This working paper estimates participation in early childhood education (ECE) programs by child's age, program setting, family income level, and child's household language. To produce the best possible estimates of participation, the authors combined information from multiple data sets. In 2010, approximately 6.6 million between the ages of 2 and…

This study examined whether 12-month-olds will accept words that differ phonologically and phonetically from their native language as object labels in an associative learning task. Sixty infants were presented with sets of English word-object (N = 30), Japanese word-object (N = 15), or Czech word-object (N = 15) pairings until they habituated.…

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject-object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish…

This article explores the widely documented difficulty with object clitics in the acquisition of French. The study investigates the effects of L1 transfer and processing limitations on the production and comprehension of object clitics in child L2 learners of French with different L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Spanish). The Spanish-speaking learners…

There are great expectations that new digital technology will become a powerful tool for developing education activities. Like many countries in Europe and worldwide, Sweden has invested a large amount of resources in new technology and new media (hereafter called digital media), and they have become a natural and important part of school…

Does the intensification of what can be called "language-specific speech perception" around reading onset occur as a function of maturation or experience? Preschool 5-year-olds with no school experience, 5-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, 6-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, and 6-year-olds with 18 months' schooling were tested on…

Trilingual families need language support if they wish to maintain three languages. Most studies on trilingualism have paid little attention to the influence of grandparents as an affective factor. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the impact of the extended family, particularly grandparents, on trilingual families' language maintenance.…

We examined how words from bilingual toddlers' second language (L2) primed recognition of related target words in their first language (L1). On critical trials, prime-target word pairs were either (a) phonologically related, with L2 primes overlapped phonologically with L1 target words [e.g., "slide" (L2 prime)-"Kleid" (L1 target, "dress")], or…

In five experiments, we examined cross-language activation during speech production in various groups of bilinguals and trilinguals who differed in nonnative language proficiency, language learning background, and age. In Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 5, German 5- to 8-year-old second language learners of English, German-English bilinguals,…

This study analysed the extent to which literate native speakers of a language with a phonemic alphabetic orthography rely on their first language (L1) orthography during second language (L2) speech production of a language that has a morphophonemic alphabetic orthography. The production of the English flapping rule by 15 adult native speakers of…

The investigation of the comprehension of L1 relative clauses across different languages has shown that subject relatives (SRs) are acquired earlier and responded to more accurately than object relatives (ORs). Most of this work has been based on SVO nominative-absolutive languages. In this article we present the results obtained in a binary…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of gender and linguistic diversity in the growth of Dutch word decoding skills throughout elementary school for a representative sample of children living in the Netherlands. Following a longitudinal design, the children's decoding abilities for (1) regular CVC words, (2) complex…

This study examined how young Korean American children and the adults around these children perform naming practices and what these practices mean to the children. As part of a large ethnographic study on Korean American children's peer culture in a heritage language school in the United States, data were collected by observing 11 prekindergarten…

This study examines whether adult second language (L2) learners of an ungendered first language (L1) are sensitive to gender congruency (grammatical feature absent in the L1) and noun animacy (semantic feature present in the L1) when processing L2 gender concord and whether L2 proficiency level determines such sensitivity. To address these…

Structural modelling offers an overall pattern of relationships; this paper looks at differences in students' attitude structures between England and Estonia. Where different coherent sets of beliefs exist in a national sample, factor analysis, which focuses on sets of responses which differ between groups, should be able to separate them out.…