Previous research suggests that child HSs’ performance in offline linguistic tasks is typically worse than their age-matched monolingual peers and is modulated by linguistic and child-level factors. This study examined the comprehension and production of three Mandarin non-canonical structures in 5- to 9-year-old Mandarin–English heritage children and Mandarin-speaking monolingual children, including an online processing task. Results showed that heritage children had different performance in production and offline comprehension across structures compared to monolinguals. In online processing, they showed sensitivity to different cues similarly to monolinguals but took longer to revise initial misinterpretations. Within heritage children, we found that presence of morphosyntactic cues facilitated performance across tasks while cross-linguistic influence was only identified in production and offline comprehension but not in online processing. Additionally, input quantity predicted their production and offline comprehension accuracy of non-canonical structures, whereas age modulated their production. Lastly, online processing was not modulated by age nor input.

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.

Findings of bilingual participants outperforming their monolingual counterparts in executive functioning tasks have been repeatedly reported in the literature (Bialystok, 2017). However, uncontrolled factors or imperfectly matched samples might affect the reliability of these findings. This study aims to take into account a range of relevant variables in combination with innovative analyses to investigate the performance of one unstudied language group, Greek–English bilingual children in the north of England, compared to monolingual control groups. Our battery of executive function tasks taps into inhibition, updating and shifting. We use k-means nearest neighbour methods to match the groups and factor analysis to determine language proficiency. We find that bilinguals’ accuracy is on a par with their monolingual peers – however, they are faster in inhibition and working memory tasks. Our study provides strong evidence for the presence of a bilingual advantage in these domains, while making important methodological contributions to the field.

The shared-syntax account of bilingual syntactic representations suggests that similar structures from different languages are represented as one in the bilingual mind. In this study, we examined the degree of morpho-syntactic similarity needed for representations to be shared in the bilingual mind by comparing passive structures in Greek and English. Contrary to English, non-active morphology in Greek is not restricted to passives and the “by phrase” is considered marked. In two structural priming experiments, we examined whether passives can be primed in L1-Greek and, subsequently, whether there is a single representation for passives in Greek–English bilinguals despite distributional and morpho-syntactic differences. Results showed that passive structures were primed in L1-Greek (Experiment 1) and from L1-Greek to L2-English (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that morpho-syntactic and distributional differences inherent to passives do not prevent priming, and that structural representations can be shared even when featural structure is not identical.

The current study sought to investigate whether word properties can facilitate the identification of developmental language disorder (DLD) in sequential bilinguals by analyzing properties in nouns and verbs in L2 spontaneous speech as potential DLD markers. Measures of semantic (imageability, concreteness), lexical (frequency, age of acquisition) and phonological (phonological neighbourhood, word length) properties were computed for nouns and verbs produced by 15 sequential bilinguals (5;7) with DLD and 15 age-matched controls with diverse L1 backgrounds. Linear mixed modelling revealed a significant interaction of group and word category on phonological neighbourhood values but no differences across imageability, concreteness, frequency, age of acquisition, and word length measures in spontaneous speech. Outcomes suggest that group-level differences may not be apparent at the word-level, due to the heterogeneous nature of DLD and potential similarities in production during early L2 acquisition.

This study investigates the role of parental input quality on the acquisition of Greek as a heritage language in Western Canada. Focusing on subject use, we tested four groups of Greek speakers: monolingual children, heritage children, and the parents of each one of those groups. Participants completed an elicited production task designed to elicit subject placement in wide focus and embedded interrogative contexts, where postverbal subjects are preferred/required in the monolingual variety. Results gave rise to two main conclusions: first, the parental input received by heritage children may be qualitatively different from the parental input received by monolingual children, in that it contains a higher rate of deviant preverbal subjects. Second, parental input quality in addition to quantity may affect the outcome of heritage language acquisition, in that children producing a higher rate of preverbal subjects had parents whose Greek input was not only quantitatively reduced, but also richer in preverbal subjects.

This study examined the linguistic and individual-level factors that render case marking a vulnerable domain in English-dominant Greek heritage children. We also investigated whether heritage language (HL) children can use case-marking cues to interpret (non-)canonical sentences in Greek similarly to their monolingual peers. A group of six- to twelve-year-old Greek heritage children in New York City and a control group of age-matched monolingual children living in Greece participated in a production and a picture verification task targeting case marking and (non-)canonical word order in Greek. HL children produced syncretic inflectional errors, also found in preschool monolingual children. In the comprehension task, HL children showed variable performance on the non-canonical OVS but ceiling performance on the SVO conditions, which suggests influence from English. Linguistic factors such as case transparency affected comprehension, whereas child-level factors such as proficiency and degree of (early) use of Greek influenced performance on both modalities.

This study investigated whether third person singular –s and past tense accuracy and error types can reveal distinct developmental patterns of agreement and tense acquisition in younger and older Welsh (L1) sequential bilingual (L2) English children with typical development (L2-TLD) and in younger children with language impairment (L2-SLI_Y). A group of older (L2-TLD_O; mean age = 93.72 months) and younger (L2-TLD_Y; mean age = 67 months) Welsh–English (TLD) bilingual children and a group of young (mean age = 63 months) children with SLI (L2-SLI_Y) age matched to the L2-TLD_Y group were administered the screening component of the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. Results indicated that the three groups differed in their production of third person singular –s and regular past tense but not in accuracy on irregular past tense verbs, when vocabulary skills were considered. The L2-SLI_Y children produced similar error types to the L2-TLD_Y children, who differed from their L2-TLD_O peers in this respect. L2 children’s vocabulary size, nonverbal intelligence, and item-level factors, such as frequency and morphophonology, differentially contributed to their performance across the various morphemes. We discuss these results within current accounts of language development and impairment.

Studies examining age of onset (AoO) effects in childhood bilingualism have provided mixed results as to whether early sequential bilingual children (eL2) differ from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) and L2 children on the acquisition of morphosyntax. Differences between the three groups have been attributed to other factors such as length of exposure (LoE), language abilities, and the phenomenon to be acquired. The present study investigates whether four- to five-year-old German-speaking eL2 children differ from 2L1 children on the acquisition of wh-questions, and whether these differences can be explained by AoO, LoE, and/or knowledge of case marking. The 2L1 children outperformed the eL2 children in terms of accuracy; however, both bilingual groups exhibited similar error patterns. This suggests that 2L1 and eL2 bilingual children are sensitive to the same morphosyntactic cues, when comprehending wh-questions. Finally, children's performance on the different types of wh-questions was explained by a combination of knowledge of case marking, LoE, and AoO.

The present study compared production and on-line comprehension of definite articles and third person direct object clitic pronouns in Greek-speaking typically developing, sequential bilingual (L2-TD) children and monolingual children with specific language impairment (L1-SLI). Twenty Turkish Greek L2-TD children, 16 Greek L1-SLI children, and 31 L1-TD Greek children participated in a production task examining definite articles and clitic pronouns and, in an on-line comprehension task, involving grammatical sentences with definite articles and clitics and sentences with grammatical violations induced by omitted articles and clitics. The results showed that the L2-TD children were sensitive to the grammatical violations despite low production. In contrast, the children with SLI were not sensitive to clitic omission in the on-line task, despite high production. These results support a dissociation between production and on-line comprehension in L2 children and for impaired grammatical representations and lack of automaticity in children with SLI. They also suggest that on-line comprehension tasks may complement production tasks by differentiating between the language profiles of L2-TD children and children with SLI.

This study examines the comprehension and production of subject and object relative clauses (SRCs, ORCs) by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The purpose is to investigate whether relative clauses are problematic for Danish children with SLI and to compare errors with those produced by TD children. Eighteen children with SLI, eighteen TD age-matched (AM) and nine TD language-matched (LM) Danish-speaking children participated in a comprehension and in a production task. All children performed better on the comprehension compared with the production task, as well as on SRCs compared to ORCs and produced various avoidance strategies. In the ORC context, children with SLI produced more reversal errors than the AM children, who opted for passive ORCs. These results are discussed within current theories of SLI and indicate a deficiency with the assignment of thematic roles rather than with the structural make-up of RCs.

This study investigates the production and online processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty-nine six- to nine-year-old L2 children and twenty-eight typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person -s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 2001) and participated in an online word monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person -s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive -ing, possessive 's) morphemes. The L2 children's performance on the online task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery and Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non-target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997).