We presented 28 Spanish monolingual and 28 Catalan-Spanish close-language bilingual 5-year-old children with a video of a talker speaking in the children's native language and a nonnative language and examined the temporal dynamics of their selective attention to the talker's eyes and mouth. When the talker spoke in the children's native language,…

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…

Current models of the affinity between syntax and vocabulary are complex and recognize the contribution of bootstrapping and computational processes. To date, the mutual facilitation between these two constructs over time has not been studied in second language (L2) school children. The present study investigated longitudinally the direction and…

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of…

The goal of the current study was to statistically evaluate the reliable scalability of a set of tasks designed to assess Theory of Mind (ToM) without language as a confounding variable. This tool might be useful to study ToM in populations where language is impaired or to study links between language and ToM. Low verbal versions of the ToM tasks…