Bilingual children are a more heterogenous group than their monolingual counterparts with respect to the sources of variation in their language learning environments, as well as the wide individual variation in their language abilities. Such heterogeneity in both individual difference factors and language abilities argues for the importance of an…

This research investigates selectivity in word learning for bilingual infants. Previous work demonstrated that bilingual infants show greater openness to non-native language sounds in object labels than monolinguals (Hay et al., 2015; Singh, 2018). It remains unclear whether bilingual openness extends to nonspeech sounds. We presented 14- and…

Literature on early language acquisition has observed that age of onset of acquisition (AoA) is relevant for certain grammatical phenomena. Simultaneous bilinguals receive regular and extensive exposure to two languages from birth (Müller, 2009), whereas sequential child learners get in extensive contact to L[subscript B] once the L[subscript A]…

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children's narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax,…

The main purpose of this study is to explore and examine an early bilingual child whose use of English might be different on the account of the context the child uses English. Specifically, it was sought to find out if the child resorted to different phonological varieties as well as different interaction patterns while communicating. The relevant…

Purpose: This article aims to describe how exemplar variability can manipulate the word learning environment to maximize within- and cross-language generalization in Spanish--English bilinguals. Furthermore, we examined sources of individual variability that predicted word learning. Method: Nineteen Spanish--English bilingual children participated…

Purpose: This study examined the utility of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) recording system for investigating the language input to bilingual infants. Method: Twenty-one French-English bilingual families with a 10-month-old infant participated in this study. Using the LENA recording system, each family contributed 3 full days of…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

This paper seeks to examine the emerging sociolinguistic trends in Nigeria with the view to ascertaining the use of English as a first language among its speakers particular in Calabar, Nigeria. The study adopts Vygotsky's (1978) Social Interactionist Theory. The theory is relevant because it accounts for the intentional and changing linguistic…

The Norwegian language has two written standards, Bokmål (majority variety) and Nynorsk (minority variety), and children receive their schooling in one or other of them. Pupils schooled in Nynorsk acquire the Bokmål variety simultaneously through extracurricular exposure and thus develop what may be termed "bidialectal literacy". In this…

Spanish [l] is characterized as clear, and is associated with a high second formant (F2) frequency and a large difference between F2 and the first formant (F1) frequencies. In contrast, English [l] is darker (with a lower F2 and a relatively smaller F2-F1 difference) and also exhibits contextual variation due to an allophonic velarization rule…

Bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) has been considered a possible mechanism of contact-induced change in several recent studies (Siegel, 2008, p. 117; Satterfield, 2005, p. 2075; Thomason, 2001, p. 148; Yip & Matthews, 2007, p.15). There is as yet little consensus on the question, with divergent views regarding both BFLA at the individual…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

We begin with the hypothesis that all people are "bilingual" because every language contains ingredients from several grammars, just as English exhibits both an Anglo-Saxon and a Latinate vocabulary system. We argue that the dominant grammar is defined by productivity and recursion in particular. Although current evidence is sparse, in principle,…

An area in need of study in child language acquisition is that of complex multilingual contexts in which there is little language separation by interlocutor or domain. Little is known about how multilingual children use language to construct their identities in each language or in both languages. Identity construction in monolingual contexts has…