Limited studies have examined demographic differences in children’s vocabulary in longitudinal samples, while there are questions regarding the duration, direction, and magnitude of these effects across development. In this longitudinal study, we included over 400 Dutch children. Caregivers filled out N-CDIs when children were 9–11 months (measuring word comprehension, word production, and gestures) and around 2–5 years of age (measuring word production). At 2–5 years, we also administered a receptive vocabulary task in the lab. We examined demographic effects on vocabulary size across infancy and toddlerhood. We found a disadvantage for males in infants’ gestures and toddlers’ vocabulary production. We found a negative effect of maternal education on infants’ caregiver-reported vocabulary, but a positive effect on toddlers’ lab-administered receptive vocabulary. Lastly, we found a negative effect of multilingualism – but only for the lab-administered task. Examining predictors in large, longitudinal samples ensures their robustness and generalisability across development.

The vocabulary of bilingual children is determined by various linguistic factors that develop depending on the language input and individual factors of these children. To understand vocabulary development and to be able to support these children accordingly, the assessment instruments essentially need to be adapted to this individual process. The current study examined factors influencing productive vocabulary performance by means of explanatory item-response models on a sample of 126 German monolingual and Turkish—German bilingual preschool children aged between 3 and 6 years. We analyzed item features with respect to lexical category, length, frequency, age of acquisition, and complexity in dependence of the language background of the children. Apart from a general delay in the development and some language specific characteristics, the results indicate a parallel shifted acquisition of vocabulary in bilingual children, which is nonetheless shaped by the same factors as in monolinguals.

Typically-developing bilingual children often score lower than monolingual peers of the same age on standardized measures; however, research has shown that when assessed in more natural discourse contexts, bilinguals can perform similar to age-matched monolinguals in some language subdomains. This study investigated complex syntax production in simultaneous French–English bilingual children and monolingual age-matched peers, using structured and spontaneous measures. Surprisingly, the bilinguals scored higher than the monolinguals on the structured task. There was no difference between groups on the spontaneous measure; however, predictors of complex syntax production differed by language groups and by tasks. Contrary to other language subdomains showing bilingual English development as protracted relative to monolingual peers, these results point to a relative strength of complex syntax acquisition among simultaneous bilingual children. Differences in exposure relative to monolingual children may be less pronounced in syntax, in part because bilinguals can benefit from syntactic knowledge in their other language.

Sign language research is important for our understanding of languages in general and for the impact it has on policy and on the lives of deaf people. There is a need for a sign language proficiency measure, to use as a grouping or continuous variable, both in psycholinguistics and in other sign language research. This article describes the development of a Swedish Sign Language Sentence Repetition Test (STS-SRT) and the evidence that supports the validity of the test’s interpretation and use. The STS-SRT was administered to 44 deaf adults and children, and was shown to have excellent internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.915) and inter-rater reliability (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient [ICC] = 0.900, p < .001). A linear mixed model analysis revealed that adults scored 20.2% higher than children, and delayed sign language acquisition were associated with lower scores. As the sign span of sentences increased, participants relied on their implicit linguistic knowledge to scaffold their sentence repetitions beyond rote memory. The results provide reliability and validity evidence to support the use of STS-SRT in research as a measure of STS proficiency.

Though Germany has long provided education for children speaking a heritage language and received two recent waves of refugees, reliable assessment tools for diagnosis of language impairment or the progress in the acquisition of German as a second language (L2) by refugee children are still lacking. The few tools expressly targeting bilingual populations are normed for younger, early successive bilingual children. This study investigates 27 typically developing children with Arabic as first language (L1), comparing 15 school-age Syrian refugees (6;6–12;8), with 12 heritage speakers (6;0–12;9). We assess the L1 and L2 skills of these two groups with standardized tests, but crucially with an Arabic and a German sentence repetition (SRT) as well as a nonword (NWRT) repetition task (Grimm & Hübner, in press; Marinis & Armon-Lotem, 2015). Comparable scores emerged only for German LITMUS-NWRT and Arabic LITMUS-SRT. Refugee children had an advantage in L1 measures, for example, vocabulary and morphosyntactic production, whereas they performed poorly in the German LITMUS-SRT and other L2 tests involving morphosyntax and vocabulary even with 24 months of systematic exposure. This indicates that the acquisition of adequate vocabulary and complex syntax takes time. The paper explores factors influencing performance on the repetition tasks and relates the results to established diagnostic procedures and educational policies.

We examine the role of language production mechanisms in sentence repetition, a task widely used as a diagnostic tool in developmental disorders. We investigate sentence repetition in 5- to 8-year-old native speakers of Kannada, an inflectionally rich language of India. The inflectional characteristics of the language make it an ideal testing ground for exploring the engagement of grammatical and phonological encoding processes. We presented active, passive, and embedded sentences and, in a subset of the material, we also manipulated sentence length. Using accuracy and speech error analyses at the sentence, word, and affix levels, we provide evidence that individual differences in task performance are influenced by the linguistic properties of the material. These findings clarify the role of key language production mechanisms involved in sentence repetition. We propose that it is the versatility to develop a profile across several language production mechanisms that makes sentence repetition particularly useful as a clinical tool.

As Tarone (1998) stated, an understanding of interlanguage variation in relation to contextual changes has been a key issue in both second language acquisition (SLA) and language assessment (LA) research. Research on interlanguage variation has shown that systematic variation is often evidenced when different phonological and syntactic forms are examined across contexts. Such systematic variation has raised important questions about the distinction between competence and performance, and generalizability of results beyond the research elicitation tasks or test tasks in SLA and LA research. However, most previous studies that have examined this issue are based on cross-sectional data with a focus on between-group differences rather than within-individual differences across different contexts. Such limited data often make it difficult for researchers to understand individual developmental trends in interlanguage as well as to interpret context effects on the learner's spoken and written language data. Electronic (E)-portfolios may address this limitation by serving as a valuable research and assessment tool for collecting and storing an individual learner's language samples obtained across different tasks over time. The technology may also enhance the situational and interactional authenticity of tasks by including multi-media input and constructed response tasks. However, it is not clear how tasks in E-portfolios can be constructed to represent various linguistic and situational contexts, and how they could be systematically evaluated and scored. In that vein, this article addresses a number of limitations of existing E-portfolios as a research and assessment tool, and offers recommendations and suggestions for future research.

Based on a Conversation Analysis (CA) of a corpus of Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI), the study asks what kind of interaction receives high and low ratings in OPIs. The discussion focuses on issues of interactional organisation, considering turn-taking, sequence, repair and topic development in relation to candidate scores. The study presents findings of two funded studies of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Speaking Test (IST), which is one part of IELTS, a major international English proficiency test.

The article explains how interaction in the IST is organised in interactional terms and how this organisation generates opportunities to differentiate high- and low-scoring interaction. The study then lists the interactional characteristics of high-scoring and low-scoring tests, based on an inductive search through the database and analysis of the micro-interaction. Extracts are presented to support characterisations. Differences in score correlate to the following interactional differences in Parts 1 and 3 of the IST: ability to answer the question, engage with and develop a topic coherently, amount of trouble and repair, lexical choice, and identity construction. In Part 2 of the IST, length of turn may also be related to score.