Search Results (99)

The presence of culturally and linguistically diverse children increases in early education classrooms worldwide. In monolingual education settings, multilingual children are at a disadvantage regarding their learning opportunities compared to monolingual children. Knowledge about how monolingual educators support children in a multilingual classroom has not been systematized yet. The present scoping review aims to synthesize the existing empirical evidence on (a) characteristics of the learning environment of monolingual teachers with multilingual children and (b) how teacher characteristics relate to the learning environment characteristics in early education institutions worldwide. The inclusion criteria used in this review included articles that report empirical evidence from 1990 to 2024, with multilingual children aged 0–6 of minoritized languages and monolingual teacher practices within a naturalist environment. Subsequently, through the PRISMA-ScR method on the articles found in the WOS and SCIELO databases, 40 articles were included with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods designs. The results showed that in the Latin American context, culturally responsive practices are scarce for bilingual children with immigrant backgrounds. In the USA and European contexts, educators are more likely to implement activities that include children’s L1, even if they have limited knowledge of that language. The international perspective of this review allows us to identify contributions and challenges in different geographic regions. Full article

Previous research on the relationship of bilingualism and theory of mind has largely focused on children. However, several recent studies of the theory of mind have found differences in theory of mind processing among older populations, namely adults. Given that language has been found to play an important role in the successful theory of the mind task performance of adults, it is valuable to understand the relationship of the language ability of bilingualism and theory of mind in adults. The specific focus is on studies comparing monolinguals and bilinguals in a theory of mind assessment for an adult sample. In this systematic review, we reviewed and analyzed these studies and conducted a meta-analysis. Among the studies included for meta-analysis (k = 7), we found a significant small-to-medium effect size (d = 0.429, p < 0.0001), indicating a bilingual advantage among adults. A variety of different measures for theory of mind were included in these studies. More studies are required to better understand the relationship between multiple language processing and social cognition among adults to better understand this gap in the literature. Full article

Despite the growing number of bilinguals worldwide, research on how bilingualism influences grammatical development in children with learning disabilities remains limited. This may be due to challenges in assessing language in these children, given the heterogeneity of their disabilities, lack of appropriate tools, and variability in language background and exposure common in bilingual populations. This pilot study investigates grammatical abilities in bilingual versus monolingual children with Down syndrome using the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task, specifically designed for bilingual populations. Sentence repetition tasks are widely used for assessing grammar in neurotypical children and children with language impairments and are part of many omnibus language assessments. Ten children with Down syndrome aged 5–8 were recruited: five bilingual, speakers of British English and various home languages, and five monolingual, age- and language-matched. Both groups produced a high proportion of ungrammatical repetitions, with more omissions of verbs than nouns, function words than content words, and significant difficulties producing complex structures such as relative clauses, wh-questions, and passives. However, qualitative analyses showed that bilingual children speaking morphologically rich home languages (e.g., Polish, Greek) appeared to have fewer difficulties with some function words (e.g., prepositions) and were able to produce complex structures like passives and wh-questions, unlike their monolingual peers. Although the small sample limits generalisability, two insights emerge: First, sentence repetition may be of limited use in assessing expressive grammar in children with Down syndrome due to frequent ungrammatical responses. Second, while both groups showed similar challenges, bilingualism—especially with richly inflected home languages—may support specific grammatical skills. These findings support existing evidence that bilingualism does not hinder grammatical development in children with Down syndrome and suggest that parents should not avoid dual-language input. Further research is needed to determine whether bilingualism confers specific benefits in grammatical morpheme use and complex syntactic constructions. Full article

This article explores the concept of the Relational Refugee Child (RRC), emphasising the importance of trauma-informed and culturally responsive approaches in fostering refugee students’ educational and social integration. Refugee children often navigate multifaceted layers of disconnection resulting from cultural, linguistic, and spatial barriers, which challenge their sense of belonging and participation in educational systems. Drawing on a qualitative study with sub-Saharan refugee students and their teachers in Algerian national schools, this article critically explores the relational dimensions of refugee education. It highlights how systemic factors such as language policies and perceptions around integration shape refugee students’ experiences. The study contends that trauma-informed practices, which centre the refugee child, are crucial in addressing the psychological and social burdens of displacement. Simultaneously, culturally and linguistically inclusive pedagogies that actively challenge the marginalisation of “low-prestige” cultures and languages may offer transformative potential by validating refugee students’ identities, fostering meaningful connections, and enhancing their sense of agency. These approaches counter the dominance of monolingual ideologies and recognise the profound cultural and motivational significance of minority languages and cultures. By situating refugee education within the broader framework of relational inclusion, this article advocates for an integrative approach that merges trauma-informed strategies with inclusive methodologies. Full article

Children around the world often grow up with multiple language varieties and are exposed to regional and second-language accents. This linguistic heterogeneity presents both benefits and challenges for cognitive and language development. Recognizing the importance of input variability in theories of language processing, researchers are now using more nuanced assessments of language experience that go beyond simple ‘monolingual’ versus ‘bilingual’ categories. These assessment methods capture the gradient nature of language exposure and use. This article provides a narrative review of recent research on the role of different accents and languages in children’s environments. It emphasizes the importance of applying gradient assessments of accent variation to both bilingual and monolingual populations. In doing so, a more comprehensive understanding of speech processing in heterogeneous contexts among school-aged children can be achieved. Full article

Children learn linguistic structures from the input they receive. Their learning may depend on several factors such as children’s sensitivity to structure in the input, prior language experience, and the consistency of linguistic structures in the input. In this study, we investigated how inconsistent input (i.e., substitution errors) in an artificial language affects 7 to 11-year-old Dutch-speaking children’s learning of words and rules. Using a cross-situational statistical learning task (CSL task), we assessed children’s learning of label–referent pairs (word learning) and their generalization of two morphophonological rules. Eighty-nine children were randomly allocated to three input conditions: a fully consistent input condition (n = 31), a 12.5% inconsistent input condition (n = 32), and a 25% inconsistent input condition (n = 26). In the inconsistent input conditions, children were exposed to substitution errors, respectively, 12.5% and 25% of the time. We found evidence that substitution errors in children’s language input hindered their cross-situational statistical language learning. While we have evidence that children learned the words in our artificial language, we have no evidence that children—regardless of input condition—detected the morphophonological rules. This study eventually may inform us on how differences in the quality of children’s language environments (arising from, e.g., speaker variability and language proficiency) affect their language learning. Full article

This study investigates the beliefs about multilingualism and the multilingual language use of multilingual children living in the Netherlands, a highly diverse and multilingual society. We interviewed 26 8- to 12-year-old primary school children with different home languages (i.e., English, German, Polish or Turkish). Children indicated how a multilingual alter-ego felt about multilingual language use scenarios and why. The scenarios comprised situations using their different languages with parents, friends or teachers in monolingual and multilingual modes. Children overwhelmingly associated neutral or positive feelings with using the societal and home language. These feelings were not consistently affected by the societal prestige of their home language (measured by English and German vs. Polish and Turkish as their home language). The content analysis indicated that, besides competence, accommodating the interlocutor, personal preference and normality were the most frequent explanations children provided for their emotional reactions. Our findings indicate that the participating children experience being multilingual as normal and are not (yet) negatively affected in their attitudes despite their experience with a monolingual bias at school. Although no effects of home language prestige emerged, differences between children from specific home language communities suggest that myths about multilingual competence and code-mixing persist. Full article

Children’s consonant cluster productions in typical and atypical phonological development were investigated for different languages reporting developmental productions that are universal, language-specific, and/or child-specific. These patterns are often interpreted considering sonority hierarchy effects. Quantitative norms on developmental cluster productions are less prevalent in the literature cross-linguistically, as are investigations on the development of less frequent cluster types in the world’s languages, like those involving falling and level sonority two-member onsets. Our study contributes to these investigations, focusing on Greek-specific onsets: falling sonority obstruents [ft, xt], level sonority obstruents [fθ, fç, ðʝ, xθ, ɣð], and level sonority nasals [mɲ]. We present cross-sectional, longitudinal data from 90 monolingual children, aged 2;0–4;0, based on the word elicitation task, Phonological Assessment for Greek (PAel). As only [ft] 89%, [fç] 80%, [mɲ] 88% are acquired by 3;6–4;0, the data provide evidence that [ft, xt, fθ, xθ, ɣð] reduce to C2, [mɲ] reduces to C1, and [fç], [ðʝ] show the most variability in reduction/simplification patterns. Reduction patterns largely reflect individual cluster acquisition paths longitudinally; the relative reduction to a member changes with age, but the preference to the member does not, except for [ðʝ]. The data facilitate the establishment of quantitative markers for cluster development and qualitative interpretations in terms of featural and structural prominence, including a veiled sonority effect not previously reported in the literature. Full article

Objectives: This study aimed to adapt and validate the Parents’ Evaluation of Aural/Oral Performance of Children (PEACH) questionnaire for Greek-speaking children aged 1 to 6 years. Key objectives included assessing the PEACH questionnaire’s reliability and validity and determining if children from Greece and Cyprus exhibit similar auditory performance, which would suggest they belong to a comparable population. Methods: This cross-sectional study involved 87 children from monolingual Greek-speaking households in Greece (N = 38) and Cyprus (N = 49), all full-term with typical hearing and no cognitive or language deficits. The children’s ages ranged from 12 to 82 months. The study used an independent samples t-test to compare PEACH Overall Scores between Greek and Greek–Cypriot children. Internal consistency was assessed with Cronbach’s alpha and item-total correlations for each country. Additionally, regression models examined the relationship between PEACH scores and age. Results: Greek–Cypriot children had significantly higher PEACH scores (92.09%) than Greek children (86.71%), t(85) = 2.31, p = 0.023. The Cronbach’s alpha for the Greek sample was 0.92, indicating a strong internal consistency, while the Greek–Cypriot sample had a lower alpha of 0.79, with item-total correlations ranging from 0.16 to 0.75. Normative curves showed that auditory performance in the Greek sample increased sharply until 40 months, then plateaued until 60 months. In contrast, the Greek–Cypriot sample’s scores rose sharply until 25 months and plateaued by 40 months. Conclusions: The Greek-translated PEACH questionnaire demonstrated strong reliability and construct validity for Greek children, consistent with other language adaptations. However, the Greek–Cypriot sample did not achieve similar reliability, and differences in scores suggest potential cultural, linguistic, or environmental factors impacting auditory development. These findings emphasize the importance of regional adaptations in standardized assessments. Further research is recommended to explore factors contributing to these differences for more accurate assessments of Greek-speaking children. Full article

The purpose was to contribute to the validation of the TFPI, a new tool to assess the phonetic development of Italian-speaking children aged 18–47 months. Since currently norm-referenced instruments for Italian are lacking, the TFPI would fill this gap. We recruited 52 monolingual children aged 24–47 months with typical development. They were administered the complete TFPI, i.e., a naming task and repetition task; however, only their performances from the naming task were analyzed. The sessions were audio-recorded, in order to be later segmented and annotated in Praat, then manually transcribed with IPA. These data were then imported into Phon, an extremely suitable software for conducting analyses of phonological and speech data. We compiled the Phonetic Inventory (PhI) and calculated the Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC) for each child, taking into consideration the allophones of Italian, in order to not compute them as errors. Both the PhI and the PCC improve with age, while intersubjective variability progressively decreases. Additionally, we investigated the age of the acquisition of each phone, since this domain lacks robust scientific data. Finally, our results align with previous findings, which proves the reliability and validity of the TFPI, and provides new information about the PCC, for which there are no reference values for the Italian language. Full article

Background/Objectives: Narration is a sensitive tool for the assessment of language in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HF-ASD) since mild language deficits beyond the sentential level are not always noticeable through the administration of standardized language tests targeting the lexical or sentential level. This study investigated the narrative ability of monolingual Greek-speaking HF-ASD children in comparison to that of their typically developing (TD) peers and explored the associations between narrative variables, ADHD symptomatology, and memory skills in the participants on the autistic spectrum. Methods: The participants were 39 children aged 7 to 12 years, 19 with HF-ASD and 20 age-matched, vocabulary-matched, and cognitively matched TD peers. Results: The two groups were similar in most microstructural and macrostructural variables but differed significantly in syntactic complexity (p = 0.024; d = 0.754) and subordination (p < 0.001; d = −1.576) indices, implying that the HF-ASD group presented syntactic delay in comparison to their TD peers. The HF-ASD participants showed significantly higher heterogeneity in the amount of information generated for the story’s main character (p = 0.004; d = −0.093) in comparison to their TD peers. Significant associations were observed between verbal and visual memory, complex syntactic structures, and Theory of Mind-related internal state terms. ADHD symptomatology was negatively correlated with the generation of simple and coordinated clauses. Finally, complex syntax and delayed vSTM were correlated with retelling total scores, indicating that language ability and verbal memory compensate for narrative competence in HF-ASD children. Conclusions: The findings highlight the impact that language skills, memory ability, and ADHD symptomatology have on narrative competence in children with HF-ASD, as well as the importance of narrative use for assessing the language skills in populations with mild language impairment. Full article

A number of different language measures are used in child language acquisition studies. This raises the issue of comparability across tasks, and whether this comparability diverges depending on the specific language domain or the language population (e.g., monolinguals versus bilinguals). The current study investigates the comparability across tasks in the domains of vocabulary, morphology, and syntax in primary-school-aged sequential bilingual children with L1 Arabic/L2 English (N = 40, 5;7–12;2) and age-matched monolinguals (N = 40). We collected narrated speech samples to produce measures across language domains, and additional measures from separate vocabulary, morphology, and syntax assessments. Using a logistic regression analysis, we find a correspondence between syntax measures in monolinguals; however, we find no further correspondences in the other domains for monolinguals, and no correspondences at all in bilinguals. This suggests that assessment measures are highly task-dependent, and that a given assessment measure is not necessarily indicative of language as a whole, or even of language within a domain. We also find selective effects of age for monolinguals and both age and length of exposure (LOE) for bilinguals; in particular, while LOE predicts variation between the first and second language, age effects reflect underlying similarity across languages. We consider the implications of these effects for language assessments across populations. Full article

The literature on bilingual language development often reports cases of cross-linguistic interaction of the two languages being acquired. In this paper, we investigate possible cross-linguistic interaction outputs in the development of branching onsets in the bilingual acquisition of French and Portuguese. Thirty French–Portuguese bilingual children, aged between 3;6 and 6;1, participated in our study. Their elicited productions were collected using two picture naming tasks containing 29 clusters in French and 57 clusters in Portuguese. Almost all the children acquire branching onsets earlier in French than in Portuguese, independently of the quality of cluster type (Consonant + Rhotic (Cr) clusters vs. Consonant + Lateral (Cl) clusters). Epenthesis is more present in Portuguese than in French. Shared structures in both languages are not acquired at the same time. These results show that bilingual children follow separate patterns of development, close to the ones reported for monolinguals, during the acquisition of their two languages. Moreover, the bilingual children show higher rates of development of clusters in Portuguese than the ones reported for monolinguals, suggesting an accelerated acquisition of clusters in Portuguese due to a positive influence of French. Full article

Children born preterm are at an elevated risk of language delays compared to children born full-term. However, there is a dearth of research investigating language outcomes in premature children exposed to more than one language. There is also limited empirical evidence linking the quantity and quality of parent input and language outcomes in premature children and the strength of these relationships in bilingual contexts remains unknown. Therefore, the current study examined language skills, parent input, conversational turns, and their associations at 16 months to 36 months in monolingual and bilingual children born preterm. Nine English-speaking monolingual parent–child dyads, and nine Spanish–English bilingual parent–child dyads participated in parent–child interactions that occurred over time in play-based contexts. Results revealed that preterm monolingual and bilingual children exhibited similar language abilities at all time points assessed. While both monolingual and bilingual dyads engaged in a comparable number of conversational turns at 16 m, monolingual mothers produced more words than bilingual mothers during play. Significant associations were observed between children’s vocabulary skills and their ability to combine words within and across most time points. Notably, relationships between parental input, conversational turns, and language skills were limited to a significant association between conversational turns at 16 m and vocabulary skills at 24 m. Together, findings indicate that bilingual children born preterm acquire language on the same timeline as monolingual children born preterm. While it is crucial that the current work be replicated in larger samples of children born preterm, the current work is the first to compare relationships between children’s language outcomes and the quantity and quality of parental input in monolingual and bilingual contexts. Full article

Background. Language development in toddlers can be influenced by social interactions in environments and proximal contexts with mothers and fathers. We present the literature on mothers’ and fathers’ education level and socioeconomic status on the child’s language development; further evidence is needed in the Italian-speaking context. Aims. The study aims to confirm the role of mother and father education level on toddlers’ language skills assessed with direct and indirect measures. Methods and Procedures. Participants were 51 Italian-speaking children aged 33 to 41 months. Children were tested with a lexical test (PinG test) for comprehension and production of nouns and predicates and a morpho-syntactic test for grammar comprehension (PCGO). Parents of the children completed a demographic form and the Italian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI long version. Two series of one-way ANCOVAs were performed to study the role of mothers’ and fathers’ level of education on separate measures of their child’s language. Outcomes and Results. Findings suggest that in most families, mothers’ level of education is higher than fathers’ level of education. There was no significant difference between children of parents with low–middle level of education and children of parents with high level of education for the grammar comprehension tasks (PCGO) and indirect measure of vocabulary production (MacArthur-Bates CDI). However, both mothers’ and fathers’ level of education appears to be significant for the direct measurement of word production. Conclusions and Implications. This study provides new evidence for the role of mothers’ and fathers’ education on the development of word production in children aged 33 to 41 months, contributing to enriching the literature on the Italian context; it lays the groundwork for future research on the social and environmental factors that can affect language development. Full article