Predictors of Language Growth in Bilingual Infants (Honorable Mention)

Both monolingual and bilingual toddlers exhibit rapid gains in vocabulary beginning at approximately 18 months of age, making this age especially interesting for examining word processing and vocabulary growth (Hoff, 2009). In this paper, I review research with monolingual children showing that early processing abilities predict later differences in language growth, and that this relationship has been noted in bilingual as well as monolingual children. I also review the evidence that there are language processing differences between each language of bilingual children, as well as differences in the processing skills of bilingual compared to monolingual children, and propose that individual differences in the early language processing abilities of bilingual children are linked to their later language development