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…

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.…

The auditory scaffolding hypothesis states that early experience with sound underpins the development of domain-general sequence processing abilities, supported by studies observing impaired sequence processing in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. To test this hypothesis, we administered a sequence processing task to 77 DHH children who use…

Purpose: This study explored whether a monolingual-normed English language battery could identify children with English as an additional language (EAL) who have persistent English language learning difficulties that affect functional academic attainment. Method: Children with EAL (n = 43) and monolingual English-speaking children (n = 46)…

The unique relation of language use (i.e., output) to language growth was investigated for forty-seven 30-month-old Spanish-English bilingual children (27 girls, 20 boys) whose choices of which language to speak resulted in their levels of English output differing from their levels of English input. English expressive vocabularies and receptive…

We asked whether parental questionnaires on the heritage language proficiency of bilingual children might elucidate how proficient bilingual children are in their heritage language. We tested 20 UK-based Polish-English bilingual children between 4;5 and 5;9 years on Polish and English versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs). These…

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…

Purpose: Implicit statistical learning in 2 nonlinguistic domains (visual and auditory) was used to investigate (a) whether linguistic experience influences the underlying learning mechanism and (b) whether there are modality constraints in predicting implicit statistical learning with age and language skills. Method: Implicit statistical learning…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare narrative abilities in children with specific language impairment (SLI) who are monolingual and those who are dual language learners. Method: The participants were 26 children with SLI, 14 monolingual English speakers and 12 dual language learners. The dual language learners were English dominant and…

Purpose: This study examined lexical-semantic organization of bilingual children in their 2 languages and in relation to monolingual age-mates. Method: Twelve Mandarin-English bilingual and 12 English monolingual children generated 3 associations to each of 36 words. Responses were coded as paradigmatic ("dog-cat") or syntagmatic ("dog-bark").…

In this experimental study for developing a bilingual diagnostic language test, findings in English and Spanish about monolingual language acquisition were used in designing materials to investigate the bilingual language acquisition (English and Spanish) of children five to eight years old in Tucson, Arizona. Attention was focused on acquisition…