Elma Blom

Utrecht University | UU · Department of Pedagogical and Educational Sciences

PURPOSE It is widely acknowledged that parental input plays an important role in typical language development. Less is known about the input provided to children with (suspected) developmental language disorder (DLD) or those at risk for DLD. These children may not benefit from parental input in the same way as their typically developing (TD) peers...

Bilinguals frequently switch between languages. The present study examined cued language switching (CLS) longitudinally in bilingual Turkish–Dutch children with ( n = 11) and without ( n = 30) developmental language disorder (DLD) in a three-wave design with one-year intervals. We studied effects of dominance, indexed by language proficiency and ex...

Purpose Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) instruments were developed to improve the identification of developmental language disorders in multilingual children. The current study investigated the usability and feasibility of the online Dutch version of several of these instruments (LITMUS-NL) according to speech-language...

The quantity of language input is a relevant predictor of children’s language development and is frequently used as a variable in child bilingualism research. Studies use various methods to measure bilingual language input quantity, but it is currently unknown what the optimal method is. We investigated the bilingual language input estimates of 31...

Regional language speakers are subject to negative social judgments. In this contribution, I provide an overview of research in the Netherlands with children who are regional language learners against the backdrop of this deficit perspective. Findings on the lexical and cognitive development of children from Fryslân, a northern Dutch province, and...

The current study investigates the role of teacher behaviors in toddlers' executive function development. Teachers' ( N = 215) emotional and behavioral support and instructional support were observed through classroom observations when children were 2 years old. Selective attention, verbal short‐term memory, and visuospatial working memory of child...

Purpose This study compares the home language environments of children with (a suspicion of) developmental language disorder (DLD) with that of children with typical development (TD). It does so by adopting new technology that automatically provides metrics about children's language environment (Language ENvironment Analysis [LENA]). In addition, r...

The aim of the current systematic review is (1) to examine theoretical frameworks and mechanisms explaining the association between parental and teacher behaviors and child executive function (EF) development, and (2) to compare and combine empirical findings for the relationship between parental and teacher behaviors and child EF development in ea...

We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7‐month‐old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the sc...

Introduction To guarantee a reliable diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in bilingual children, evaluating both languages is recommended. However, little is known about how DLD impacts the heritage language, and it is largely unknown whether bilingual children with DLD develop the heritage language at the same pace as their peers wit...

Achtergrond. Taalontwikkelingsstoornis (TOS) wordt gekenmerkt door grote heterogeniteit, maar er is nog weinig bekend over de variatie in specialistische onderwijsondersteuning voor kinderen met TOS. Dit longitudinale onderzoek bestudeerde de taal- en leesvaardigheid van kinderen met TOS bij wie onderwijsondersteuning op 7- of 8-jarige leeftijd beë...

Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are reported to have word reading difficulties. However, previous research has focused mostly on monolingual children. The present study used two existing datasets to assess word reading outcomes of bilingual children with DLD. In Study 1, we compared word reading outcomes of monolingual and...

Aims: We investigated: (i) whether differences in accuracy between heritage (HS) and monolingual speakers (MS) signal differences in the path or merely in the rate of language development, and (ii) whether, independently of these differences, HS become more accurate as they grow older. Methods: Using an elicitation task, we collected data from thr...

Bilingualism is associated with enhanced switching skills, while a developmental language disorder (DLD) may negatively impact switching ability. However, both studies with bilinguals as well as studies including children with DLD have revealed mixed results. Moreover, the interaction of bilingualism and DLD has not been addressed and the origin of...

We conducted a close replication of the seminal work by Marcus et al. (1999), which showed that after a brief auditory exposure phase, seven‐month‐old infants were able to learn and generalize a rule to novel syllables not previously present in the exposure phase. This work became the foundation for the theoretical framework by which we assume that...

access: https://netherlands.openaire.eu/search/publication?pid=10.1007%2Fs10212-021-00586-6 In this review, we evaluate the claim that translanguaging in the classroom supports the development of the bilingual lexicon by enhancing cross-linguistic transfer. To address this issue, we integrate findings from psycholinguistics and educational science...

COST Action IS0804 “Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment” aimed to profile bilingual specific language impairment (biSLI) by establishing a network for research on the linguistic and cognitive abilities of bilingual children with SLI across different migrant communities. A battery of tools fo...

Previous research on the effects of word-level factors on lexical acquisition has shown that frequency and concreteness are most important. Here, we investigate CDI data from 1,030 Dutch children, collected with the short form of the Dutch CDI, to address (i) how word-level factors predict lexical acquisition, once child-level factors are controlle...

Children who are refugees become bilingual in circumstances that are often challenging and that can vary across national contexts. We investigated the second language (L2) syntactic skills of Syrian children aged 6-12 living in Canada ( n = 56) and the Netherlands ( n = 47). Our goal was to establish the impact of the first language (L1 = Syrian Ar...

Bilingual children often experience difficulties with inflectional morphology. The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate how regularity of inflection in combination with verbal short-term and working memory (VSTM, VWM) influences bilingual children’s performance. Data from 231 typically developing five- to eight-year-old children were a...

Comprehension of texts and understanding of questions is a cornerstone of successful human communication. Whilst reading comprehension has been thoroughly investigated in the last decade, there is surprisingly little research on children’s comprehension of picture stories, particularly for bilinguals. This can be partially explained by the lack of...

Background Children’s executive functioning (EF) is often negatively associated with a developmental language disorder (DLD) and positively related to bilingualism. However, both regarding children with DLD and bilingual children, findings are mixed and few studies have investigated the combination of DLD and bilingualism in relation to EF. Aims T...

Bilingualism as it occurs in current societies is a complex, multidimensional and dynamic phenomenon, calling for new approaches to capture this concept. This study shows the feasibility of a person-centred approach by combining measures of the use of and proficiency in the first and second language from 110 young Turkish–Dutch children at two meas...

Taking a perception-action perspective, we investigated how the presence of different real objects in children’s immediate situation affected their creativity and whether this effect was moderated by their selective attention. Seventy children between ages 9 and 12 years old participated. Verbal responses on a visual Alternative Uses Task with a lo...

This contribution provides an overview of the current state of affairs with respect to the Dutch version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). We describe properties of the Dutch MAIN, the creation of the Dutch MAIN, and the results of recent research with this new instrument to measure narrative competence.

Purpose Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have weaknesses in executive functioning (EF), specifically in tasks testing interference control and working memory. It is unknown how EF develops in children with DLD, if EF abilities are related to DLD severity and persistence, and if EF weaknesses expand to selective attention. Th...

Previous research has shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing cognitive control. Bilinguals’ enhanced cognitive control is thought to be caused by the necessity to exert more language control in bilingual compared to monolingual settings. Surprisingly, between-group research of cognitive effects of bilingualism is har...

The study focuses on the assessment of young refugee students, and the role of language and parents therein. Low achievement at tests can stem from lack of knowledge of the content being tested. However, it can also be due to low proficiency in the language of testing. Additionally, poor communication between refugee parents and schools caused by l...

Various studies have shown that bilingual children score lower than their monolingual peers on standardized receptive vocabulary tests. This study investigates if this effect is moderated by language distance. Dutch receptive vocabulary was tested with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The impact of cross-language distance was examined by...

The challenging task of establishing meaningful translanguaging in multilingual classrooms necessitates negotiation between different stakeholders. Such negotiation requires investigation of the contexts and ways in which translanguaging may be implemented as a suitable teaching strategy. The aim of the current study was to elicit practical and ped...

Background and aims Recent research indicates that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often also score lower than their peers with typical development (TD) on tasks testing nonverbal executive functioning (EF). This study investigated whether there is evidence that children with DLD use linguistic and EF resources to support their...

Cambridge Core - Applied Linguistics - Learning through Language - edited by Vibeke Grøver

Previous research has shown that in a minority–majority language context, the quantity of language input at home is more important for the development of the minority language than for the development of the majority language. In the current study, we examined whether the same holds true for the frequency of specific language activities at home. In...

This study investigated the influence of cognitive ability on bilingual children's vocabulary development in both their languages. Sixty‐nine bilingual immigrant children participated, with data collected at three annual intervals. At Time 1, the participants were 5 or 6 years old. Receptive vocabulary was tested in the minority (Turkish, Tarifit)...

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions Recent research suggests that cognitive control plays a role in code-switching, both in bilingual adults and in bilingual children. Code-switching would only require cognitive control, however, when speakers maintain some degree of separation between their two languages, not when they completely mix th...

A recurring question in the literature of heritage language acquisition, and more generally of bilingual acquisition, is whether all linguistic domains are sensitive to input reduction and to cross-linguistic influence and to what extent. According to the Interface Hypothesis, morphosyntactic phenomena regulated by discourse–pragmatic conditions ar...

This volume provides an overview of the current state in theorizing about cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism and presents a collection of studies that reflects the breadth and depth of research on cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. The primary reason of this volume, however, is to honour Aafke Hulk who, throughout her career, has i...

This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in t...

This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in t...

Child Heritage Language

Closely related languages share cross-linguistic phonological regularities, such as Frisian -âld [ͻ:t] and Dutch -oud [ʱut], as in the cognate pairs kâld [kͻ:t] – koud [kʱut] ‘cold’ and wâld [wͻ:t] – woud [wʱut] ‘forest’. Within Bybee’s (1995, 2001, 2008, 2010) network model, these regularities are, just like grammatical rules within a language, ge...

Purpose: This study examined the effects of language impairment (LI) and bilingualism across vocabulary, morphology and verbal memory in a sample of children learning Dutch. Methods: Children (M-age = 71 months) were assigned to a monolingual group with typical development (TD) ( n = 30), bilingual TD ( n = 30), monolingual LI ( n = 30) or bilingua...

Background: The language profiles of children with language impairment (LI) and bilingual children can show partial, and possibly temporary, overlap. The current study examined the persistence of this overlap over time. Furthermore, we aimed to better understand why the language profiles of these two groups show resemblance, testing the hypothesis...

Language Variation - European Perspectives VI showcases a selection of papers from the 8th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which was held in Leipzig in 2015. The volume includes plenaries by Miriam Meyerhoff and Steffen Klaere (“The large and the small of it: Big issues with smaller samples in the study of language variatio...

Purpose Grammatical morphology is often a locus of difficulty for both children with language impairment (LI) and bilingual children. In contrast to previous research that mainly focused on verbal tense and agreement markings, the present study investigated whether plural and past participle formation can disentangle the effects of LI and bilingual...

This study focuses on the relationship between dialect use and the acquisition of standard Dutch vocabulary by young children in the Dutch province of Limburg. 5 The results of a newly-developed dialect expressive vocabulary task show extensive inter-individual variation that does not support a dichotomous distinction between monolingual and bidial...

Many studies have shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing executive functioning, but other studies have not revealed any effect of bilingualism. In this study we compared three groups of bilingual children in the Netherlands, aged 6–7 years, with a monolingual control group. We were specifically interested in testing...

Language delays of bilingual children can arise from language impairment (LI) but also from insufficient exposure to the target language. A reliable diagnosis of LI in bilingual children is therefore ideally based on the evaluation of both languages, as LI affects each language that is learned. However, due to the multitude of language combinations...

"Although standardly recognized by linguists of many diverse theoretical persuasions, finiteness continues to figure among [...] the most poorly understood concepts of linguistic theory”. This was eloquently stated by Ledgeway (2000, 2007) and remains true even today. The present volume thus aims to shed some much needed light on this area of lingu...

Background: Research has produced conflicting findings about the effects of language impairment (LI) on narrative macrostructure outcomes. Aims: The present study investigated if children with LI perform weaker than typically developing (TD) controls on narrative macrostructure in different tasks, whether this changes over time and if between-gr...

While age of acquisition effects have been researched extensively in adult second language (L2) acquisition, there is less research focused on examining age of acquisition effects in child language learners. Importantly, for child learners, delays in exposure to language can occur not only for a second but also for a first language (L1). In regard...

When sending text messages on their mobile phone to friends, children often use a special type of register, which is called textese. This register allows the omission of words and the use of textisms: instances of non-standard written language such as 4ever (forever). Previous studies have shown that textese has a positive effect on children's lite...

Type of textisms used by children in their elicited text messages. (DOCX)

Sample scenarios. (DOCX)

Background Understanding and expressing a narrative's macro-structure is relatively independent of experience in a specific language. A narrative task is therefore assumed to be a less biased method of language assessment for bilingual children than many other norm-referenced tests and may thus be particularly valuable to identify language impairme...

Purpose This study evaluated a newly developed quasi-universal nonword repetition task (Q-U NWRT) as a diagnostic tool for bilingual children with language impairment (LI) who have Dutch as a 2nd language. The Q-U NWRT was designed to be minimally influenced by knowledge of 1 specific language in contrast to a language-specific NWRT with which it w...

Previous research with children learning a second language (L2) has reported errors with verb inflection and cross-linguistic variation in accuracy and error patterns. However, owing to the cross-linguistic complexity and diversity of different verbal paradigms, the cross-linguistic effects on the nature of default forms has not been directly addre...

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugri...

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6–8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate stud...

This study investigated the role of age-of-acquisition in determining whether young bilingual children show a pattern of L2/nonnative English, precocious BE acquisition, or whether they show the L1/native English pattern of synchronous acquisition of BE and inflectional morphology. Two groups of children with age-of-acquisition before or after 4;0...

Purpose This study investigated the comprehension of counterfactual conditionals in monolingual Turkish children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children. Comprehending counterfactuals requires a well-developed cognitive system (Beck, Riggs, & Gorniak, 2009). Children with SLI have impaired cognitive functionin...

Whether bilingual children outperform monolingual children on visuospatial and verbal working memory tests was investigated. In addition, relations among bilingual proficiency, language use at home, and working memory were explored. The bilingual Turkish–Dutch children (n = 68) in this study were raised in families with lower socioeconomic status (...

Across languages, children do not comprehend 3SG/3PL subject–verb agreement before age five, despite early mastery in spontaneous speech. This study investigates subject–verb agreement in a language hitherto not studied in this respect, namely Dutch. The authors examine if (1) Dutch two- and three-year-olds comprehend subject–verb agreement and (2)...

The goal of this study was to investigate whether individual difference factors influence the second language (L2) learning of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD) differently. The study focuses on tense inflection development in English L2 children. The roles of age of L2 acquisition, length o...

Purpose In this study, the authors investigated whether errors with subject–verb agreement in monolingual Dutch children with specific language impairment (SLI) are influenced by verb phonology. In addition, the productive and receptive abilities of Dutch acquiring children with SLI regarding agreement inflection were compared. Method An SLI group...

The present study compared production and on-line comprehension of definite articles and third person direct object clitic pronouns in Greek-speaking typically developing, sequential bilingual (L2-TD) children and monolingual children with specific language impairment (L1-SLI). Twenty Turkish Greek L2-TD children, 16 Greek L1-SLI children, and 31 L...

Previous studies have found that the morpho-syntactic aspects of grammatical morphemes, including articles, pose problems for Dutch-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In the present study it is demonstrated that article errors in Dutch children with SLI appear to be modulated by the pragmatic context to some extent. This stu...

Both children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children who acquire a second language (L2) make errors with verb inflection. This overlap between SLI and L2 raises the question if verb inflection can discriminate between L2 children with and without SLI. In this study we addressed this question for Dutch. The secondary goal of the study...

This article addresses a child language stage that has figured prominently in the current debate on children’s early linguistic competence: the Optional Infinitive (OI) stage, a relatively extended period during which children freely alternate between finite and nonfinite structures in contexts where adults only use finite forms. The study examines...

Purpose This study investigated whether past tense use could differentiate children with language impairment (LI) from their typically developing (TD) peers when English is children’s second language (L2) and whether L2 children’s past tense profiles followed the predictions of Bybee’s (2007) usage-based network model. Method A group of L2 childre...