Bilingual children's total vocabulary in each of their languages is often smaller than that of monolinguals. In their seminal study, Bialystok et al. (2010. 'Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children.' "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 13 (4): 525-531) divided children's vocabulary into 'home' and…

Evidence of sensitivity to graphotactic and morphological patterns in English spelling has been extensively examined in monolinguals. Comparatively few studies have examined bilinguals' sensitivity to spelling regularities. The present study compared late Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on their sensitivity to systematic…

Vocabulary assessment is an important part of measuring language proficiency in both monolingual and bilingual children. The LITMUS Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT) provides a framework for assessing the vocabulary of monolingual and bilingual children using a standardized procedure and comparable stimuli across languages. All language…

This article uses cognitive measures previously developed within linguistic relativity research to explore the thinking patterns of Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children in the Yucatan peninsula. These measures were designed to detect cognitive patterns associated with specific language patterns. Here, these measures are used to test whether 12…

The linguistic relativity hypothesis has focused on the influence of grammar in language on speakers' cognition. Previous studies show that speakers of languages with grammatical number (e.g., English) are more aware of the number of objects. Additionally, recent studies reveal that bilinguals who speak languages with different grammatical…

Many universities in non-English speaking countries have been adopting English as a medium of instruction to internationalize their education. We set out to compare the language policies of a Finnish and a Japanese university using the lens of language ideology -- a set of normative beliefs about the social dimension of language. Data were…

Given the accumulating evidence about audiovisual input as a valuable resource from which knowledge of multiword expressions (MWEs) can be built up incidentally, the next inquiry arises as to what can be done to promote MWE uptake from this resource. Despite the increasing popularity of bilingual subtitles as a form of on-screen text, their…

A good deal of research purports that bilingualism has a positive effect on some aspects of cognitive functioning. However, this effect is not consistent, and little research examines trajectories of cognitive skill development in bilingual children. Moreover, it remains unclear whether different types of bilingualism impact how cognitive…

Morphological knowledge is known to be positively associated with reading ability. However, whether morphological knowledge affects children's learning of new orthographic representations is less clear. Purpose: This study aimed to investigate morphological effects on orthographic learning in English, and whether this effect, if any, is different…

Despite the extensive research on bilingual development, our understanding of how lexical competition unfolds in the bilingual mind remains limited. Previous studies have predominantly focused on crosslinguistic competition, neglecting the examination of the competition process within each language and the influence of diverse bilingual…

Monolingual studies contrasting memory for positive versus negative emotion-laden words have generally used single-trial paradigms and have produced inconsistent results (no difference or an advantage for either positive or negative valence). However, monolingual studies with multiple presentations of stimuli have consistently found a positivity…

This study examined the role of child cognitive abilities for procedural and declarative learning in the earliest stages of second language (L2) exposure. In the context of a computer game, 53 first language Italian monolingual children were aurally trained in a novel miniature language over 3 consecutive days. A mixed effects model analysis of…

Previous studies found that bilingual children and adults with typical language development (TLD) perform better than monolinguals in novel word learning, but show lower scores on lexical retrieval tasks (e.g., naming known words). Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) lack in their abilities in both tasks compared with children with…

While much research has examined second language (L2) phonetic acquisition, less research has examined first language (L1) attrition in terms of the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops. The current study examined L2 acquisition and L1 attrition in the VOT of word-initial voiceless stops among late English-Arabic and Arabic-English bilinguals…

Macaro has stated that the choice between a monolingual, immersive, target language-only pedagogy versus a non-immersive, multilingual pedagogy is 'probably the most fundamental question facing second language acquisition (SLA) researchers, language teachers, and policymakers'. Recognizing that prior empirical work on monolingual versus…