The relationship between amount of bilingual exposure and performance in receptive and expressive vocabulary in French and English was examined in 5-year-old Montreal children acquiring French and English simultaneously as well as in monolingual children. The children were equated on age, socio-economic status, nonverbal cognition, and on minority/majority language status (both languages have equal status), but differed in the amount of exposure they had received to each language spanning the continuum of bilingual exposure levels. A strong relationship was found between amount of exposure to a language and performance in that language. This relationship was different for receptive and expressive vocabulary. Children having been exposed to both languages equally scored comparably to monolingual children in receptive vocabulary, but greater exposure was required to match monolingual standards in expressive vocabulary. Contrary to many previous studies, the bilingual children were not found to exhibit a significant gap relative to monolingual children in receptive vocabulary. This was attributed to the favorable language-learning environment for French and English in Montreal and might also be related to the fact the two languages are fairly closely related. Children with early and late onset (before 6 months and after 20 months) of bilingual exposure who were equated on overall amount of exposure to each language did not differ significantly on any vocabulary measure.

It is generally recommended that bilingual children be assessed in both of their languages. However, specific procedures for such bilingual assessment and for interpretation of the results are lacking. Normally developing French -English bilingual preschool-age children were compared to monolingual children (n ¼ 28) on expressive and receptive measures of vocabulary and syntax. Results indicated that when measured in one language only, as well as when measured by combination measures such as conceptual vocabulary, which attempt to include both languages, bilingual children may score significantly lower than monolingual peers in various aspects of language. However, the extent of the difference may depend on a number of factors, including amount of bilingual exposure, relative proficiency in the two languages, as well as language specific factors, or the specific language combination being learned by the children.The ways in which bilingual development resembles and differs from monolingual development is of interest to both researchers and interventionists. For speech-language pathologists (SLPs), one of the greatest challenges in serving bilingual children is assessment of their language level -the associated difficulties have been discussed in a number of recent articles (e.g., Kayser, 1995;Gutierrez-Clellen, 1996;Junker and Stockman, 2002). As a result of this increased discussion, SLPs are increasingly aware of the pitfalls of such practices as administering monolingual tests and applying the associated monolingual norms to bilingual children. It is now widely acknowledged that not only does assessment in one language only fail to cover the full extent of these children's linguistic proficiency, but also, test items and procedures are influenced by cultural factors, which affect their validity when used for populations other than those for whom they were developed.In its position statement on clinical management of minority language populations, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA, 1985) recommends that bilingual children be, whenever possible, assessed in both of their languages so that their language dominance can be determined. Different clinical strategies are then proposed depending on

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The findings have important implications for language assessment involving cross-linguistic comparisons, such as occurs in the assessment of bilingual children, and in the matching of participants in cross-linguistic studies. Given differences in the mean length of utterance and vocabulary scores across the languages, the finding of the same mean length of utterance or vocabulary obtained in the two languages for a given bilingual child or for monolingual speakers of the two languages does not imply equivalent levels of language development in the two languages.

The use of complex syntax was investigated in narrative language samples of older children and adolescents with Down syndrome (n = 24) and a group of typically developing children matched on mean length of utterance. Both groups used conjoined and subordinate sentence forms and did not differ significantly in either the proportion of utterances containing complex sentences or in the variety of complex sentence types used. The analysis of developmental patterns suggested a similar order of acquisition across groups. The findings indicate that syntactic development in individuals with Down syndrome continues into late adolescence and is not limited to simple syntax. This study does not support earlier findings of a critical period effect in syntactic development in Down syndrome based on age or syntactic complexity.

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In spite of the complexity of verb argument structure, argument structure errors are infrequent in the speech of children with specific language impairment (SLI). The study examined the spontaneous argument structure use of school-age children with SLI and with normal language (NL) (n = 100). The groups did not differ substantially in frequency of argument structure errors, particularly when pragmatic context was considered. However, children with SLI used significantly fewer argument types, argument structure types and verb alternations than age-matched children with NL. Further, significant differences between children with SLI and mean length of utterance-matched controls were found involving the use of three-place argument structures. The results show that children with SLI demonstrate mostly correct, but less sophisticated, verb argument structure use than NL peers, and that the difference is not merely attributable to production limitations such as utterance length. The possibility of incomplete argument structure representation is suggested.