Language exposure is an important determiner of language outcomes in bilingual children. Family language strategies (FLS, e.g., one-parent-one-language) were contrasted with parents' individual language use to predict language exposure in 4-31-month-old children (50% female) living in Montreal, Quebec. Two-hundred twenty one children (primarily…

Evidence is lacking on the impact of bilingualism on the speech skills of children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study described the speech production of children with CIs acquiring French and one or more additional spoken languages. Four groups of children aged 4-11 were included: bilinguals (n = 15) and monolinguals (n = 14) with CIs and…

This study aims to describe the relationships between child-internal and child-external factors and the consonant accuracy of bilingual children. More specifically, the study looks at internal factors: expressive and receptive vocabulary, and external factors: language exposure and language status, of a group of 4-year-old bilingual Arabic-French…

The present study explores the distinct aspects of adolescents' experiences during their stay abroad in comparison to university students. Specifically, it investigates the evolution of adolescents' social networks and questions the applicability of Coleman's (2013) three concentric circles model to high school students. Drawing on the narratives…

While some guiding principles have been proposed for the selection and presentation of vocabulary, it is unclear whether these notions have been applied systematically, particularly in ways that highlight cultural nuances. To explore the cultural foundations of vocabulary, this study garnered prototypical words for Hexagonal French (the French of…

This project studies how Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals use language learning strategies (LLS) differently depending on their order of language acquisition when they are learning French as an L4. Considering that the use of LLS has been pointed out as a sign of successful language learning, the study inquires whether being a simultaneous…

This study contributes to the understanding of attitudes towards monolingual and code-switched varieties by examining the perceptions of 95 bilinguals towards Manitoban French, Canadian English and code-switching in Manitoba, a Canadian province where French is a minority language with official federal status. By means of a matched-guise test, we…

Code-switching (switching between languages) is a common linguistic behavior in bilingual speech directed to infants and children. In adult-directed speech (ADS), acoustic-phonetic properties of one language may transfer to the other language close to a code-switch point; for example, English stop consonants may be more Spanish-like near a switch.…

People are often asked to self-evaluate their abilities, and these evaluations may not always reflect objective reality. Here, we investigated this issue for bilingual adults' self-evaluations of language proficiency and usage. We specifically examined how people's self-reported language solidarity impacted their first- (L1) and second-language…

The present study investigated the relation between continuous measures of two qualitatively different types of bilingual experience and outcome measures that varied in domain (verbal or nonverbal) and processing demands (degree of conflict). Participants were 195 English-speaking children, 7 years old, who were enrolled in French immersion…

Purpose: This study conducted a transcription-based and spectral moments' analysis of alveolar and alveopalatal fricatives in monolingual and bilingual Frenchs-peaking children, aged 2;6--6;10 (years;months). We measured the percent accuracy of fricatives and investigated whether young children could distinguish alveolar and alveopalatal…

Many children grow up hearing multiple languages, learning words in each. How does the number of languages being learned affect multilinguals' vocabulary development? In a pre-registered study, we compared productive vocabularies of bilingual (n = 170) and trilingual (n = 20) toddlers aged 17-33 months growing up in a bilingual community where…

Studies of language evolution in the lab have used the iterated learning paradigm to show how linguistic structure emerges through cultural transmission--repeated cycles of learning and use across generations of speakers . However, agent-based simulations suggest that prior biases crucially impact the outcome of cultural transmission. Here, we…

Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

The current research study investigated the patterns of reading strategies employed by English/French bilingual adults and children in both languages. An in-depth analysis of patterns of strategy use was conducted on a subset of skilled readers and poor readers from previous data sets. Think-aloud data on short passages revealed that, overall,…