Questioning others is one of the most powerful methods that children use to learn about the world. How does questioning develop? How is it socialized? And how can questioning be leveraged to support learning and education? In this volume, some of the world's leading experts are brought together to explore critical issues in the development of…

This edited volume brings together 10 cutting-edge empirical studies on the realities of English language learning, teaching and testing in a wide range of global contexts where English is an additional language. It covers three themes: learners' development of interactional competence, the organization of teaching and testing practices, and…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate significant language impairments despite normal-range hearing and nonverbal IQ. Many of these children also show marked deficits in working memory (WM) abilities. However, the theoretical and clinical characterization of the association between WM and language limitations in SLI…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

Third and sixth graders read an illustrated story and were presented with either a television or radio version of another story. Across a range of comprehension and memory measures, performance in the radio condition and reading were related, while performance in the television condition and reading were not. (Author/CB)

Reviews the research on how readers or listeners construct mental models of the situation a writer or speaker is describing. Narrative components and spatial models are discussed. (YP)

Compares the effects of audio and audiovisual presentation on young children's cognitive processing while explicitly controlling the amount and complexity of information. (HOD)

Three experiments investigated (1) whether developmental differences in the information integration rule apply to ulterior motive information; (2) whether such developmental differences are limited to situations involving parental reward; and (3) how related age differences among children can best be explained. (RH)

According to S. K. Langer, people create meaning through presentational and discursive symbolism. Presentational symbolism, Langer suggests, is an abstracted sense of experienced life, while discursive symbolism is a series of subordinating or coordinating positions that set in motion the relation of ideas and permits the discussion of causation.…

Aimed at improving the methodology used in comprehension research, this paper analyzes the designs and interpretations of intervention training studies and suggests the implications of that analysis for future research. It points out that the typical training approach, deriving data from three sources--comprehension tests administered to older…

Across three experiments involving four-, five-, and six-year-olds, the same pattern of ability to sequence events was found: familiar events in forward order were the easiest to sequence, then unfamiliar events in forward order, familiar events in backward order, and finally unfamiliar events in backward order. (Author/RH)

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues by 10 college age adults in the speech of 9 children with profound hearing loss and 9 children with normal hearing. Overall, listeners were able to identify vowels in productions by both groups though the patterning of vowel identification differed for the two speaker groups in…

A reevaluation of a previous study which found a significant improvement in speechreading scores of 15 normal hearing adults following a word-scoring training intervention found that, though subjects increased verbal output and mean length of utterance, they did not improve sentence comprehension, syntactic correctness, or overall response…

Young children's understanding of the effects of ambiguous and informative messages on a listener's knowledge is studied in two experiments. (PCB)

The effects of consonantal context on vowel lipreading were assessed for 30 adult males with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss who lipread videotape recordings of two female talkers. Results indicated that vowel intelligibility was significantly poorer in most contexts involving highly visible consonants. (Author/DB)