The influences of word decoding, availability, and accessibility of semantic word knowledge on reading comprehension were investigated for monolingual "("n = 65) and bilingual children ("n" = 70). Despite equal decoding abilities, monolingual children outperformed bilingual children with regard to reading comprehension and…

The present study examined the growth of receptive lexical skills in preschoolers over an academic year in relation to teacher speech. The participating students were English language learners and their monolingual English-speaking peers from the same classrooms. The measures of teacher input included indicators of the amount of speech (total…

What makes a child's language development trajectory have the patterns that it has, and what causes differences across children in those patterns? These fundamental questions have for over half a century been at the heart of research on language development in monolingual children, on the cross-linguistic development of language in children from…

Research in monolingual populations indicate that vocabulary knowledge is essential to reading achievement, but how vocabulary develops in bilingual children has been understudied. The current study investigated the role of home and school factors in predicting English vocabulary among 284 bilingual kindergartners (168 Chinese, 65 Malay, 51…

Two empirical studies set out explore the relation between breadth and depth of word knowledge and to link these concepts with language acquisition and frequency of language input. The studies found that there was no conceptual distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary, and that breadth and depth were affected by the same factors for…