Studies on multilingual word learning have focused on identifying a bilingual advantage over monolingual peers, paying little attention to the relationships between bilinguals' existing vocabulary size and novel word learning. This study compared monolingual and bilingual school-age children on word learning tasks in familiar and unfamiliar…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

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…

In this study, the authors compare the production of internal codas and branching onsets in four groups of children learning French: monolingual typically-developing children (n = 12), bilingual typically-developing children (n = 61), monolingual children with Specific Language Impairment (n = 17) and bilingual children with Specific Language…

How do early bilingual experiences influence children's neural architecture for word processing? Dual language acquisition can yield common influences that may be shared across different bilingual groups, as well as language-specific influences stemming from a given language pairing. To investigate these effects, we examined bilingual English…

During narration, speakers constantly choose appropriate referential forms (nominals or pronominals). Children may engage in this reference marking differently than adults. Discourse- or listener-oriented approaches make different predictions about referential behaviour in cognitively demanding situations: the first predicts a higher number of…

The Spanish subjunctive mood (SUBJ) is said to be highly vulnerable in heritage language (HL) acquisition. However, there is little controlled research on HL-speaking children acquiring the various Spanish SUBJ contexts, so we do not have a clear picture of when, how, or why heritage speakers (HSs) develop in the SUBJ as they do. This study tests…

This article shows that the Korean Extrinsic Plural Marker (EPM) may be acquired by children on the basis of very little evidence. The EPM marks distributivity, unlike the Instrinsic Plural Marker, which marks plurality. Thirty monolingual learners of Korean aged 5;03 to 6;09 (mean age 6;01) were tested using a series of Truth Value Judgment Tasks…

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)…

We examine whether German children attach an adultlike relevance to the pragmatic category of polarity contrast (e.g., "In my picture the child IS eating the candies" following after "In my picture the child is not eating the candies") with linguistic expressions (i.e., the affirmative particles…

Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in…

We investigated how bilinguals choose words in a narrative task, contrasting the possibilities of a developmental delay vs. compensatory strategies. To characterize a developmental delay, we compared younger (three to five years) and older (seven to ten years) children's lexicalization of target words (Study 1). The younger children told shorter…

This study investigates relationships between acquisition of exhaustivity in single and multiple "wh"-questions, mastery of semantic and pragmatic aspects of quantifier comprehension, and general skills in receptive grammar. The participants of the study were 25 Polish monolingual typically developing children aged 4;02-6;02, who were…

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…

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…