Children with autism often display discrepancies in their intellectual functioning, with nonverbal skills frequently being more developed than verbal. Compared to monolingual autistic children, however, much less is known about how bilingualism affects intelligence in autism. The current study examined the intelligence profiles of 146 bilingual…

The Spanish subjunctive mood (SUBJ) is said to be highly vulnerable in heritage language (HL) acquisition. However, there is little controlled research on HL-speaking children acquiring the various Spanish SUBJ contexts, so we do not have a clear picture of when, how, or why heritage speakers (HSs) develop in the SUBJ as they do. This study tests…

Past research has shown that young monolingual children exhibit language-based social biases: they prefer native language to foreign language speakers. The current research investigated how children's language preferences are influenced by their own bilingualism and by a speaker's bilingualism. Monolingual and bilingual 4- to 6-year-olds heard…

This study investigates relationships between acquisition of exhaustivity in single and multiple "wh"-questions, mastery of semantic and pragmatic aspects of quantifier comprehension, and general skills in receptive grammar. The participants of the study were 25 Polish monolingual typically developing children aged 4;02-6;02, who were…

Vocabulary plays a critical role in language and reading development for children, particularly those learning English as an additional language (EAL) (Stahl & Nagy, 2006). Previous research on vocabulary has mainly focused on measuring individual words without considering multi-word phrase knowledge, despite evidence that these items occur…

The present study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 to examine whether the relationship between first-grade word-reading and reading-comprehension growth through eighth grade was different for language-minority learners (LMs) versus native English-speaking students (NEs). Among high word…

Reading development in students who are second language learners (SLLs) has been a concern of many educators. It is important to understand reading development in students who are SLLs to effectively support their reading development. The dissertation consists of two studies, presented in two stand-alone manuscripts, that aimed to deepen our…

Little is known about outcomes of early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder reared in bilingual homes. There are concerns that social communication deficits among children with autism spectrum disorder may reduce the developmental benefits of early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder raised in bilingual…

The interdependence between the first and second language of bilingual immigrant children has not received sufficient attention in research. Most studies concentrate on mainstream language skills of immigrant pupils. In some studies, the gaps in the language development of immigrant children are documented by comparing mainstream pupils with…

Purpose: To test the proposal that the tense deficit that has been demonstrated for children with specific language impairment (SLI) in other languages is also found in child Spanish and that low performance on tense-related measures can distinguish Spanish-speaking children with SLI from those without. Method: The authors evaluated evidence from…

The purpose of this study was to systematically review the factors affecting the language, speech intelligibility, speech production, and lexical tone development of children with hearing loss who use spoken languages other than English. Relevant studies of children with hearing loss published between 2000 and 2011 were reviewed with reference to…

We investigated the processing of agreement marking and case marking in the comprehension of German relative clauses in 48 seven-year-old monolingual German-speaking children in a picture selection task. We examined the relation between the effectiveness of these different morphological cues and individual memory resources as measured by a…

Thirty-five children (17 boys and 18 girls, 4 to 8 years old) in 2-parent Chinese immigrant families had attended English-speaking facilities for 35.0 months (boys) and 32.9 months (girls), respectively. They were tested at home with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) and the Mandarin version of PPVT-R. No gender differences were…

We explored the relationship between working memory (WM) and visually controlled attention (CA) in young bilingual and monolingual children. Previous research has shown that balanced bilingual children outperform monolinguals in CA. However, it is unclear whether this advantage is truly associated with bilingualism or whether potential WM and/or…

Purpose: Identifying children with primary or specific language impairment (LI) in languages other than English continues to present a diagnostic challenge. This study examined the utility of English and Spanish nonword repetition (NWR) to identify children known to have LI. Method: Participants were 4 groups of school-age children (N = 187).…