PURPOSE Deficits in phonological working memory and deficits in phonological processing have both been considered potential explanatory factors in specific language impairment (SLI). Manipulations of the lexicality and phonotactic frequency of nonwords enable contrasting predictions to be derived from these hypotheses. METHOD Eighteen typically developing (TD) children and 18 children with SL...

This paper reports memory span data from 45 monolingual, normal-hearing children ranging in age from 3;5 to 5;11 years. A newly implemented methodology (here termed the “memory span game”) required participants to reproduce sequences of lights, or sequences of lights accompanied by sounds, by pressing appropriately matched buttons on a response box. Auditory stimuli used in the light-plus-sound...

The main purpose of the study reported in this paper was to examine the interrelationships between L2 risk-taking, English learning motivation, L2 speaking anxiety, linguistic confidence, and low-proficiency English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). A secondary purpose was to test whether task repetition can influence the level of the mentio...

Focused visuo-spatial attention was studied in 10 developmental dyslexic children with impaired nonword reading, 10 dyslexic children with intact nonword reading, and 12 normally reading children. Reaction times to lateralized visual stimuli in a cued detection task showed that attentional facilitation of the target at the cued location was symmetrical in the three groups. However, dyslexics wi...

Twelve experiments examined the effect of neighborhood density on repetition latency for nonwords. Previous reports have indicated that nonwords from high density neighborhoods are repeated with shorter latency than nonwords from low density neighborhoods (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1998). Experiment 1 replicated these previously reported results; however, further analysis indicated an interaction...