Codeswitching is a common feature of bilingual language practices, yet its impact on word learning is poorly understood. Critically, processing costs associated with codeswitching may extend to learning. Moreover, verbs tend to be more difficult to learn than nouns, and the challenges of learning verbs could compound with processing costs…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the dosage and fidelity of EMT en Español strategies that are posited to drive change in child outcomes. The study is a re-analysis of data collected during the National Institutes of Health (NIH) R21 grant "Teaching Spanish-speaking Caregivers to Implement EMT en Español: A Small Randomized…

We examined the size, content, and use of evaluative lexis by 26 English monolingual and 20 Spanish-English bilingual 30-month-old children in interaction with their mothers. We extracted the evaluative words, defined as words referring to cognition, volition, or emotion. Controlling for overall vocabulary skills as measured by the MacArthur-Bates…

Purpose: This study explores the hypothesis that vocabulary growth can have 2 types of effects in morphosyntactic development. One is a general effect, where vocabulary growth globally determines utterance complexity, defined in terms of sentence length and rates of subordination. There are also specific effects, where vocabulary size has a…

Research using online comprehension measures with monolingual children shows that speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition are correlated with lexical development. Here we examined speech processing efficiency in relation to vocabulary development in bilingual children learning both Spanish and English (n=26 ; 2 ; 6). Between-language…

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…

Evaluates the effects of presenting verbal models following the initiations or expressions of interest of 16 children aged 28 to 34 months on both production and comprehension abilities measures. Results suggest that the timing of exposure to language models plays a critical role in language acquisition. (RJC)

Bilingual case study of infant acquiring Spanish and English from birth to 1;10 is used to address whether young bilinguals differentiate between their languages based on language choice. Daily diary records and weekly video recordings in the two language contexts were used to construct the child's lexicon and establish that translation…

Investigates how early a developing bilingual who is exposed simultaneously to English and Spanish can make appropriate language choices. Kept detailed records of the child's cumulative vocabulary from the first word at 10 months and on weekly audiovideo recording in both Spanish and English contexts from age 1-3. (Author/VWL)

Data are presented from one subject (J) that show a gradual development of the complexity of words in terms of syllable structure and degree of phonetic similarity of co-occurring consonants. During the age range of 1;9 to 2;6, J's data show a highly systematic progression of stages, each characterized by fewer restrictions on the number, order,…

This study tests the widely cited claim that young simultaneous bilingual children reject cross-language synonyms in their earliest lexicons. First, the accuracy of the claim is examined, and then its adequacy as support for the argument that bilingual children do not have independent lexical systems in each language is considered. (JL)

The data in this study are taken from an on-going research project investigating the development of the production of intervocalic consonants in Mexican Spanish. The total project includes both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of forty children and uses both naturalistic observation and experimental methods. The data discussed here is from…

Research was conducted to examine the language acquisition of a Mexican-American child who has been brought up in a linguistic environment where code-switching between Spanish and English is the dominant style of speaking. In addition, the relation of code- switching to the acquisition of bilingualism is analyzed. The speech of the subject, a…

This study focuses on the semantic development of individual lexical items, as viewed from a semantic features perspective. It involves four narrow semantic domains, a sample of elementary school-children and their teachers, and two native language groups, English and Spanish. Semantic development is studied through the process of equivalence…

A common assumption underlying cross-linquistic studies in child language is that the comparison of any feature in unrelated languages may simplify semantic-grammatical complexities in a way that studies on a single language cannot. This paper begins by discussing the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Spanish by four…