Vocabulary size is a crucial early indicator of language development, for both monolingual and bilingual children. Assessing vocabulary in bilingual children is complex because they learn words in two languages, and there remains significant controversy about how to best measure their vocabulary size, especially in relation to monolinguals. This…

The thrust of this study was to investigate the impact of learning styles in general and Field dependence/Independence (FD/I) in particular on the receptive/productive lexical performance of language learners. It aimed to check whether FD/I learners perform differently on receptive and productive vocabulary tests. To achieve this, first, 94…

Collocations, e.g., apples and pears, hard worker, constitute an important avenue of linguistic enquiry straddling both grammar and the lexicon. They are sensitive to language experience, with adult L2 learners and children learning English as an Additional Language (EAL) exhibiting poor collocational knowledge. The current study piloted a novel…

Background: The role of domain-general short-term memory (STM) in language development remains controversial. A previous finding from the HelSLI study on children with developmental language disorder (DLD) suggested that not only verbal but also non-verbal STM for temporal order is related to language acquisition in monolingual children with DLD.…

Children with Down syndrome (DS) present language deficits in all linguistic domains and their language development lags behind that of typically developing children. However, their receptive language skills appear to be better than their productive in all linguistic domains. Research on bilingual children with DS is limited, but has shown that…

Bilingual children demonstrate varying levels of proficiency in each of the two languages to which they are exposed. Even though it is widely acknowledged that bilingual children are not a homogenous group, existing studies on dual-language profiles in bilingual children have focused on expressive language profiles. In this study, we used the…

While it is established that parental "wh"-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children's "wh"-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children's "wh"-questions during a dinnertime conversation are…

Erlam & Ellis (2018) published, in "Canadian Modern Language Review", an experimental study that investigated the effect of input-based tasks on the acquisition of vocabulary and markers of plurality by adolescent near-beginner learners of L2 (second language) French. The present paper reports an approximate replication of the…

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word…

An experimental crossover research design was utilized to investigate the effects of multimedia-enhanced instruction on the vocabulary acquisition of dual language learners in the early childhood age range. Sixteen 3-year-olds stratified by classroom and randomly assigned to condition participated in an eight-week intervention that incorporated…

Late language emergence (LLE) may result from genetic and environmental factors. Little is known about environmental factors in LLE in South Africa. The study describes the nature of differences in language functioning between toddlers with LLE and without LLE, and which factors were associated with LLE in a middle-income area in South Africa.…

Research findings: This study examined the dual language development and experience of the understudied Chinese dual language learners (DLLs). Twice in the preschool/pre-k year (about 4 months apart), we assessed 39 Chinese 3- and 4-year-old DLLs' receptive vocabularies in English and Chinese, interviewed 37 parents about the language use and…

Early trilingual development is an excellent testing ground for input reduction effects on acquisition outcomes. This article reports a study investigating input-outcome relations in a child Leo in Hong Kong, who was addressed to in Mandarin, Cantonese and later also in English by caretakers through 'one caretaker-one language' and 'one day-one…

Executive function (EF) skills play a crucial role in young children's academic and social-emotional development. Given that factors associated with poverty can compromise the development of EF skills, it is vital to continue to examine what factors help predict and support EF skills in children from at-risk backgrounds. Using a sample of Head…

In this study, monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) five- and six-year-old children completed a grammaticality judgment test in order to assess their awareness of the grammaticality of two types of syntactic constructions in English: word order and gender representation. All children were better at detecting…