This study examined the influence of cognate status and language distance on simultaneous bilingual children's vocabulary acquisition. It aimed to tease apart effects of word-level similarities and language-level similarities, while also exploring the role of individual-level variation in age, exposure, and nontarget language proficiency. Children…

A large number of children are exposed to more than one language. One well-established method of assessing early vocabulary development in monolingual children is parent report; however, its use in bilingual/multilingual contexts is less established and brings unique challenges. In this methodological scoping review, we reviewed studies of early…

Extending previous findings on adult L2 learners' integration of verbal and constructional information, this study investigated how child learners of English as a foreign language produce verbs in target constructions and whether (a) receptive skills and (b) the specific production modality (spoken versus written) modulate the integration process.…

Montrul's (2008) onset age hypothesis predicts that, if attrition occurs in early bilingualism, it will be more severe in simultaneous than in sequential bilinguals. This study tested that prediction in an eye-tracking experiment focused on the processing of Spanish gender agreement during sentence reading. Heritage Spanish speakers exposed to…

Theories of how language works have shifted from rule-like competence accounts to more skill-like incremental learning accounts. Under these, people acquire language incrementally, through practice, and may even lose it incrementally as they acquire competing mappings. Incremental learning implies that (1) a bilingual's abilities in their…

This study investigated the effects of task complexity on child learners' second language (L2) gains, the relationship between aptitude and L2 development, and the extent to which task complexity influences this relationship when recasts are provided. Sixty child EFL learners were assigned to two experimental groups. During the treatment, one…

Successful language use requires the ability to process nonadjacent dependencies (NADs) that occur in linguistic input. Learning such structural regularities seems therefore crucial for children, and researchers have indeed proposed that language problems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD), especially problems with grammar, are…

The Less-Is-More hypothesis was proposed to explain age-of-acquisition effects in first language (L1) and second language (L2) learning. We scrutinize different renditions of the hypothesis by examining how learning outcomes are affected by (a) limited cognitive capacity, (b) reduced interference resulting from less prior knowledge, and (c)…

Children learning language efficiently process single words and activate semantic, phonological, and other features of words during recognition. We investigated lexical recognition in deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) to determine how perceiving language in the visual-spatial modality affects lexical recognition. Twenty native…

This study investigated the predictions of two approaches to second language acquisition. According to the usage-based approach, learner knowledge results from the strengths and weaknesses of input-driven statistical learning. According to the learner-varieties approach, pragmatic communication principles and language-internal constraints play…

Most studies on bilingual children's metalinguistic awareness assess metalinguistic awareness using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual's languages dynamically interact with each other in creating metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek-Italian bilingual children (8-11 years) for metalinguistic awareness using…

This study investigated how bilinguals' perception of their first language (L1) differs according to age of reduced contact with L1 after immersion in a second language (L2). Twenty-one L1 Korean-L2 English bilinguals in the United States, ranging in age of reduced contact from 3 to 15 years, and 17 control participants in Korea were tested…

We present the case study of MB--a bilingual child with Down syndrome (DS) who speaks Russian (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]) and has learned to read in two different alphabets with different symbol systems. We demonstrate that, in terms of oral language, MB is as proficient in Russian as English, with a mild advantage for…

This study examined young emergent bilinguals' cognate and false cognate knowledge and vocabulary outcomes on four early-language assessments in English and Spanish. Findings revealed that children were able to use shared phonology of words--before they had developed extensive knowledge about their orthography--to recognize and produce cognates.…

We meta-analyzed the effectiveness of incidental second language word learning from spoken input. Our sample contained 105 effect sizes from 32 primary studies employing meaning-focused word-learning activities with 1,964 participants with typical cognitive functioning. The random-effects meta-analysis yielded a mean effect size of g = 1.05,…