The present study examined the growth of receptive lexical skills in preschoolers over an academic year in relation to teacher speech. The participating students were English language learners and their monolingual English-speaking peers from the same classrooms. The measures of teacher input included indicators of the amount of speech (total…

This study examined the relation between young English language learners' (ELL) native oral language skills and their language input in transitional bilingual education kindergarten classrooms. Spanish-speaking ELLs' ("n" = 101) Spanish expressive language skills were assessed using the memory for sentences and picture vocabulary…

This study investigated the relationships between home language learning activities and vocabulary in a sample of monolingual native Dutch (n = 58) and bilingual immigrant Moroccan-Dutch (n = 46) and Turkish-Dutch (n = 55) 3-year-olds, speaking Tarifit-Berber, a nonscripted language, and Turkish as their first language (L1), respectively. Despite…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home…

Examined the extent to which years of exposure to a language, amount of language input at home and at school, and amount of exposure to reading and other literacy activities in a language relate to observed bilingual performance in young children as obtained from teacher and parent reports. (VWL)

Two empirical studies set out explore the relation between breadth and depth of word knowledge and to link these concepts with language acquisition and frequency of language input. The studies found that there was no conceptual distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary, and that breadth and depth were affected by the same factors for…

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic…

Two experiments examined the effect of single-modality (sound or text) and bimodal (sound and text) presentation on word meaning, as measured by both improvements in spoken word recognition efficiency and recognition memory. Both native and nonnative speakers of English were tested. Concludes simultaneous text presentation can aid novel word…

Understanding the mechanisms learners use to process target language input is crucial to developing a complete model of both first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. If adult L2 learners are found to process the target language with mechanisms that differ from those used by child L1 learners and adult native speakers, what…