Much research has been conducted in adult second language learning through interaction, but knowledge about the child language learner has remained scarce. To address social language development in middle childhood, the article presents a longitudinal case study concerning a nine-year-old L1 Russian-speaking learner of Finnish. The data consist of…

Background: The important role of phonological processing for reading has been demonstrated by many studies. The purpose of this research was to investigate the role of phonological processing for reading in Russian. Specifically, we tested whether the overall complexity of a phonological task predicts reading fluency and reading comprehension.…

The paper presents results from a fieldwork study with Russian Roma children. Two groups of children, 6-8 years and 8-10 years old, were involved in the study. Before the pandemic crisis began in Russia, a large number of Roma children were kept home by the parents. The study was conducted in a Roma settlement of a small town not so far from…

With the increasing number of young emergent multilingual language learners in transnational contexts, there is a growing need to explore and examine how emergent multilingual children develop their translingual competence and how they exercise their agency to engage in translingual practices across different settings (e.g., home and school). Yet,…

In 1986, Reactor 4 in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Within a year of exposure to radiation poisoning the rate of cancer, particularly leukaemia and thyroid cancer, was reported as 100 times higher in children living in contaminated areas. Volunteers in more than 18 countries responded by establishing a network of recuperative…

Errors with "be", whether omission (e.g., "John happy") or overuse (i.e., "be"-insertion; e.g., "John is love Mary"), have received particular attention in L2 acquisition studies exploring L1 transfer. This study investigates such errors in the context of L3 acquisition, focusing on L1 transfer. L1-Chinese…

This article investigates verbal short-term memory (vSTM) and verbal working memory (vWM) abilities and their relation to lexical and syntactic abilities in monolingual (mono-) and bilingual (bi-) children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical development (TD). The authors employed the following tasks: vSTM (non-word repetition…

Morphophonological alternations can make target-like production of grammatical morphemes challenging due to changes in form depending on the phonological environment. This article explores the acquisition of morphophonological alternations involving the interacting patterns of vowel deletion and stress shift in Russian-speaking children (aged…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

The ability of language-impaired children to maintain coherence by using discourse connectives has so far been assessed by quantitative measures. This study is a first attempt to scrutinize the "quality" of connective use in specific language impairment (SLI). The authors investigate whether Russian-speaking children reveal sensitivity…

We present the case study of MB--a bilingual child with Down syndrome (DS) who speaks Russian (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]) and has learned to read in two different alphabets with different symbol systems. We demonstrate that, in terms of oral language, MB is as proficient in Russian as English, with a mild advantage for…

In order to reach far in the work for sustainable development, communication in foreign languages prior to strategic decisions is required from international partners. In this communication English has become the lingua franca. Even though the use of EFL (English as a foreign language) is widely spread, it is clear that in some geographical…

This article describes the results of an epidemiological study of developmental language disorder (DLD) in an isolated rural Russian population. We report an atypically high prevalence of DLD across all age groups when contrasted with a comparison population. The results are corroborated by a set of comparisons of school-aged children from the…

The collapse of the Communist bloc in 1989 and then of the Soviet Union in 1991 has presented unique challenges to the educational systems in place during socialist times, and the ensuing transition in Ukraine is no exception. The introduction of Ukrainian as the sole state language when a high number of citizens still prefer to use Russian has…

The objective of this study was to evaluate the first language (L1) vocabulary knowledge in a large-scale sample (n = 70) of second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants in Israel. The interest in this research population follows from the unique demographic, sociocultural, linguistic, and psychological distinctiveness of RJ immigration in Israel.…