Adriana Weisleder

Young children’s symbolic play provides insight into their language and cognitive development. However, little is known about the development of symbolic play in multilingual learners. Recent evidence suggests that multilingual environments can lead to certain cognitive adaptations, including in processes that have been linked to symbolic play. In the current study, we observed a U.S.-based sample of 15- to 20-month-old multilingual and monolingual learners in a parent-child interaction from which we coded their symbolic play (47 multilingual, 48 monolingual). We found no differences between the monolingual and multilingual learners in early emerging levels of symbolic play (e.g., drinking from an empty cup). However, we found significant differences in later emerging levels of symbolic play (e.g., using a piece of cloth as a blanket), with multilingual learners showing greater engagement in these more advanced levels of symbolic play than monolingual learners. This is the first study to show that multilingual learners engage in more abstract levels of symbolic play than age-matched monolingual learners. These findings support the hypothesis that early exposure to multiple languages may contribute to cognitive adaptations with diverse behavioral manifestations.

Decades of research have established links between speech input and children’s vocabulary growth. However, it is unclear if input also facilitates phonological development. Phonology has a strong biological component—–implicating fine motor development—–so language socialization factors like speech input may matter less. Further complicating matters, children in many cultures are exposed to vastly different amounts of speech input, and yet these children still reach many major language development milestones on age-appropriate timelines. How does speech input relate to infant phonological development in the first years of life? We estimated infants’ (1) speech input and (2) vocal maturity using daylong audio recordings taken in an Indigenous Quechua- and Spanish-speaking community in Bolivia (n=10, M age=12 months, 5 females, 5 males) and an immigrant Spanish- and English-speaking community in the U.S. (n=10, M age=9 months, 4 females, 6 males; all Hispanic or Latino). Although we found no differences in the overall amount of total speech input between communities, infants in the U.S. were 2.5x more likely to hear speech directed to them than the infants in Bolivia. When child-directed speech was instead characterized to include all speech directed to any child within the infants’ vicinity, there were no differences between communities. When employing these different definitions of child-directed speech, we found positive relationships between quantity of speech input and different metrics of the Bolivian infants’ vocal maturity. These results paint a nuanced picture showing that directedspeech input, even when less common, is related to early precursors of phonological development, and that by expanding the definition of speech input to accommodate diverse cultural settings we can understand how infants’ language development is resilient to differences in speech input.

Purpose: Pediatricians are the first professionals to provide guidance about language development to families with young children and referrals for those who may have a language or communication disorder. One-quarter of children in the United States are dual language learners (DLLs), yet there is little information about pediatrician's readiness to provide culturally and linguistically responsive care for these children. This pilot study sought to examine pediatricians' knowledge of bilingual language development and its relation to the provision of language and literacy promotion and developmental surveillance for Latine DLLs. Method: Sixty-seven pediatricians at two academic pediatric clinics completed a survey asking about their knowledge about bilingual language development, Spanish proficiency, and provision of culturally effective health care to Latine DLLs. Analyses examined mean levels of these variables as well as relationships between knowledge, proficiency, and practices. Results: On average, pediatricians' responses to the knowledge-based questions agreed with the evidence 69% of the time. Only 29% of pediatricians said they felt comfortable counseling Latine parents on bilingual language development, and 75% indicated they had difficulty recognizing signs of a language or communication disorders in Latine children from Spanish-speaking homes. Multiple regressions showed that pediatricians with higher Spanish proficiency and those with greater knowledge of bilingual language development provided more culturally and linguistically responsive care to Latine DLLs. Conclusions: We identified significant gaps in pediatricians' knowledge about bilingual language development that were associated with their practice patterns. Results highlight the need for incorporating training about bilingual language development into pediatric education and increasing the number of providers that speak languages other than English. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29954468

Book-sharing interactions expose children to diverse language input, yet most research on parent–child book-sharing has focused on monolingual parents reading monolingual books. This study investigated how Latine bilingual parents in the U.S. share different types of books with their children. Twenty-four Latine parents and their three- to five-year-old children shared a monolingual English-only book and a bilingual English-Spanish book. Parents used a higher proportion of total words and different words in Spanish when sharing the bilingual book than the monolingual book. They also engaged in more code-switching with the bilingual book than the English monolingual book. There were no differences in the number or diversity of words in English between book types. These findings show that bilingual books increase parents’ use of the home language (in this case Spanish) relative to books in the societal language, and suggest they may be one way of supporting children’s dual language development.

Book-sharing interactions expose children to diverse language input, yet most research on parent-child book-sharing has focused on monolingual parents reading monolingual books. This study investigated how Latine bilingual parents in the U.S. share different types of books with their children. Twenty-four Latine parents and their three- to five-year-old children shared a monolingual English-only book and a bilingual English-Spanish book. Parents used a higher proportion of total words and different words in Spanish when sharing the bilingual book than the monolingual book. They also engaged in more code-switching with the bilingual book than the English monolingual book. There were no differences in the number or diversity of words in English between book types. These findings show that bilingual books increase parents’ use of the home language (in this case Spanish) relative to books in the societal language only, and suggest they may be one way of supporting children’s dual language development.

Purpose: Children with a history of late talking continue to score on the low-average end of the language endowment spectrum as they grow up. Most research on Late Talker outcomes focuses on spoken language, raising questions about the role of nonverbal communication in children with a history of late talking. The current study extends work on Late Talker outcomes by examining gesture use in children with and without a history of late talking.Method: Preschool aged children with a history of late talking (hLT, n = 16) and with a history of typical talking (hTT, n = 23) told four stories based on wordless cartoons. We examined their gesture use by coding gesture frequency, types (deictic vs. representational), and the informational relationship between spoken language and gesture (redundant vs. non-redundant). We hypothesized that hLTs would recruit gesture as a communication tool during storytelling to supplement their spoken language skills, and thus use more gestures and specifically more representational and non-redundant gestures.Results: Both groups used gestures during the storytelling task. However, we did not find significant differences between hLTs and hTTs on measures of gesture frequency, type, or informational relation to spoken language. Conclusion: Gesture appears to be a ubiquitous communication tool used alongside spoken language for preschoolers with and without a history of late talking. Our findings suggest that a history of late talking does not reliably predict gesture use at 4 years of age.Keywords: gesture, nonverbal communication, history of late talking, language delay, communication outcomes, preschool.

Immigrant children are a growing and demographically important segment of the world's population. One key aspect of immigrant children's experience is navigating multiple languages, creating both opportunities, and challenges. However, the literature on bilingualism rarely centers the experiences of immigrant children. Focusing on immigrant children in the United States, this article brings together cognitive science research on bilingualism with the integrative risk and resilience model of adaptation in immigrant-origin children to elucidate how common contexts that immigrant children encounter can support or discourage multilingualism. Policy must consider immigrant children's intersecting identities—both as immigrants and as learners of minoritized, and often racialized, languages. A proposed framework can guide policies to support multilingualism in immigrant children, with downstream consequences for their health and development.

Immigrant children are a growing and demographically important segment of the world's population. One key aspect of immigrant children's experience is navigating multiple languages, creating both opportunities, and challenges. However, the literature on bilingualism rarely centers the experiences of immigrant children. Focusing on immigrant children in the United States, this article brings together cognitive science research on bilingualism with the integrative risk and resilience model of adaptation in immigrant-origin children to elucidate how common contexts that immigrant children encounter can support or discourage multilingualism. Policy must consider immigrant children's intersecting identities—both as immigrants and as learners of minoritized, and often racialized, languages. A proposed framework can guide policies to support multilingualism in immigrant children, with downstream consequences for their health and development.