This article examines multilingual language use in two groups of children, one group at a state school, and one at a private IB school. The IB school has earlier been assumed to reflect an 'elite' multilingualism. Three research questions are posed: to what extent is the children's language use multilingual, what are their typological profiles,…

Bilingualism continues to increase with more than 350 different languages spoken in the United States, and more than 21% of people over the age of five (approximately 66 million people) speaking a language other than English at home (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). Many bilingual children in the US speak a minority first language (L1) and English as…

Background: An increasing number of children in the UK and Ireland are growing up speaking more than one language. The many advantages of bilingualism are acknowledged; however, this increased linguistic diversity presents particular challenges for speech and language therapists (SLTs). The case is often more complex with speakers of minority…

This study examined the developmental trajectories of Arabic grammatical number in Arabic-English bilingual children. The samples consisted of 80 individuals (40 monolingual children residing in Jordan and 40 bilingual children residing in the USA), aged between 5 and 9 years. Data was collected through two tasks involving picture able objects and…

An area in need of study in child language acquisition is that of complex multilingual contexts in which there is little language separation by interlocutor or domain. Little is known about how multilingual children use language to construct their identities in each language or in both languages. Identity construction in monolingual contexts has…

Much research on requests has been carried out among L1 Chinese adults, L1 Chinese children, L1 children, L2 adults, and L2 children, but no studies to date have simultaneously examined Chinese children's requests in Chinese (L1) and English (L2). The aim of this study is to investigate how Taiwanese elementary school children vary requests…

Criteria that 9 nonnative English-speaking children in grades 2-6 used when evaluating writing are described. Results indicate that the students were critical evaluators, focused on meaning regardless of age and author, were idiosyncratic in the range of criteria used, and were influenced by the pedagogical focus of their…

The aim of this paper is to present some results of a pilot study designed to find out the extent to which English words and expressions are already familiar to Swedish-speaking children before they start studying English at school, that is, at the end of their fourth school year. The study drew data from a simple productive and receptive English…

Examines some consequences of optimality theoretic constraint ranking and violability for the study of phonological development. The empirical base for the study is provided by previously unpublished data from a longitudinal corpus of phonetically transcribed speech from four English-learning children. (Author/JL)

Describes an investigation of the phonetic characteristics of children's second language acquisition, focusing on acoustical correlates of the voicing contrast for stop consonants, as produced by young native speakers of Arabic who were learning English as a second language. Neither age nor experience with English could predict phonetic…

Explored effects of interactional feedback on children's second language (L2) development in a prettest/posttest design. Child learners carried out communicative tasks that provided contexts for targeted forms and interactional feedback to occur. An experimental group received interactional feedback in response to non-targetlike production of…

A study of the "silent period" in second-language learning focused on behavior of a 6-year-old Polish child shortly after immigration, in interaction with American children, bilingual Polish-American children, and another recent English-learner. Comparing play environments allowed identification of characteristics of interaction with…

Discusses problems and issues in naturalistic (non-school) acquisition of the phonology of a second language (L2). The data come from a longitudinal study of four German-speaking siblings learning English as a second language within an English-speaking community without classroom instruction. (KM)

This study was undertaken to examine the suspicion that a young Greek girl in the short time span of two years had become more fluent in a second language (English) than in her native tongue. To provide a basis of comparison the tests used in this study were also given to the child's older brother who had been in the United States for…

The present study discusses and describes codeswitches produced by two trilingual children acquiring English, Spanish and Hebrew simultaneously from birth. Data were collected regularly over a period of 20 months (from age 2;6 to 4;2 for M and from age 5;5 to 7;1 for E), in naturalistic tape-recorded sessions. Codeswitches drawn from…