India's sex ratio at birth (SRB) has become increasingly masculine, coinciding with a declining total fertility rate. Couples often resort to sex-selective abortion or even infanticide to ensure the birth of a son. We use household-level data from all four waves of India's National Family Health Survey (NFHS) to investigate the effect of India's demographic transition on the SRB. Mixed-effects logit regression analysis demonstrates that since the early 1990s, the probability of a third-order birth being male is decreasing in the number of sons previously born, while for second-order births, this effect does not become apparent until the 2000s. Accounting for geographic heterogeneity in the fertility transition, we find additional heterogeneity in son preference and sex selection at the village/neighborhood level. This heterogeneity has strengthened over time at both second- and third-order births and in more and less gender skewed regions of the country, suggesting potential convergence in sex ratios across India. By incorporating the most recent 2015–16 round of the NFHS, we demonstrate that previously documented trends in sex selection continue, and additionally that sex selection is increasingly occurring at lower parities as the desire for a smaller family combines with the traditional preference for sons.

When bilinguals name pictures while in ‘monolingual mode’, we expect that under conditions of language-constraint and no cognate facilitation, factors influencing lexical retrieval in monolinguals ought to exert similar effects on bilinguals. To this end, we carried out a L1-only naming task on early Hindi–English bilinguals. Results of linear mixed effects analysis reveal AoA, Familiarity, Image Agreement and Codability (availability of alternate names) to be the most significant predictors of lexical retrieval speed for early bilinguals, confirming our expectations. However, we report, for the first time, a by-subject variation in Codability for bilinguals. Implications of the results are discussed in the context of current theories of bilingual lexical access and competition. In preparation for this study, Hindi norms from bilinguals for items in the Snodgrass and Vanderwart set have been established, which will be of use for stimuli selection in experimental studies involving bilinguals.