Bilingual children's language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data from a broad-scale study of monolingual English and bilingual Spanish-English learners in Miami provided a clear demonstration of "profile effects," where bilingual children perform at varying levels compared to monolinguals across different test types. The profile effects were strong and consistent across conditions of socioeconomic status, language in the home, and school setting (two way or English immersion). The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages. Other test types showed intermediate scores in bilinguals, again with substantial consistency across groups. These profiles are interpreted as primarily due to the "distributed characteristic" of bilingual lexical knowledge, the tendency for bilingual individuals to know some words in one language but not the other and vice versa.Childhood bilingualism has been reported to show academic advantages over monolingualism. In optimal circumstances of learning, these advantages have been reported to include, in comparison with monolinguals, at least as good and often better performance by bilinguals in language, literacy, and various realms of cognition (Ben

By their 10th month of life, typically developing infants produce canonical babbling, which includes the well-formed syllables required for meaningful speech. Research suggests that emerging speech or language-related disorders might be associated with late onset of canonical babbling. Onset of canonical babbling was investigated for 1,536 high-risk infants, at about 10-months corrected age. Parental report by open-ended questionnaire was found to be an efficient method for ascertaining babbling status. Although delays were infrequent, they were often associated with genetic, neurological, anatomical, and/or physiological abnormalities. Over half the cases of late canonical babbling were not, at the time they were discovered associated with prior significant medical diagnoses. Late canonical-babbling onset may be a predictor of later developmental disabilities, including problems in speech, language, and reading.

The ability to coordinate expressive behaviors is crucial to the development of social and emotional communication. Coordination involves systematic sequencing of behaviors from two different modalities that have some temporal overlap. A bootstrapping procedure was used to determine whether preverbal 3- and 6-month-old infants sequence vocalizations, gazes at their mothers' faces, and facial expressions into pairs of coordinated patterns nonrandomly. Smiles and frowns were highly coordinated with vocalizations. Smiles were also coordinated with gazes at mothers' faces, which became stronger with age. Vocalizations were not coordinated with gazes at mothers' faces. These findings illustrate the manner in which infants temporally coordinate communicative actions and provide new evidence that facial expressions (particularly smiles) are central to early infant communications.

This study used an event-based approach to provide empirical evidence regarding the nature of coordination in 3- and 6-month-old infants. Vocalizations and facial actions of 12 normally developing infants interacting with their caregivers were coded. Coded vocalizations and facial actions were considered coordinated when they temporally overlapped. Results indicate that infants coordinated their vocalizations and facial actions more than expected by chance. Coordinated events were governed by 2 sequence patterns. When 2 communicative events were temporally associated across modalities, 1 event tended to be completely embedded within the other, and vocalizations tended to end before facial actions. This study provides new information about how infant communication is structured, confirms results from other coordination studies, and describes a new method for analysis of event-based data.

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