This study examined dual language learners' (DLLs n = 24) and English-only (EO n = 20) children's expressive and receptive language in kindergarten (M[subscript age] = 5.7 years) as well as the relation to peers' language use. Expressive language skills (vocabulary diversity, syntactic complexity) were measured in the fall, winter, and spring…

This study investigated whether the effect of exposure to code-switching on bilingual children's language performance varied depending on verbal working memory (WM). A large sample of school-aged Spanish-English bilingual children (N = 174, Mage = 7.78) was recruited, and children were administered language measures in English and Spanish. The…

The majority of bilingual speech research has focused on simultaneous bilinguals. Yet, in immigrant communities, children are often initially exposed to their family language (L1), before becoming gradually immersed in the host country's language (L2). This is typically referred to as sequential bilingualism. Using a longitudinal design, this…

Investigated in preschoolers whether the bilingual advantage in cognitive control or selective attention could be found in a nonverbal task, the dimensional change card sort, requiring minimal demands for analysis or representation. Found that bilingual children were more advanced than monolinguals in solving problems requiring high levels of…

Investigated the influence of Ukrainian-English bilingualism on first and third grade children's awareness of the arbitrary nature of word-referent relationships and on their ability to analyze linguistic input. (JMB)

Studied bilingual children and children learning a second language using a picture-word interference task. The printed distractors interfered with naming both on trials where the distractor and naming language were the same and on trials where they were different. These and other results question whether an "input switch" operates for bilingual…

Investigates the metalinguistic ability of monolingual or bilingual children between five and nine years of age on two language tasks (grammaticality judgment and correction). (HOD)