Most speakers' first language (L1) in Hong Kong and Guangdong China is Cantonese. Even though the L1 of both Guangdong Cantonese speakers and Hong Kong Cantonese speakers is the same, their second languages (L2) belong to different language families. Previous studies have pointed out that L2 status in third language (L3) acquisition is a salient…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine whether and how learning American Sign Language (ASL) is associated with spoken English skills in a sample of ASL-English bilingual deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children. Method: This cross-sectional study of vocabulary size included 56 DHH children between 8 and 60 months of age who were…

Research on language and cognitive processes in bilinguals over the past few decades has underscored the activation of words in the first language (L1) during comprehension and production of the second language (L2) (e.g., Dijkstra, Van Jaarsveld, & Ten Brinke, 1998; Van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998; Hermans, Bongaerts, De Bot, &…

The extent of quantitative and qualitative differences in phonological development between bilingual children and their monolingual counterparts remains unresolved, especially with regard to typologically-related languages. The current study used a comparative research design to examine the phonological skills of preschool children speaking Polish…

While it is common for deaf children to be bilingual in a spoken and signed language, studies often attribute any delays in language acquisition to language deprivation, rather than as a result of cross-linguistic interaction. This study compares the production of simple sentences in three languages (Palestinian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

This paper reports the preliminary results of a study examining the role of structural overlap, language exposure, and language use on cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual first language acquisition. We focus on the longitudinal development of determiners in a corpus of two French-English children between the ages of 2;4 and 3;7. The…

Current research on cross-language transfer has focused primarily on literacy development. The present study extends the scope of existing research by focusing on argumentative reasoning, an important but under-research academic skill. A single-case study with a reversal design was conducted with four Chinese-English elementary students with the…

It has been proposed that children differ from adults in that children license a conjunctive inference to disjunctive sentences that lack any licensing expression. The proposal is that children infer "A and B" from sentences of the form "A or B." Although children's conjunctive interpretations of disjunction have been reported…

Noise, although ubiquitous, is seldom considered as a factor that may impede learning. In South Africa, most learners are multilingual and learn in English, which is their second language. Most noise studies have been conducted in the Global North, where the school context differs from the Global South. In this article, using questions selected…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…

This article synthesizes the conclusions of the empirical studies in this special issue and outlines key questions in future research. The research reported in this volume has identified several fundamental issues in pronunciation-focused task design that are discussed in detail and on which suggestions for further research are outlined. One…

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

The present study explores the initial stages of incidental acquisition of two grammatical properties of verbs (subcategorization and [ir]regularity) during reading in first language (L1) and second language (L2) German using an adjusted self-paced reading paradigm. The results indicate that L1 speakers are superior to L2 speakers in the…

The ability to acquire language is a critical part of human development. Yet there is no consensus on how the skill emerges in early development. Does it constitute an innately-specified, language-processing module or is it acquired progressively? One of Annette Karmiloff-Smith's (1938-2016) key contributions to developmental science addresses…