In line with the recent trend in comparative analysis of different populations (see Friedmann & Rusou, 2015, as an example), Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan (2017) present a comprehensive review of different language outcomes in populations that have received qualitatively and quantitatively different input during the first year of life, from enriched stimuli in bilingual situations to no stimuli at all in the case of children with profound hearing impairment. The claims derived from these data deserve some comment, however, and need some caveats about the measures used, which I will provide in the following with a brief discussion of complementing research and the presentation of some new data derived from the Bilingual Language Development (BiLaD) Project, a recent French/German collaboration studying bilingual populations with and without specific language impairment (SLI).

Exposure to a minority language is largely limited in terms of frequency, and often delivered by nonnative speakers in certain domains. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of two types of native-language input sources (story telling and minority language children's television) in providing 4- and 5-year-old native English-speaking children with beginning awareness of Welsh. Results revealed that exposure to Welsh via television programs was equally as beneficial, if not more so in some cases, as listening to Welsh stories in developing children's vocabulary, particularly within the context of social interaction. These results suggest a useful and potentially effective role for the use of native-language television within a carefully designed language curriculum to aid early second language development in minority language contexts.

The present study investigates the priming and subsequent production of word order variation (adverb–verb–subject vs. subject–verb–adverb order) with temporal phrases (Experiment 1) and locative phrases (Experiment 2) among intermediate English–German second language learners. Participants exhibited comparable short-term priming for adverb-first word order in both experiments. In the initial baseline phase, participants produced adverb-first sentences with temporal phrases but not locative phrases, and only temporal phrases led to significant long-term priming, as measured in a postpriming phase. This suggests that at lower proficiency levels, long-term, but not short-term, priming may depend on the stability of specific semantically constrained constructions rather than more generalized syntactic representations and that such cumulative effects may be shaped by preferences for a particular construction in the native language.

The effect of visual salience on speakers’ choices is investigated by contrasting the effects of both visual and linguistic manipulations on picture descriptions and eye movements. Two-character pictures were used, which can be described in one of two complementary ways (e.g., a cop chasing a robber can be described either from a chasing or from a fleeing perspective), and using simple actives or other alternative syntactic structures (e.g., “a robber is being chased by a cop”). The pictures were preceded by a verb priming one of the two perspectives and/or a preview of one of the two characters. The results show that the visual manipulation affects looks to the characters regardless of which perspective had been linguistically primed, but it only affects verbal descriptions in the absence of a linguistic prime. Linguistically priming one of the perspectives, in contrast, has a reliable effect on both looks to the characters and verbal descriptions. These results suggest that visual salience does not influence linguistic choices directly.

There is evidence that the ability to segment an utterance into words improves with literacy, yet previous research makes it difficult to disentangle the effect of literacy from that of age or cognitive abilities. We tested the hypothesis that literacy increases lexical segmentation in a second language in a unique sample of adult illiterates learning to read in their second language, controlling for cognitive abilities and using a task that taps language processing rather than only metalinguistic awareness. Participants’ segmentation was correlated with first language reading at the beginning of an intensive literacy course for illiterate adults. At the end of the course, those learning to read for the first time benefited more in terms of their segmentation abilities. We discuss implications for models of second language learning.

The cumulative effects hypothesis (CEH) claims that bilingual development would be a challenge for children with specific language impairment (SLI). To date, research on second language (L2) children with SLI has been limited mainly to their early years of L2 exposure; however, examining the long-term outcomes of L2 children with SLI is essential for testing the CEH. Accordingly, the present study examined production and grammaticality judgments of English tense morphology from matched groups of L2 children with SLI and L2 children with typical development (TD) for 3 years, from ages 8 to 10 with 4–6 years of exposure to English. This study found that the longitudinal acquisition profile of the L2 children with SLI and TD was similar to the acquisition profile reported for monolinguals with SLI and TD. Furthermore, L2-SLI children's accuracy with tense morphology was similar to that of their monolingual age peers with SLI at the end of the study, and exceeded that of younger monolingual peers with SLI whose age matched the L2 children's length of exposure to English. These findings are not consistent with the CEH, but instead show that morphological acquisition parallel to monolinguals with SLI is possible for L2 children with SLI.

First language learners can track word-referent co-occurrence information across situations and evaluate co-occurrence probabilities across situations to determine the best-of-fit mappings. However, cross-situational word learning can be difficult to foreign language learners, because in addition to aggregating information across situations, they have to build robust representations for foreign-sounding words. In Experiment 1, third-grade Mandarin-speaking children learned four English word-referent pairs in two conditions, varying in within-trial ambiguity. In one condition, information about word-referent association was determinable across trials but not within a trial. In the other, word-referent association within a trial was inferable. In Experiment 2, participants learned words in a condition where referential ambiguity across trials, though not within a trial, was reduced by successive presentation of certain word-referent pairs. The results revealed that participants learned more word-referent pairs than expected by chance. Reducing ambiguity within a trial facilitated word mapping and word retention (Experiment 1), but reducing ambiguity across trials did not (Experiment 2). Across two experiments, word mapping and retention performance was associated with phonological awareness, whether measured in children's first language or a foreign language, but not with digit span, suggesting that success in cross-situational word learning in a foreign language rests on specification of word forms.

Two eye-tracking experiments examined influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues on the assignment of thematic roles in German. Participants (N1 = 32, N2 = 40) read sentences with subject- and object-extracted relative clauses, where thematic agents and patients remained ambiguous until the end of the relative clause. The results reveal a linguistic gender bias: agent roles are assigned more easily to grammatically masculine than feminine role nouns and stereotypically neutral than female ones. The opposite pattern is observed in the assignment of patient roles for stereotypical but not grammatical gender. The findings are discussed within the framework of situation model theories as well as in constraint-based and similarity-based interference accounts, while gender is viewed as a dimension of prominence.

We examined the cross-language relations among Spanish-speaking preschoolers’ (N = 125; M age = 53 months, SD = 4.58) English and Spanish vocabulary, letter–word, and math skills; the changes they exhibited in those skills during 1 year of preschool; and the extent to which Spanish skills were associated with English skill gains. The results revealed that children's Spanish and English vocabulary skills were unassociated across languages, whereas their letter–word and math skills were positively associated. Children exhibited gains in vocabulary, letter–word, and math skills in English, with letter–word and math skills in Spanish at the start of preschool being positively associated with the development of those skills in English. Children also gained math skills in Spanish. However, their Spanish vocabulary and letter–word skills did not appear to change. Vocabulary skills showed positive within-language relations with children's letter–word and math skills. The findings highlight cross-language linkages between Spanish-speaking preschoolers’ academic skills in English and Spanish and how Spanish skills associate with their English academic readiness.

Looking to atypical populations to illuminate the functioning of core cognitive systems has a long history in the behavioral sciences (e.g., Caramazza, 1986; McCloskey, 1992). Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan (2017) continue that tradition in their keynote article, here by shedding light on how the development of phonological working memory (PWM) may be shaped not only by individual genetic variation but also by various features of the language acquisition context, whether that context is enriched, as in bilingualism; delayed, as with cochlear implantation (CI) or international adoption (IA); or impoverished, as with deaf children of hearing parents or repeat cases of otitis media. Their review of the literature demonstrates that a sensitive (/critical) period for phonological development, encompassing variation in quality, quantity, and timing of early exposure, has crucial consequences for an individual's level of PWM attainment and, by a compelling extension, for aspects of ongoing language development such as vocabulary learning and reading skills.

Taking as a premise that phonological working memory (PWM) influences later language development, in their keynote article, Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan aim to specify the relations between early language input and the development of PWM in terms of separable influences of timing, quantity, and quality of early language input. We concur that prior work has established that PWM and language development have reciprocal influences on one another during development (e.g., Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998; Gathercole, 2006; Gathercole, Hitch, Service, & Martin, 1997; Metsala & Chisolm, 2010). The goal of the keynote article was to describe how early language experience may influence the development of PWM. Pierce et al. argue that this can be done by comparing the development of PWM across groups of children with differing language experiences during early childhood, specifically (a) delayed exposure to language, (b) impoverished language input, or (c) enriched language input. The authors suggest that this comparison may contribute to establishing that individual differences in PWM are due, in part, to early language experience. Sensitive periods for phonological development that are open roughly in the first year of life are discussed, and it is suggested that the quantity and quality of early language input shapes the quality of phonological representations. Efforts to specify mechanisms by which early language input may influence the development of PWM have both theoretical and, potentially, clinical importance. Considering this, Pierce et al.’s article, which aims to create a platform for future research in terms of the timing, quantity, and quality of early language input, is a valuable contribution.

This study investigated whether different types of corrective feedback (CF) in second language speech perception training have differential effects on second language speech production. One hundred Korean learners of English were assigned to five different groups and participated in eight computer-assisted perception training sessions focusing on English vowels. While no CF was provided to the control group, participants in the four treatment groups received one of three types of auditory CF or a visual type of CF. A pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest each consisted of a production measurement at a controlled-speech level. Results revealed that the extent to which the participants’ production accuracy benefited from the perception training depended on CF type. In addition, by adopting the perception accuracy data by Lee and Lyster (2016b), the current study found that improvement in perception accuracy was a significant predictor of improvement in production accuracy.

We studied anaphor resolution and its relationship with cognitive control abilities in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children. In a sentence–picture verification task assessing anaphor interpretation, the SLI group was less successful than age-matched TD peers, and displayed similar performance patterns as younger TD children in previous studies. The SLI group showed weaknesses in nonlinguistic cognitive control tasks, which were associated with anaphor interpretation results. These findings are in contrast with the view that proposes a grammar-specific deficit behind anaphor resolution problems in SLI. We suggest that anaphor interpretation in this population is delayed but not atypical, and this delay can be partly explained by weaker cognitive control abilities.

The present study examined Korean mothers’ literate mediation strategies and socioemotional supports for 84 4- and 5-year-old children as they wrote unfamiliar words, and the relation of these strategies and comments to Korean children's Hangul reading. The mother–child writing interactions were videotaped. Eight strategies of maternal literate mediation were subsequently identified and five socioemotional comments were coded. Mothers of 5-year-olds used a coda-focused (i.e., emphasis on the final consonant of a syllable) strategy more often than those of 4-year-olds. The maternal coda focus was uniquely associated with children's word reading over and above mothers’ education and children's age, grade, vocabulary, and writing skill. Maternal literate mediation focused on the consonant–vowel (CV) subsyllabic unit, which explained children's reading of CV Gulja (Korean written syllable). These results suggest that efficient maternal literate mediation strategies focus on salient psycholinguistic grain size of Korean language such as CV (body) and coda subsyllabic units. In addition, the two socioemotional categories of process and critical comments were uniquely associated with children's reading. Findings underscore the importance of Korean language and culture in mothers’ early scaffolding to facilitate children's literacy acquisition.

Cross-linguistic priming in comprehension is understudied, and it remains unclear whether bilinguals have shared abstract syntactic representations during sentence comprehension. This article reports a self-paced reading experiment investigating the influence of Chinese passive relative clauses on the interpretation of English sentences that are temporarily ambiguous between an active main clause and a passive reduced relative (dispreferred) structure. The results showed that reading Chinese passive relative primes reduced processing difficulty in English targets at the dispreferred disambiguation. Chinese-to-English priming in comprehension occurred without lexical and word-order equivalence between primes and targets. In addition, translation-equivalent verbs did not boost cross-linguistic structural priming. The findings support an account under which bilingual sentence processing involves abstract, unordered syntactic representations that are integrated between languages.

Second language (L2) speakers often experience difficulty discriminating speech sounds of the nonnative language, which can result in phonolexical ambiguity. We report two experiments that examine how L2 Russian speakers may utilize contextual constraints for phonolexical ambiguity resolution during speech comprehension. L2 ambiguous words constitute minimal pairs with palatalized and unpalatalized consonants in the Russian language, where the phonological feature of palatalization marks semantic, morphological, or syntactic distinctions between words. L2 performance is compared to that of a control group of Russian native speakers. The results demonstrate that L2 listeners rely on contextual information for meaning disambiguation during sentence comprehension, but that the relative reliance on different types of context is task specific.

The present study tested the hypothesis (Byrne, 1996) that young children who do not yet understand that the elements of alphabetic writing represent phonemes link writing to language at the level of morphemes. We asked US preschoolers to write words that varied in the number of morphemes and the number of syllables that they contained. We identified a group of 50 children who used letters that represented phonemes in the intended words no more often than expected by chance (mean age = 4 years, 9 months). These prephonological spellers did not produce longer spellings for two-morpheme words such as teacup than for one-morpheme words such as napkin, although the length of their spellings was affected by the number of letters that they used to spell the previously presented word and by the order of the word in the experiment. The results suggest that the length of prephonological spellers’ productions is not influenced by the linguistic length of a message in phonemes, syllables, or morphemes, and they do not support the idea that these children show a special sensitivity to morphemes.

Respeaking involves producing subtitles in real time to make live television programs accessible to deaf and hard of hearing viewers. In this study we investigated how the type of material to be respoken affects temporal aspects of respeaking, such as ear–voice span and pauses. Given the similarities between respeaking and interpreting (time constraints) and between interlingual respeaking and translation (interlingual processing), we also tested whether previous interpreting and translation experience leads to a smaller delay or lesser cognitive load in respeaking, as manifested by a smaller number of pauses. We tested 22 interpreters, 23 translators, and a control group of 12 bilingual controls, who performed interlingual (English to Polish) and intralingual (Polish to Polish) respeaking of five video clips with different characteristics (speech rate, number of speakers, and scriptedness). Interlingual respeaking was found to be more challenging than the intralingual one. The temporal aspects of respeaking were affected by clip type (especially in interpreters). We found no clear interpreter or translator advantage over the bilingual controls across the respeaking tasks. However, interlingual respeaking turned out to be too difficult for many bilinguals to perform at all. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine temporal aspects of respeaking as modulated by the type of materials and previous interpreting/translation experience. The results develop our understanding of temporal aspects of respeaking and are directly applicable to respeaker training.

Relatively little is known about the importance of phonological and orthographic processing skills for reading and spelling in monolingual and bilingual adults. We compared these underlying skills, using a series of phonological and orthographic tasks, in English monolingual (n = 28), English first language and Chinese second language bilingual (n = 21), and Chinese first language and English second language bilingual adults (n = 22) who were equally proficient in reading and spelling English, and examined the contributions of these skills to English word reading and spelling for each group. The results showed group differences in phonological processing, with English monolingual adults having better phonological skills than both groups of bilingual adults. No significant group differences were found for orthographic processing. Regression analyses showed phonological skills were a unique predictor of English word reading for both bilingual groups, but not for the English monolingual group. Orthographic skills were a significant predictor of English word spelling, but only for the English monolingual adults. This suggests there may be a long-lasting influence of being exposed to two contrasting languages on skills underlying literacy in bilingual individuals.

This longitudinal study examined metalinguistic awareness in bilingual word reading development among Malay–English bilingual children in Singapore. Participants were assessed with the same tasks twice with a 1-year interval from Grade 3 to Grade 4 in phonological and morphological awareness and derived word decoding in both English and Malay. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that both types of metalinguistic awareness significantly predicted derived word reading in both languages. Subsequent cross-lagged panel modeling found construct-level transfer facilitation effect from Malay on English for phonological awareness but conversely from English on Malay for morphological awareness. Neither type of metalinguistic awareness exerted a transfer facilitation effect on word reading. These findings shed light on the developmental mechanism of cross-linguistic transfer in biliteracy acquisition.