The present study examined the speech production of three-year-old Korean-English bilingual (KEB) children. English and Korean stops, as well as front vowels in both languages, were compared acoustically among the KEB children, then also measured against those of their age-equivalent monolingual counterparts. Evidence of distinctive phonetic…

Monolingual children identify referents uniquely in gesture before they do so with words, and parents translate these gestures into words. Children benefit from these translations, acquiring the words that their parents translated earlier than the ones that are not translated. Are bilingual children as likely as monolingual children to identify…

Previous research suggests that English monolingual children and adults can use speech disfluencies (e.g., "uh") to predict that a speaker will name a novel object. To understand the origins of this ability, we tested 48 32-month-old children (monolingual English, monolingual French, bilingual English-French; Study 1) and 16 adults…

Substantial individual differences exist in regard to type and amount of experience with variable speech resulting from foreign or regional accents. Whereas prior experience helps with processing familiar accents, research on how experience with accented speech affects processing of unfamiliar accents is inconclusive, ranging from perceptual…

This study investigates effects of age on character introductions in the oral narratives of seventy-two monolingual Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds, comparing results from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina "et al.," 2012, 2015), and the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider…

Children categorize native-accented speakers as local and non-native-accented speakers as foreign, suggesting they use accent (i.e., phonological proficiency) to determine social group membership. However, it is unclear if accent is the strongest--AND ONLY--group marker children use to determine social group membership, or whether other aspects of…

This study examines the influence of language-internal (frequency and complexity of linguistic properties), language-external (percent French input, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender), and lexical factors (size of total and French vocabulary) on the phonological production abilities of monolingual and bilingual French-speaking children, aged…

Production studies show that both Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and bilingual children for whom Russian is a non-dominant language have difficulty distinguishing between the near-synonymous connectives "i" "and" and "a" "and/but." "I" is a preferred connective…

The aim of this study was to compare linguistic and narrative skills of monolingual and bilingual preschoolers and to estimate linguistic predictors of the macro-structural level of narratives. A battery of linguistic measures in Italian was administered to sixty-four Monolinguals and sixty-four Early Bilinguals; it included Vocabulary,…

This study investigated the durational features of English word-initial /s/+stop clusters produced by bilingual Mandarin (L1)-English (L2) children and monolingual English children and adults. The participants included two groups of five- to six-year-old bilingual children: low proficiency in the L2 (Bi-low) and high proficiency in the L2…

We report here on a series of elicited production experiments that investigate the production of indirect object and oblique relative clauses by monolingual child learners of English and Korean. Taken together, the results from the two languages point toward a pair of robust asymmetries: children manifest a preference for subject relative clauses…

Monolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the…

A battery of standardized language tests and control measures was administered to three groups of at-risk language learners -- internationally adopted children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and children with specific language impairment -- and to groups of second-language learners and typically developing monolingual children. All…

Monolingual children sometimes resist learning second labels for familiar objects. One explanation is that they are guided by word learning constraints that lead to the assumption that objects have only one name. It is less clear whether bilingual children observe this constraint. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that bilingual…

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)…