English-speaking children (N = 122) in French immersion classes participated in a 1-year longitudinal study of the relation between phonological awareness and reading achievement in both languages. Participants were administered measures of word decoding and of phonological awareness in French and in English as well as measures of cognitive ability, speeded naming, and pseudoword repetition in English only. The relation of phonological awareness in French to reading achievement in each of the languages were equivalent to that in English. These relations remained significant after partialing out the influences of speeded naming and pseudoword repetition. Phonological awareness in both languages was specifically associated with 1-year increments in decoding skill in French. These findings support the transfer of phonological awareness skills across alphabetic languages.Children in immersion programs learn to read in a language different from the one spoken at home. Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms involved in this learning. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relations between phonological processing skills and word decoding ability (reading isolated words) in children in French immersion. More precisely, we explored the possibil-

According to one explanation of child bilingual codemixing (the modeling hypothesis), bilingual children' s rates of mixing are related to rates of mixing in the input addressed to them. An assumption of this hypothesis is that bilingual children are sensitive to codemixing in the input and that they can adjust their own rates on-line in accordance with the input. Despite its widespread appeal, evidence concerning its validity has been largely inconclusive. The assumption is largely noncontroversial in the case of older bilingual children, as evidenced by their adoption of the patterns of codemixing of the speech communities in which they live. H owever, it is not clear whether young bilingual children have the cognitive and linguistic capacities implicated by this assumption. The present study sought to examine this assumption directly. Six French-English bilingual children (average age 2;4 years) were recorded during play sessions with an assistant who engaged in relatively low (15%) or relatively high rates (40%) of mixing on three separate occasions. The results indicate that these children were sensitive to the language choices of their interlocutors and that they were able to adjust their rates of mixing accordingly; further, they appeared to do this by matching their language choice with that of their interlocutors on a turn-by-turn basis.

This study examined two- (n=10) and three-year-old (n=16) French–English bilingual children’s repairs of breakdowns in communication that occurred when they did not use the same language as their interlocutor (Language breakdowns) and for other reasons (e.g. inaudible utterance). The children played with an experimenter who used only one language (English or French) during the play session. Each time a child used the other language, the experimenter made up to five requests for clarification, from non-specific (What?) to specific (Can you say that in French/English?). The experimenter also made requests for clarification when breakdowns occurred for other reasons, e.g. the child spoke too softly, produced an ambiguous utterance, etc. Both the two- and three-year-olds were capable of repairing Language breakdowns by switching languages to match that of their experimenter and they avoided this repair strategy when attempting to repair Other breakdowns. Moreover, they switched languages in response to non-specific requests. The results indicate that even two-and-a-half-year-old bilingual children are capable of identifying their language choice as a cause of communication breakdowns and that they can differentiate Language from Other kinds of communication breakdowns.

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This study examined the conversational repair skills of 2-and 3-year-old FrenchEnglish bilingual children and monolingual French-speaking children. While the ability to respond to requests for clarification has been well researched in monolingual children, it has not been investigated among bilingual children except to examine their ability to repair breakdowns due to the use of a language not spoken by their interlocutor. The present study provides a direct comparison of bilingual and monolingual children's repairs of the types of breakdowns in conversations that are experienced by both populations, e.g., breakdowns due to ambiguity, choice of words, mispronunciations, inaudible utterances, and so on. A methodology of stacked requests for clarification was used to examine the range of response strategies and the overall response patterns of the children. The results reveal no differences between the bilingual and the monolingual children's conversational repair skills. The present findings contribute to the growing body of evidence that bilingualism does not interfere with the language development of simultaneous bilinguals. As well, they extend our understanding of their ability to repair conversational breakdowns of the type that are experienced by all children.