Effects of dual- and single-language exposure on children's word learning: Experimentally testing the role of competition.

This study investigated the role of dual- and single-language input in bilingual children's word learning. In Experiment 1, 26 Spanish-English bilingual children aged 4 and 5 years (9 girls; 73% Latino; 65% White) learned novel words in single- and dual-language conditions. In the single-language condition, children learned English-like labels for novel objects. In the dual-language condition, the same children learned Spanish- and English-like labels for a different set of objects; all labels were produced by the same bilingual speaker, creating competition between the two languages. A second group of bilingual children (N = 25; 14 girls; 72% Latino; 40% White) participated in Experiment 2, which tested whether tagging language by speaker in the dual-language condition (mimicking the one person-one language input strategy) would influence performance. In both experiments, participants learned novel English words above chance (ps < .05) in both conditions, with better performance in the single-language condition. These results indicate an advantage for single-language learning contexts, but the theoretical roots and the practical value of this advantage are unclear.

Social-Pragmatic Skills and Length of Bilingualism Predict Inhibitory Control in Children.

PURPOSE: There is conflicting evidence regarding effects of bilingualism on inhibition, and the mechanisms that might underlie the effects remain unclear. A prominent account views additional demands on structural language use in bilinguals as being at the root of bilingual effects on inhibition. In this study, we tested the novel hypothesis that social-pragmatic skills (alone or together with structural language skills) are associated with inhibition in bilingual children. METHOD: Parents of 114 typically developing 8- to 11-year-old Spanish-English bilingual children completed the Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition to index social pragmatics and the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function to index executive functioning skills. The Inhibit clinical scale score reflected children's inhibition. Children's language ability was indexed by the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fourth Edition in English and Spanish. Length of bilingualism was operationalized continuously as the length of time children had been exposed to both languages in their lifetime. Moderation analyses tested the effects of structural language, social-pragmatic skills, and length of bilingual experience, and their interactions on inhibition. RESULTS: While structural language skills were not associated with inhibition, they moderated the relation between social-pragmatic skills and inhibition, such that children with better social-pragmatic skills demonstrated better inhibition, and this effect was stronger for children with better structural language skills. Furthermore, longer length of bilingual experience was associated with better inhibition, and this effect was not moderated by any other predictor. CONCLUSION: These results confirm a graded relationship between bilingualism and inhibition, and indicate that this association is not qualified by structural language or social-pragmatic skills. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21183916.

Attention in Bilingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose Attention and language are hypothesized to interact in bilingual children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). In children who are bilingual, attentional control may be enhanced by repeated experience regulating 2 languages. In children with DLD, subtle weaknesses in sustained attention may relate to impaired language processing. This study measured attentional control and sustained attention in monolingual and bilingual children with and without DLD in order to examine the potential influences of bilingualism and DLD, as well as their intersection, on attention. Method Monolingual English-only and bilingual Spanish-English children aged 6-8 years were categorized into participant groups based on eligibility testing and parent interviews. Parent interviews included standardized assessment of language environment and parent concern regarding language. Participants completed 2 nonlinguistic computerized assessments: a flanker task to measure attentional control and a continuous performance task to measure sustained attention. Results One hundred nine children met all eligibility criteria for inclusion in a participant group. Regression models predicting performance on the attention tasks were similar for both sustained attention and attentional control. For both tasks, DLD was a significant predictor, and bilingualism was not. Measuring bilingualism continuously using parent-reported exposure did not alter results. Conclusions This study found no evidence of a "bilingual cognitive advantage" on 2 types of attention among sequential Spanish-English bilingual children but also found a negative effect of DLD that was consistent across both types of attention and both bilingual and monolingual children. Results are consistent with the broader literature on subtle nonlinguistic deficits in children with DLD and suggest these deficits are minimally affected by diverse linguistic experience.