Purpose: This study investigated the dimensionality of language in bilingual children using measures of semantics and morphosyntax in English and Spanish. Method: Participants included 112 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4-8 years from a wide range of language abilities and dominance profiles. Using measures of semantics and morphosyntax…

This study examined the influence of linguistic input on the development of productive and receptive skills across three fundamental language domains: lexico-semantics, syntax, and phonology. Seventy-one (35 female) Basque-Spanish bilingual children were assessed at three time points (Fall 2018, Summer 2019, Winter 2021), between 4 and 6 years of…

Purpose: This study used structural equation modeling to investigate the dimensionality of language in Spanish-English bilingual kindergartners. Five theoretical models were compared, including (a) a unidimensional model; (b) a two-dimensional model by language (Spanish, English); (c) a three-dimensional model by domain of language (phonology,…

Purpose: The current study examines bilingual children's development of Spanish and English morphosyntax structures over the period of 1 year. Identification of morphosyntax forms clustered by difficulty can elucidate their development and guide clinicians to select appropriate targets for intervention and monitoring. Specifically, we aim to…

Bilinguals employ both global and local control mechanisms to manage coactivated languages that compete for selection, yet little is known about how they operate on morphosyntactic information. The current study investigated bilingual language control mechanisms for a morphosyntactic production task. Across two experiments, 48 early…

Over the last two decades, the question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject to controversy in the field of third language (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial language learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between an…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the growth of previously established clinical markers of developmental language disorder (DLD) in Spanish-speaking bilingual children with and without DLD. Method: Forty-three bilingual children with DLD and 57 typically developing children were tested 3 times over a 2-year period. Their average…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

This project examined the acquisition of third person accusative clitics in Spanish by Chinese-speaking learners. Specifically, it focused on the role of cross-linguistic influence and patterns of language exposure and use in the acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties constraining the production and intuition of overt and null…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

This paper aims to discuss old and contemporary perspectives in understanding language acquisition taking into account the neural theory of language. Discussing a recent theory by Kuhl (2010), neural substrates of first language learning will be put forward (Berwick et al., 2013). Neural substrates of phonetic learning, word learning, sentence…

Background: Although there is a growing body of literature on cognitive and language processing in bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), there is a major gap in the evidence for language intervention. Critically, speech-language therapists are often required to make clinical decisions for language intervention on specific…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine changes in English and Spanish morphosyntactic standardized scores over time in bilingual children. Method: One hundred bilingual children participated in this longitudinal study. The average age of the children at the beginning of the study was 5;11 (years; months). A subset of the participants was identified…

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children's narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax,…