This dissertation outlines three studies investigating linguistically diverse students' (including bilingual and monolingual students) language use and self-efficacy in writing. Bilingual students are those who speak a language other than English, including students with various levels of English proficiency and language experience. The first two…

We examined the narrative abilities of bilingual and monolingual children on the autism spectrum (AS), whether bilinguals presented stronger social and pragmatic language abilities compared to monolinguals, and the link between narrative, social, and pragmatic language abilities. The narrative, social, and pragmatic language skills of school-aged…

Purpose: This study examined the language and nonverbal inhibitory control skills of Italian monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TD) preschoolers with Italian as their second language and of age-matched monolingual and bilingual peers with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Four groups of preschoolers were enrolled: 30 TD…

Large individual differences in language skills are well documented in monolingual children (e.g., Kidd, Donnelly & Christiansen, 2018). In bilinguals, the broad variation is even more pronounced. Interestingly, some bilingual children might be weak in their Heritage Language (HL, also labeled as Minority Language, Home Language, Community…

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…

Non-word repetition tasks are widely used to assess phonological short-term memory (PSTM). Results of previous research on the performance of monolingual and bilingual children in PSTM tasks are inconclusive. Although in some studies bilinguals did outperform monolinguals in the repetition of non-words, most studies reported comparatively weak…

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…

We identify language and discourse skills in 54-month-old Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers and their English-speaking monolingual peers, using multiple measures. Forty-one Spanish-English bilingual and 25 English monolingual children, all US born, viewed an eight-minute wordless video. The bilingual children recounted the story once in…

Preschool-aged bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can keep pace with their monolingual peers with ASD. However, can older children with ASD continue to do so as language demands become greater? Also, can they reach language levels similar to those of neurotypically developing (ND) bilingual children? The current study compares…

Purpose: The aim of the current study was to investigate whether dual language experience modulates the efficiency of the 3 attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive control) in typically developing (TD) children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: We examined the attentional networks in monolingual…

Purpose: The aim of the current study was to investigate whether dual language experience modulates processing speed in typically developing (TD) children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). We also examined whether processing speed predicted vocabulary and sentence-level abilities in receptive and expressive modalities.…

This study examines the influence of bilingual status, language-internal (complexity of L1 phonology), language-external (dominance), and lexical (L2 vocabulary score) factors on phonological production in French-speaking monolingual (n = 37) and bilingual children (n = 64) aged three to six years. Children participated in an object and picture…

Most Indigenous peoples live in urban and regional locations across Australia and no longer speak their traditional languages fluently. Instead contact languages, creoles and dialects, are widely spoken. In many educational settings, educators may know little about the first languages of the Indigenous children they teach, and not recognise these…

The extent of quantitative and qualitative differences in phonological development between bilingual children and their monolingual counterparts remains unresolved, especially with regard to typologically-related languages. The current study used a comparative research design to examine the phonological skills of preschool children speaking Polish…

The present study investigates whether exposure to multilingual pedagogies enhances emergent bilingual children's narrative abilities. These abilities are among the most reliable indicators of children's literacy skills. We compare two groups of emergent bilingual children with migrant background attending the fourth and fifth grade of a public…