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…

Current models of the affinity between syntax and vocabulary are complex and recognize the contribution of bootstrapping and computational processes. To date, the mutual facilitation between these two constructs over time has not been studied in second language (L2) school children. The present study investigated longitudinally the direction and…

Early trilingual development is an excellent testing ground for input reduction effects on acquisition outcomes. This article reports a study investigating input-outcome relations in a child Leo in Hong Kong, who was addressed to in Mandarin, Cantonese and later also in English by caretakers through 'one caretaker-one language' and 'one day-one…

This study examined dual language learners' (DLLs n = 24) and English-only (EO n = 20) children's expressive and receptive language in kindergarten (M[subscript age] = 5.7 years) as well as the relation to peers' language use. Expressive language skills (vocabulary diversity, syntactic complexity) were measured in the fall, winter, and spring…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…

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…

Existing research on the impact of bilingualism on metalinguistic development has concentrated on the development of phonological awareness. The present study extended the scope of existing research by focusing on morphological awareness, an aspect of metalinguistic awareness that becomes increasingly important beyond the initial phase of literacy…

The present study investigated language skills and reading comprehension with English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 2-5. Of the 377 children in the sample, 207 were English monolingual and 170 were Spanish-English bilingual. Data were collected within a cohort-sequential design for two academic years in the fall and…

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,…

Purpose: This study explores the hypothesis that vocabulary growth can have 2 types of effects in morphosyntactic development. One is a general effect, where vocabulary growth globally determines utterance complexity, defined in terms of sentence length and rates of subordination. There are also specific effects, where vocabulary size has a…

What makes a child's language development trajectory have the patterns that it has, and what causes differences across children in those patterns? These fundamental questions have for over half a century been at the heart of research on language development in monolingual children, on the cross-linguistic development of language in children from…

Where do the two languages of the bilingual child interact? The literature has debated whether bilingual children have delays in the acquisition of direct objects. The variety of methods and languages involved have prevented clear conclusions. In a transitivity-based approach, null objects are a default structural possibility, present in all…

Background: Although a number of studies have been conducted on normal acquisition in French, systematic methods for analysis of French and normative group data have been lacking. Aims: To develop a systematic method for the analysis of language samples in Quebec French, and to provide preliminary normative data on early lexical and syntactic…

We present a hypothesis for a specific kind of code-mixing in young bilingual children, during the development of their two first languages, one of which is considerably weaker than the other. Our hypothesis, which we label the Ivy Hypothesis, is that, in the interaction meant to be in the weaker language, the child uses portions of higher…