This article evaluates the acquisition of directionals in Q'anjob'al, a Western Mayan language of Guatemala. The data come from a longitudinal study of two Q'anjob'al monolingual children of Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala: Xhuw (1;9-2;5) and Xhim (2;3-3;5). The results show how these children acquire the morphological distribution of…

Previous research on English Medium Instruction classrooms has almost exclusively documented the interaction between a teacher and students where the teacher is able to understand and use the first language (L1) of the students. We present data obtained from science classrooms in English-medium-instruction (EMI) high-school programs in China where…

This study explores language shift and maintenance of Indigenous languages in bilingual contact situations. It specifically examines how factors such as language attitudes favour and deter the use, maintenance and transmission of Nahuatl. Data on language attitudes were collected by means of interviews which covered the linguistic background,…

Purpose: To avoid misdiagnosis with developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children, it is recommended to evaluate both languages. However, unlike their monolingual peers, bilingual children acquire their heritage language under adverse input conditions. Focusing on Levantine Arabic, the study evaluates the clinical utility of a…

This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (Italian 'o') in negative sentences by Italian monolingual and bilingual (L1 Italian - L2 English) children and Italian adults. Participants were asked to judge Italian sentences corresponding to the English sentence 'This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper'. According to the…

This dissertation explores clear speech which is defined as a specific speaking style people adopt when fluent communication could be compromised for various reasons. Although acoustic properties and their perceptual benefits of clear speech produced by monolingual speakers of English are well documented, there has only been a small body of past…

Most L1 (first language) Japanese speakers in Japan seem to think that they are monolingual. While it appears that Japanese people accept monolingual-ness as normative in the nation, there is little situated understanding of what makes up this Japanese monolingual-ness. This study reports on repeated, long, and mostly unstructured interviews with…

Bilingual children's total vocabulary in each of their languages is often smaller than that of monolinguals. In their seminal study, Bialystok et al. (2010. 'Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children.' "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 13 (4): 525-531) divided children's vocabulary into 'home' and…

Filipino migrants are the fifth largest migrant community in Australia. Filipino migration to the country has been driven by socioeconomic and political factors in both the Philippines and Australia. Against this context, this paper investigates heritage language maintenance practices of Filipino migrant families by using a 2019 interview-based…

This study investigates the use of overt and null subjects in Bulgarian in child heritage speakers with L2 German. The alternation of overt and null pronominal subjects in null-subject languages like Bulgarian depends on grammatical and discourse conditions and contrasts with German. Oral narratives were elicited in Bulgarian, comparing the…

Lexical access and lexical diversity are often assumed to be vulnerable to first language (L1) attrition. They also differ between monolinguals and nonimmersed bilinguals. This raises the question whether lexical attrition can be ascribed to nonuse or to competition between the two languages. We compare two populations of late L2 learners of Dutch…

Scholars have long critiqued points of view in which monolingual perspectives are seen as normative in research on multilingualism. In relation to this "monolingual orientation," however, in which monolingualism is perceived to be the implicit norm, less work has been dedicated to methodological challenges. As disciplinary perspectives…

This study investigates the grammatical skills of typically developing Oromo-speaking preschool-age children and lays the foundation for a language assessment tool for Oromo, a Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia. The current study used a standard picture-based elicitation task that evaluated children's accuracy in producing grammatical…

We investigated the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in the unfolding of vocabulary and text-comprehension skills in language minority bilingual children, who are educated exclusively in their L2. For comparison, a monolingual control group was also tested, consisting of children of the same age and schooling. We administered a synonyms task to…

This study explored whether the directionality of the relation between majority language and various facets of socioemotional development (three to 5 years old) differs between children with different language backgrounds. 12,951 children (49% girls; 85% White, 6% Pakistani and Bangladeshi, 3% Black, 3% Mix, 2% Indian) from the British Millennium…