This study investigates perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel /e/-/[epsilon]/ contrast by two groups of 4.5-year-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual children, differing in language dominance. Perception was assessed with an XAB discrimination task involving familiar words and non-words. Production accuracy was measured using a familiar-word…

Previous comprehension studies using Picture Matching Tasks (PMT) have shown that, by the age of four, Spanish-speaking children have acquired the semantics of "estar" being able to calculate the implicature that a property introduced with "estar" does not hold independent of time as well as displaying some ability to integrate…

The Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT; Haman, Luniewska & Pomiechowska, 2015) is a vocabulary task designed to enable cross-linguistic comparisons both across and within (bilingual) children. In this paper we assessed the validity of the CLT as a measure of language proficiency in bilingual children, by determining the extent to which: (1)…

Several studies have found that, after repeated exposure to new words, children form orthographic representations that allow them to read those words faster and more fluently. However, these studies did not take into account variables related to the words. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of sublexical variables on the…

Preposition knowledge is important for academic success. The goal of this project was to examine how different variables such as English input and output, Spanish preposition score, mother education level, and age of English exposure (AoEE) may have played a role in children's preposition knowledge in English. 148 Spanish-English children between…

Some inconsistency is observed in the results from studies of reading development regarding the role of the syllable in visual word recognition, perhaps due to a disparity between the tasks used. We adopted a word-spotting paradigm, with Spanish children of second grade (mean age: 7 years) and sixth grade (mean age: 11 years). The children were…

Past research suggests that bilingualism positively affects children's performance in false belief tasks. However, researchers have yet to fully explore factors that are related to better performance in these tasks within bilingual groups. The current study includes an assessment of proficiency in both languages (which was lacking in past work)…

In this study, monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) five- and six-year-old children completed a grammaticality judgment test in order to assess their awareness of the grammaticality of two types of syntactic constructions in English: word order and gender representation. All children were better at detecting…

We report a longitudinal comprehension study of (long) passive constructions in two native-Spanish child groups differing by age of initial exposure to L2 English (young group: 3;0-4;0; older group: 6;0-7;0), where amount of input, L2 exposure environment, and socioeconomic status are controlled. Data from a forced-choice task show that both…

Considerable research has demonstrated that English-speaking children extend nouns on the basis of shape. Here we asked whether the development of this bias is influenced by the structure of a child's primary language. We tested English- and Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 1 ; 10 and 3 ; 4 in a novel noun generalization task. Results…

Early language comprehension may be one of the most important predictors of developmental risk. The need for performance-based assessment is predicated on limitations identified in the exclusive use of parent report and on the need for a performance measure with which to assess the convergent validity of parent report of comprehension. Child…

Examined Venezuelan children's developing abilities to use evaluative language in fictional and personal narratives. Looks at whether the use of evaluative language varies in fictional and personal narratives, there is a relationship between the use of evaluative language in these two narrative genres, and and the role children's age and…

Tested preschool monolingual speakers of Spanish and English in their native countries on classification of familiar objects through a task assessing strategies in a free sort, a sort with instructions to use natural gender, and one for the Spanish speakers with instructions to use grammatical gender. Results suggest that instructional context and…