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…

Simultaneous bilingual education of a child is a dynamic process. Construction of linguistic competences undeniably depends on the conditions of the linguistic environment of the child. This education in a monolingual family, requires the practice of parenting tactics to increase the frequency of the language use in minority, during which,…

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…

The mothers of 29 Spanish English bilingual 25-month-olds kept diary records of their children's dual language exposure and provided information on their children's English and Spanish language development using the MacArthur-Bates inventories. Relative amount of exposure predicted language outcomes in English and Spanish. In addition, the number…

Contexts of limited input such as trilingual families where a language is not spoken in the wider community but only by a reduced number of speakers in the home provide a unique opportunity to examine closely the relationship between a child's input and what she learns to say. Barnes reported on the relationship between maternal input and a…

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…

Research indicates that mothers scaffold the literacy skills of their children when jointly engaged in literacy-related activities in monolingual families (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2001). Yet little is known about the linguistic environment of English language learners in the USA, a group at high risk for reading difficulties if they are only taught…

Major innovations are becoming available for research in language development and disorders. Among these innovations, recent tools allow naturalistic recording in children's homes and automated analysis to facilitate representative sampling. This study employed all-day recordings during the 2nd year of life in a child exposed to three languages,…

This investigation examined the impact of maternal language and children's gender on bilingual children's vocabulary and emergent literacy development during 2 years in Head Start and kindergarten. Seventy-two mothers and their children who attended English immersion programs participated. Questionnaires administered annually over a 3-year period…

Describes a study which attempts to place the problem of second language learning and use by bilingual children into a framework of double socialization through the analysis of mother-child and peer group interaction. Ukrainian and Greek second generation mothers and their children aged 5-6 years were observed in four sessions. (SED)

This study examined whether the effects on cognitive and language outcomes of a recently developed home-based educational intervention program, Opstap Opnieuw, for 4-6-years-old disadvantaged children could be explained by improved mother-child interaction. The present sample (n = 30) was drawn from a larger sample of Turkish-Dutch families (n =…