Most studies on bilingual language development focus on children’s second language (L2). Here, we investigated first language (L1) development of Polish-English early migrant bilinguals in four domains: vocabulary, grammar, phonological processing, and discourse. We first compared Polish language skills between bilinguals and their Polish non-migrant monolingual peers, and then investigated the influence of the cumulative exposure to L1 and L2 on bilinguals’ performance. We then examined whether high exposure to L1 could possibly minimize the gap between monolinguals and bilinguals. We analyzed data from 233 typically developing children (88 bilingual and 145 monolingual) aged 4;0 to 7;5 (years;months) on six language measures in Polish: receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, receptive grammar, productive grammar (sentence repetition), phonological processing (non-word repetition), and discourse abilities (narration). Information about language exposure was obtained via parental questionnaires. For each language task, we analyzed the data from the subsample of bilinguals who had completed all the tasks in question and from monolinguals matched one-on-one to the bilingual group on age, SES (measured by years of mother’s education), gender, non-verbal IQ, and short-term memory. The bilingual children scored lower than monolinguals in all language domains, except discourse. The group differences were more pronounced on the productive tasks (vocabulary, grammar, and phonological processing) and moderate on the receptive tasks (vocabulary and grammar). L1 exposure correlated positively with the vocabulary size and phonological processing. Grammar scores were not related to the levels of L1 exposure, but were predicted by general cognitive abilities. L2 exposure negatively influenced productive grammar in L1, suggesting possible L2 transfer effects on L1 grammatical performance. Children’s narrative skills benefitted from exposure to two languages: both L1 and L2 exposure influenced story structure scores in L1. Importantly, we did not find any evidence (in any of the tasks in which the gap was present) that the performance gap between monolinguals and bilinguals could be fully closed with high amounts of L1 input.

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.

Reading and telling stories to children improves their narrative skills, which is well-documented for monolinguals, but not for bilinguals. We investigated whether bilingual narratives improve when the child is provided with a model story. We studied the narratives of Polish-English bilingual children (n = 75, mean age 5;7 years; months) raised in the UK. We elicited narratives through picture stories in two modes: told spontaneously and retold after a model provided by an adult experimenter. The bilinguals told and retold stories in Polish and English. The study combined a within-subject design, comparing the bilinguals' two languages, and a between-subject design, comparing the stories told and retold in Polish by the bilinguals and by Polish age-matched monolinguals (n = 75). We investigated whether retelling might improve bilingual and monolingual storytelling to the same extent. In the stories, we assessed both the macrostructure (e.g. story structure and answered comprehension questions) and microstructure (e.g. type-token ratio). We found a positive effect of retelling for the macrostructure in both monolinguals and bilinguals (regardless of the language). As for the microstructure, when retelling, children told longer stories, regardless of the language (Polish, English) and group (bilingual, monolingual). We argue that retelling stories improves the narrative skills of bilinguals. ARTICLE HISTORY

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries (from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown.

Language input is crucial for language acquisition and especially for children’s vocabulary size. Bilingual children receive reduced input in each of their languages, compared to monolinguals, and are reported to have smaller vocabularies, at least in one of their languages. Vocabulary acquisition in trilingual children has been largely understudied; only a few case studies have been published so far. Moreover, trilingual language acquisition in children has been rarely contrasted with language outcomes of bilingual and monolingual peers. We present a comparison of trilingual, bilingual, and monolingual children (total of 56 participants, aged 4;5–6;7, matched one-to-one for age, gender, and non-verbal IQ) in regard to their receptive and expressive vocabulary (measured by standardized tests), and relative frequency of input in each language (measured by parental report). The monolingual children were speakers of Polish or English, while the bilinguals and trilinguals were migrant children living in the United Kingdom, speaking English as a majority language and Polish as a home language. The trilinguals had another (third) language at home. For the majority language, English, no differences were found across the three groups, either in the receptive or productive vocabulary. The groups differed, however, in their performance in Polish, the home language. The trilinguals had lower receptive vocabulary than the monolinguals, and lower productive vocabulary compared to the monolinguals. The trilinguals showed similar lexical knowledge to the bilinguals. The bilinguals demonstrated lower scores than the monolinguals, but only in productive vocabulary. The data on reported language input show that input in English in bilingual and trilingual groups is similar, but the bilinguals outscore the trilinguals in relative frequency of Polish input. Overall, the results suggest that in the majority language, multilingual children may develop lexical skills similar to those of their monolingual peers. However, their minority language is weaker: the trilinguals scored lower than the Polish monolinguals on both receptive and expressive vocabulary tests, and the bilinguals showed reduced expressive knowledge but leveled out with the Polish monolinguals on receptive vocabulary. The results should encourage parents of migrant children to support home language(s), if the languages are to be retained in a longer perspective.

Purpose: As a contribution to the complex task of developing appropriate tools for language assessment in bilingual children, the current paper investigates whether direct and indirect measures of language skills paint a similar picture of children's multilingual language competence. Approach: Emerging from the recent COST Action IS0804 (Bi-SLI), the study used two new tools from the battery Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS): the direct assessment tool Crosslinguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT) and the parental report Parents of Bilingual Children Questionnaire (PaBiQ), offering an indirect measure of overall language skills. Data and Analysis: The participants were 36 children of Polish immigrants to Norway or the UK. Correlations were investigated with Kendall's rank correlation, and group comparisons carried out with Wilcoxon rank sum tests. Findings: The direct and indirect measures correlated. There were no group differences on the direct measure, but the parents in the UK still judged their children as less proficient in Polish than the parents in Norway did. Two different accounts for this incongruity are discussed: First, parents in the UK may set higher benchmarks for their children's minority language skills than the parents in Norway. Alternative accounts of this interpretation related to differences in the parents' socioeconomic background, proficiency or language attitudes are discussed. Second, parental reports may indicate early stages of attrition of the minority language among the children in the UK that the direct lexical assessment tool may not be sensitive enough to uncover. Originality: The study used two new tools designed specifically for multilingual children-comparing two groups of children of a recent and growing immigration group, whose language development is currently underinvestigated. Implications: The findings underscore the complexity of assessing bilingual children's full language competence. The cross-cultural differences documented here call for further longitudinal research systematically comparing immigrant children from different language backgrounds.

Polish and English differ in the surface realization of the underlying Determiner Phrase (DP): Polish lacks an article system, whereas English makes use of articles for both grammatical and pragmatic reasons. This difference has an impact on how referentiality is rendered in both languages. In this article, the authors investigate the use of referential markers by Polish–English bilingual children and Polish monolingual children. Using the LITMUS-MAIN picture stories, the authors collected speech samples of Polish–English bilinguals raised in the UK ( n = 92, mean age 5;7) and compared them with matched Polish monolinguals ( n = 92, mean age 5;7). The analyses revealed that the bilinguals’ mean length of utterance (MLU) in Polish was significantly higher than that of the monolinguals because the bilinguals produced significantly more referential markers (especially pronouns) which inflated their MLU. The authors posit that the non-standard referentiality used by the bilinguals in Polish is caused by cross-language transfer at the syntax–pragmatics interface. When producing narratives in Polish, Polish–English bilinguals overuse referential markers as cohesive devices in their stories, which is not ungrammatical, but pragmatically odd in Polish. Bilinguals tend to do this because they are immersed in English-language input, rich in overt pronouns. Thus, in the process of realizing the surface features of the Polish DP they partly rely on an underlying English DP structure.

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.