We identify language and discourse skills in 54-month-old Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers and their English-speaking monolingual peers, using multiple measures. Forty-one Spanish-English bilingual and 25 English monolingual children, all US born, viewed an eight-minute wordless video. The bilingual children recounted the story once in…

Many children learn language, in part, from the speech of non-native speakers who vary in their language proficiency. To investigate the influence of speaker proficiency on the quality of child-directed speech, 29 mothers who were native English speakers and 31 mothers who were native speakers of Spanish and who reported speaking English to their…

In this preregistered, longitudinal study of early code-switching, 34 US-born, Spanish-English bilingual children were recorded with a bilingual family member at 2;6 and 3;6, in Spanish-designated and English-designated interactions. Children's Spanish and English expressive vocabulary and their exposure to code-switching were measured through…

Children from language minority homes reach school age with variable dual language skills. Cluster analysis identified four bilingual profiles among 126 U.S.-born, 5-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals. The profiles differed on two dimensions: language balance and total language knowledge. Balance varied primarily as a function of indicators of…

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…