Background: The phonological and morphosyntactic structures of English and Mandarin contrast maximally and an increasing number of bilinguals speak these two languages. Speech and language therapists need to understand bilingual development for children speaking these languages in order reliably to assess and provide intervention for this…

During the Spanish regimen, Puerto Rican education was limited and restricted to Spanish language as the medium of instruction. It was not until the U.S. colonization of the island that public education was introduced. As a result, English replaced Spanish as medium of instruction in the new educational system. Immediately after, Puerto Rican…

The interconnectedness of bilingual memory remains a topic of great debate. Semantic priming provides a powerful methodological tool with which to investigate this issue in early bilingual toddlers. Semantic priming effects were investigated in 21 bilingual toddlers (2.5 years) within and across each of their languages. Results revealed the first…

The current study examines bilingual children as language policy agents in the interplay between official language policy and education policy at three Swedish-medium preschools in Finland. For this purpose we monitored nine Finnish-Swedish bilingual children aged 3 to 5 years for 18 months. The preschools were located in three different parts of…

This study investigates the use of the Spanish subjunctive in bilingual children with and without specific language impairments (SLI). Using an elicitation task, we examine: (i) the potential of the subjunctive as a grammatical marker of SLI in Spanish-English bilingual children, (ii) the extent to which degree of bilingualism affects performance,…

The frequency-lag hypothesis proposes that bilinguals have slowed lexical retrieval relative to monolinguals and in their nondominant language relative to their dominant language, particularly for low-frequency words. These effects arise because bilinguals divide their language use between 2 languages and use their nondominant language less…

This study provides the first systematic account of word-final cluster acquisition in bilingual children. To this end, forty Welsh-English bilingual children differing in language dominance and age (2;6 to 5;0) participated in a picture-naming task in English and Welsh. The results revealed significant age and dominance effects on cluster…

There is a growing need for more information regarding the early academic development of preschool-age children who are learning to speak Spanish and English. To achieve this, studies are needed that acknowledge the heterogeneity of language abilities within bilingual preschool children, and that these variations in language abilities may impact…

An in-depth examination of the acquisition of grammatical gender has not previously been conducted for Irish, an endangered indigenous language now typically acquired simultaneously with English, or as L2. Children acquiring Irish must contend with the opacity of the Irish gender system and the plurifunctionality of the inflections used to mark…

Lexical development in first language (L1) Turkish and second language (L2) German in two- to three-year-old children was examined, using parental vocabulary checklists in Turkish and in German. Children showed strong Turkish dominance in the number of lexical items they produced, which was due to the more frequent exposure to Turkish and higher…

This study investigated the role of language exposure in vocabulary acquisition in Irish, a threatened minority language in Ireland which is usually acquired with English in a bilingual context. Using a bilingual Irish-English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories) [Fenson, L., V. A. Marchman, D. J. Thal, P. S.…

This study investigates how fluent second-language (L2) learners of English produce and perceive the /ae/-/?/ vowel contrast of Southwestern American English. Two learner groups are examined: (1) early, proficient English speakers who were raised by Spanish-speaking families but who became dominant in English during childhood and, as adults, lack…

When participants are asked to translate an ambiguous word, they are slower and less accurate than in the case of single-translation words (e.g., Laxen & Lavour, 2010; Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). We report an experiment to further examine this multiple-translation effect by investigating the influence of variables shown to be relevant in bilingual…

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…

American schools today display unprecedented levels of diversity in regard to the linguistic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds of their student population. Increasingly, more American students are also emergent bilingual learners. Despite this fact, most of the standardized assessments used by schools have been designed and normed for…