Most research reporting that bilingual children exhibit enhanced cognitive skills and social awareness relative to their monolingual peers focusses on children raised and educated bilingually, making it difficult to pinpoint the degree of second language exposure necessary for such advantages to materialise. The current study measures the social…

Early trilingual development is an excellent testing ground for input reduction effects on acquisition outcomes. This article reports a study investigating input-outcome relations in a child Leo in Hong Kong, who was addressed to in Mandarin, Cantonese and later also in English by caretakers through 'one caretaker-one language' and 'one day-one…

Purpose: The aim of this article was to explore how the type of allomorph (e.g., past tense buzz[ d ] vs. nod[ ?d ]) influences the ability to perceive and produce grammatical morphemes in children with typical development and with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: The participants were monolingual Australian English--speaking children.…

A growing percentage of low-income children in the United States come from Spanish-speaking homes and are dual language learners (DLLs). Recent research shows that bilingual children, compared to monolinguals, have enhanced executive functioning (EF), a set of foundational cognitive skills that predict higher social-emotional competence and…

Spanish-English bilingual learners are the fastest growing demographic in U.S. elementary schools. Yet many schools, particularly those in new immigration destination regions, continue to measure bilingual students' vocabulary using monolingual norms. This inequitable practice makes it appear as if bilingual learners have lower language abilities…

This experiment investigated comprehension monitoring in children learning English as an additional language (EAL) compared to monolinguals. Sixty-three 9-10-year-old children read texts containing an internal inconsistency (e.g. a barking kitten vs. barking puppy) while their eye movements were monitored. Standardized tests measured word reading…

Existing research suggests that being multilingual may convey advantages for additional language learning. However, little research to date has examined the role of multiple languages in primary-school classroom settings and in foreign language learning in particular. We investigated the learning of French by children with English as an additional…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine inhibition of irrelevant information in younger and older English monolingual and Spanish--English bilingual adults. Method: Sixty-one participants divided into four groups: 15 younger English monolinguals, 16 younger Spanish-English bilinguals, 15 older English monolinguals, and 15 older…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine differences in performance between monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual second graders (aged 7-9 years old) on executive function tasks assessing inhibition, shifting, and updating to contribute more evidence to the ongoing debate about a potential bilingual executive function advantage.…

This study examined dual language learners' (DLLs n = 24) and English-only (EO n = 20) children's expressive and receptive language in kindergarten (M[subscript age] = 5.7 years) as well as the relation to peers' language use. Expressive language skills (vocabulary diversity, syntactic complexity) were measured in the fall, winter, and spring…

This investigation aimed to provide insights into the controversial debate on the role that age at onset of bilingualism plays in human language capacity with a focus on what it entails for first language (L1) attrition. L1 performance of Turkish immigrants (n = 57) in the United Kingdom with age at onset ranging between 7 and 34 years was…

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of parallel reading text (English and Arabic) on English as a Foreign language (EFL) Intermediate II level students? at Birzeit University in terms of reading comprehension, vocabulary retention, and sentence structure awareness. The sample for this study is 38 undergraduate students of the…

Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to "all") in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical…

Monolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the…

Bilingualism is a typical linguistic experience, yet relatively little is known about its impact on children's cognitive and brain development. Theories of bilingualism suggest that early dual-language acquisition can improve children's cognitive abilities, specifically those relying on frontal lobe functioning. While behavioral findings present…