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Background – Despite the high prevalence of bilingualism in the UK, few Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs) are bilingual themselves. Most SLT research on bilingualism has generated knowledge to inform service delivery for bilingual clients, but few studies have investigated how being a bilingual SLT influences one’s professional experiences and practices. Better understanding the unique positionality of bilingual SLTs can yield critical insights to meaningfully address issues of diversity, inclusion and equity in the profession.Aim – To investigate the experiences and practices of bilingual paediatric SLTs in the UK through the lens of the CHAT-ICF framework, which is conjoining the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory with the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. CHAT-ICF is a newly proposed theoretical framework developed to conceptualize the activities of professionals working in the field of disability.Methods – In this qualitative study, nineteen bilingual paediatric SLTs practising in the UK were interviewed individually, using a semi-structured interview guide. The data was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.Results – Six overarching components of the CHAT-ICF framework hosted the twelve sub-themes identified to capture the experiences and practices of bilingual SLTs: (1) Subject (Intersectionality); (2) Tools (Language skills; Education; Clinical resources); (3) Rules (Structural barriers; Sense of responsibility); (4) Community (Sense of inclusion); (5) Division of labour (Parents; Colleagues); and (6) Activity (Empathy with children; Holistic mindset; Flexible approach). The use of the CHAT-ICF theoretical lens revealed three key structural phenomena to better understand the experiences of bilingual SLTs: (1) the distribution of sub-themes across many components of CHAT-ICF demonstrated that being a bilingual SLT is a multifactorial experience; (2) the chain reactions between multiple components of CHAT-ICF illustrated the interconnections between these factors; and (3) the power differentials at play within and between components of CHAT-ICF showed specific phenomena of marginalization that can regulate their experiences.Conclusion – This is the first qualitative study to date to provide in-depth insights into the experiences and practices of bilingual SLTs in the UK. Being bilingual in a profession oriented towards language and communication disability creates a unique positionality that profoundly impacts SLTs’ experiences and practices, and cannot be reduced to their linguistic abilities. Research giving voice to bilingual SLTs, and other underrepresented demograhics in the SLT workforce, has the potential to hasten the identification of barriers and catalyze action to promote a more diverse and inclusive profession. It can also inform progress towards the vision of the RCSLT strategy 2022-2027.

It has been found that bilinguals and children from minority backgrounds lag behind monolinguals or those in the majority culture, with respect to prevalence, assessment, and treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This suggests that bilingualism might be yet another factor giving rise to variability in ADHD. Using regression methods, we analyzed parent reports for 394 primary school-age children on background and language experience, ADHD-related behavior, and structural language skill in English to explore whether bilingualism is associated with levels of ADHD-related behavior. Bilingualism as a category was associated with slightly lower levels of ADHD-related behavior. Bilingualism as a continuous measure showed a trend of being associated with lower levels, but this did not quite reach significance. Structural language skill in English was the main predictor of levels of ADHD-related behavior; higher skill predicting lower levels. More investigation is required to confirm whether these effects occur across different populations, to understand which, if any, aspects of bilingualism give rise to variability, and if need be, to address these as far as possible.

Despite a plethora of evidence demonstrating the importance of maintaining bilingualism for children on the autism spectrum, there remain many barriers to accessing learning and communication support for children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) families. In an increasingly globalised world, in which many countries have established more than one national language, bilingualism is the norm for more than half the world’s population. Parent-led therapy (PLT) is critical for autistic children, more so for those from CaLD families, for whom access to dual/multi-language and communication support is more difficult. The aim of this scoping review protocol is to structure the mapping of published literature on PLT for young autistic children in the bilingual context. The concept of this study is to identify the availability of early support programs that can be delivered by parents and/or key caregivers to their young autistic children. The context of this study is to identify PLT programs that have been examined in the bilingual environment. This review will allow researchers to explore the extent, range, and nature of evidence available in this area, which can be used to guide discussions about supporting communication development of CaLD autistic children. This study protocol has been preregistered with the Open Science Framework (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/HY9R2).

Funder: University of Cambridge; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000735, With greater linguistic diversity in educational settings around the world as a result of international migration, and a rise in autism diagnoses, educators are more frequently teaching children who are both neurodiverse and linguistically different to their peers. The aim of the present study was to uncover the perspectives and experiences of educational practitioners who provide support for bilingual learners on the autism spectrum in two linguistically different educational settings: England and Wales. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 practitioners (5 teachers, 4 teaching assistants, 3 special educational needs coordinators and 1 speech and language therapist) working in mainstream schools. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), which seeks to illuminate participants' lived experience. Three superordinate themes were extracted from the data: (1) perspectives on bilingualism in autism; (2) comparisons across two linguistically different settings; (3) creating inclusive learning environments. The results demonstrate that practitioners had concerns about the feasibility of bilingualism for some autistic pupils, and argued that exposure to two languages may have a negative impact on their development. Future research should focus on finding effective ways to identify and support learning needs among bilingual pupils to ensure that children who are ‘doubly different’ from their peers not only have access to educational provision, but also have opportunities to harness and celebrate their differences.

Aims and objectives: The aim of this scoping review is to investigate the association between bilingualism in the family and child subjective well-being, by reviewing the literature to identify key themes to date and remaining questions for future research. Methodology: Scopus, Web of Knowledge, ERIC, Psych Articles and PsychInfo were searched systematically between September and October 2018, and after title, abstract and full-text screening, 17 of the initial 1433 articles were included in this review. Data and analysis: Each study was coded for the discipline from which it emerged, the language combination studied, the measures of well-being and language proficiency it used, the geographical location of the study and the number of participants. Data on the link between bilingualism and well-being was extracted from each study. Findings and conclusion: Two main themes were identified: ‘The effect of language proficiency on family relationships’ and ‘The acculturation of parents and children as mediated by language’. Across studies, there was significant heterogeneity in definition of concepts and a diverse range of measures employed. In addition, the studies identified suggest a positive link between minority language maintenance and child well-being, and a positive influence of bilingualism, rather than knowledge of only the home or the majority language. However, the directionality of these relationships will need to be investigated in future research. Originality: This is the first scoping review conducted systematically to explore the link between bilingualism in the family and child well-being internationally. It builds on previous work such as a narrative review which examined this association in the European context.

To better understand the developmental trajectory of children's pragmatic development, studies that examine more than one type of implicature as well as associated linguistic and cognitive factors are required. We investigated three- to five-year-old English-speaking children's (N = 71) performance in ad hoc quantity, scalar quantity and relevance implicatures, as well as word learning by exclusion inferences, using a sentence-to-picture-matching story-based task. Children's pragmatic abilities improved with age, with word learning by exclusion acquired first, followed by relevance and ad hoc quantity implicatures, and finally scalar quantity implicatures. In an exploratory analysis (with a subset of the data N = 58), we found that structural language knowledge was a predictor of pragmatic performance (but no evidence for an association with socioeconomic status or Theory of Mind, controlling for structural language). We discuss reasons why this developmental pattern emerges with reference to linguistic and extra-linguistic properties of these inferences.

In the current paper, we investigate the existence of a shared derivation mechanism between manner and quantity implicature. As per the Gricean-inspired perspective, both manner and quantity implicature are derived in a substantially analogous fashion, relying on the consideration of alternative ways in which the speaker could have spoken, but didn’t. In contrast, other accounts (e.g., grammatical accounts) of quantity implicature consider manner implicature and quantity implicature to be distinct in their derivational mechanisms.Previous studies have found that quantity implicature can prime the derivation of subsequent quantity implicature both within and between quantity implicature subtypes in a structural priming paradigm, suggesting that ad hoc, numeral and some quantity implicature are governed by the same derivational mechanism. We have applied a structural priming paradigm to the case of manner implicature to investigate 1) whether manner implicature can be primed, 2) whether manner implicature can prime manner implicature and 3) whether manner implicature can be primed by quantity implicature. Through manner-manner priming, the paper addresses the psycholinguistic reality of manner. While quantity-manner priming probes the existence of a shared derivational mechanism between the phenomena.We show that manner implicature can prime manner implicature under certain experimental circumstances and that ad hoc quantity, but not some quantity implicature can also prime manner implicature, whereas some quantity implicature cannot.

Recent research has reported superior socio-communicative skills in bilingual children. We examined the hypothesis of a bilingual pragmatic advantage by testing bilingual, bi-dialectal and monolingual children on the comprehension and processing of various pragmatic meanings: relevance, scalar, contrastive, manner implicatures, novel metaphors and irony. Pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to control items. Furthermore, children were least accurate with metaphors and irony. Metaphors and irony were also the most difficult to process; for these meanings, pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to the same critical items. Finally, pragmatic performance positively correlated with working memory. Despite this variation, we found no bilingual or bi-dialectal advantage over monolinguals in pragmatic responses or speed of pragmatic processing. This was also true despite bilinguals' and bi-dialectals' lower vocabularies as measured by formal tests. We conclude that bilingual children exhibit monolingual-like pragmatic interpretation, despite their often-reported weaker language knowledge in the target language., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Do bilinguals use the same logical representations in processing both languages they know if the languages they know diverge on the preferred interpretation of a scopally ambiguous sentence? We investigated this question by studying effects of cross-linguistic influence and priming in the comprehension of scopally ambiguous all...not sentences. In this investigation, we focused on Estonian-English bilinguals, because these sentences are interpreted differently in English compared to Estonian.Across four sentence-picture matching experiments, we firstly observed that bilingual logical representations can be primed within languages (both from L1-to-L1 and from L2-to-L2) and between languages (both from L1-to-L2 and from L2-to-L1). This finding indicates that bilinguals make use of shared logical representations in processing the languages they know, and that logical representations do not specify language-specific biases in the assignment of scope. Secondly, we observed that bilinguals experience bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the construction of logical representations. This finding suggests that bilingual representations of implicit knowledge about scopal preferences is integrated between the languages they know.

Our commentary is mainly concerned with Kissine's first argument in his 2021 target article: that mind reading is not necessarily needed for pragmatics. We fully agree with Kissine, and we present (i) additional recent empirical evidence in support of this view and (ii) a new model of pragmatics and mind reading, based on the situation of language use rather than the type of pragmatic phenomenon that is instantiated. The last part of our commentary concerns the logical validity of Kissine's argument, taking into account important concepts in autism research such as heterogeneity, equifinality, and neurodiversity, but also evaluating how relevant the empirical evidence from learning language from TV is to the debate on nativism vs. constructivism. We conclude that there is much to love (as regards pragmatics) and some to query (as regards the conclusions we can draw about nativism vs. constructivism) in this timely and thought-provoking article.

Social sciences researchers emphasize that new technologies can overcome the limitations of small and homogenous samples. In research on early language development, which often uses parental reports, taking the testing online might be particularly compelling. Due to logistical limitations, previous studies on bilingual children have explored the language development trajectories in general (e.g., by including few and largely set apart timepoints), or focused on small, homogeneous samples. The present study protocol presents a new, on-going study which uses new technologies to collect longitudinal data continuously from parents of multilingual, bilingual, and monolingual children. Our primary aim is to establish the developmental trajectories in Polish-British English and Polish-Norwegian bilingual children and Polish monolingual children aged 0–3 years with the use of mobile and web-based applications. These tools allow parents to report their children’s language development as it progresses, and allow us to characterize children’s performance in each language (the age of reaching particular language milestones). The project’s novelty rests on its use of mobile technologies to characterize the bilingual and monolingual developmental trajectory from the very first words to broader vocabulary and multiword combinations. This research was funded by National Science Centre, grant number 2018/31/B/HS6/03916 awarded to E.H., and supported by the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, from the funds awarded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in the form of a subsidy for the maintenance and development of research potential in 2021 and 2022 (501-D125-01-1250000) awarded to K.M. and G.K.

PurposeChildren with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and children with developmental language disorder (DLD) face challenges with pragmatics, but the nature and sources of these difficulties are not fully understood yet. The purpose of this study was to compare the competence of children with ASD and children with DLD in two pragmatics tasks that place different demands on theory of mind (ToM) and structural language.MethodTwenty Spanish-speaking children with ASD, 20 with DLD, and 40 age- and language-matched children with neurotypical development were assessed using two pragmatics tasks: a linguistic pragmatics task, which requires competence with structural language, and a social pragmatics task, which requires competence with ToM as well.ResultsFor linguistic pragmatics, the ASD group performed similarly to the DLD and language-matched groups, and performance was predicted by structural language. For social pragmatics, the ASD group performed lower than the DLD and language-matched groups, and performance was predicted both by structural language and ToM.ConclusionsChildren with ASD and children with DLD face difficulties in linguistic pragmatics tasks, in keeping with their structural language. Children with ASD face exceptional difficulties with social pragmatics tasks, due to their difficulties with ToM. The distinction between linguistic and social pragmatic competences can inform assessment and intervention for pragmatic difficulties in different populations.

A growing body of evidence suggests that bilingual exposure does not negatively impact children on the autism spectrum. This study sought to illuminate parents’ perceptions and choices regarding maintaining bilingualism in autism. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 family members in England and Wales. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Although parents expressed positive attitudes towards bilingualism, these views were not always congruent with their language practices. Instead, several factors influenced decisions about language maintenance in autism, including the severity of the child’s autism, advice received, and the importance of English as the dominant societal language. This article calls for greater support for families in making language decisions that are suitable for the individual child and their family.

While a significant amount of research has focussed on whether bilingualism bestows advantages in cognitive skills, perspective-taking and Theory of Mind, less is known about the effect of bilingualism in communicative tasks where these and related skills may be called for. This study examines bilingual and monolingual adults’ communicative skills through their production of two types of listener-adapted speech (LAS): child-directed speech and foreigner-directed speech. 20 monolinguals and 20 bilingual adults were asked to explain a cooking recipe to a child, a non-native adult and a control native adult. Participants adapted their speech for the child and the foreigner compared to the native adult. Furthermore, bilinguals adapted some features of their speech to a greater extent and in a fine-tuned way (wider pitch range addressing the child and vowel hyperarticulation addressing the foreigner). The prevalence of these features in bilingual speech was not correlated with personality or cognitive measures. We discuss possible sources of this difference in speech adaptation and implications for theories of bilingual cognition.

Binary judgement on under-informative utterances (e.g. Some horses jumped over the fence, when all horses did) is the most widely used methodology to test children’s ability to generate implicatures. Accepting under-informative utterances is considered a failure to generate implicatures. We present off-line and reaction time evidence for the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis, according to which some children who accept under-informative utterances are in fact competent with implicature but do not consider pragmatic violations grave enough to reject the critical utterance. Seventy-five Dutch-speaking four to nine-year-olds completed a binary (Experiment A) and a ternary judgement task (Experiment B). Half of the children who accepted an utterance in Experiment A penalised it in Experiment B. Reaction times revealed that these children experienced a slow-down in the critical utterances in Experiment A, suggesting that they detected the pragmatic violation even though they did not reject it. We propose that binary judgement tasks systematically underestimate children’s competence with pragmatics.

While generic generalisations have been studied by linguists and philosophers for decades, they have only recently become the focus of concentrated interest by cognitive and developmental psychologists, who propose the generics-as-default view. In this paper we focus on the ‘Generic Overgeneralisation’ (GOG) effect proposed by Leslie and colleagues and the native speaker judgments that have been used to support it, and by extension, the generics-as-default view. We take a step back to look at the history of the GOG effect in order to contextualise it. We review existing experimental evidence and discuss four non-mutually exclusive explanations for the GOG effect: ignorance, subkind interpretation, atypical behaviour of all and quantifier domain restriction. We conclude that a closer look at the semantics and pragmatics of generics and universal quantifiers may provide a more nuanced explanation for the pattern of judgment data than that proposed by the generics-as-default view.

Learning and using multiple languages places major demands on our neurocognitive system, which can impact the way the brain processes information. Here we investigated how early bilingualism influences the neural mechanisms of auditory selective attention, and whether this is further affected by the typological similarity between languages. We tested the neural encoding of continuous attended speech in early balanced bilinguals of typologically similar (Dutch-English) and dissimilar languages (Spanish-English) and compared them to results from English monolinguals we reported earlier. In a dichotic listening paradigm, participants attended to a narrative in their native language while ignoring different types of interference in the other ear. The results revealed that bilingualism modulates the neural mechanisms of selective attention even in the absence of consistent behavioural differences between monolinguals and bilinguals. They also suggested that typological similarity between languages helps fine-tune this modulation, reflecting life-long experiences with resolving competition between more or less similar candidates. The effects were consistent over the time-course of the narrative and suggest that learning a second language at an early age triggers neuroplastic adaptation of the attentional processing system.

Some evidence suggests that bilingualism improves communication and cognitive skills which are often impaired in autism. However, diagnosing autism in bilinguals may suffer a cultural bias, which can affect the investigation of bilingualism and autism. Therefore, the current study investigates relations between autistic-like traits (ALTs) and bilingualism in a general population sample of 394 children (M age = 8;3). Within the high-scoring group on the ALT measure, monolinguals had significantly higher ALT scores than bilinguals. There were no differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in the low-scoring group. Across the whole sample, age and structural language skills accounted for 35% variance in ALTs, while bilingualism had no effect on ALTs. Furthermore, structural language skills explained more variance in ALTs among bilinguals than among monolinguals. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10803-019-03994-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This handbook is the first to explore the growing field of experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the past twenty years, experimental data has become a major source of evidence for building theories of language meaning and use, encompassing a wide range of topics and methods. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters in this volume offer an up-to-date account of research in the field spanning thirty-one different topics, including scalar implicatures, presuppositions, counterfactuals, quantification, metaphor, prosody, and politeness, as well as exploring how and why a particular experimental method is suitable for addressing a given theoretical debate. The volume’s forward-looking approach also seeks to actively identify questions and methods that could be fruitfully combined in future experimental research.

Background With growing numbers of bilingual children on the autism spectrum in UK classrooms, the interaction between autism and bilingualism is becoming a pressing issue for practitioners, researchers and families. In this study, we report the school experiences of bilingual, autistic children in the UK through their own voice with focus on five aspects of their school life. Method Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) as a methodological framework, semi-structured, computer-assisted interviews were conducted with 11 children aged 7 to 14 from across England and Wales. Interviews were carried out in English and took place in mainstream schools or the children’s home, depending on their preference. Results Results indicate that, while children’s school experiences vary widely, there were commonalities in this population’s identity formation, including being bilingual, and their classroom experiences. Most notably, children educated in more multilingual environments (i.e. in schools with larger multilingual populations) expressed more positive views about multilingualism than those in more monolingual settings. In line with previous studies, limited social circles and classroom anxiety were present in participants’ school experiences. Implications The findings of this paper suggest that giving autistic children from bilingual backgrounds opportunities to explore their linguistic identities in the classroom may enhance their experiences of school. Further research should focus on parents’ and practitioners’ attitudes and perspectives towards the support available for this population.

Qualitative studies within autism research are gaining prominence, yet there is little evidence about the usefulness of particular qualitative approaches in reflecting the perspectives and experiences of autistic participants. This short report serves to introduce interpretative phenomenological analysis as one among a range of qualitative approaches to autism research. We argue that certain features of interpretative phenomenological analysis, including its commitment to an equality of voice and researcher reflexivity, may help to illuminate the experiences of autistic individuals. The procedures of interpretative phenomenological analysis are presented through the lens of 10 studies into autistic people’s experiences, and a case is made for the suitability of this approach within qualitative autism research.

This study investigates relationships between acquisition of exhaustivity in single and multiple wh-questions, mastery of semantic and pragmatic aspects of quantifier comprehension, and general skills in receptive grammar. The participants of the study were 25 Polish monolingual typically developing children aged 4;02–6;02, who were administered a set of tasks including the Exhaustive Wh-Questions Task, the Test for Reception of Grammar, version 2, and the Comprehension of Quantification Task. The selection of the tasks was motivated by the major linguistic accounts of exhaustivity. We found significant predictive relationships between single exhaustive wh-questions and both semantics of quantifiers and receptive grammar. In contrast, the scores in multiple wh-questions were predicted only by age, showing their delayed acquisition with respect to single wh-questions. However, this age-related difference was not accounted for by any of the linguistic variables tested. Crucially, the analyses reveal...

The expressive lexical skills of 53 Polish bilinguals aged 24–36 months living in the UK and Ireland were assessed using Polish and British English adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Polish vocabulary scores were compared to those of 53 Polish monolinguals matched for age, gender and parental education. The bilinguals were born to two Polish parents and mostly lived outside Poland since birth. Results showed substantial differences in Total Conceptual Vocabulary and single-language vocabulary scores between the groups. However, the groups did not differ on Total Vocabulary measures. In the bilingual sample, there were significant correlations between children’s frequency of language use and their vocabulary scores in the same language. A negative correlation between children’s frequency of English use and their Polish vocabulary scores was found. A complex pattern of factors relating to children’s low performance in Polish emerged. Hierarchical multiple regre...

This cross-linguistic study evaluates children’s understanding of passives in eleven typologically different languages: Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish. The study intends to determine whether the reported gaps between the comprehension of active and passive and between short and full passive hold crosslinguistically. The present study offers two major findings. The first is the relative ease in which five year-old children across 11 different languages are able to comprehend short passive constructions (compared to the full passive). The second and perhaps the more intriguing finding is the variation seen across the different languages in children’s comprehension of full passive constructions. We argued, based on the present findings, that given the relevant linguistic input (e.g., flexibility in word order and experience with argument reduction), children at the age of five are capable of acquiring both the short passive and the full passive. Variation, however, stems from the specific characteristics of each language, and good mastery of passives by the age of five is not a universal, cross-linguistically valid milestone in typical language acquisition. Therefore, difficulties with passives (short or full) can be used for identifying SLI at the age of five only in those languages in which it has already been mastered by typically developing children.

We propose that attraction errors in agreement production (e.g. the key to the cabinets are missing) are related to two components of executive control: working memory and inhibitory control. We tested 138 children aged 10 to 12, an age when children are expected to produce high rates of errors. To increase the potential of individual variation in executive control skills, participants came from monolingual, bilingual, and bidialectal language backgrounds. Attraction errors were elicited with a picture description task in Dutch and executive control was measured with a digit span task, Corsi blocks task, switching task, and attentional networks task. Overall, higher rates of attraction errors were negatively associated with higher verbal working memory and, independently, with higher inhibitory control. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the role of both working memory and inhibitory control in attraction errors in production. Implications for memory- and grammar-based models are discussed., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Pragmatic skills enable children to produce and comprehend words and sentences in ways that are appropriate to the conversational context. While structural language is known to vary widely in children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), pragmatic language has been claimed to be consistently impaired within this population, and has been considered a hallmark of ASD (Volden and Phillips, 2010). Specially, people with ASD frequently demonstrate unusual or inappropriate conversational behavior and deficits in a wide range of pragmatic skills (Philofsky et al., 2007). These difficulties have been experimentally demonstrated in detecting violations of maxims of conversation (Surian et al., 1996), understanding figurative language (Happé, 1993; Norbury, 2005), using context to disambiguate polysemous words (Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen, 1999; Brock et al., 2008), managing topic maintenance and topic shifts (Volden and Phillips, 2010), and comprehending humor, drawing inferences from narratives and understanding indirect requests (Ozonoff and Miller, 1996). Pragmatic difficulties are often attributed to intrinsic features of ASD. These include a weaker tendency to integrate information from the context (Weak Central Coherence; Happé and Frith, 2006), a deficit in Theory-of-Mind (ToM) that prevents children with ASD from inferring intentions and mental states of other people (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), a deficit in executive functions such as poor inhibition or cognitive flexibility (Hill, 2004) or lack of social motivation as a result of an attenuated social instinct (Chevallier et al., 2012).

The present study compares the performance of multilingual children speaking Cypriot Greek, Standard Modern Greek, and English (and sometimes an additional language), bilectal children speakers of Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek, and Standard Modern Greek-speaking monolingual children on a task that measures the comprehension of different types of implicature. Despite lower scores in language ability in the target language, multilingual and bilectal children performed at rates comparable to the monolinguals with implicature. Regression analyses indicated a positive correlation between implicature, language proficiency, and age (but not executive control), albeit language ability did not affect implicature within multilinguals. We suggest an interpretation according to which multilingual, bilectal, and monolingual children maintain a comparable level of implicature understanding, but they do so by relying on different resources. Finally, a principal component analysis on different implicature types revealed a single factor of implicature performance. This outcome has implications for pragmatic theory.

Background The relationship between language and theory of mind (ToM) development in participants with specific language impairment (SLI) it is far from clear due to there were differences in study design and methodologies of previous studies. Aims This research consisted of an in-depth investigation of ToM delay in children with SLI during the typical period of acquisition, and it studied whether linguistic or information-processing variables were the best predictors of this process. It also took into account whether there were differences in ToM competence due to the degree of pragmatic impairment within the SLI group. Methods & Procedures Thirty-one children with SLI (3;5–7;5 years old) and two control groups (age matched and language matched) were assessed with False Belief (FB) tasks, a wide battery of language measures and additional information-processing measures. Outcomes & Results The members of the SLI group were less competent than their age-matched peers at solving FB tasks, but they performed similarly to the language-matched group. Regression analysis showed that overall linguistic skills of children with SLI were the best predictor of ToM performance, and especially grammar abilities. No differences between SLI subgroups were found according to their pragmatic level. Conclusions & Implications A delay in ToM development in children with SLI around the critical period of acquisition is confirmed more comprehensively, and it is shown to be more strongly related to their general linguistic level than to their age and other information-processing faculties. This finding stresses the importance of early educational and clinical programmes aimed at reducing deleterious effects in later development.

If hearers are sensitive to Gricean maxims of Quantity ( Grice, 1975/1989 ), they should disfavour expressions which give too little or too much information for the unique identification of an intended referent. Accordingly, cooperative speakers are expected to provide all and only as much information as is necessary for their interlocutor to uniquely identify a referent. Engelhardt et al. (2006) report that speakers and hearers are sensitive to under-informativeness but not to over-informativeness. Based on this finding, the authors re-interpret the literature which claims to document pragmatic effects in language comprehension and instead attribute previous findings to structural-lexical biases. We argue that the reason why speakers and hearers seemed insensitive to over-informativeness in Engelhardt et al.’s studies was because certain aspects of their experiments favoured the use of redundant information. Our experiments 1 and 2 manipulate these factors, revealing that hearers are in fact sensitive to violations of over- as well as under-informativeness. A further production experiment shows that speakers do not under- or over-specify when the factors that favoured over-informativeness in Engelhardt et al.’s study are removed. The findings provide evidence that speakers and hearers are sensitive to both Quantity maxims, and suggest that the effects obtained in previous literature should indeed be attributed to pragmatic factors.

There is a growing body of evidence showing that conversational implicatures are rapidly accessed in incremental utterance interpretation. To date, studies showing incremental access have focussed on implicatures related to linguistic triggers, such as ‘some’ and ‘or’. We discuss three kinds of on-line model that can account for this data. A model built around the notion of linguistic alternatives stored in the lexicon would only account for linguistically triggered implicatures of the kind already studied and not so-called ‘particularised’ implicatures that are not associated with specific linguistic items. A second model built around the idea of focus alternatives could handle both linguistically triggered implicatures and so-called particularised implicatures but would be insensitive to the role that information about the speaker’s mental state plays in deriving implicatures. A third more fully ‘Gricean’ model takes account of the speaker’s mental state in accessing these implications. In this paper we present a visual world study using a new interactive paradigm where two communicators (one confederate) describe visually-presented events to each other as their eye movements are monitored. In this way, we directly compare the suitability of these three kinds of model. We show hearers can access contextually specific particularised implicatures in on-line comprehension. Moreover, we show that in doing so, hearers are sensitive to the relevant mental states of the speaker. We conclude with a discussion of how a more ‘Gricean’ model may be developed and of how our findings inform a long-standing debate on the immediacy of on-line perspective taking in language comprehension.

Several studies have investigated how listeners generate scalar implicatures using the under-informative statement paradigm, where participants evaluate statements such as “Some of the cards have a star” as descriptions of situations in which all of the cards have a star. Rejection of the under-informative utterances is taken as evidence that participants have interpreted these sentences with a scalar implicature, to the effect that “Some but not all of the cards have a star”. However, acceptance rates of under-informative utterances exceed 35% in many studies ( Bott and Noveck, 2004 , Guasti et al., 2005 , Pouscoulous et al., 2007 ; i.a.). The aim of our experimental investigation is to examine the cognitive or personality profile of participants who reject under-informative utterances. We provide empirical evidence that age and working memory capacity significantly predict the rate at which under-informative utterances are rejected, but find little support for influence from a broad range of personality factors.

Background Language and communication skills are essential aspects of child development, which are often disrupted in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Cutting edge research in psycholinguistics suggests that multilingualism has potential to influence social, linguistic and cognitive development. Thus, multilingualism has implications for clinical assessment, diagnostic formulation, intervention and support offered to families. We present a systematic review and synthesis of the effects of multilingualism for children with neurodevelopmental disorders and discuss clinical implications. Methods We conducted systematic searches for studies on multilingualism in neurodevelopmental disorders. Keywords for neurodevelopmental disorders were based on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition categories as follows; Intellectual Disabilities, Communication Disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Specific Learning Disorder, Motor Disorders, Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders. We included only studies based on empirical research and published in peer-reviewed journals. Results Fifty studies met inclusion criteria. Thirty-eight studies explored multilingualism in Communication Disorders, 10 in ASD and two in Intellectual Disability. No studies on multilingualism in Specific Learning Disorder or Motor Disorders were identified. Studies which found a disadvantage for multilingual children with neurodevelopmental disorders were rare, and there appears little reason to assume that multilingualism has negative effects on various aspects of functioning across a range of conditions. In fact, when considering only those studies which have compared a multilingual group with developmental disorders to a monolingual group with similar disorders, the findings consistently show no adverse effects on language development or other aspects of functioning. In the case of ASD, a positive effect on communication and social functioning has been observed. Conclusion There is little evidence to support the widely held view that multilingual exposure is detrimental to the linguistic or social development of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. However, we also note that the available pool of studies is small and the number of methodologically high quality studies is relatively low. We discuss implications of multilingualism for clinical management of neurodevelopmental disorders, and discuss possible directions for future research.