This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

This study investigated three key issues in heritage language (HL) research. Previous research shows HL speakers have an advantage on oral production tasks compared to L2 speakers who instead perform better on written tasks. Furthermore, both L2 and HL speakers are claimed to have a "yes-bias" towards retaining ungrammaticality in GJTs.…

This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the acquisition of embedded "wh"-questions in L3 English in German-dominant heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. Specifically, we investigate whether a higher proficiency in the heritage language Italian increases the potential for CLI from that language. To this end, 21 adult-aged…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…

This article explores attitudes and response to language selection in advertising targeting Italian bilinguals who belong to a defined speech community. The research builds upon (i) research on multilingual advertising by investigating its attitudinal correlates, and (ii) studies on advertising to bilinguals through the verification of the…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

This study outlines a linguistic profile of two subgroups of Italian English circumstantial bilinguals - one dominant in English and the other dominant in Italian--by exploring for the first time their linguistic repertoire through the Gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale (Dunn & Fox Tree, 2009). The scale takes into account language…

The present study adopts a multilingual approach to analysing the standardized test results of primary school immigrant children living in the bi-/multilingual context of South Tyrol, Italy. The standardized test results are from the Invalsi test administered across Italy in 2009/2010. In South Tyrol, several languages are spoken on a daily basis…

The purpose of the two experiments reported here was to investigate whether bilingualism confers an advantage on children's conversational understanding. A total of 163 children aged 3-6 years were given a Conversational Violations Test to determine their ability to identify responses to questions as violations of Gricean maxims of conversation…

This study addresses the question of whether language dominance and cross-linguistic influence are related by investigating the acquisition of determiner omission in four bilingual German-Italian children. The study begins by showing that monolingual Italian learners omit determiners less extensively than monolingual German learners. If bilingual…

This paper explores interpreting in three-generational Italian-English bilingual families as a complex language brokering activity. Recent studies approach non-professional interpreting as language brokering in which bilinguals (often children) interpret for non-bilinguals (adults) in institutional settings (Hall 2004; Valdes 2003). These studies…

Data from one English-Italian bilingual child (1;10-3;1) are presented in this study which challenge the hypothesis that the consistent realization of overt subjects in English is caused by the emergence of finite verbal morphology in the child's grammar. The argument is made for the emergence of subjects as an independent grammatical property of…

Compares the results from monolingual children with object omissions in bilingual children who have acquired two languages simultaneously. Claims that the difference between monolingual and bilingual children is due to crosslinguistic influences in bilingual children. (Author/VWL)

Comments are provided by ten authors in response to an article on language separation and crosslinguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

Responds to comments by various researchers on an early article presented in the same issue of this journal, claiming that language separation and crosslinguistic influence coexist in bilingual first language acquisition. (Author/VWL)