Among immigrant families, parents are important socialization agents in transmitting cultural practices to their children, including the use of the heritage language (HL). In the current study, we examined whether parents' cultural orientation facilitates children's (N = 79; M[subscript age] = 5.11 years; 57% boys; 50% enrolled in HL schools) HL…

Purpose: To determine whether preschool-age children with cochlear implants have age-appropriate phonological awareness and print knowledge and to examine the relationships of these skills with related speech and language abilities. Method: The sample comprised 24 children with cochlear implants (CIs) and 23 peers with normal hearing (NH), ages 36…

Age of acquisition (AoA) effects have been used to support the notion of a critical period for first language acquisition. In this study, we examine AoA effects in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users via a grammaticality judgment task. When English reading performance and nonverbal IQ are factored out, results show that accuracy of…

The purpose of this study was to compare a group of recently diagnosed bilingual-exposed children with autism (n = 20) aged 24-2 months with a matched group of monolingual-exposed children with autism (n = 40). The groups were matched with regard to chronological age at the time of language assessment and nonverbal IQ score, then compared with…

Could a mutation in a single gene be the evolutionary lynchpin supporting the development of human language? A rare mutation in the molecule known as FOXP2 discovered in a human family seemed to suggest so, and its sequence phylogeny reinforced a Chomskian view that language emerged wholesale in humans. Spurred by this discovery, research in…

The study of song learning and the neural song system has provided an important comparative model system for the study of speech and language acquisition. We describe some recent advances in the bird song system, focusing on the role of off-line processing including sleep in processing sensory information and in guiding developmental song…

This response was constructed based on the author's experience as a language program coordinator and her expertise in second language (L2) reading development. Because "transcultural competence," as defined in the MLA Report (2007), shares much of its underlying capacities with "reading ability," in principle, reading instruction could play a…

The abilities to understand and use language represent two of the most important developmental competencies that children must master during the first 3 years of life. Over the past decade, screen media content directed at infants and toddlers has dramatically increased. As a result, infants' and toddlers' time spent with media has also notably…

Three popular assertions have hindered the promotion of an empiricist approach to language acquisition: (a) that Brown and Hanlon (1970) claimed to offer data that parents do not reinforce their children's grammaticality; (b) that Brown and Hanlon also claimed to offer data that parents do not provide negative evidence (i.e., corrective feedback)…

Garth Boomer had been a seminal influence on this author's practice and thinking as a young English teacher in the 1980s. When asked to present the Garth Boomer Memorial address in 2009, the author realised that he would be speaking on his fiftieth birthday, thus the desire to take the opportunity to reflect on his teaching life was overwhelming.…

Four experiments are reported which were designed to test hypotheses concerning the asymmetry of masked translation priming. Experiment 1 confirmed the presence of L2-L1 priming with a semantic categorization task and demonstrated that this effect was restricted to exemplars. Experiment 2 showed that the translation priming effect was not due to…

Brysbaert and Duyck (this issue) suggest that it is time to abandon the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart, 1994) in favor of connectionist models such as BIA+ (Dijkstra and Van Heuven, 2002) that more accurately account for the recent evidence on non-selective access in bilingual word recognition. In this brief response, we first…

For potential consideration by the Mind, Brain, and Education community, here is a modest but provocative hypothesis regarding the relationships between acquisition of languages, awareness of cultures, and development of ethics in human beings. Starting from the basic idea according to which "a fish does not know what water is," and using both…

Research on individual multilingualism and third language acquisition has expanded greatly in recent years. A theoretical correlate of this is the recognition of the fact that humans are potentially multilingual by nature, that multilingualism is the default state of language competence, and that this in turn has implications for an adequate…

Recent research has suggested consonants and vowels serve different roles during language processing. While statistical computations are preferentially made over consonants but not over vowels, simple structural generalizations are easily made over vowels but not over consonants. Nevertheless, the origins of this asymmetry are unknown. Here we…