In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word…

Idiom comprehension and production reflect a child's language competence. Research suggests that there is a positive relationship between children's reading comprehension skills and their idiom understanding. This study examines whether adult verbal scaffolding, in conjunction with the deliberate use of iconic gestures, can facilitate young…

Using an observational task followed by an experimental task with an Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, we examined the effect of input on children's acquisition of class extension rules by investigating the relationship between the amount of polysemous noun-verb pairs in French-speaking 2-year-olds' input and both their spontaneous…

Research Findings: To extend findings that are mainly based on North American studies with English speakers, we studied 989 Chilean mothers from households of low socioeconomic status and their prekindergarten children, posing 2 questions: (a) Do mothers' self-reported practices about literacy development predict early literacy outcomes over and…

When bilingual children enter formal reading education, host language proficiency becomes increasingly important. This study investigated the relation between socioeconomic status (SES), maternal language use, reading input, and vocabulary in a sample of 111 six-year-old children of first- and second-generation Turkish immigrant parents in the…

In this study we investigated adopted Chinese girls' expressive English language outcomes in relation to their age at adoption, chronological age, length of exposure to English and developmental risk status at the time of adoption. Vocabulary and phrase utterance data on 318 girls were collected from the adoptive mothers using the Language…

This study investigates early childhood educators' language training competence that is required to support children's linguistic development. Hundred and forty-four early-years-professionals in Germany completed a computer-based assessment. We first tested knowledge of linguistic topics (e.g. morpho-syntax, developmental stages). Second, we…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the language status of 120 young, Latino dual language learners living in poverty in the United States. Maternal language input and home language and literacy environments were examined with regard to language development at 24 and 36 months. Results suggested that even when combining English and Spanish…

Educators of young children, including speech-language pathologists, are often uncertain as to how to effectively work with children from diverse backgrounds because they do not know enough about cultural and linguistic diversity and its impact on language development. The current study helps to address this gap by examining the validity of parent…

Previous studies show that young monolingual children's ability to "fast map" new word forms is closely associated with both their age and existing vocabulary knowledge. In this study we investigate potential relationships between age, fast mapping skills and existing vocabulary knowledge in both languages of developing bilingual preschool…

This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home…

Compares native Spanish-speaking (N=9) and native English-speaking kindergarten students' use of language learning acts after individual peer tutoring sessions in English. Findings reveal that students appear to acquire English according to their level of general academic achievement. (Author/CB)

Exploration of the extent to which acculturation may be related to classroom second-language acquisition in Turkish immigrant children reared in the Netherlands found that the relationship was significant and positive, but not really high. (Author/CB)