Monolingual children identify referents uniquely in gesture before they do so with words, and parents translate these gestures into words. Children benefit from these translations, acquiring the words that their parents translated earlier than the ones that are not translated. Are bilingual children as likely as monolingual children to identify…

This study investigated the vocabulary development of children (N = 547) from linguistically and socioeconomically diverse classrooms in Germany from age 3 in preschool to age 7 in Grade 1. The results showed that for dual language learners (DLLs, n = 107) growth rates in their German majority language skills varied over classrooms. Compared to…

Onomatopoeia are disproportionately high in number in infants' early words compared to adult language. Studies of infant language perception have proposed an iconic advantage for onomatopoeia, which may make them easier for infants to learn. This study analyses infants' early word production to show a phonological motivation for onomatopoeia in…

The present study aims at exploring: (a) the role of the educational setting in the acquisition of aspect and executive functions (i.e. updating) skills, (b) the acquisition of the aspectual features in Greek-German bilingual children and (c) the impact of updating on the acquisition of aspect. Imperfective aspect has been found to be acquired…

The aim of this exploratory study was to examine the role of the "First Language First" model for preschool bilingual education in the development of vocabulary depth. The languages studied were Russian (L1) and Hebrew (L2) among bilingual children aged 4-5 years in Israel. According to this model, the children's first language of…

This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…

The current study examined monolingual English-speaking toddlers' (N=50) ability to learn word-referent links from native speakers of Dutch versus English, and second, whether children generalized or sequestered their extensions when terms were tested by a subsequent speaker of English. Overall, children performed better in the English than in the…

The present paper reports on a study that investigated the role of procedural and declarative memory in the acquisition of Finnish past tense morphology. Two competing models were tested. Ullman's (2004) declarative/procedural model predicts that procedural memory supports the acquisition of regular morphology, whereas declarative memory supports…

Verbal fluency tasks are used extensively in clinical settings because of their sensitivity to a wide variety of disorders, including cognitive decline and dementia, and their usefulness in differential diagnoses. However, the effects of bilingualism on neuropsychological assessment, and verbal fluency in particular, are currently not completely…

We use a time-course analysis to examine the roles of vocabulary size and executive control in bilinguals' verbal fluency performance. Two groups of bilinguals and a group of monolingual adults were tested in English with verbal fluency subtests from the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System. The two bilingual groups were equivalent in their…

Research in monolingual populations indicate that vocabulary knowledge is essential to reading achievement, but how vocabulary develops in bilingual children has been understudied. The current study investigated the role of home and school factors in predicting English vocabulary among 284 bilingual kindergartners (168 Chinese, 65 Malay, 51…

Two studies examined the role of phonological cues in the lexical categorization of new words when children could also rely on learning by exclusion and whether the role of phonology depends on extensive experience with a language. Phonological cues were assessed via phonological typicality--an aggregate measure of the relationship between the…

How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants show a tendency to associate a novel noun with a novel object rather than a familiar one, a heuristic known as…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether children exposed to 2 languages would benefit from the phonotactic probability cues of a single language in the same way as monolingual peers and to determine whether crosslinguistic influence would be present in a fast-mapping task. Method: Two groups of typically developing children…

Bilinguals sometimes report on difficulties in finding words while speaking in the first language (L1) or the second language (L2), which is frequently attributed to the negative influence of one language onto the other. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the relationship between L1 and L2 vocabulary knowledge of Korean-English…