Bilingual children are a more heterogenous group than their monolingual counterparts with respect to the sources of variation in their language learning environments, as well as the wide individual variation in their language abilities. Such heterogeneity in both individual difference factors and language abilities argues for the importance of an…

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…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

Paradis' (2023) keynote article is a timely documentation of the ongoing shift in focus within childhood bilingualism research from investigating the factors that modulate majority or second language (ML/L2) attainment (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011) to understanding the sources of variation that lead to minority heritage language (HL)…

This study examined the linguistic and individual-level factors that render case marking a vulnerable domain in English-dominant Greek heritage children. We also investigated whether heritage language (HL) children can use case-marking cues to interpret (non-)canonical sentences in Greek similarly to their monolingual peers. A group of six- to…

The relationship between first and second language in early vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children is still debated in the literature. This study compared the expressive vocabulary of 39 equivalently low-SES two-year-old bilingual children from immigrant families with different heritage languages (Romanian vs. Nigerian English) and the same…

In this preregistered, longitudinal study of early code-switching, 34 US-born, Spanish-English bilingual children were recorded with a bilingual family member at 2;6 and 3;6, in Spanish-designated and English-designated interactions. Children's Spanish and English expressive vocabulary and their exposure to code-switching were measured through…

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 paper reports the preliminary results of a study examining the role of structural overlap, language exposure, and language use on cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual first language acquisition. We focus on the longitudinal development of determiners in a corpus of two French-English children between the ages of 2;4 and 3;7. The…

This study examines the influence of language-internal (frequency and complexity of linguistic properties), language-external (percent French input, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender), and lexical factors (size of total and French vocabulary) on the phonological production abilities of monolingual and bilingual French-speaking children, aged…

From a socio-cultural perspective, language offers a means for children to communicate with and learn from others through interaction: language is the medium through which young children are provided cognitive, social, and emotional support in interactions with caregivers, siblings, and peers; and children characterized as dual language learners…

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…

Child characteristics, family factors, and preschool factors are all found to affect the rate of bilingual children's vocabulary development in heritage language (HL). However, what remains unknown is the relative importance of these three sets of factors in HL vocabulary growth. The current study explored the complex issue with 457 Singaporean…

Bilingual children show a number of advantages in the domain of communication. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether differences in interactions are present before productive language skills emerge. For a duration of 5 minutes, 64 parents and their 14-month-old infants explored a decorated room together. The coordination of their…

When bilingual children enter formal reading education, host language proficiency becomes increasingly important. This study investigated the relation between socioeconomic status (SES), maternal language use, reading input, and vocabulary in a sample of 111 six-year-old children of first- and second-generation Turkish immigrant parents in the…