Bilingualism continues to increase with more than 350 different languages spoken in the United States, and more than 21% of people over the age of five (approximately 66 million people) speaking a language other than English at home (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). Many bilingual children in the US speak a minority first language (L1) and English as…

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…

This dissertation investigates the child language acquisition of Kosraean (ISO 639-3 kos) and English (ISO 639-3 eng) on the island of Kosrae of the Federated States of Micronesia, with the aim of assessing the current vitality status of Kosraean and its strength compared to English. The concerns raised by the community regarding child proficiency…

In this paper, the authors report the findings of a narrative review of extant international research literature to propose a conceptual model for how young children's language is entangled with place. Educational policy, curriculum documents, and speech and language therapy assessments in England tend to frame children as placeless and treat the…

Children from language minority homes reach school age with variable dual language skills. Cluster analysis identified four bilingual profiles among 126 U.S.-born, 5-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals. The profiles differed on two dimensions: language balance and total language knowledge. Balance varied primarily as a function of indicators of…

This study examined the developmental trajectories of Arabic grammatical number in Arabic-English bilingual children. The samples consisted of 80 individuals (40 monolingual children residing in Jordan and 40 bilingual children residing in the USA), aged between 5 and 9 years. Data was collected through two tasks involving picture able objects and…

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…

Given that L1A of subject properties in non-null subject languages emerges later than that of null subject languages, this study aims at determining to what extent the same pattern of acquisition is observed in early child L2A in bilingual immersion settings where English and Spanish are both source and target languages. Using an elicited oral…

The evaluation of minority children for special education by law should be nondiscriminatory. To be in compliance with federal mandates such as the Individuals with Disability Education Act (IDEA), No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and Public Law 94-142, minority children who are also English language learners (ELLs) should be assessed in their native…

Much research on requests has been carried out among L1 Chinese adults, L1 Chinese children, L1 children, L2 adults, and L2 children, but no studies to date have simultaneously examined Chinese children's requests in Chinese (L1) and English (L2). The aim of this study is to investigate how Taiwanese elementary school children vary requests…

This study introduces a typological model of the "conceptual language-specific approach" to the L2 research on the acquisition of tense-aspect. The model is based on the typological notion of prominence, classifying languages into tense-prominent and aspect-prominent (Bhat 1999) and the L1 research proposal that language-specific…

Posits that a child's success in acquiring English may depend to a large degree on his or her proficiency in the heritage language. (CB)

Many parents in the United States who speak and value a language other than English feel torn-between wanting their children to develop age-appropriate fluency and literacy in the language of their heritage, and wanting their children to acquire English as quickly and flawlessly as possible. When parents support communication in and acquisition of…

Papers in English, French, and Portuguese address topics of creativity and its relationship to: native language instruction by television; conditions of language production at the moment of the emergence of creativity; comparison teaching; foreign language teachers; modern language instruction; psychological, pedagogical, and cultural…