Bilingual language development might be characterized by transfer, deceleration, and/or acceleration, the first two being relevant for the language impairment diagnosis. Studies on bilingual children's productive phonology show evidence of transfer, but little is known about deceleration in this population. Here, we focused on phonological…

The expressive lexical skills of 53 Polish bilinguals aged 24-36 months living in the UK and Ireland were assessed using Polish and British English adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Polish vocabulary scores were compared to those of 53 Polish monolinguals matched for age, gender and parental education. The…

This multidisciplinary approach to cultural mediation brings together insights from anthropology, sociology, linguistics and intercultural communication to offer a detailed depiction of family life in immigrant Chinese communities. Utilising a strongly contextualised and evidence-based narrative approach to exploring the nature of child cultural…

In spite of important differences in some of the resources immigrant parents have to invest in their children, and in immigrant selection rules and settlement policies, there are significant similarities in the relative positions of 4- and 5-year-old children of immigrants in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Children…

The child population in the United States is rapidly changing and diversifying--in large part because of immigration. Today, nearly one in four US children under the age of 18 is the child of an immigrant. While research has focused on the largest of these groups (Latinos and Asians), far less academic attention has been paid to the changing Black…

This paper reports on the results of a small-scale study into the ways in which two bilingual boys attempt to manage the discontinuities between their identities at home and as members of an early years class at a mainly white primary school in the UK. To do this, a number of semi-structured interviews were undertaken with the boys and their…

The ways in which children learn a language--be it their mother tongue or their second language--can have a strong influence on their success in school. Researchers in linguistics and early child development have tried to determine the factors that can help and hinder language acquisition in young children, with some conflicting results. In this…

Presents three major types of language awareness elicited during a pilot study, using data collection instruments, such as interviews and tape recordings of the conversations of two groups of Iranian children living in the United Kingdom. (Author/VWL)