Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

Young children do not develop language skills by studying grammar and rules for forming sentences. Children's brains are wired to acquire language naturally; all they need is exposure. Many opportunities for language learning are lost to deaf children if they are not surrounded by other signers. In fact, the loss can be so severe that deaf and…

We identify language and discourse skills in 54-month-old Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers and their English-speaking monolingual peers, using multiple measures. Forty-one Spanish-English bilingual and 25 English monolingual children, all US born, viewed an eight-minute wordless video. The bilingual children recounted the story once in…

Purpose: Understanding what is known about the language profiles of children with hearing loss (CHL) is vital so that researchers and teachers can identify the specific complex syntactic structures that CHL may struggle to master. An understanding of which aspects of complex syntax pose difficulties for CHL is necessary to inform the kind of…

This paper presents a longitudinal examination of Spanish and English phonological, lexical, and morpho-syntactic abilities in 20 low-SES bilingual preschoolers with mothers who had either completed primary or secondary education in Spanish in their country of origin, Mexico. We focused on the link between maternal education and the following…

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of delivery method (face-to-face or telepractice), time, home language, and language ability on bilingual children's receptive vocabulary scores in Spanish and English. Method: Participants included bilingual children with (n = 32) and without (n = 57) developmental language disorders (DLD) that were…

Many parents in the UK enrol their children in Greek supplementary schools so the children can learn and maintain the Greek language and culture in parallel with English mainstream education. Despite fears about the effects of this heritage language (Greek) use on children's skills in the majority language (English), research on these somewhat…

This longitudinal study investigates whether the development in executive control and bilingual experience predicts change in language control in bilingual children. Children were tested twice over the course of 1 year, using the language-switching paradigm and the Simon task. The participants were Japanese-English bilingual "returnee"…

Critical scholarship in bilingualism and bilingual education has documented multiple ways that the rich language and literacy practices of Black children participating in bilingual education programs are often erased in favor of dominant narratives about the literacy practices of their White Mainstream English-speaking peers. Utilizing Black girl…

Purpose: This study describes the language diversity (the within-group variability in dual-language skills) of a sample of Latino dual-language learners (preschoolers, 3-5 years of age) and how language diversity is related to home and classroom factors. Method: A sample of 161 caregivers and their preschoolers participated in this study.…

Prediction-based theories posit that interlocutors use prediction to process language efficiently and to coordinate dialogue. The present study evaluated whether listeners can use spatial deixis (i.e., "this," "that," "these," and "those") to predict the plurality and proximity of a speaker's upcoming…

This study aims to identify the similarities and differences between English and Arabic color-based metaphorical expressions, to identify translation students' difficulties and their translation strategies. A corpus of English and Arabic color-based metaphorical expressions was collected and compared. It was found that English and Arabic…

The growing relevance of research in English as a lingua franca (ELF) for ELT has led to a need to rethink the way we approach English in the language classroom and to reassess how we configure knowledge about language in teacher education. This article reports on a joint project initiated in 2017 at King's College London (UK) and the University…

Only 15% of children with hearing loss who could receive a cochlear implant receive one leaving American Sign Language (ASL) as their access to communication. Spanish-speaking families face even greater challenges including learning different languages/cultures and lack of trained Hispanic professionals. This study identifies how Hispanic mothers…

Research has investigated how lexical-semantic and participant factors impact word learning in young children and adults. However, limited information pertaining to expressive vocabulary development exists for school-aged bilinguals--particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic differences in the semantic…