This study compared the lexical-semantic organization skills of bilingually developing deaf children in American Sign Language (ASL) and English with those of a monolingual hearing group. A repeated meaning-association paradigm was used to assess retrieval of semantic relations in deaf 6-10-year-olds exposed to ASL from birth by their deaf…

This study reports on the conceptualization of a new construct targeting the cross-disciplinary academic language skills most relevant to school reading comprehension, targeting the validation of the Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) Instrument, a novel assessment tool which measures this construct. Participants included Grade 4-8 monolingual…

Can an early learned second language influence speech production after living many years in an exclusively monolingual environment? To address this issue, we investigated the consequences of discontinued early bilingualism in heritage speakers who moved abroad and switched language dominance from the second to the primary learned language. We used…

The current study examined academic language (AL) input of mothers and teachers to 15 monolingual Dutch and 15 bilingual Turkish-Dutch 4- to 6-year-old children and its relationships with the children's language development. At two times, shared book reading was videotaped and analyzed for academic features: lexical diversity, syntactic…

Children who start formal education in a second language may experience slower vocabulary growth in that language and subsequently experience disadvantages in literacy acquisition. The current study asked whether lexical specificity training can stimulate bilingual children's phonological awareness, which is considered to be a precursor to…

We present the case study of MB--a bilingual child with Down syndrome (DS) who speaks Russian (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]) and has learned to read in two different alphabets with different symbol systems. We demonstrate that, in terms of oral language, MB is as proficient in Russian as English, with a mild advantage for…

This study examines whether adult second language (L2) learners of an ungendered first language (L1) are sensitive to gender congruency (grammatical feature absent in the L1) and noun animacy (semantic feature present in the L1) when processing L2 gender concord and whether L2 proficiency level determines such sensitivity. To address these…

Because of less exposure to either language, bilingual children's language acquisition can be delayed relative to monolingual children in domains related to input frequency. This study predicted that the acquisition of gender agreement with adjectives in French would be delayed in bilingual children on a picture description task. The results…

Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5-6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word…

The study examined differences in reading achievement and mastery skill development among Grade-6 students with different language background profiles, using cognitive diagnosis modeling applied to large-scale provincial reading test performance data. Our analyses revealed that students residing in various home language environments show different…

Based on an analysis of the speech of long-term emigres of German and Dutch origin, the present investigation discusses to what extent hesitation patterns in language attrition may be the result of the creation of an interlanguage system, on the one hand, or of language-internal attrition patterns on the other. We compare speech samples elicited…

This study investigated whether bilingual-monolingual differences would be apparent in school-age children's use and knowledge of English verb morphology and whether differences would be influenced by amount of exposure to English, complexity of the morphological structure, or the type of task given. French-English bilinguals (mean age = 6;10)…

In Experiment 1, monolingual native Spanish speakers (NSSs) had better kernel recall and longer end-of-clause (EOC) pauses than native English speakers (NESs) when reading texts that varied in syntactic complexity as a function of the number of nonessential clauses added to the kernel text. NSS familiarity with embedded clauses in Spanish seem to…

Much of the research that contributes to understanding how bilingual children become literate is not able to isolate the contribution of bilingualism to the discussion of literacy acquisition for these children. This article begins by identifying three areas of research that are relevant to examining literacy acquisition in bilinguals, explaining…

Examination of differences in the language-learning strategies of monolingual and multilingual adults found no clear evidence that multilinguals were superior in language-learning abilities overall, although they were more able to adjust their learning strategies according to language task requirements. (Author/CB)