The purpose of the current study was to explore the influence of language experience on the presence of the receptive-expressive gap. Each of 778 Spanish-English bilingual children screened pre-kindergarten in Utah and Texas were assigned to one of five language experience groups, ranging from functionally monolingual to balanced bilingual.…

This investigation examined the ability of 44 preschool children to acquire novel words embedded in storybook contexts. Previous investigations of word learning have typically consisted of novel words for which synonyms exist. It is argued that the acquisition of unfamiliar words that refer to existing concepts that already have labels is not…

An essential part of the human capacity for language is the ability to link conceptual or semantic representations with syntactic representations. On the basis of data from spontaneous production, Tomasello (2000) suggested that young children acquire such links on a verb-by-verb basis, with little in the way of a general understanding of…

Picture naming and picture identification tasks were used to investigate lexical-semantic skills in young children learning Hmong as a first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2). A total of 19 children, ages 3; 4 (years; months)-5; 2, participated in this study. Performance on lexical tasks was analyzed as a function of development…