This longitudinal study examined the relationship between kindergarten word writing andgrade 1 literacy in a large sample of Israeli children. In kindergarten, a majority of childrenproduced writing which displayed most of the graphospatial characteristics of conventional wordwriting, although only one-third of the children demonstrated a working knowledge of thealphabetic principle. Kindergarten writing significantly predicted variance in all three measuresof grade 1 literacy (decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension), even after controlling forgeneral intelligence. We also investigated the role of alphabetic skills and socioliteracy variablesin accounting for the predictive power of kindergarten writing. Kindergarten alphabetic skills(phonemic awareness and knowledge of letter names), but not socioliteracy factors (parental printexposure, parents' reading to child, and Clay's Concepts about Print), explained allthe variance contributed by kindergarten writing to grade 1 decoding and spelling. In the case ofreading comprehension, both alphabetic and socioliteracy variables were able to account for thepredictive power of kindergarten writing. As a precursor of reading comprehension, kindergartenwriting appears to reflect both domain-specific alphabetic skills and broader socioliteracy factorsunderlying the higher order cognitive competencies essential for comprehending text.

Studies on the acquisition of a third language (L3) in a bilingual context have shown thatliteracy in two languages facilitates the acquisition of a third (Cenoz & Valencia, 1994;Swain, Lapkin, Rowen, & Hart, 1990). The present study seeks to contribute to this line ofresearch by comparing the acquisition of English as an L3 by Catalan/Spanish bilingual highschool students in an immersion program with the acquisition of English by Spanishmonolinguals. Data from 201 participants were submitted to a hierarchical multiple regressionanalysis, rendering results that show that bilingualism indeed has a positive effect on theacquisition of an L3. The evidence is discussed from a cognitive perspective.

Private speech (PS) – or speech for the self – was studied in preschool-agechildren to determine how widely and with what characteristics it occurs when examined in thefamiliar home setting. Activities were selected that required several steps and that were intendedto engage working memory or longer term recall. Both quantitative (numbers of words andutterances produced) and qualitative (utterance type) analyses were conducted on thechildren's PS. Across the age range from 4 ½ to 6 years, younger children hadhigher frequencies of PS than older children, which fits the predictions made by Vygotsky(1958/1962, 1978). Increased information loads resulted in more PS, indicating a relationbetween PS and task difficulty; however, total quantities of PS were not correlated with degree oftask success. Self-regulatory utterances accounted for 89% of the PS produced; themajority of these utterances involved repetitions of the instructions that appeared to enhancerecall, to help pace the children's activity, or to enable deliberation with respect to makingchoices. There was a strong age trend in which the amount of audible PS decreased with age.Qualitative differences across tasks are presented and considered in relation to how PS functionsfor different activities and possibly achieves adaptive significance.

Goswami and Bryant (1990) proposed a theory of reading development based on three causalconnections. One of these causal connections was based on the relationship between rhymingskills and reading development found in English. To explain this connection, they suggested thatyoung readers of English used analogies based on rimes as one means of deciphering thealphabetic code. This proposal has recently become the subject of some debate. The most seriouscritique has been advanced by Seymour and his colleagues (Duncan, Seymour, & Hill,1997; Seymour & Duncan, 1997; Seymour & Evans, 1994). These authors reported aseries of studies with Scottish schoolchildren which, they claim, show that progression in normalreading acquisition is from a small unit (phonemic) approach in the initial stage to a large unit(rime-based) approach at a later stage. Two experiments are presented which replicate thoseconducted by Seymour and his group with samples of English schoolchildren. Different resultsare found. It is argued that methodological and instructional factors may be very important forthe conceptual interpretation of studies attempting to pit “small” units (phonemes)against “large” units (onsets and rimes) in reading. In particular, it is necessary toconsider whether a given phonological awareness task requires the recognition of sharedphonological segments (“epilinguistic” processing) or the identification andproduction of shared phonological segments (metalinguistic processing). It is also important totake into account the nature of the literacy instruction being implemented in participatingschools. If the phonological aspects of this tuition focus solely on phonemes (small units), thenpoor rime-level (large unit) performance may be found in metalinguistic tasks.

The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a pair of widely usedparent-report instruments for assessing communicative skills in infants and toddlers. This reportdescribes short-form versions of the CDIs and their development, summarizes newly availablenormative data and psychometric properties of the instruments, and discusses research andclinical applications. The infant short form (Level I, for 8- to 18-month-olds) contains an89-word checklist for vocabulary comprehension and production. The two parallel versions ofthe toddler short form (Level II, Forms A and B, for 16- to 30-month-olds) each contain a100-word vocabulary production checklist and a question about word combinations. The formsmay also be useful with developmentally delayed children beyond the specified age ranges.Copies of the short forms and the normative tables appear in the appendices.

In this study we examined the influence of working memory on the off-line and real-timesentence comprehension/processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Atotal of 12 children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for chronological age(CA), and 12 children matched for receptive syntax (RS) completed three tasks. In the workingmemory task, children recalled as many words as possible under three processing load conditionsvarying in the number of mental operations (i.e., no load, single load, dual load). In the off-linecomprehension task, children listened to linguistically nonredundant and redundant sentences. Inthe real-time sentence processing task, children monitored sentences for the occurrence of atarget word appearing at the beginning, middle, or end of a test sentence and pushed a responsepad as quickly as possible upon hearing the target. In the memory task, SLI children recalledfewer words in the dual-load condition relative to CA peers, who showed no condition effect.The SLI and RS groups performed similarly overall; however, both groups recalled fewer wordsin the dual-load condition than in the other conditions. In the off-line task, the SLI groupcomprehended fewer sentences of both types relative to the CA controls and fewer redundantsentences relative to themselves and to the RS controls. A significant correlation betweenworking memory and sentence comprehension was found for the SLI group and control groups.For the on-line task, between-group analyses revealed that the SLI group yielded an overallslower word recognition reaction time than the CA and RS groups. Working memory andsentence processing were not correlated for any group. Results were interpreted to suggest thatSLI children have a more limited functional working memory capacity than their CA peers.Children with SLI also appear to have greater difficulty managing their working memoryresources relative to both age peers and younger children when performing a conventionaloff-line sentence comprehension task but not a real-time sentence processing task.

This book by Carson Schütze poses an important question. Are grammaticalityjudgments a reliable source of data for linguistic theories? Grammaticality judgments, reliable ornot, have been the main, and most often the only, source of data in linguistic theory for manyyears. “‘Because many of the relevant structures are fairly complex and simplymight not arise in the normal course of conversation, or during observation by anexperimenter' (White, 1989, p. 58), UG [Universal Grammar] researchers havegenerally relied on some form of grammaticality judgment (GJ) task” (Katrien &Lantolf, 1992, p. 32). Katrien and Lantolf (1992) pointed out that with this task linguists try todraw on speakers' intuitions about their competence. Grammaticality judgments consist ofquestions about whether a sentence is grammatical according to native speakers. Most often, thenative speaker is the linguist her- or himself as the only subject. Not only can bias exist whenlinguists are the source of data for her or his own theories, but also relying on the intuitions ofonly one speaker limits the credibility of the theory. When more than one speaker is queried, ithas been shown that consistency is not always guaranteed: variation among and within speakersis a common feature in judgments (Mohan, 1977; Snow & Meijer, 1977). Idiosyncrasies ofthe subjects, presentation of the material, and experimenter's procedure are among thefactors that contribute to this variation in judgments. An underlying problem in linguistictheorizing comes from the fact that linguists are normally not “trained in methods forgetting reliable data” (p. 4). All this results in theories that are not adequately supported.Nonetheless, they are used as a springboard for new theories. Schütze provides linguistswith answers to the following questions. What information about language can grammaticalityjudgments offer? What factors affect the form of these judgments? What can be done to make thebest use of these judgments?

In the early 1990s, Lynn Cherny spent much of her time in the MUD – not mired inwet earth, but actively exploring “Multi-User Dungeons.” These “fictionaluniverses with a focus on role-playing,” as they are defined in the Introduction, enablegroups of Internet-connected individuals to assemble in cyberspace, communicating by way ofsequentially typed text. Later, as a doctoral student in linguistics at Stanford, Cherny decided tostudy ethnographically – that is, from the perspective of one methodically anddispassionately observing a different race – the expressive practices of those habituallyusing this strange new modality.

Steven Pinker has written a very lengthy new book that, as the dust cover informs the reader,attempts to do for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 bestseller, TheLanguage Instinct. What The Language Instinct did was to expand on Pinkerand Bloom's (1990) thesis that language is an evolved system, an intricately designed setof mechanisms that must have been shaped by natural selection. What The LanguageInstinct did not do was provide a specific thesis about how language actually evolved. ThatPinker did not provide a theory of actual language origins in his 1994 book is not a weakness.Indeed, Pinker's work has provided a useful rubric for subsequent linguistic theorizing (cf.Hurford, Studdert-Kennedy, & Knight, 1998). It is this directional strategy that also appearsto be at the heart of “how the mind works.” Critically, Pinker wants the reader tothink about three main ideas (see the interview with Pinker in The Evolutionist): (1)computation; (2) evolution; and (3) specialization.