This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124 children in second and fifth grades who were enrolled in either a French immersion or a regular English program. All children were from monolingual English-speaking homes and attended local public schools in middle socioeconomic neighborhoods. Measures included morphological awareness, syntactic awareness, and verbal fluency, with all testing in English. These tasks differed in their need for executive control, a cognitive ability that is enhanced in bilingual children. Overall, the metalinguistic advantages reported in earlier research emerged gradually, with advantages for tasks requiring more executive control (grammaticality judgment) appearing later and some tasks improving but not exceeding performance of monolinguals (verbal fluency) even by fifth grade. These findings demonstrate the gradual emergence of changes in metalinguistic concepts associated with bilingualism over a period of about 5 years. Performance on English-language proficiency tasks was maintained by French immersion children throughout in spite of schooling being conducted in French.

Children produce a deictic gesture for a particular object (point at dog) approximately 3 months before they produce the verbal label for that object (“dog”; Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Gesture thus paves the way for children's early nouns. We ask here whether the same pattern of gesture preceding and predicting speech holds for iconic gestures. In other words, do gestures that depict actions precede and predict early verbs? We observed spontaneous speech and gestures produced by 40 children (22 girls, 18 boys) from age 14 to 34 months. Children produced their first iconic gestures 6 months later than they produced their first verbs. Thus, unlike the onset of deictic gestures, the onset of iconic gestures conveying action meanings followed, rather than preceded, children's first verbs. However, iconic gestures increased in frequency at the same time as verbs did and, at that time, began to convey meanings not yet expressed in speech. Our findings suggest that children can use gesture to expand their repertoire of action meanings, but only after they have begun to acquire the verb system underlying their language.

According to usage-based approaches to acquisition, the detection of a construction may be facilitated when input contains numerous exemplars with a shared lexical item, which is referred to as skewed input. First language studies have shown that skewed input is more beneficial for the acquisition of novel constructions than balanced input, in which a small set of lexical verbs occurs an equal number of times. However, a second language (L2) study of datives found no advantage for skewed input compared to balanced input. The present study compared the effectiveness of skewed and balanced input at facilitating the comprehension of the double-object dative construction in L2 English. Over a 2-week period, Thai English as foreign language learners (N = 78) completed comprehension tests and a treatment activity that provided either skewed first, skewed random, or balanced input. The results indicated that balanced input was most effective at promoting comprehension of double-object datives. The implications are discussed in terms of the benefits of different types of input for L2 learners.

Qian and Schedl's Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge Test was administered to 31 native-speaker undergraduates under an “unconstrained” condition, in which the number of responses to headwords was unfixed, whereas a corresponding group (n = 36) completed the test under the original “constrained” condition. Results revealed lower accuracy in the unconstrained condition and in paradigmatic versus syntagmatic responses. Native speakers failed to reach the 90% criterion on most unconstrained and many constrained items. Although certain modifications could improve such a test (e.g., eliminating psycholinguistically anomalous headwords, such as adjectives, or presenting responses to headwords discontinuously), two intransigent problems impede test validity. First, collocates in the mental lexicon differ in tightness and vary across dialects, sociolects, and age groups. Second, it is more serious that second-language Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge Tests are likely spot checks of metalinguistic knowledge rather than depth tests that reflect what learners would actually produce in spontaneous utterances.

Baum and Titone address several issues related to bilingual advantages in executive control that are often overlooked in this literature but warrant further consideration and empirical investigation. We limit our comments to two issues: the problem of establishing the directional relationship between bilingualism and executive control and the problem of decomposing executive control.

In this comprehensive review by Baum and Titone, the authors promote the notion that bilingualism should be thought of as an agent of neuroplastic change over the life span. Their proposal offers a context within which to view early enrichment, one element of which is the early learning of two languages. The review points out the complexities of studying bilingualism and highlights empirical gaps in research that are critical to our understanding of how experience with language, especially exposure to two languages, might affect the neurocognitive system. The framework brings together disparate sets of studies in the literature across multiple methods, models, and disparate repertoires of descriptive terms.

The words “paradigmatic” and “syntagmatic” were transposed in the second sentence of the Abstract, which is reprinted herein. We regret this transposition and any problems it may have caused.

This study examined the combined and unique contributions of home, teacher, and peer English exposure levels on Spanish-speaking preschoolers’ (N = 107) English receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. The combined levels of English exposure during the fall of preschool were positively associated with children's English receptive and expressive vocabulary skills in the spring. Furthermore, English exposure levels at home were uniquely and positively associated with children's English receptive and expressive vocabularies, whereas peer English exposure levels were uniquely and positively associated with children's English expressive vocabulary. Teachers’ English exposure levels were not uniquely associated with children's English vocabulary. The findings highlight the importance of the home environment and peer experiences in the classroom for maximizing Spanish-speaking children's early English vocabulary skills.

It is often assumed that young bilinguals are lexically delayed in comparison to monolinguals. A comprehensive comparison of comprehension and production vocabulary in 31 firstborn bilingual and 30 matched monolingual children fails to find empirical foundation for this assumption. Several raters completed Dutch and French adaptations of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories for children aged 13 and 20 months. At 13 months, bilinguals understood more words than did monolinguals; at 20 months, monolinguals knew more Dutch words than did bilinguals (combining comprehension and production). There were no group differences for word production or for Dutch word comprehension. Both groups understood and produced the same number of lexicalized meanings; ratios of word comprehension to word production did not differ; interindividual variation was similar. This study underscores the importance of conducting bilingual–monolingual comparisons with matched groups and suggests that if individual bilingual children appear to be slow in early vocabulary development, reasons other than their bilingualism should be investigated.

In the last two decades, there has been an upsurge of research on bilingualism recognizing that bilinguals may be more representative language users than their monolingual peers (e.g., Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski, & Valdes Kroff, 2012). The excitement about bilinguals is related not only to their neglected status in the past literature but also to a set of twin discoveries that have catapulted research on bilingualism into central view in psycholinguistics, cognitive and developmental neuroscience, and gerontology. One of these discoveries is that both languages are active when bilinguals read, listen to speech, and plan speech in either of their two languages (for a review, see Kroll et al., 2012). The other discovery is that bilingualism appears to confer a set of consequences to domain general cognition and to the neural structures that support it (e.g., Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009). Those consequences are observed across the lifespan and are particularly evident when cognitive resources are challenged because of the normal or pathological trajectory of aging (e.g., Gold, Kim, Johnson, Kriscio, & Smith, 2013). The focus of the new research is on how these two discoveries might be related. The parallel activity of the two languages and the interactions across them require that the bilingual develops skill in language selection to enable fluent performance. The hypothesis that has guided the recent flurry of research is that bilingual minds and brains change as a consequence of having to regulate the two languages. In their Keynote Article, Baum and Titone provide a comprehensive and current summary of the existing evidence on this hypothesis.

A wealth of research on experience-related plasticity has shown that specific experiences, such as musical training (Herholz & Zatorre, 2012) or juggling (Draganski et al., 2004), can modify brain function and structure and induce long-term changes in cognitive behavior throughout the life span. In their comprehensive Keynote Article, Baum and Titone focus on the neural and cognitive implications of lifelong experience with multiple languages. They discuss empirical studies on bilingualism, executive control, and aging to enhance our understanding of the frequently observed executive control advantages in bilinguals and how lifelong bilingualism may contribute to the development of cognitive reserve and buffer age-related declines in executive control functions. In reframing these issues in terms of neuroplasticity, Baum and Titone propose to “embrace the inherent individual variability among bilinguals in all its glory” and identify key issues related to individual variability to pave the way to new avenues of research. We fully concur with Baum and Titone's general recommendation to embrace variability among bilinguals to advance our understanding of bilingualism, aging, and neuroplasticity, but we would like to particularly highlight the importance of the earlier stages of second language (L2) learning and the emergence of executive control advantages, a topic we believe has been understudied in this domain. How much bilingual experience is needed to affect executive control?

This research assessed phonological and morphological awareness in dyslexic university students. We tested 44 dyslexic university students in phonological and morphological awareness tasks and compared their performances to those of both matched chronological age and matched reading level controls. In the phonological awareness tests, the dyslexic university students performed at the same level as their reading level controls. In contrast, they systematically outperformed their reading level controls in the morphological awareness tasks and almost reached the proficiency level of the chronological age controls. The results show that dyslexic university students develop their morphological awareness more than their phonological awareness. These findings add to the evidence indicating that morphological awareness is not deficient in dyslexia and could instead play a beneficial role in the development of literacy skills in this population.