This study aims to explore the specific contributions of derivational, inflectional, and compounding morphological awareness to reading comprehension through decoding and syntactic awareness. A total of 181 Grade 3 and 4 Chinese primary school children learning English as a second language in Hong Kong participated in this study. The results of…

Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

Among the existing sign language assessment tools, only a small number can be used in clinical settings. This contribution aims at presenting three comprehension assessment tests (two lexical and one syntactic) that offer a solid basis to build tools to assess language impairments in deaf signing adults. We provide the material and guidelines,…

Background: Although there is a growing body of literature on cognitive and language processing in bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), there is a major gap in the evidence for language intervention. Critically, speech-language therapists are often required to make clinical decisions for language intervention on specific…

This article provides an overview of the research on morpho-syntactic challenges in Swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD), compared with typically developing (TD) children learning Swedish as their first and second language (L1/L2). Children with DLD show vulnerabilities with verb finiteness, the possessive…

In the present study, we used a scanpath approach to investigate reading processes and factors that can shape them in monolingual Russian-speaking adults, 8-year-old children, and bilingual Russian-speaking readers. We found that monolingual adults' eye movement patterns exhibited a fluent scanpath reading process, representing effortless…

In this article, I argue that first language (L1), second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition are fundamentally the same process, based on learning by parsing. Both child and adult learners are sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, and language development takes place in small steps. While the bulk of the article focuses on…

To investigate cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic influences in grammatical gender in early bilingualism, we tested 12 simultaneous, 12 early successive bilingual Russian-German children, and 15 monolingual German children aged 8-9 years. An elicited production task in German shows that all bilingual children assign target gender to nouns,…

Age is an essential factor in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), impacting the success of students and instructional methods. The purpose of this study is to examine the age factor in SLA by examining three age categories -- children, adolescents and adults. In doing so, the study considers the Critical Period Hypothesis as a base of linguistic…

This article reviews prominent research on non-English-speaking children's extramural acquisition of English through digital media, and examines the understudied scenario of possible effects of such second language (L2) English input on domestically dominant but globally small first languages (L1s), with Icelandic as the test case. We outline the…

The Less-Is-More hypothesis was proposed to explain age-of-acquisition effects in first language (L1) and second language (L2) learning. We scrutinize different renditions of the hypothesis by examining how learning outcomes are affected by (a) limited cognitive capacity, (b) reduced interference resulting from less prior knowledge, and (c)…

The Spanish subjunctive mood (SUBJ) is said to be highly vulnerable in heritage language (HL) acquisition. However, there is little controlled research on HL-speaking children acquiring the various Spanish SUBJ contexts, so we do not have a clear picture of when, how, or why heritage speakers (HSs) develop in the SUBJ as they do. This study tests…

Learner corpus studies using syntactic complexity as a construct for characterizing learner proficiency have found that higher proficiency permits learners to produce more complex syntactic structures. However, the majority of previous studies have focused on writing, almost exclusively with adult second language (L2) learners. Given the…

Purpose: This study examines English performance on a set of 11 grammatical forms in Spanish-English bilingual, school-age children in order to understand how item difficulty of grammatical constructions helps correctly classify language impairment (LI) from expected variability in second language acquisition when taking into account linguistic…