This article examines multilingual language use in two groups of children, one group at a state school, and one at a private IB school. The IB school has earlier been assumed to reflect an 'elite' multilingualism. Three research questions are posed: to what extent is the children's language use multilingual, what are their typological profiles,…

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

It is often assumed that all languages are fundamentally the same. This assumption has been challenged by research in linguistic typology and language evolution, but questions of language learning and use have largely been left aside. Here we review recent work on Danish that provides new insights into these questions. Unlike closely related…

Much research has focused on the expression of voluntary motion (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000). The present study contributes to this body of research by comparing how children (three to ten years) and adults narrated short, animated cartoons in English and German (SATELLITE-FRAMED languages) vs. French (VERB-FRAMED). The cartoons showed agents…

Mother tongue-based education has been central to the promotion of early literacy skills in many multilingual contexts of the Global South. However, learners in such environments may face significant linguistic challenges when changing language of instruction during schooling. In particular, the linguistic distance between mother tongue and…

The early use of first and second person pronouns has been viewed as a sign of emerging social understanding. However, it may also depend on general language development: pronouns do not appear among the first words children acquire. In addition, some languages conjugate verbs for person, and the inflections may thus show similar relations to…

This study aimed to clarify the relations between morphological awareness and literacy skills in Spanish and English in young simultaneous bilingual learners. Guided by theoretical perspectives on the associations between morphological awareness and word- versus sentence-level literacy skills, and their transfer between bilinguals' two languages,…

The main goal of this article is to study the respective role of language typology and context on the noun to verb asymmetry in caregiver speech. The speech of 20 French- and 20 Turkish-speaking mothers addressed to their children in two different situations (book-reading and toy-play) were analysed in terms of noun to verb ratio as well as in…

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic-Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns…

Author focuses on need to teach language classifications and meanings as well as the conventional skills of reading and writing. (MB)

Before the white invasion, Native American peoples possessed an extremely rich and varied heritage with highly developed oral literatures, and constant development of new phrases, expressions, and patterns of pronunciation. Examples of Indian people's adeptness with language include: many learned to speak more than two languages fluently;…