When threatened with ostracism, children attempt to strengthen social relationships by engaging in affiliative behaviors such as imitation. We investigated whether an experience of ostracism influenced the extent to which children imitated a partner's language use. In two experiments, 7- to 12-year-old children either experienced ostracism or did…

Languages differ in their preferences for particular intensifying constructions. While intensifying adjectival compounds (IACs) (e.g. "ijskoud, ice-cold") are productively used to express intensification in Dutch and English, in French this construction is hardly productive. Consequently, French-speaking learners may encounter…

This study investigated contributors of English reading comprehension outcomes among predominantly U.S.-born 1st- and 3rd-grade (N = 73) dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking, low-income homes who attend English-only instructional schools in the Southern region of the United States, which is experiencing historic rates of school-age…

This study investigates the referential choice of Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The data consist of narratives from 16 children with ASD and 16 typically-developing (TD) children. The narratives were elicited using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" Participants' referential expressions…

The primary purpose of the present study was to test language and cognitive predictors of lexical selection in the storytelling of monolingual and bilingual children. Measures of language proficiency and cognitive ability were assessed with both English- and Mandarin-speaking monolinguals and Mandarin-English bilinguals aged 4 to 6 years old. To…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

Four-year-old (n = 20) and five-year-old (n = 22) bilingual children were tested twice in six months on Armenian (minority language) and English (majority language) picture identification and picture naming tasks to examine receptive and expressive vocabulary growth in both languages. Parental education, Armenian/English language exposure, and…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine within-group individual differences in the code-related and oral language abilities of an economically stressed Spanish-speaking English language learner (ELL) preschool sample and to evaluate the predictive relationship of these differences to later listening comprehension. Latent class…