Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

In the present case study, we aimed to explore whether there were any differences between monolingual Turkish and Turkish-Italian bilingual children in terms of their use of language structures in Turkish while narrating a story from a picture book titled "Frog, where are you?" by Mayer (1969). Four monolingual Turkish and three…

Adults, preschool children, and infants gesture more with their right hand than with their left hand. Since gestures and speech are related in production, it is possible that this right-hand preference reflects left-hemisphere lateralization for gestures and speech. The primary purpose of the present study was to test if children between the ages…

The extent of quantitative and qualitative differences in phonological development between bilingual children and their monolingual counterparts remains unresolved, especially with regard to typologically-related languages. The current study used a comparative research design to examine the phonological skills of preschool children speaking Polish…

This study investigates the influences of early and intense L2 exposure on children's L1 causative verb production, assessed by an experimental causative verb production task. Turkish expresses causality by morphological and lexical means, whereas English does so by periphrastic and lexical means. Learning L2 English might enhance L1 Turkish…

The present study was carried out with 120 Native Tamil speakers to know the effects of age and instructional language on narrative comprehension and inference-making ability. Children from 3rd to 5th grades (8 to 11 years) were divided into Group A (n = 60; Monolinguals) and Group B (n = 60; Bilinguals). Seven questions were framed to assess…

Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study…

This meta-analysis aims to quantitatively synthesize the relation between the essential components of reading and reading comprehension in children whose first language is Spanish and who are learning to read in Spanish in a monolingual setting. Searches were conducted in WOS, Scopus, and ERIC from 2000 to 2021. We used a random effects model and…

Most children learn a language such as Mandarin Chinese that uses lexical tone to communicate meaning. This study aimed to examine the phonological specificity of tone representations in monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin. Two age-groups were tested: toddlers (2.5 to 3.5 years) and preschoolers (4 to 5 years; N = 80). Using a…

Despite the important role assigned to analogical reasoning (AR) in cognition and language, the relationship between this ability and language skills in the emergent literacy period has not been sufficiently studied, especially in Spanish speakers. To explore this link, we examined two modalities of AR (verbal and non-verbal) as predictors of…

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the intelligibility of children's atypical speech in relation to listeners' language background. Method: Forty-eight participants listened to and transcribed isolated words repeated by children with speech sound disorders. Participants were divided into, on the one hand, a multilingual group (n = 29) that…

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…

Word knowledge and the speed of word processing in monolingual children and adults are influenced by word properties, such as the age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and frequency. Understanding how different properties of words contribute to the ease of processing by bilingual children is a critical step for establishing models of childhood…

Purpose: The aim of the present cross-sectional study was to determine the effects of age, sex, and maternal education of monolingual Spanish-speaking preschoolers on both macrostructural (oral narrative quality) and microstructural measures (number of different words, communication units, mean length of utterance in both words and morphemes, and…

Purpose: This study examines intraword variability in 40 typically developing French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, aged 2;6-4;8 (years;months). Specifically, it measures rate of intraword variability and investigates which factors best account for it. They include child-specific ones such as age, expressive vocabulary, gender,…