Testing theories of the vocabulary spurt with monolingual and bilingual infants.

Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive changes. To test these theories, English-French monolingual and bilingual children with different exposure to each language were studied.

Patterns of language switching and bilingual children's word learning: An experiment across two communities.

Language switching is common in bilingual environments, including those of many bilingual children. Some bilingual children hear rapid switching that involves immediate translation of words (an '' pattern), while others hear their languages most often in long blocks of a single language (a '' pattern). Our two-site experimental study compared two groups of developing bilinguals from different communities, and investigated whether differences in the timing of language switching impose different demands on bilingual children's learning of novel nouns in their two languages: do children learn differently if they hear a translation immediately vs.

Cognates are advantaged over non-cognates in early bilingual expressive vocabulary development.

Bilinguals need to learn two words for most concepts. These words are called translation equivalents, and those that also sound similar (e.g.

Are translation equivalents special? Evidence from simulations and empirical data from bilingual infants.

The acquisition of translation equivalents is often considered a special component of bilingual children's vocabulary development, as bilinguals have to learn words that share the same meaning across their two languages. This study examined three contrasting accounts for bilingual children's acquisition of translation equivalents relative to singlets (i.e.

The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants: A multi-laboratory study.

Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non-verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always have access to the same word-learning heuristics (e.