In Canada, approximately 12% of school-aged children are enrolled in French Immersion (FI), with some provinces estimating close to 30%. FI programs are intended to produce bilingual individuals who can functionally communicate in both of Canada's official languages. Yet, we are currently underinformed as to how to identify children with French…

This study investigated bilingualism effects on the production of focus in 5- to 9-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual autistic children's L1 Cantonese, compared to their monolingual autistic peers as well as monolingual and bilingual typically developing children matched in nonverbal IQ, working memory, receptive vocabulary and maternal…

This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related…

The current study explored the home and school factors that are important for Singaporean pre-schoolers' (N = 1440) early English development from K1 to P1. Language input quantity and quality factors at home (e.g., number of English books,) and at school (e.g., instructional support in class) were used to predict children's English vocabulary and…

Working memory (WM) is a recognised component of executive function and has undergone scrutiny in terms of bilingual and monolingual performance comparisons. Research to date, however, has not consistently replicated the presence of bilingual advantage. The present study examined short-term (STM) and WM in immersion-educated children and a matched…

Four-year-old (n = 20) and five-year-old (n = 22) bilingual children were tested twice in six months on Armenian (minority language) and English (majority language) picture identification and picture naming tasks to examine receptive and expressive vocabulary growth in both languages. Parental education, Armenian/English language exposure, and…

Cognate awareness is the ability to recognize the cognate relationship between words in two etymologically related languages. The current study examined the development of cognate awareness and its contribution to French (second language) reading comprehension among Canadian French immersion children. Eighty-one students were tested at the end of…

Research Findings: This study examined the heterogeneity in Spanish-speaking children's (N = 117; M age = 53 months; SD = 5 months; 57% boys) vocabulary and letter-word skills in English and Spanish after one year of preschool and the extent to which early self-regulation abilities (i.e., executive function and effortful control) were associated…

This study compared bilingual and monolingual school beginners on measures of simple and complex verbal working memory and receptive and expressive vocabulary. The aim was to determine whether the tests of working memory are fairer measures of language ability than the vocabulary tests for bilingual children when tested in their second language.…

Phonological awareness has been repeatedly reported as important for learning to read in different orthographies. It is important to understand what specific levels of phonological awareness are involved in Chinese and English for Chinese children who learn English-as-a-second-language (ESL). Measures of phonological awareness, word reading,…