Dutch-medium schools in Brussels traditionally cater to a Dutch-speaking minority, but they have recently seen a massive influx of pupils with a limited competence in Dutch. In order to face the resulting pedagogical and ideological challenges, many of these schools have intensified their efforts to remain Dutch enclaves in a predominantly…

This paper explores the connection between nurses' multilingual beliefs and their advice on multilingual parenting to families with young children. Data was gathered through video-stimulated reflection dialogues with 11 nurses employed at infant welfare clinics in Belgium. Our analysis disclosed two salient counter topics regarding participants'…

While much research has focused on how Western schools contain or silence the increasing multilingualism of their pupils, this paper investigates how a Dutch-medium school in Brussels has decided to take a different approach by branding itself as multilingual. Based on sociolinguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it will show that teachers invested in…

Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in…

We propose that attraction errors in agreement production (e.g., the key to the cabinets are missing) are related to two components of executive control: working memory and inhibitory control. We tested 138 children aged 10 to 12, an age when children are expected to produce high rates of errors. To increase the potential of individual variation…

Bilinguals are often not fully monolingual-like in either language. With respect to the lexicon, recent research demonstrates that their naming patterns for common household objects tend to converge on a common pattern for the two languages. The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of naming of common household objects in…

The present study explored the relation between language control and nonverbal cognitive control in different bilingual populations. We compared monolinguals, Dutch-French unbalanced bilinguals, balanced bilinguals, and interpreters on the Simon task (Simon & Rudell, 1967) and the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz,…

The language planning activities undertaken by Belgium's government suggest that the goals of linguistic legislation have changed over time, reflecting the evolution and complex interplay of social, cultural, political, and economic characteristics. Initially, language legislation stemmed from the desire of Flemish militants to protect and promote…

Discusses the consequences of "language shift through erosion" on the basis of an analysis of the gradual disappearance of Dutch as a native language in French Flanders. Sketches the theoretical language-in-contact framework, breaking down the chronological evolution into diglossic, bilingual and (almost) monolingual phases. (37…

Charts the vocabulary evolution of three groups of students in Brussels' kindergartens: (1) originally monolingual Dutch-speaking children; (2) originally simultaneously bilingual children (Dutch/French); and (3) young successive second-language learners (French at home, Dutch in kindergarten). (23 references) (Author/CK)