Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee…

I investigate the acquisition of affrication in Québec French (QF), where affricates are in complementary distribution with coronal stops, being realized before high front vowels and glides. Previous research on other languages shows that affricates are acquired before branching onsets, which supports the idea that complexity at the level of the…

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…

This study investigates the role of parental input quality on the acquisition of Greek as a heritage language in Western Canada. Focusing on subject use, we tested four groups of Greek speakers: monolingual children, heritage children, and the parents of each one of those groups. Participants completed an elicited production task designed to…

This study presents the first investigation of the development of possessive constructions in Northern East Cree, a polysynthetic language indigenous to Canada. It examines transcripts from naturalistic recording sessions involving one adult and one child, from age 2;01.12 to 3;08.24. Findings reveal that, despite the frequency of possessive…

Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0-36…

This study examined the psycholinguistic profiles of Quebec French-speaking children with developmental phonological disorders (DPD). The purpose was to determine whether the endophenotypes that have been identified in English-speaking children with DPD are similarly associated with speech impairment in French-speaking children. Seventy-two…

A fundamental question in language acquisition research is whether young children have abstract grammatical representations. We tested this question experimentally. French-learning 30-month-olds were first taught novel word-object pairs in the context of a gender-marked determiner (e.g., un[subscript MASC]ravole "a ravole"). Test trials…

Investigated whether low-income mothers learned to interact with their preschoolers in ways that fostered narrative skills. Mothers of intervention children were encouraged to elicit questions, encourage longer narratives, and participate in narrative conversation. Assessment of children's pre- and post-intervention narrative and vocabulary skills…

Examined language differentiation in bilingual toddlers prior to the emergence of functional categories. The children were observed with each parent separately and both together. Results indicate that while these children did code mix, they were able to differentiate between their two languages. There was some evidence that language dominance…

Examines the development of children's understanding of the difference between "want" and "need" in two different experiments. The first experiment required the children to respond verbally in choosing between the two concepts; the second required them to give an object to one of two characters who had made a request using…

Thirty-six three- to four-year-old children were tested to assess whether hearing a word-referent link from an ignorant speaker affected children's abilities to subsequently link the same word with an alternative referent offered by another speaker. In the principal experimental conditions, children first heard either an ignorant or a…