Codeswitching has been used as a tool to investigate how the properties of the two language systems interact in the bilingual mind with relatively few studies investigating bilingual children. We target two groups of L1-Spanish-L2-English children in Spain to address language activation and language inhibition in the processing of codeswitching…

In today's globalised and networked life ecologies, the language socialisation and literacy experiences of children around the globe are increasingly multilingual. Children encounter new languages early on in kindergarten and school and many children speak home languages other than the community language. Science and education have a joint…

A qualitative study of language attitudes toward Spanish in contact with English in San Diego county reveals that while Spanish-English bilingualism is highly valued, Spanish-English codeswitching is disfavored. While studies in other border communities along the U.S.-Mexico border have found similar general results, the present study contributes…

This study aimed to investigate the meta-linguistic and executive function profile for different subtypes of reading difficulties (RD) among upper-elementary students. Based on 1,112 third- to fifth-grade Chinese-speaking children, we identified 72 with decoding difficulties (DD), 74 with comprehension difficulties (CD), and 29…

Code-mixing, which denotes switches between languages as well as a phenomenon reflecting grammars of both languages in interpersonal interactions simultaneously, is a universal language-contact phenomenon present in both individual bilingualism and societal bilingualism, and individual differences exist in both frequency and complexity of…

The paper investigates a Hungarian-English bilingual child's Sarah's second language acquisition (SLA) with a special focus on how she integrated English (L2) into her speech to convey the intended meaning and negotiate the multiple identities she developed in her bilingualism in various social contexts. An ethnographic single-case study research…

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…

Current theories of bilingualism argue that the language practices of bilinguals are drawn from a single linguistic repertoire, and that enabling access to the full breadth of students' language practices can be a vital resource for further language development. This challenges commonplace practices within English as an Additional Language (EAL)…

Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2 is the "gold standard" autism spectrum disorder observational assessment, and it is increasingly used in South Africa. However, its use is limited to English speakers, as it has not been translated into the country's other 10 official languages. Moreover, the cultural appropriateness of this tool…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the early code switching patterns of a simultaneous multilingual subject (Aris) in accordance with Muysken's (2000) code switching typology: insertion and alternation. Firstly, the records of naturalistic spontaneous conversations were obtained from the parents via e-mail, phone calls and…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language…

This study highlights differences in cognitive strategies in children and adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders (n = 52) on a verbal fluency task (naming as many words as possible (e.g. animals) within 60 s). The ability to form clusters of words (e.g. farm animals like "cow-horse-goat") or to switch between unrelated…

This paper examines how children exercise their agency vis-à-vis their mother's beliefs and practices of bilingualism, especially code-switching, at home and elsewhere. The data were mainly collected through audio-recordings of family conversations both with and without the presence of the researcher and semi-structured interviews conducted during…

In this article, we analyse visual narratives of multilingual children, in order to acknowledge their self-perception as multilingual selves. Through the analysis of drawings produced by children enrolled in Portuguese as heritage language (PHL) classes in Germany, we analyse how bi-/multilingual children perceive their multilingual repertoires…