Parental level of education, instruction time, and amount of language practice that children receive have enhanced our understanding of how bilingual and multilingual children learn to comprehend text. Guided by the simple view of reading and the interdependence hypothesis, this longitudinal study conducted in Canadian French immersion programs examined the (a) within- and cross-language association between oral language skills and reading comprehension of bilingual English–French and multilingual children and (b) patterns of growth, while controlling for possible influences of parental level of education and methods of instruction on reading achievement. The sample included 150 children tested once at the beginning of Grade 4 (T1) and again at the end of Grade 4 (T2) and in Grade 6 (T3). Individual growth modeling revealed that bilingual and multilingual children showed similar development in oral language and reading skills across the timeframe. Moreover, growth in English and French reading comprehension was associated with within-language variables. English reading comprehension in Grade 4 was also associated with cross-language variables, including French listening comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. Reading development in the second and third language is enhanced in contexts where classroom instruction, as well as social, economic, and educational opportunities to learn, is equivalent for all students.

This study examines how properties of path (the trajectory of motion) and manner (how an action is performed) components of motion events are reflected in linguistic and nonlinguistic motion event conceptualization in a path-focused language, Turkish. In two experiments, we investigated how path and manner differed in salience (i.e., prominence) and ease of expression (EoE, i.e., effort of describing), and how these factors were related to lexicalization and similarity judgments of motion events. In Experiment 1, participants rated motion events based on path and manner salience and EoE and expressed path and manner in a written format. Results indicated that manner was rated as more salient and path as easier to express. Path salience and EoE were related to both types (i.e., number of different expressions) and the total number of paths and manners used. However, manner EoE but not salience was associated with only types and the total number of manners used. In Experiment 2, participants rated the similarity of motion event pairs created using the ratings in Experiment 1. We found that higher manner salience and EoE difference were associated with lower similarity ratings. These findings suggest that salience and EoE of path and manner are related to both linguistic and nonlinguistic aspects of motion event conceptualization.

The current study investigated the contribution of multiple verbal and working memory (WM) skills to morphosyntactic prediction in Turkish-speaking 4- to 8-year-old children. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, 76 children were presented with verb-final sentences with nominative and accusative case markers on the initial noun (e.g., the fast rabbitnominative … the carrotaccusative eatfuture vs. the fast rabbitaccusative … the foxnominative eatfuture) while they were looking at a visual display with three objects (e.g., rabbit, carrot, and fox). Importantly, the case markers on the initial noun could be used to predict the second noun in these sentences. The results revealed that when children’s early productive vocabulary and language production skills were higher, the better and faster they were in predicting the upcoming noun. The episodic buffer, a component of WM, was also positively associated with children’s morphosyntactic prediction abilities. The implications of these results for the mechanisms of linguistic prediction are discussed.

Studies on the processing of non-active (NACT) voice have indicated that passive sentences are more difficult to comprehend and require more time to process. Children with Reading Difficulties (RDs) face problems with sentence comprehension, which are often attributed to phonological processing, working memory, syntactic awareness limitations, or a maturation delay. Using an online self-paced reading task, we investigated the effect of voice morphology and argument structure on sentence processing in 3 groups of participants; 30 children RDs, 28 Age-Matched (AM) controls without RDs, and 28 young Beginning Readers (BRs). Our results suggest that although the RDs and BR groups present similar reading times, their reading patterns differ qualitatively. Beginning Readers experienced greater processing delays when processing NACT structures, suggesting that they have not yet fully grasped the properties of the various NACT verbs. However, the RDs group presents effects not found in the BR group; children with RDs were sensitive to the properties of the different types of NACT verbs showing (a) evidence that the language processor successfully engages in predictions based on the morphosyntactic and lexical characteristics of verbs and (b) preference for default/prototypical readings. These results point toward processing limitations that are greatly affected by syntactic complexity.

This study examined the role of first language (L1) transparency in intra-orthographic effects on second language (L2) pronunciation by studying L2 learners with a non-alphabetic and orthographically opaque L1 and an alphabetic L2. Relations between orthographic effects, phonological awareness, and L2 proficiency were examined. Fifty-four Cantonese-speaking English as a second language (ESL) learners participated in Experiment 1 with orthographic effect tasks (homophone and silent-letter read-aloud) and phonological awareness tasks. Thirty Cantonese-speaking and 30 Mandarin-speaking ESL learners participated in Experiment 2 with orthographic effect tasks and an L2 proficiency task. The L2 pronunciation of Cantonese and Mandarin participants was subjected to intra-orthographic effects. Phonological awareness and L2 proficiency were associated with less orthographic effects on L2 pronunciation in Cantonese participants. Mandarin participants did not subject to more orthographic effects than Cantonese participants when controlling L2 proficiency, implying that shared alphabetic scripts between Pinyin and English did not interfere with L2 production. Overall, transferring the L1 reading strategy that relies on orthography to decode phonology to L2 reading seemed not to be the key mechanism behind intra-orthographic effects. L2 graphemes were likely to be decoded with incorrect L2 grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences, resulting in intra-orthographic effects.

Sign language research is important for our understanding of languages in general and for the impact it has on policy and on the lives of deaf people. There is a need for a sign language proficiency measure, to use as a grouping or continuous variable, both in psycholinguistics and in other sign language research. This article describes the development of a Swedish Sign Language Sentence Repetition Test (STS-SRT) and the evidence that supports the validity of the test’s interpretation and use. The STS-SRT was administered to 44 deaf adults and children, and was shown to have excellent internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.915) and inter-rater reliability (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient [ICC] = 0.900, p < .001). A linear mixed model analysis revealed that adults scored 20.2% higher than children, and delayed sign language acquisition were associated with lower scores. As the sign span of sentences increased, participants relied on their implicit linguistic knowledge to scaffold their sentence repetitions beyond rote memory. The results provide reliability and validity evidence to support the use of STS-SRT in research as a measure of STS proficiency.

The comprehension of Spanish verbal future and past tense of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) was evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment with 96 Spanish- and Catalan-speaking participants distributed in 4 groups: 24 children with DLD (Mage 7.8 years), 24 children with the same chronological age (Mage 7.8), 24 children with the same linguistic level (Mage 6.8 years), and 24 adults (Mage 22.5 years). Empirical data revealed that children with DLD can comprehend verbal tense, at least in the present experimental conditions. Based on the empirical results and despite some minor differences between the DLD group and the chronological control group, we suggest that tense morphology comprehension in DLD might be more typical than what is generally considered. Additionally, we propose that verbal comprehension difficulties in children with DLD might be less related to the lack of understanding of specific morphological markers, and more to an accumulation of difficulty which leads to a linguistic processing slowdown.

This study investigated whether adult and 3- to 6-year-old native speakers of Russian can use gender-marked adjectives to predict the upcoming noun during sentence comprehension. In a visual world paradigm, participants heard questions (e.g., Где хороший синий ёжик? Gde horošij sinij ëžik? “Where is the nicemasc bluemasc hedgehogmasc?”) including two gender-marked adjectives and a noun while seeing pictures of a target and a distractor of either the same (e.g., ёжик ëžik “hedgehogmasc,” мишка miška “bearmasc”) or different gender (e.g., ёжик ëžik “hedgehogmasc,” собачка sobačka “dogfem”) on the screen. We examined whether participants could use gender-marking anticipatorily (i.e., before the onset of the noun). Mixed-effects logistic regression analyses revealed that both adults and children anticipated the upcoming noun before its onset. The magnitude of the anticipation effect was stronger for adults than children. Subsequent analyses on the child data did not show evidence that age modulated their anticipation ability. The results of this study extend and improve knowledge regarding the role of adjectives that carry a grammatical gender cue in online sentence processing.

The joint effects of stimulus quality and semantic context in visual word recognition were examined with event-related potential (ERP) recordings. In one-character Chinese word recognition, we manipulated stimulus quality at two degradation levels (highly vs. slightly degraded) and semantic context at two priming levels (semantically related vs. unrelated). In a prime–target–probe trial flow, ERPs were recorded to the target character which was presented in either high or slight degradation and which was preceded by either a semantically related or unrelated prime character. The target character was then followed by a probe character which was either identical to or different from the target character. Subjects were instructed to make target–probe matching judgments. The ERP results demonstrated a degradation by priming interaction, with larger N400 semantic priming effects for slightly degraded targets. Moreover, the degradation effects were observed on the P200, N250, and N400. These findings provided evidence for the cascaded model of visual word recognition such that the visual processing cascaded into the semantic stage and thus interacted on the N400 amplitude. The results were compared to an earlier study with a null ERP degradation by priming interaction. The ramifications of these results for models of visual word recognition are discussed.

The present study examined nonword repetition (NWR) and comprehension/production of single-word vocabulary in the majority language (English) in six- to eight-year-old English-Gaelic emergent bilingual children attending Gaelic-medium primary education (GMPE) (primary years 2 and 3). GMPE is an immersion education model found in Scotland where the minority language, Gaelic, is the language of instruction, whereas English is the majority community language, not supported in school in the first three years of primary schooling. All children spoke English as their first language (L1) and had varying exposure to the second language (L2) Gaelic outside the school setting. We investigated how individual factors, such as age and frequency of exposure, and psycholinguistic factors, such as task modality, word class (for vocabulary), frequency, length, and prosody (for NWR), influenced performance. Later exposure to Gaelic and higher nonverbal IQ were contributing predictors of performance for English vocabulary. For NWR, participants with earlier and longer exposure to Gaelic who also used both languages at home more performed significantly better on this task. These results suggest that minority language immersion education differentially affects majority language abilities; later L2 onset benefited L1 vocabulary learning, whereas earlier L2 onset boosted L1 NWR skills in these bilinguals.

Syntactic structures and meaning appear to independently contribute to structural priming within English structural alternations. Japanese uses scrambling of case-marked phrases to create syntactic alternations, and it is not clear how meaning impacts scrambling-based structural choices. To examine this issue, meaning overlap with dative targets was manipulated in two structural priming experiments. In Experiment 1, datives primed dative targets, but structurally similar primes with idiomatic meanings did not prime. In Experiment 2, transitive primes that differed from datives in thematic roles showed as much priming as dative primes. The transitive results demonstrate that scrambling-based alternations in Japanese can be primed from structures that differ in role meaning, but the lack of idiom priming means that these structures may be less independent of meaning than those in other languages.

Past research shows that family language patterns (i.e., which languages are spoken in the family and by whom) are associated with bilingual children’s language use. However, it is unclear how input properties such as input quantity, parental proficiency, and language mixing may differ across family language patterns. It is also unclear whether the effects of family language patterns on children’s language proficiency remain when differences in input properties are controlled. We investigated (i) which family language patterns occurred in bilingual families in the Netherlands (n = 136), (ii) whether input properties differed across patterns, and (iii) how patterns related to children’s proficiency, once input properties were controlled. Home language situations were assessed through a questionnaire, children’s proficiency in Dutch and the minority language through vocabulary tests and parent ratings. Three language patterns were found: one-parent-one-language, both parents mixed languages or used the minority language. The results showed differences in input properties across all patterns, as well as effects of these patterns on children’s proficiency in Dutch and the minority language that disappeared once input properties were controlled. These findings do not provide robust evidence that family language patterns predict children’s proficiency, but rather, that input quantity is crucial.

Research on English relative clauses shows that, in most studies, subject relatives are comprehended more accurately than object relatives by both monolingual and bilingual children. The current study focuses on Czech-English bilingual children and extends this line of research in two ways. First, it includes a condition in which the noun phrases involved in the action differ in number (one is singular and the other is plural), a manipulation that was never tested on bilinguals. Second, it includes a fine-grained measure of language exposure, since the exposure has been linked to the acquisition of complex structures. Thirty-eight Czech-English bilinguals (aged 8–11 years) were tested on their comprehension of relative clauses using a picture matching paradigm. Results show that sentences with number mismatch were comprehended more accurately than match sentences and that subject relatives were comprehended more accurately than object relatives. In addition, in the subject relatives subset, higher exposure to English corresponded to poorer performance in relative clauses with number mismatch. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed.

Previous translation process research has pointed to an increased cognitive load when translating metaphoric compared to literal language. Yet, studies conducted thus far have not examined the role of translation direction (i.e., L1–L2 vs. L2–L1) in novel metaphor translation and have not tested whether and how this process might be modulated by the linguistic form of a novel meaning. In the present study, Polish (L1) – English (L2) translation students translated novel nominal metaphors (A is B), novel similes (A is like B), and literal sentences, in either L1–L2 or L2–L1 translation directions, while their translation behavior was recorded using a keystroke logging method. The results revealed longer translation durations for both metaphors and similes relative to literal utterances. Furthermore, we found slower translation times for novel nominal metaphors compared to novel similes and literal sentences, yet only in the L2–L1 translation direction. Such results might indicate that novel meaning translation is more cognitively taxing in the case of novel nominal metaphors, which require a more robust activation of comparison mechanisms, relative to novel similes. Importantly, this effect might be stronger when translating in the direction in which access to semantic representations is potentially more automatic (i.e., L2–L1 translation).

Exposure to statistical patterns of language use affects language production and comprehension. In this longitudinal study of English language learner (ELL) university students, we examined the interplay between language experience and language statistics as a window into the formation and stability of morphological representations in memory. We hypothesized that within-participant change in sensitivity to distributional properties of complex words on written production would reflect changes in morphological knowledge. At two timepoints, separated by 8 months of language exposure, a sample of ELLs (n = 196) completed a written suffix completion task. The largest gains in production accuracy were observed for derived words ending in less productive suffixes. In addition, across both timepoints we found a consistent effect of derivational family entropy, such that derived words belonging to morphological families with equally dominant members were less accurately produced. Both effects indicate that ELLs exploit distributional cues to morphological structure and shed light on two aspects of morphological knowledge in ELLs. First, knowledge of suffixes becomes more entrenched in memory, independently of knowledge of the full forms of derived words. Second, ELLs draw upon interlexical connections between morphological family members during written word production.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show heterogeneous language profiles beyond early language delays. Understanding the second language profiles of bilingual children with ASD is important for clinical practice in diverse societies. Accordingly, we examined the narrative abilities of bilinguals with ASD, with developmental language disorder (DLD), and with typical development (TD) to determine which narrative components best differentiate bilinguals with ASD from the other groups. Participants were 29 bilingual children with ASD, DLD, and TD who were matched for age (mean = 6;8), nonverbal intelligence, and receptive vocabulary. Narratives were coded for macrostructure (story grammar (SG) scores, number of individual SG components) and microstructure (syntactic complexity, mean length of utterance, lexical diversity, and story length). The TD group had superior SG scores, included more SG components, and used longer utterances and more complex syntax than the ASD group, whereas no differences were found between the clinical groups. For SG components requiring perspective-taking abilities, the ASD group had worse performance than the TD and DLD groups. Our results suggest that bilingual children with ASD show weaknesses in both macrostructure and microstructure, which can overlap with children with DLD. The linguistic profiles of bilingual children with ASD and DLD are thus both overlapping and distinct.

The orthographic forms (spellings) of second language (L2) words and sounds affect the pronunciation and awareness of L2 sounds, even after lengthy naturalistic exposure. This study investigated whether instruction could reduce the effects of English orthographic forms on Italian native speakers’ pronunciation and awareness of L2 English sounds. Italians perceive, produce, and judge the same sound as a short sound if it is spelled with one letter and as a long sound if it is spelled with a digraph, due to L1 Italian grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) rules whereby double consonant letters represent long consonants. Totally, 100 Italian learners of English were allocated to two conditions (final n = 88). The participants in the explicit GPC (EGPC) condition discovered English GPC rules relating to sound length through reflection, explicit teaching, and practice; the participants in the passive exposure condition practiced the same words as the EGPC participants, but with no mention of GPCs. Pre- and postintervention production (delayed word repetition) and phonological awareness (rhyme judgment) tasks revealed no positive effects of the instruction. GPC instruction appears to be ineffective in reducing orthographic effects on L2 phonology. Orthographic effects may be impervious to change, whether by naturalistic exposure or by instruction.

We know a great deal about children’s first steps into reading. Here, we explore how they become more sophisticated readers, learning to read complex words. Theoretical accounts predict that one key factor is morphological awareness, or awareness of the minimal units of meaning in language. And yet empirical studies have yet to clarify whether morphological awareness has a stronger relation to the development of reading skill for words with multiple morphemes in particular (i.e., morphological decoding) or to the reading of a whole range of words. We examined this question in this study by contrasting the role of morphological awareness in the development of morphological decoding and of broader word reading skill. Participants were 197 English-speaking children who were followed from Grade 3 to 4. We conducted longitudinal analyses that included stringent autoregressive controls to capture the determinants of gains over time, as well as controls for vocabulary and phonological awareness. Structural equation modeling (SEM) path analysis with this set of controls revealed that morphological awareness predicted significant unique gains in morphological decoding from Grade 3 to 4 with no such unique contributions to broader word reading skill. These findings clarify the role of morphological awareness in supporting children in developing the ability to read morphologically complex words, supporting a more targeted role for morphology in theories of word reading development.

Chinese morphological awareness is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct but there is a lack of understanding of how its dimensions are related. Latent change score modeling was used to examine the bivariate relationships of two facets of oral morphological awareness, namely morpheme and structure awareness in Chinese children in grades one through three. Two hundred and three children in China completed morpheme (homonym awareness) and structure awareness (lexical compounding) tasks across the three grades (M = 6.66, SD = .30 at the first time point). Results indicated that growth in structure awareness was predicted in part by previous levels of morpheme awareness, suggesting that morpheme awareness leads the growth of structure awareness. Educational implications are discussed.