Linguistic input in multi-lingual/-cultural contexts is highly variable. We examined the production of English and Malay laterals by fourteen early bilingual preschoolers in Singapore who were exposed to several allophones of coda laterals: Malay caregivers use predominantly clear-l in English and Malay, but their English coda laterals can also be…

Learning to mark for tense in a second language is notoriously difficult for speakers of a tenseless language like Chinese. In this study we test two reasons for these difficulties in Chinese-English sequential bilingual children: (1) morphophonological transfer (i.e., avoidance of complex codas), and (2) interpretation of -"ed" as an…

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers' speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book…

This study investigated the durational features of English word-initial /s/+stop clusters produced by bilingual Mandarin (L1)-English (L2) children and monolingual English children and adults. The participants included two groups of five- to six-year-old bilingual children: low proficiency in the L2 (Bi-low) and high proficiency in the L2…

This study examined accuracy in production and grammaticality judgements of verb morphology by eighteen Chinese-speaking children learning English as a second language (L2) followed longitudinally from four to six years of exposure to English, and who began to learn English at age 4;2. Children's growth in accuracy with verb morphology reached a…

To fully acquire a language, especially its phonology, children need linguistic input from native speakers early on. When interaction with native speakers is not always possible--e.g. for children learning a second language that is not the societal language--audios are commonly used as an affordable substitute. But does such non-interactive input…

This longitudinal case study documents the emergence of bilingualism in a young monolingual Mandarin boy on the basis of an acoustic analysis of his vowel productions recorded via a picture-naming task over 20 months following his enrollment in an all-English (L2) preschool at the age of 3;7. The study examined (1) his initial L2 vowel space, (2)…

This study used three experiments to study whether infant-directed (ID) or adult-directed (AD) speech facilitated the learning of Chinese vocabulary by adults whose native language was English and who had had no prior knowledge of Chinese. Results indicate that ID speech may play a pivotal role in early lexical acquisition. (51 references)…

Looks at naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine whether variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. Naturalistic speech samples from English-, Italian-, and Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. (Author/JL)

Study of children who go through a "silent period" early in the course of second language development found that most of the children engaged in extensive private speech, including: repetition of others' utterances; recall and practice; creation of new linguistic forms; paradigmatic substitution; and rehearsal for overt social…