We investigated the role of bilingual parents' language proficiency in their reports of their children's vocabulary size. Sixty-four Spanish-English bilingual mothers whose L1 was Spanish reported their bilingual children's English and Spanish vocabularies and 37 monolingual L1 English-speaking mothers reported their monolingual children's English…

Language proficiency exams have been used since the development of bilingual education. The purpose of the following case study is to demonstrate how the English and Spanish proficiency exams given to a child for admission into a dual language (Spanish-English) program framed a child in a deficit view and missed the proficiency the child had…

The paper describes the role parental language ideology and the home literacy environment play in heritage language (HL) literacy learning of bilingual Arabic-English-speaking children in the UK. Information about the under-reported literacy practices of Arabic-English-speaking families will enhance current knowledge about HL literacy practices…

This study explores typically developing bilingual children's performance in their English as a heritage language. The aim of this study is to advance our understanding of heritage language expectations and the role of chronological age and bilingual exposure. A broad range of receptive and expressive linguistic domains are investigated as a…

Having heard "a pimwit", English-speakers assume that "the pimwit" is also possible. This type of productivity is attributed to syntactic categories such as NOUN and DETERMINER, but the key question is "how" do humans become endowed with these categories in the first place. We propose a novel approach that combines…

Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…

Recent developments in multilingualism research urge us to move beyond seeing bilingualism as 'double monolingualism' and towards "translanguaging," which conceptualises language as a bundle of socially constructed linguistic resources that individuals can deploy to make sense of their multilingual world. Despite this theoretical…

Previous studies have found correlations between parent input and child language outcomes, providing prima facie evidence for a causal relation. However, this could also reflect the effects of shared genes. The present study removed this genetic confound by measuring English vocabulary growth in 29 preschool-aged children (21 girls) aged…

Many children learn language, in part, from the speech of non-native speakers who vary in their language proficiency. To investigate the influence of speaker proficiency on the quality of child-directed speech, 29 mothers who were native English speakers and 31 mothers who were native speakers of Spanish and who reported speaking English to their…

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the…

This study adopts a conversation analytic approach to present a close analysis of the sequential organisation of a parent-child homework activity in a Swedish-English bi-national family. Families formed within migration contexts are increasingly common in an ever-globalised world, but current research has not fully investigated how parent-child…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is phonetically distinct from adult-directed speech (ADS): It is typically considered to have special prosody--like higher pitch and slower speaking rates--as well as unique speech sound properties, for example, more breathy, hyperarticulated, and/or variable consonant and vowel articulation. These phonetic features…

Language exposure is an important determiner of language outcomes in bilingual children. Family language strategies (FLS, e.g., one-parent-one-language) were contrasted with parents' individual language use to predict language exposure in 4-31-month-old children (50% female) living in Montreal, Quebec. Two-hundred twenty one children (primarily…

Background & Aims: Given that standardized language measures alone are inadequate for identifying functionally defined developmental language disorder (fDLD), this study investigated whether non-linguistic cognitive abilities (procedural learning, motor functions, executive attention, processing speed) can increase the prediction accuracy of…

Infants and toddlers experience the world in interaction with others. Likewise, social interactions are important in learning about math--concepts of number ("one," "two," "three"), space ("on top," "upside-down," "round"), and magnitude ("more," "big,"…