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…

This article examines factors that promote active multilingualism. For this purpose, the "Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test" was used with 48 children. Their results were linked to a parental questionnaire designed to evaluate the children's linguistic input in their immediate environment. The study shows that, besides a minimum amount of…

This study examined the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input to toddlers with moderate hearing loss (MHL) compared with toddlers with normal hearing (NH). The linguistic input to eighteen toddlers with MHL and twenty-four toddlers with NH was examined during a 10-minute free-play activity in their home environment. Results showed that…

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 thesis examines whether native, heritage, and L2 speakers of Spanish engage a morphological layer of representation in the processing of inflected words, and whether they do so with both regularly- and irregularly-inflected words. Also examined is whether this tendency towards compositional (i.e. morphological rule-based) processing is…

The unique relation of language use (i.e., output) to language growth was investigated for forty-seven 30-month-old Spanish-English bilingual children (27 girls, 20 boys) whose choices of which language to speak resulted in their levels of English output differing from their levels of English input. English expressive vocabularies and receptive…

This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related…

Research Findings: This study examines lexical- and sentence-level dimensions of academic language to describe teachers' natural use of academic language and its association with vocabulary growth in 489 at-risk 4-year-olds enrolled in Head Start preschool classrooms. Using transcripts derived from video recordings of book-reading sessions in 52…

Via naturalistic observations, parent interview, and direct assessments, we examined language proficiency, language use, and differentiation of a 3-year, 4-month-old bilingual child exposed to Mandarin and English via the "one parent-one language" principle. Although noun versus verb dominance has been explored across verb-based…

In this paper the incidental language acquisition of 11-year-old Flemish children (n = 30) who have not received any formal English instruction is investigated. The study looks into children's English proficiency and the learner characteristics that can be associated with it. In order to measure the children's English proficiency, a receptive…

The input factors that may cause variation in bilingual proficiency were investigated in 38 French-English bilinguals aged six to eight, of middle-to-high socio-economic status, attending an international state school in France. Data on children's current and cumulative language exposure and family background were collected through questionnaires…