The present study compared Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals within three age groups to examine whether bilinguals have an advantage in syntactic processing. Participants were tested on morphosyntactic awareness, word-order awareness, artificial syntax learning, and general cognitive abilities. Bilinguals within the three age…

Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and…

Purpose: Currently, there is no reliable instrument to measure naming abilities in bilingual speakers of English and French. The Boston Naming Test (BNT; Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983)is a widely used scale for clinical assessments of language function, but it is not suitable to assess bilinguals. Rasch analysis provides a unique and…

Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues' respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we…

Processing of emotional meaning is crucial in many areas of psychology, including language and music processing. This issue takes on particular significance in bilinguals because it has been suggested that bilinguals process affective words differently in their first (L1) and second, later acquired languages (L2). We undertook a series of five…

Research on second-language (L2) acquisition has identified linguistic domains that appear to be especially difficult to learn--one such sticking point being syntactic structures that depend on the surrounding discourse. The Interface Hypothesis (IH) explains what makes such constructions problematic by appealing to a modular view of language,…

This study explored the development of oral narrative retell proficiency among Mandarin Chinese-English dual language immersion (DLI) learners in Utah. The study compared the younger and the older DLI learners' oral narrative retelling production in order to provide information regarding the Mandarin narrative developmental trend of the DLI…

This study examined whether the proposed bilingual advantage in inhibitory control and working memory can be extended to a trilingual advantage, and assessed any age-related effects on a continuum in young adults to older adults. Trilinguals, bilinguals and monolinguals' performance on the Simon task and a numerical version of the N-back task was…

Input variability is key in many aspects of linguistic learning, yet variability increases input complexity, which may cause difficulty in some learning contexts. The current work investigates this trade-off by comparing speaker variability effects on L2 vocabulary learning in different age groups. Existing literature suggests that speaker…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

The bilingual advantage hypothesis contends that the management of two languages in the brain is carried out through domain-general mechanisms, and that bilinguals possess a performance advantage over monolinguals on (nonlinguistic) tasks that tap these processes. Presently, there is evidence both for and against such an advantage. Interestingly,…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine online and off-line sentence processing using Korean language relative clause sentences between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD). Method: Twenty-four children with TD and 19 children with SLI participated in this study. Children completed…

Previous studies showed that bilinguals tend to score lower on some language tests than monolinguals in each of their languages and outperform monolinguals on some cognitive tasks. We investigated whether short-term and working memory capacities that underlie language abilities differ between sequential bilinguals and monolinguals. We tested…

Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

Purpose: This study examined bilinguals' performance on functional executive function map tasks such as the Zoo Map from the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome and the extent to which working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition measures predicted bilinguals' performance on these tasks. Additionally, we explored the utility of…