Given that L1A of subject properties in non-null subject languages emerges later than that of null subject languages, this study aims at determining to what extent the same pattern of acquisition is observed in early child L2A in bilingual immersion settings where English and Spanish are both source and target languages. Using an elicited oral…

Simultaneous bilingual education of a child is a dynamic process. Construction of linguistic competences undeniably depends on the conditions of the linguistic environment of the child. This education in a monolingual family, requires the practice of parenting tactics to increase the frequency of the language use in minority, during which,…

The present study explores the vocabulary development of bilingual children when neither of their languages has a minority language status. With both languages having high relative prestige, it is possible to address the impact of exposure variables: age of onset, length of exposure, and frequency of exposure (FoE) to both languages. Parents of 40…

Using an observational task followed by an experimental task with an Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, we examined the effect of input on children's acquisition of class extension rules by investigating the relationship between the amount of polysemous noun-verb pairs in French-speaking 2-year-olds' input and both their spontaneous…

This study investigates how derivational complexity interacts with first language (L1) properties, second language (L2) input, age of first exposure to the target language, and length of exposure in child L2 acquisition. We compared elicited production of "wh"-questions in French in two groups of 15 participants each, one with L1 English…

This study tested whether bilingual children show a lag in semantic development (the schematic-categorical shift) relative to monolingual children due to smaller vocabularies within a language. Twenty French-English bilingual and twenty English monolingual children (seven to ten years old) participated in a picture-naming task in English. Their…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

This longitudinal case study documents the emergence of bilingualism in a young monolingual Mandarin boy on the basis of an acoustic analysis of his vowel productions recorded via a picture-naming task over 20 months following his enrollment in an all-English (L2) preschool at the age of 3;7. The study examined (1) his initial L2 vowel space, (2)…

It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

Research Findings: To extend findings that are mainly based on North American studies with English speakers, we studied 989 Chilean mothers from households of low socioeconomic status and their prekindergarten children, posing 2 questions: (a) Do mothers' self-reported practices about literacy development predict early literacy outcomes over and…

An area in need of study in child language acquisition is that of complex multilingual contexts in which there is little language separation by interlocutor or domain. Little is known about how multilingual children use language to construct their identities in each language or in both languages. Identity construction in monolingual contexts has…

The extant literature includes conflicting assertions regarding the influence of bilingualism on the rate of language development. The present study compared the language development of equivalently high-SES samples of bilingually and monolingually developing children from 1 ; 10 to 2 ; 6. The monolingually developing children were significantly…

When bilingual children enter formal reading education, host language proficiency becomes increasingly important. This study investigated the relation between socioeconomic status (SES), maternal language use, reading input, and vocabulary in a sample of 111 six-year-old children of first- and second-generation Turkish immigrant parents in the…

This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from…

This study focuses on a trilingual toddler's ability to differentiate her Tagalog, Spanish and English productions on phonological/phonetic grounds. Working within the articulatory phonology framework, the word-initial segments produced by the child in Tagalog, Spanish and English words at age 1;10 were narrowly transcribed by two researchers and…