This article examines the language and cognitive skills of bidialectal and bilingual children, focusing on African American English bidialectal speakers and Spanish-English bilingual speakers. It contributes to the discussion by considering two themes in the extant literature: (1) linguistic and cognitive strengths can be found in speaking two…

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this "distributed learning effect" with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children…

A discussion focusing on the concept of metalinguistic awareness, particularly in bilingual children, precedes a discussion of metalinguistic awareness and its potential relationship with the cognitive advantages of bilingualism. The metalinguistic history and metalinguistic awareness of a subject, bilingual in German and English, are highlighted.…

Research is reported showing that children are lexically conservative in the domain of learning argument omissibility. Two studies (one observational case study, one experimental) show a relationship between the argument frames used in input and those used by child subjects. (Contains 38 references.) (Author/LB)

This volume deals with various aspects of the relationship between linguistic ability and general cognitive development. It presents original, up-to-date research for child psychologists, linguists, psycholinguists, scholars, teachers, and students interested in this field and interprets the findings in the context of contemporary linguistic…

Phenomena are examined to support the conception that cognitive structures continue to reflect the numerous ways of apprehending the world that blend to some degree into each other. (AMH)

One hundred and twenty kindergarten and second grade children from three different language environments were given a perceptual matching test and a verbal communication test to examine the relationship between language and cognitive performance. The object of the study was to focus on the cognitive processing demands imposed by the linguistic…

Cross-sectional and longitudinal acquisition data for English, German, Italian, and Turkish children ranging in age from approximately 1 to 4 provide a preliminary answer to the question of whether there is a consistent interlanguage order of development of notions of conjunction. It was found that children first conjoin sentences by simple…

A study examined the effects of differing degrees of bilingualism (English monolingual, English-French balanced bilingual, Bengali-English partial bilingual) on nonverbal problem-solving abilities of 71 grade-three children. The groups were compared on control of attention and analysis of knowledge. Results indicate the balanced bilinguals…

Investigations using English have shown that a number of linguistic constructions associated with reporting verbs, and verbs concerning plans, present comprehension difficulties to children over the age of five. The corresponding constructions in Greek involved ambiguity appreciation, and tests of monoglots and bilinguals indicated that a…

This longitudinal study of bilingual language acquisition analyzes the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes in a child bilingual in English and Chichewa (a Bantu lanugage of East Central Africa). The order of acquisition obtained is compared to that obtained by Brown (1973) for monolingual English speaking children and that…

A study was conducted in 1972-73 in Berkeley, Rome, Dubrovnik, and Istanbul, in order to examine the differences and similarities in the sequence of the development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. The subjects consisted of 48 two-, three-, and four-year-olds in each field site. Groups of three girls and…