Background: Bilingualism is widespread and being bilingual is more common than being monolingual. The lifelong practice bilinguals receive from managing two languages seems to lead to a cognitive benefit. Conversely, bilingualism seems to affect language ability negatively due to less use of each known language. Aims: This systematic review aims…

Current models of the affinity between syntax and vocabulary are complex and recognize the contribution of bootstrapping and computational processes. To date, the mutual facilitation between these two constructs over time has not been studied in second language (L2) school children. The present study investigated longitudinally the direction and…

In individuals with Down syndrome (DS) deficits in verbal short-term memory (VSTM) and deficits in sentence comprehension co-occur, suggesting that deficits in VSTM might be causal for the deficits in sentence comprehension. The present study aims to explore the presumed relationship between VSTM and sentence comprehension in individuals with DS…

As a basic indicator of verbal ability, verbal fluency refers to the degree of fluency in the use of language to convey information. The different components of working memory play an important role in verbal fluency. The inhibiting control mechanism takes place during L2 production processing in bilinguals, which may affect their verbal fluency…

This study examined whether the phonological awareness (PA) deficit in Arabic speaking dyslexic children could be impacted by the presence vs. absence of verbal working memory (WM) as function of the sensory modality of administration (auditory vs. visual) of the phonological tests. Three phonological awareness (PA) tasks, i.e., phoneme…

The present study examines both properties of the language and properties of the learner to better understand variability at the earliest stages of second language (L2) acquisition. We used event-related potentials, an oral production task, and a battery of individual differences measures to examine the processing of number and gender agreement in…

Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable…

The current study investigates the impact of the teachers' societal dominant language use within a weak version of translanguaging in early heritage language education. We explored five preschool teachers' use of English, the dominant majority language, in Tamil heritage language classes in Singapore and examined its impact on 33 children's…

This study investigates the effects of early second-language (L2) acquisition on introduction of characters in narrative discourse by comparing 5- and 7-year-old monolingual (first-language [L1] = Turkish) and bilingual (L1 = Turkish, L2 = English) children. Turkish does not have a grammaticalized article system like English which enables to…

Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical…

By the end of primary school, students are confronted with expository texts known for their high proportion of domain-specific academic vocabulary words. These words usually comprise Greek or Latin roots in their internal structure. Recent findings showed that knowledge of Greek and Latin roots is related to reading comprehension. However, no…

Background: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate deficits in vocabulary development and novel word learning processes, which have been proposed to stem from their speech perception deficits. Aims: This study had two aims. The first was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention incorporating a computer-based phonetic…

This article investigates verbal short-term memory (vSTM) and verbal working memory (vWM) abilities and their relation to lexical and syntactic abilities in monolingual (mono-) and bilingual (bi-) children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical development (TD). The authors employed the following tasks: vSTM (non-word repetition…

The present study investigated the longitudinal effects of early exposure to L2-English on L1-Turkish language competence, narrative skills and executive functioning. We asked whether early immersion-like exposure to L2, starting around 3 years of age, would have reflections on L1 competence, L1 narrative skills and gains in cognitive flexibility.…

Morphophonological processing involves the phonological analysis of morphemes. Item-specific phonological characteristics have been shown to influence morphophonological skills in children. This study investigates the relative contributions of broad phonological skills and vocabulary to production and judgement accuracies of the Dutch past tense…