This study investigated cross-linguistic priming in six-year-old, balanced Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 60). We examined bilinguals' production of transitive forms in English (active, passive) after exposure to Spanish transitives (Study 1; M age = 6.2 years; SD = 0.3) and their production of transitive forms in Spanish (active, passive) after…

As a spoken word unfolds over time, similar sounding words ("cap" and "cat") compete until one word "wins". Lexical competition becomes more efficient from infancy through adolescence. We examined one potential mechanism underlying this development: lexical inhibition, by which activated candidates suppress…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

The current study investigates the impact of the teachers' societal dominant language use within a weak version of translanguaging in early heritage language education. We explored five preschool teachers' use of English, the dominant majority language, in Tamil heritage language classes in Singapore and examined its impact on 33 children's…

Little analytical scrutiny has been devoted to teacher accommodation of academic language at the early childhood level, despite being a critical school-level factor to consider when addressing at-risk learners' academic needs. The present study investigates how fifteen Head Start teachers support three components of academic language during…

In situations of language endangerment, the ability to understand a language tends to persevere longer than the ability to speak it. As a result, the possibility of language revival remains high even when few speakers remain. Nonetheless, this potential requires that those with high levels of comprehension received sufficient input as children for…