 8 yr. 7 mo., N = 46) were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Those receiving metalinguistic ambiguity instruction learned to analyze multiple meanings of words and sentences in isolation, in riddles, and in text taken from the Amelia Bedelia series (Parish, 1979, 1988). The control group received a book reading and discussion treatment to provide special attention and to rule out Hawthorne effects. Results showed that metalinguistic ambiguity instruction was effective in teaching students to identify multiple meanings of homonyms and ambiguous sentences and to detect inconsistencies in text. Moreover, this training enhanced students' reading comprehension on a paragraph completion task (WRMT-R) but not on a multiple-choice passage recall task (GMRT4), possibly because the two tests differ in the array of linguistic or cognitive correlates influencing performance. Comprehension monitoring was not found to mediate the relationship between ambiguity instruction and reading comprehension. Results carry implications for the use of language-based methods to improve reading comprehension in the classroom. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)

Seventy-seven 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children were presented with well-formed and ill-formed versions of 10 different sentence types. They were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences and correct the ill-formed ones. The sentences were presented in an interview format, developed by McDaniel and Cairns (1990, 1996). Both grammaticality judgment and correction ability improved with age. It is argued that the ability to make grammaticality judgments and to correct ill-formed sentences reflects the child's developing ability to access syntactic knowledge consciously and to employ that knowledge in the processing of sentences.

The authors of this article report on a preliminary study of 18, 4- and 5-year-old children, followed by a longitudinal study of 44 children, who were tested in the first, second, and third grades. The children's ability to detect the ambiguity of lexically ambiguous sentences (e. g., "The children saw the bat lying by the fence") and structurally ambiguous sentences (e. g., "The girl tickled the baby with the teddy bear") was assessed in the preliminary study and in Experiments 1 and 2, which were conducted when the children were in the first and second grades, respectively. Ambiguity detection skill was found to be related to first-grade reading readiness and to second- and third-grade reading achievement. The results suggest that the detection of lexical ambiguity develops in first grade, correlates highly with reading readiness measures, and is a strong predictor of second grade reading ability, indicating that it is a precursor of reading skill. In this study, the ability to detect structural ambiguity emerged in second grade and was a predictor of third-grade reading ability. Clinical implications for the use of ambiguity detection tasks to identify children who are at risk for reading difficulty are discussed.

A study of linguistic judgment tasks and lexical decision tasks among English-German bilinguals supports the hypotheses that bilinguals have knowledge of two sets of phonotactic constraints, and that both sets of constraints are simultaneously available to the individual during language processing. (MSE)

An experiment examined whether metalinguistic awareness involving the detection of semantic ambiguity can be taught and whether this instruction improves students' reading comprehension. Lower socioeconomic status third graders (M age = 8 years, 7 months) from a variety of cultural backgrounds (N = 46) were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Those receiving metalinguistic ambiguity instruction learned to analyze multiple meanings of words and sentences in isolation, in riddles, and in text taken from the Amelia Bedelia series (Parish, 1979, 1988). The control group received a book-reading and discussion treatment to provide special attention and to rule out Hawthorne effects. Results showed that metalinguistic ambiguity instruction was effective in teaching students to identify multiple meanings of homonyms and ambiguous sentences and to detect inconsistencies in text. Moreover, this training enhanced students' reading comprehension on a paragraph-completion task but not on a multiple-choice passage-recall task, possibly because the two tests differ in the array of linguistic or cognitive correlates influencing performance. Comprehension monitoring was not found to mediate the relationship between ambiguity instruction and reading comprehension. Results carry implications for the use of language-based methods to improve reading comprehension in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resistance of high-frequency linguistic elements to aphasic impairment suggests that frequency of occurrence may be implicated in verb use differences in agrammatic aphasia. The highly-inflected Spanish verb system allows for the examination of frequency of occurrence along two main metrics, daily usage frequency and paradigmatic frequency. In this study, we explored the role of those two frequency dimensions in verb repetition by Spanish speakers with agrammatism. Six native Spanish-speaking individuals with agrammatic oral expression were matched for age, education and Spanish dialect with six speakers with typical language. The speakers participated in a sentence repetition task involving simple verb tenses. Results revealed that high frequency in daily usage can have a stronger facilitating effect on verb repetition than paradigmatic frequency. Theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed to highlight some plausible repercussions of typical discourse patterns in providing a socio-cognitive dimension to agrammatism theory and in supporting the use of frequency-based linguistic features in agrammatism therapy.