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…

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…

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…

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)…

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.…

One of the most enduring questions in the field of bilingualism is whether bilingual infants and children initially have one language system or two. Research with adults indicates that, while bilinguals do not represent their languages in two fully encapsulated language systems, they are able to functionally differentiate their languages. This…

It is unknown if the developmental path of antonym knowledge in deaf children increases continuously with age and correlates with reading comprehension, as it does in hearing children. In the current study we tested 564 students aged 4-18 on a receptive multiple-choice American Sign Language (ASL) antonym test. A subgroup of 138 students aged 7-18…

In this article we report on early rhythmic discrimination performance of children who participated in a longitudinal study following children from birth to their 6th year of life. Thirty-four children including 8 children with a family risk for developmental language impairment were tested on the discrimination of trochaic and iambic disyllabic…

All natural languages rely on sentence-level form-meaning associations (i.e., linking rules) to encode propositional content about who did what to whom. Although these associations are recognized as foundational in many different theoretical frameworks (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003; Pinker, 1984, 1989) and are--at least…

This study examines the effects of learning context and age on second language development by comparing the language gains, measured in terms of oral and written fluency, lexical and syntactic complexity, and accuracy, experienced by four groups of learners of English: children in a study abroad setting, children in their at-home school, adults in…

It is widely assumed that ultimate attainment in adult second language (L2) learners often differs quite radically from ultimate attainment in child L2 learners. This article addresses the question of whether learners at different ages also show qualitative differences in the process of L2 acquisition. Longitudinal production data from two…

In an investigation of discourse sensitivity, Catalan-speaking children aged 4 to 8 years were asked two different questions in a picture description task. One was a wide-focus question ("What is happening?"); the other was a narrow-focus question ("What is happening to 'the patient'?"). Children of all age groups displayed sensitivity to the…

A study compared the Swedish tone accent acquisition of native-speaking children (N=2) and nonnative speaking college students (N=12). Both groups overgeneralized one pitch pattern to all bisyllabic words. Children used "Accent 2" (two-peaked) and adults "Accent 1" (one-peaked), analogous to the prevailing patterns of their…

Recurrence analysis is introduced as a means to investigate syntactic coordination between child and caregiver. Three CHILDES ( MacWhinney, 2000) corpora are analyzed and demonstrate coordination between children and their caregivers in terms of word-class n-gram sequences. Results further indicate that trade-offs in leading or following this…

Describes a research project in which the acquisition of French by two six-year-old boys, native speakers of English, was observed longitudinally. (CFM)