Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

Using a habituation paradigm with a three-switch design, the present study investigated whether 20-month-old French-learning infants use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially when both the agent and the action interpretations are possible. Of particular interest was whether infants' initial…

Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee…

Many English language proficiency (ELP) tests used for university admissions and placement now include integrated writing tasks that require examinees to use external sources when writing. Integrated writing tasks improve test authenticity and impact, but they raise several validity questions, such as what academic language skills they engage and…

Bilinguals can be proficient in oral language without necessarily knowing how to read and write in at least one of their languages. Literacy has been shown to affect language processing in monolinguals. In the present study, we test if literacy affects grammaticality judgments for Cantonese-English bilinguals who varied in Chinese literacy…

Recent research that explored how input exposure and learner characteristics influence novel L2 morphosyntactic pattern learning has exposed participants to either text or static images rather than dynamic visual events. Furthermore, it is not known whether incorporating eye gaze cues into dynamic visual events enhances dual pattern learning.…

Writing native-like has always been a primary purpose for non-native writers of English and, accordingly, many language components have been investigated to develop writers' fluency. One of these language components is syntactic complexity (SC), which is often regarded as a reliable way to grade any texts from easy to difficult. This study aims to…

This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English-French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children…

Purpose: Working memory and linguistic knowledge are highly intertwined in language tasks. Verbal working memory in particular has been studied as a potential constraint on language performance. This, in turn, highlights the need for a clinical assessment tool that will assist clinicians in understanding individual children's performance in…

This study is based on naturalistic speech samples produced by one child learning Cree as her first language (2;01-4;03) and presents the first investigation into the development of preverbs in the language. Preverbs are an optional class of morpheme which precede the lexical verb stem, dividing into grammatical, lexical and directional (deictic)…

Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study of the writing practices of three plurilingual writers in Toronto, Canada, this article focuses on the translingual practices that these writers engaged with and discusses how these practices enriched their writing processes and products both in English and in their mother tongues. The author explains…

Purpose: This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating French-speaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax has not been identified as a special area of…

A child's ability to understand text (reading comprehension) can greatly impact both their ability to learn in the classroom and their future contributions to society. Reading comprehension draws on oral language; behavioural measures of knowledge at the word and sentence levels have been shown to be related to children's reading comprehension. In…

This study explored performance on expressive and receptive graphic symbol tasks and spoken comprehension by individuals who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) as well as the relationship of performance with participants' skills and characteristics. Participants were 19 children and youth (aged 5- to 18-years-old) who used aided…

The present research explores the interactional nature of oral tasks carried out in two types of learner dyads in terms of their likelihood to foster negotiation for meaning during Language Related Episodes (LREs). Quantitative data analyses reveal how learners in same L1 dyads, Spanish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, and in…