The authors assessed a battery of number skills in a sample of over 500 preschoolers, including both monolingual and bilingual/ multilingual learners from households at a range of socio-economic levels. Receptive vocabulary was measured in English for all children, and also in Spanish for those who spoke it. The first goal of the study was to…

In bilingual children, more so than in monolingual children, comprehension abilities exceed production abilities. While this receptive-expressive gap in bilinguals has been well documented, little is known about its development. The present study tracked growth in the Spanish and English receptive and expressive vocabularies of 52 bilingual…

Purpose: Measuring the growth of young children's vocabulary is important for researchers seeking to understand language learning as well as for clinicians aiming to identify early deficits. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are parent report instruments that offer a reliable and valid method for measuring early…

The unprecedented growth of Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) in new destination states (e.g., Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Tennessee) calls for better understanding of the relation between their bilingual vocabulary skills and English reading achievement. The current study focused on school-age Spanish-English DLLs (N = 60) in…

Purpose: Despite the increasing population of dual language learners (DLLs) in the United States, vocabulary measures for young DLLs have largely relied on instruments developed for monolinguals. The multistudy project reports on the psychometric properties of the English--Spanish Vocabulary Inventory (ESVI), which was designed to capture unique…

Purpose: Cognates, words in two languages that share form and meaning, can be used to support vocabulary development in bilingual children. Typically developing bilinguals have shown better performance on cognates versus noncognates. Of key interest is whether bilinguals with developmental language disorder (DLD) also show a cognate effect and, if…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether oral bilingualism could be an advantage for children with hearing loss when learning new words. Method: Twenty monolingual and 13 bilingual children with hearing loss were compared with each other and with 20 monolingual and 20 bilingual children with normal hearing on receptive vocabulary…

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of delivery method (face-to-face or telepractice), time, home language, and language ability on bilingual children's receptive vocabulary scores in Spanish and English. Method: Participants included bilingual children with (n = 32) and without (n = 57) developmental language disorders (DLD) that were…

Recent literature in the field of L2 vocabulary assessment has advocated for the development of written receptive vocabulary tests such as Vocabulary Levels Tests (VLTs) that use: (a) meaning-recall item formats, (b) a minimum of 40 item counts per 1,000-frequency band to improve level estimates, and (c) lemmas (not word-families) as the lexical…

Purpose: This study examines the response patterns of 278 Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) on a standardized test of receptive English vocabulary. Method: Investigators analyzed responses to 131 items on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Fourth Edition (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) focusing on differential accuracy on items influenced by…

Purpose: First, we sought to extend our knowledge of second language (L2) receptive compared to expressive narrative skills in bilingual children with and without primary language impairment (PLI). Second, we sought to explore whether narrative receptive and expressive performance in bilingual children's L2 differed based on the type of contextual…

Purpose: This study investigated within-language and between-language associations between phonological memory, vocabulary, and grammar in French-English (n = 43) and Spanish-English (n = 25) bilingual children at 30, 36, and 48 months. It was predicted that phonological memory would display both within-language and between-language relations to…

In this study, monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) five- and six-year-old children completed a grammaticality judgment test in order to assess their awareness of the grammaticality of two types of syntactic constructions in English: word order and gender representation. All children were better at detecting…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the underlying components or factor structure of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014) sentence repetition task and (b) to examine the relationship between Spanish-English speaking children's sentence repetition and…

This study examined Spanish-Welsh (in Patagonia) and Welsh-English (in North Wales) bilingual children's and adults' processing of sentences in which two noun phrases acted as arguments of a verb. The goal was to determine the relative importance of distinct cues to the identification of the subject in the bilinguals' processing of their two…