Vicky Chondrogianni

University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

The present study investigated whether children's difficulty with non-canonical structures is due to their non-adult-like use of linguistic cues or their inability to revise misinterpretations using late-arriving cues. We adopted a priming production task and a self-paced listening task with picture verification, and included three Mandarin non-can...

This study examined how heritage children’s experiences with the heritage language (HL) in the country of residence (e.g., children’s generation, their HL use and richness) and the country of origin (e.g., visits to and from the homeland) may change as a function of the migration generation heritage children belong to, and how this may in turn di􀀀e...

Previous research suggests that child HSs’ performance in offline linguistic tasks is typically worse than their age-matched monolingual peers and is modulated by linguistic and child-level factors. This study examined the comprehension and production of three Mandarin non-canonical structures in 5- to 9-year-old Mandarin–English heritage children...

This study investigated the psycholinguistic and child-related variables that modulate vocabulary development and the so-called receptive–expressive gap in child L2 learners of Gaelic with English as their L1. In total, 50 6- to 8-year-old English-Gaelic bilingual children attending Gaelic-medium immersion education were administered the English an...

A great majority of people around the world know more than one language. So, how does knowing one language affect the learning and use of additional languages? The question of cross-language influences is the focus of this book. Do bilinguals hear, understand, and produce language and meaning differently because of the languages they speak? How wel...

Paradis' (2022) keynote article is a timely documentation of the ongoing shift in focus within childhood bilingualism research from investigating the factors that modulate majority or second language (ML/L2) attainment (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011) to understanding the sources of variation that lead to minority heritage language (HL) maintenance....

The present study examined nonword repetition (NWR) and comprehension/production of single-word vocabulary in the majority language (English) in six- to eight-year-old English-Gaelic emergent bilingual children attending Gaelic-medium primary education (GMPE) (primary years 2 and 3). GMPE is an immersion education model found in Scotland where the...

One factor that may influence how executive functions develop is exposure to more than one language in childhood. This study explored the impact of bilingualism on inhibitory control in autistic (n = 38) and non-autistic children (n = 51). Bilingualism was measured on a continuum of exposure to investigate the effects of language environment on two...

Findings of bilingual participants outperforming their monolingual counterparts in executive functioning tasks have been repeatedly reported in the literature (Bialystok, 2017). However, uncontrolled factors or imperfectly matched samples might affect the reliability of these findings. This study aims to take into account a range of relevant variab...

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...

The current study sought to investigate whether word properties can facilitate the identification of developmental language disorder (DLD) in sequential bilinguals by analyzing properties in nouns and verbs in L2 spontaneous speech as potential DLD markers. Measures of semantic (imageability, concreteness), lexical (frequency, age of acquisition) a...

The shared-syntax account of bilingual syntactic representations suggests that similar structures from different languages are represented as one in the bilingual mind. In this study, we examined the degree of morpho-syntactic similarity needed for representations to be shared in the bilingual mind by comparing passive structures in Greek and Engli...

This study provides a preliminary validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) with a sample of 110 monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TLD) children and examines the test’s ability to distinguish between Greek monolingual children and age-matched Albanian-Greek bilinguals using a Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysi...

Across languages, structures with non-canonical word order have been shown to be problematic for both child and adult heritage speakers. To investigate the linguistic and child-level factors that modulate heritage speakers' difficulties with non-canonical word orders, we examined the comprehension and production of three Mandarin non-canonical stru...

Second language (L2) speakers frequently make errors when producing L2 inflectional morphology, but the underlying causes of errors remain unclear. We report three experiments investigating how such errors might arise within the language production system, focusing on L2 speakers whose L1 does not use inflectional morphology to indicate temporal pr...

This longitudinal study examined the development of narrative micro- and macrostructure in Japanese-English bilingual returnee children. Returnees are children of immigrant families who move to a foreign country, spending a significant portion of their formative developmental years in the foreign majority language context before returning to their...

The disambiguation effect, also referred to as process of elimination , occurs during word learning, whereby novel words are mapped onto new referents, precluding the application of a novel label to a familiar object. Prior studies showed that the emergence and use of disambiguation can be affected by children's vocabulary growth and linguistic exp...

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages, but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during L2 sentence processing. The p...

Purpose This study examined whether monolingual German-speaking preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were facilitated by the presence of case-marking cues in their interpretation of German subject and object welcher (“which”)-questions, as reported for their typically developing peers. We also examined whether knowledge of...

Oral presentation at Words in the World International Conference 2020

This paper describes the rationale for the adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) (Gagarina et al., 2012, 2015, 2019) to Scottish Gaelic (Gaelic) and presents some preliminary results from the macrostructure measures. Gaelic is a heritage minority language in Scotland being revitalised through immersion ed...

Previous studies have argued that two morphophonological properties–perceptual salience and cue reliability–can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Children acquiring a language with high salience and reliability markers (French) showed much earlier comprehension than children acquiring markers with lowe...

Disambiguation, a fast-mapping process based on the process-of-elimination, is a mechanism found in children and adults when assigning a new label to an unseen object in ambiguous word learning situations. Previous research found that multilingualism delayed the onset of when disambiguation emerged in young children. In this looking-while-listening...

Adults apply a process-of-elimination, called disambiguation, to map new words to unknown objects or concepts. Studies have shown that adults, unlike children, do not extend this reasoning by exclusivity to disambiguate other referential expressions, such as factual information about objects. This has led to an ongoing debate as to whether disambig...

This study investigates the role of parental input quality on the acquisition of Greek as a heritage language in Western Canada. Focusing on subject use, we tested four groups of Greek speakers: monolingual children, heritage children, and the parents of each one of those groups. Participants completed an elicited production task designed to elicit...

This study examined the linguistic and individual-level factors that render case marking a vulnerable domain in English-dominant Greek heritage children. We also investigated whether heritage language (HL) children can use case-marking cues to interpret (non-)canonical sentences in Greek similarly to their monolingual peers. A group of six- to twel...

Background: Children with English as an additional language (EAL) represent 20.6% of children in English primary schools (DfE, 2018). EAL pupils are at risk of underperforming academically unless their English proficiency is on a par with their monolingual peers. Thus, EAL children with low English proficiency require appropriate assessment to dist...

We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in seven languages from various language families and cultural settings: American English, Czech, Scottish Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malaysian Malay, Persian, and Western Armenian. The ratings were collected from a total of 173 participants and w...

We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in seven languages from various language families and cultural settings: American English, Czech, Scottish Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malaysian Malay, Persian, and Western Armenian. The ratings were collected from a total of 173 participants and w...

This study investigated whether third person singular – s and past tense accuracy and error types can reveal distinct developmental patterns of agreement and tense acquisition in younger and older Welsh (L1) sequential bilingual (L2) English children with typical development (L2-TLD) and in younger children with language impairment (L2-SLI_Y). A gr...

This study investigated whether third person singular (3SG)-s and past tense accuracy and error types can reveal distinct developmental patterns of agreement and tense acquisition in younger and older Welsh L1-English sequential bilingual (L2) children with typical development (L2-TLD) and in younger children with language impairment (L2-SLI_Y). A...

Language dominance is a multidimensional construct comprising several distinct yet interrelated components, including language proficiency, exposure and use. The exact relation between these components remains unclear. Several studies have observed a (non-linear) relationship between bilingual children’s amount of exposure and absolute proficiency...

Adult second language speakers exhibit consistent variability when producing L2 inflectional morphology (Lardiere, 1998), especially those whose L1 does not use morphological marking. Many different sources for errors have been proposed, including absence of the relevant morphological representations (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), and L1 prosodic constrai...

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 case study takes the reader through the process of developing a picture description paradigm for a second language (L2) production experiment as part of a PhD thesis. The case looks at the various theoretical and practical challenges faced along the way and how they were dealt with. This included the presentation of stimuli, detailed instructi...

Successive childhood bilingualism or child second language (L2) acquisition is the acquisition of an L2 during childhood after some properties of the first language (L1) are already in place. The study of child L2 development can inform us about the mechanisms and processes involved in second language learning and highlight the ways in which these...

Background Grammatical morphology has been shown to be problematic for children with specific language impairment (SLI) or developmental language disorder (DLD). Most research on this topic comes from widely spoken languages, such as English. Despite Welsh being the most extensively spoken indigenous in the UK after English, and Wales being the onl...

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

Adult second language (L2) speakers frequently make inflectional errors in production (Lardiere, 1998), especially when their L1 does not use inflectional marking. Different accounts of optional inflectional marking explain these errors in different ways, including absence of the appropriate grammatical representations (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), or pr...

Adult second language (L2) speakers frequently make inflectional errors in production (Lardiere, 1998), especially when their L1 does not use inflectional marking. Different accounts of optional inflectional marking explain these errors in different ways, including absence of the appropriate grammatical representations (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), or pr...

Language proficiency is predicted to modulate orthographic-semantic association in second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition, in accordance with the assumptions of the Developmental Bilingual Interactive-Activation model (BIA-d) (Grainger et al., 2010). The current study explored this modulation during pre-attentive L2 orthographic perception. ER...

Call for Papers for a workshop to be held as part of the 13th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, 7 – 9 September 2017, University of Westminster, London

Studies on the acquisition of indefinite articles by sequential bilingual (L2) children have provided mixed results regarding whether L2 children omit or substitute indefinite articles. In the present paper, we examined whether Turkish-speaking child L2 learners of English omitted or substituted indefinite articles by using a production task that c...

Studies examining age of onset (AoO) effects in childhood bilingualism have provided mixed results as to whether early sequential bilingual children (eL2) differ from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) and L2 children on the acquisition of morphosyntax. Differences between the three groups have been attributed to other factors such as length of...

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...

Cross-linguistic effects in successive childhood bilingualism have received increased attention in the last few years. The goal of this special issue is to bring together studies that investigate cross-linguistic influence in child second language (L2) learners by examining how first language (L1) and L2 properties develop and interact in the conte...

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...

Research on bilingualism has boomed in the past two decades. The processes by which a second language is acquired and processed has been investigated via linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic perspectives, focusing not only on second language (L2) acquisition and processing, but also the effects it might have on cognition and brain stru...

The present paper examines the production of definite and indefinite articles in English-speaking typically developing (TD) children and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Twenty four English-speaking children with SLI (mean age: 7;5), twenty nine TD age-matched (TD-AM) children (mean age: 7;5) and eleven younger (mean age: 5;5) TD v...

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...

ABSTRACT This study examines the comprehension and production of subject and object relative clauses (SRCs, ORCs) by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The purpose is to investigate whether relative clauses are problematic for Danish children with SLI and to compare errors with those produced...

This study investigates the production and online processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty-nine six- to nine-year-old L2 children and twenty-eight typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production c...

The present study investigates the effects of child internal (age/time) and child external/environmental factors on the development of a wide range of language domains in successive bilingual (L2) Turkish-English children of homogeneously low SES. Forty-three L2 children were tested on standardized assessments examining the acquisition of vocabular...

This paper investigates how sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-English children comprehend English reflexives and pronouns and tests whether they pattern similarly to monolingual (L1) children, L2 adults, or children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI).Thirty nine 6- to 9-year-old L2 children with an age of onset of 30–48 months and exposure to...

Children with English as a second language (L2) with exposure of 18 months or less exhibit similar difficulties to children with Specific Language Impairment in tense marking, a marker of language impairment for English. This paper examines whether L2 children with longer exposure converge with their monolingual peers in the production of tense mar...

This volume presents recent generative research on the nature of grammars of child second language (L2) acquirers -- a learner population whose exposure to an L2 occurs between the ages of 4 to 8. The main goal is to define child L2 acquisition in relation to other types of acquisition such as child monolingual and bilingual acquisition, adult L2 a...

Το άρθρο αφορά τη μέτρηση της ελληνομάθειας στα μειονοτικά δημοτικά σχολεία της Θράκης που πραγματοποιήθηκε κατά την περίοδο 2002-2003 στο πλαίσιο του Προγράμματος «Εκπαίδευση Μουσουλμανοπαίδων» (Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών, 2002–2004). Η έρευνα είχε ως στόχους την αξιολόγηση της γλωσσικής ικανότητας στα ελληνικά του συγκεκριμένου μαθητικού πληθυσμού, καθώ...