Purpose: This study conducted a transcription-based and spectral moments' analysis of alveolar and alveopalatal fricatives in monolingual and bilingual Frenchs-peaking children, aged 2;6--6;10 (years;months). We measured the percent accuracy of fricatives and investigated whether young children could distinguish alveolar and alveopalatal…

Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

Vocabulary size is a crucial early indicator of language development, for both monolingual and bilingual children. Assessing vocabulary in bilingual children is complex because they learn words in two languages, and there remains significant controversy about how to best measure their vocabulary size, especially in relation to monolinguals. This…

When speaking, people often produce gestures that are closely timed with the speech with which they constitute a semantically coherent unit. Analyzing the temporal patterns between the two modalities may reveal insights about how speakers plan them. Using elicited narratives, we tested English/French monolinguals and bilinguals to check whether…

Purpose: Typically developing (TD) bilingual children usually produce narratives with preserved macrostructure (i.e., narrative scheme) but with impaired microstructure (i.e., language complexity). As for monolingual and bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), they usually produce narratives with both impaired macro- and…

In the present study, we aimed to disentangle the impact of bilingualism and socioeconomic status (SES) on literacy in language-minority bilingual children (LMBC) and monolinguals exposed to French. We also wanted to explore the role of these two factors on cognitive and language skills, i.e., verbal knowledge (VK), morphosyntactic comprehension…

Purpose: Both monolingual and bilingual children use learning constraints and heuristics to acquire new words from their environment. Overall, fast mapping abilities seem to be similar in both populations, but monolinguals rely more than bilinguals on the mutual exclusivity strategy. Our study probes the robustness of these results in a large…

Adults, preschool children, and infants gesture more with their right hand than with their left hand. Since gestures and speech are related in production, it is possible that this right-hand preference reflects left-hemisphere lateralization for gestures and speech. The primary purpose of the present study was to test if children between the ages…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

Infants are sensitive to syllable co-occurrence probabilities when segmenting words from fluent speech. However, segmenting two languages overlapping at the syllabic level is challenging because the statistical cues across the languages are incongruent. Successful segmentation, thus, relies on infants' ability to separate language inputs and track…

This study examined the production of L3 French words by Spanish--English bilinguals who had no prior knowledge of the L3. Using a shadowing task, 39 Spanish L1/English L2 and 18 Spanish monolingual speakers produced 26 tokens of word-initial voiceless plosive consonants in French, Spanish and English (15 Spanish and French tokens for the…

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we…

The privileging of French and English in Canada has led to an official language policy that minimizes the country's long-established multilingual realities in favour of a socio-politically constructed linguistic and cultural duality. The impact of this policy directly shapes the linguistically diverse yet monoglossically constructed French…

Monolingual English-speaking preschool children tend to process number gestures as unanalyzed wholes rather than use the one-to-one (finger-to-quantity) correspondence. By school age, however, children can use the one-to-one correspondence. The purpose of the present studies was to test whether children learn one-to-one correspondence through…

In this paper, I explore Discourses [Gee 1996. "Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses." 2nd Edition, 1996; 3rd Edition, 2008; 5th Edition. 2015. London: Taylor & Francis] on language, and how they influenced plurilingual students' subject positioning during classroom interactions. I analyse documents published by…