This paper explores whether English-Mandarin bilingual children have mastered discourse skills and whether they show sensitivity to the discourse principle of information status of referents in their speech and gestures. We compare the speech and gestures produced by bilingual children to those produced by English- and Mandarin-speaking…

This paper investigates how learners interpret definite plural noun phrases (e.g., "the tigers") and bare (article-less) plural noun phrases (e.g., "tigers") in their second language. Whereas Spanish allows definite plurals to have both generic and specific readings, English requires definite plurals to have specific, nongeneric readings. Generic…

This study aimed to identify factors that contribute to bilingual children's decontextualized language production and investigate how schooling experience and bilingualism affect the development of this skill. The word definition skills of seventy Korean-English bilingual children whose first language was Korean, yet who had been schooled in…

Previous studies have shown that preschool bilingual children lag behind same-aged monolinguals in their production of correct past tense forms. This lag has been attributed to bilinguals' less frequent exposure to either language. If so, bilingual children acquire the past tense like monolinguals, only later. In this study, we compared the…

Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an…

This study examines vocabulary growth rates in first and second languages for Spanish-speaking and Cantonese-speaking English language learners from kindergarten through second grade. Growth-modeling results show a within-language effect of concepts about print on vocabulary. Language exposure also had an effect on English vocabulary: earlier…

Johanne Paradis' Keynote Article can be read as a concise critical review of the research that focuses on the sometimes strained relationship between bilingualism and specific language impairment (SLI). In my comments I will add some thoughts based on our own research on the learning of Dutch as a second language (L2) by children with SLI.

Only a decade ago, a very few researchers considered the study of language disorders in bilingual population worth pursuing. It was mostly argued that there were enough challenges in studying bilingualism, and even more challenges in the study of specific language impairment (SLI). So why complicate things and combine the two domains?

In the Keynote Article, "The Interface Between Bilingual Development and Specific Language Impairment," Johanne Paradis considers issues and evidence at the intersection of children learning two languages and primary or specific language impairment (SLI). The review focuses on morphosyntactic evidence and the fit of this evidence with maturational…

The Keynote Article is a very welcomed, timely, and incisive review article that examines theoretical and clinical implications of research on bilingual development and specific language impairment (SLI). Paradis provides a considered examination of the available evidence and takes into account a number of potential influencing factors. In…

I commend Johanne Paradis not only for her interesting Keynote Article but also for the careful research that she has conducted along with her collaborators in the area of bilingual language development and disorders. Her contributions have been significant and are sure to shape our theoretical as well as clinical understanding of specific…

We investigated the factors that may help understand the differential rates of language development in the home language (i.e., Spanish) of Latino preschoolers with specific language impairment. Children were randomly assigned to either bilingual or English-only small group interventions and followed from preschool to kindergarten. Predictors of…

This study explores the possibility of cross-language activation when bilinguals process number words in their first language (Italian) and their second language (German). Italian monolinguals (Experiment 1), German monolinguals (Experiment 2), and Italian/German bilinguals (Experiment 3) were required to decide the larger of two number words…

In her very interesting Keynote Article, Johanne Paradis gives a clear overview of recent research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders, and highlights its theoretical and clinical implications. She raises the challenging question of "whether bilingualism can be viewed as a kind of "therapy" for SLI." At first…

We examined developing bilinguals' use of animacy and word order cues during sentence interpretation tasks administered in each of their languages. Participants were 6- to 8-year-old children who learned Vietnamese as a first language and English as a second language (n = 23). Participants listened to simple sentences and identified the agent or…