This study examined the influence of cognate status and language distance on simultaneous bilingual children's vocabulary acquisition. It aimed to tease apart effects of word-level similarities and language-level similarities, while also exploring the role of individual-level variation in age, exposure, and nontarget language proficiency. Children…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

Children from language minority homes reach school age with variable dual language skills. Cluster analysis identified four bilingual profiles among 126 U.S.-born, 5-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals. The profiles differed on two dimensions: language balance and total language knowledge. Balance varied primarily as a function of indicators of…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

This paper examines the production of word-initial stops by two simultaneous trilingual sisters, aged 6;8 and 8;1, who receive regular input in Italian and English from multiple speakers, but in Spanish from only one person. The children's productions in each language were analyzed acoustically and compared to those of their main input providers.…

This year's conference theme, "Be Seen, Be Heard," reflected not only our goal of celebrating our achievements but also represented our intent of making sure everyone's voices are heard, especially during 2017's difficult political climate. The conference opened with a motivating address from Dean Laura E. Lyons, followed by an…

This longitudinal case study documents the emergence of bilingualism in a young monolingual Mandarin boy on the basis of an acoustic analysis of his vowel productions recorded via a picture-naming task over 20 months following his enrollment in an all-English (L2) preschool at the age of 3;7. The study examined (1) his initial L2 vowel space, (2)…

An area in need of study in child language acquisition is that of complex multilingual contexts in which there is little language separation by interlocutor or domain. Little is known about how multilingual children use language to construct their identities in each language or in both languages. Identity construction in monolingual contexts has…

This study focuses on a trilingual toddler's ability to differentiate her Tagalog, Spanish and English productions on phonological/phonetic grounds. Working within the articulatory phonology framework, the word-initial segments produced by the child in Tagalog, Spanish and English words at age 1;10 were narrowly transcribed by two researchers and…

Purpose: Significant challenges face speech-language pathologists when children raised in bilingual environments are referred for speech-language evaluations. The situation is compounded for bilingual Mandarin-English children because no research-based data is available to date. This study is a preliminary examination of phonological acquisition…

The present study investigated phonological whole-word measures and consonant accuracy in bilingual and monolingual children to investigate how target approximations drive phonological acquisition. The study included eight bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking 3-year-olds and their monolingual peers (eight Spanish and eight American English).…

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study examining the acquisition of the English voice system by a three-year-old native speaker of Dutch. The study aims to examine whether the child develops two different phonetic systems or uses just one system for both languages, and compares the early L2 acquisition process with L1,…

Childhood experience with a language seems to help adult learners speak it with a more native-like accent. Can analogous benefits be found beyond phonology? This study focused on adult learners of Spanish who had spoken Spanish as their native language before age 7 and only minimally, if at all, thereafter until they began to re-learn Spanish…

This paper is concerned with a specific case of L3 acquisition: the starting position for English vowel acquisition by infant German-Italian bilinguals will be investigated in light of prototype theory. The chosen example of triple language contact is characterised by consecutive bilingualism as the basis of L3 acquisition, where the learners' L2…

Disagrees with Ellis's claim (1996) that learning the grammatical word class of a particular word, and learning grammatical structures more generally, involves in "large part" the automatic implicit analysis of the word's sequential position. The article maintains that some grammatical acquisition, but not "vast amounts," derives from the analysis…