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(1) Background: The complex phenomenon of German noun plural inflection is investigated in three groups of German-speaking kindergarten children: (a) monolinguals (1L1), (b) simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) also acquiring Croatian, and (c) successive bilinguals (L2) acquiring Turkish as L1. Predictions of the usage-based schema model and of Natural Morphology concerning different linguistic variables are used to explore their impact on plural acquisition in the three groups of children. (2) Methods: A longitudinal study (from mean age 3;1 to 4;8) is conducted using two procedures (a formal plural test and spontaneous recordings in kindergarten), and the data are analyzed using generalized linear (mixed-effects) regression models in R. (3) Results: All children produce more errors in the metalinguistically challenging test compared to spontaneous speech, with L2 children being particularly disadvantaged. Socioeconomic status (henceforth SES) and teachers' plural type frequency are most relevant for 1L1 children, and kindergarten exposure is more relevant for L2 children, while the linguistic variables are more important for 2L1 children. (4) Conclusions: The main predictions of the schema model and of Natural Morphology are largely confirmed. All of the linguistic variables investigated show significant effects in some analyses, but morphotactic transparency turns out to be the most relevant variable for all three groups of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the linguistic relativity principle (Whorf, 1956) by investigating the impact of grammatical gender on cognition in simultaneous bilinguals of three-gendered Ukrainian and Russian. It examines whether speakers of three-gendered languages show grammatical gender effects on categorisation, empirically addressing claims that such effects are insignificant due to the presence of the neuter gender (Sera et al., 2002). We conducted two experiments using a similarity judgement paradigm while manipulating the presence of neuter gender stimuli (Phillips & Boroditsky, 2003). Experiment 1, including neuter gender, revealed no significant effects, compatible with earlier studies on three-gendered languages. Conversely, Experiment 2, excluding neuter gender stimuli, showed significant language effects. Bilingual participants rated pairs as more similar when grammatical genders in both languages were congruent with the biological sex of a character. Significant effects were also found for pairs with mismatching grammatical genders in Ukrainian and Russian. Participants with higher proficiency in Ukrainian rated pairs as more similar when the grammatical gender of a noun in Ukrainian was congruent with the character’s biological sex, and incongruent in Russian. Our findings thus provide the first empirical demonstration that the exclusion of neuter gender online induces grammatical gender effects in speakers of three-gendered languages.

The knowledge we have about language and first language acquisition would not have been unveiled in the absence of previous efforts in collecting language data, e.g., recording the spontaneous interactions between children and adults. The CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) gathers child speech in many of the world’s languages, including Croatian (documented in Kovačević’s 2002 corpus). In this paper, we describe the construction of MaLi, a corpus documenting the language productions of two bilingual children acquiring Croatian and Italian simultaneously. After a short survey of the methods used in collecting child language data with special regard to diary notes and audio recordings, we discuss the background and the details of the data collected in MaLi: we provide an overview of the sociolinguistic context of bilingual first language acquisition of the children observed and a description of the structure of the corpus. We first devote our attention to the data collection, management, and coding of the diary notes. Afterwards, we examine the collection and elaboration of the audio recordings and their ongoing transcription. In our concluding remarks, we offer a short assessment of the advantages and limits of the corpus along with a survey of the future possibilities for the use of this resource.

(1) Background: The complex phenomenon of German noun plural inflection is investigated in three groups of German-speaking kindergarten children: (a) monolinguals (1L1), (b) simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) also acquiring Croatian, and (c) successive bilinguals (L2) acquiring Turkish as L1. Predictions of the usage-based schema model and of Natural Morphology concerning different linguistic variables are used to explore their impact on plural acquisition in the three groups of children. (2) Methods: A longitudinal study (from mean age 3;1 to 4;8) is conducted using two procedures (a formal plural test and spontaneous recordings in kindergarten), and the data are analyzed using generalized linear (mixed-effects) regression models in R. (3) Results: All children produce more errors in the metalinguistically challenging test compared to spontaneous speech, with L2 children being particularly disadvantaged. Socioeconomic status (henceforth SES) and teachers’ plural type frequency are most relevant for 1L1 children, and kindergarten exposure is more relevant for L2 children, while the linguistic variables are more important for 2L1 children. (4) Conclusions: The main predictions of the schema model and of Natural Morphology are largely confirmed. All of the linguistic variables investigated show significant effects in some analyses, but morphotactic transparency turns out to be the most relevant variable for all three groups of children.

The study investigated the role of linguistic and cognitive factors in Turkish word reading fluency (WREAD) among second-grade Turkish–Arabic simultaneous bilingual and Turkish monolingual children. It specifically focused on the impact of phonological awareness (PA), phonological memory (PM), rapid automatized naming (RAN), morphological awareness (MA), morphological fluency (MF), processing speed (PS), and vocabulary knowledge (VK) on reading fluency.The study used a cross-sectional design and collected data from 127 children in Hatay, Turkey. The participants completed a battery of tests measuring PA, PM, RAN, MA, PS, VK, and WREAD. The tests were administered individually, and the scores, along with the time spent on each test, were recorded.Data from the tests were analyzed using SPSS 22.0. Independent samples t-tests were conducted to determine the differences between bilingual and monolingual children in the linguistic and cognitive measures. Pearson r correlation analyses were conducted to illustrate the relationship among the variables and stepwise regression analyses to explore the extent to which these variables explained the variance in WREAD.The findings highlighted significant differences between Turkish–Arabic bilingual and Turkish monolingual children in PA and PS. While MF and RAN explained WREAD in the bilingual group, MF and PA were the strongest predictors of WREAD in the monolingual children.This study is the first to investigate word reading development in Turkish–Arabic simultaneous bilingual children, contributing novel insights into literacy acquisition in simultaneous bilingualism. In addition, the concept of MF has been proposed in the literature as a distinct measurement from MA.The study expands the existing knowledge on bilingual reading development, emphasizing the importance of timed cognitive and linguistic variables in predicting WREAD. It also sheds light on the educational needs of bilingual children in the Turkish context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In bilingual children, more so than in monolingual children, comprehension abilities exceed production abilities. While this receptive-expressive gap in bilinguals has been well documented, little is known about its development. The present study tracked growth in the Spanish and English receptive and expressive vocabularies of 52 bilingual children from 4.5–10 years. The children's English vocabularies grew faster than their Spanish vocabularies, more so in the expressive domain than the receptive domain. The proportion of children who were English-dominant also increased more in the expressive than the receptive domain. By age 10, the children's expressive skills were almost always English dominant while their receptive skills were most frequently balanced. Among children who hear a heritage language at home and a societal language at school, trajectories of dual language development differs in the expressive and receptive domains. These longitudinal data suggest continuity between the receptive-expressive gap observed in bilingual children and the receptive bilingualism often observed in adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an innovative bilingual education program developed and implemented in 208 primary classes in Senegal from 2009 to 2018 by a Senegalese NGO working with the national Ministry of Education to address issues of quality in primary education. L'approche simultanée or simultaneous approach, also known as bilinguisme en temps réel or real-time bilingualism, developed organically through a consultative process between NGO development actors, university linguists and educators. Unlike the early-exit transitional bilingual programs previously piloted in Senegal that are common throughout West Africa, this program taught literacy, mathematics and the sciences in both a national language (Wolof or Pulaar) and French from the first year of primary school. Using data collected for an external evaluation conducted in 2018, along with follow-up research conducted in 2019 with designers and implementers of the simultaneous approach, this paper analyzes the effectiveness of the program and its implications for Senegal, where the Ministry of Education appears close to adopting a national language-in-education policy. There are also implications for the field of L1-based multilingual education, as ARED's simultaneous approach provides a refreshing new perspective on teaching and learning non-dominant and dominant languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]