Jim Paradis
Biographic Data
| ID | 1144250 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jim Paradis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jim |
| FAMILY NAME | Paradis |
| SIGNATURE | PARADIS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4825-3301 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Bullying victimization, language proficiency, and school belonging among Syrian refugee early adolescents in Canada
Refugee children's school adjustment is often associated with host country language proficiency, peer victimization, and school belonging, but longitudinal associations among these constructs may reflect both stable child differences and time‐varying school‐experience processes. This three‐wave longitudinal study examined English language proficiency, bullying victimization, and school belonging in 68 Syrian refugee children in Canada. We estimat…
The role of age of arrival and language environment factors in Arabic heritage language development
The Arabic development of Syrian refugee children ( N = 133; mean age = 9;4 at Time 1) was examined over 3 time periods during their first five years in Canada. Children were administered sentence repetition and receptive vocabulary tasks in English and Arabic, and information about age-of-arrival (AOA), schooling in Arabic and language environment factors was obtained via parent report. Older AOA was associated with superior Arabic abilities acr…
Predictors of cross-linguistic influence in school-age child and adolescent heritage speakers
This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the production of wh -questions by child heritage speakers of Mandarin aged 6;9 to 16;2 years in Canada. The form of CLI addressed is wh -fronting in Mandarin object-questions (where fronting is ungrammatical) and when -questions (where fronting is dispreferred). Our goals were, first, to determine whether the children front more frequently relative to their mothers; and second, to determine…
Effects of bilingualism on foreign language learning during kindergarten years
This study examines the underlying mechanisms driving the bilingual advantage in learning English as a foreign language (EFL) among kindergarten-aged children. Participants included 85 Dutch-speaking monolinguals and 34 bilingual children. We assessed children’s English vocabulary and grammar as the outcome variables. Furthermore, phonological awareness, executive functions and motivation to learn English were measured as potential mediators of t…
The longitudinal development of L2 complex syntax in Arabic-English refugee children
We examined the growth of English-L2 clausal density (CD) in narrative language samples from 129 school-age Syrian refugee children during their first 5 years of residency in Canada. First, we found that CD showed unique developmental trajectories from MLUw, and relatively rapid acquisition, consistent with studies with non-refugee participants. Second, faster growth in CD was associated with superior cognitive abilities and higher maternal educa…
The role of refugee children’s host country language in their resilience to resettlement
One hundred twenty-six children (between 6 and 13 years) in 71 families who were resettled in Canada, as a result of the Syrian Civil War, were followed up over 3 years, using a sibling comparison, longitudinal design. This design allowed us to test the hypothesis that host country receptive language competence (L2) protects refugee children's mental health in families with limited resources (low parental education, large family size). The siblin…
The impact of out-of-school L2 input and interaction on adolescent classroom immersion and community-L2 learners’ L2 vocabulary
Comparing young second-language (L2) learners in different learning contexts is a valuable, but under-researched, design for determining how L2 experiences impact L2 development. This study addressed this gap by comparing the out-of-school L2 experiences of adolescents ( N = 64) learning L2-English as either a community majority language or as a foreign language in an immersion classroom, and examining how differences in L2 experience impacted En…
The role of parental characteristics, home language use, and schooling in children's Mandarin heritage language development in Canada
Introduction This study on child HL (heritage language) speakers of Mandarin examines the associations between parental characteristics (attitudes and proficiency), children's HL use (at home and through schooling), and children's HL outcomes (in vocabulary and simple syntax). Methods Forty-seven Mandarin-English bilingual children of Chinese heritage (mean age: 10.5; age range: 6.8–16.2) residing in Western Canada participated in the study. All …
Developmental language disorder in sequential bilinguals
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) and phonological (phonological neighbourhood, word length) properties were computed for nouns and ver…
Sources of individual differences in the dual language development of heritage bilinguals
Bilingual children are a more heterogenous group than their monolingual counterparts with respect to the sources of variation in their language learning environments, as well as the wide individual variation in their language abilities. Such heterogeneity in both individual difference factors and language abilities argues for the importance of an individual differences approach in research on bilingual development. The main objective of this arti…
Morphology and Reading Skills in Arabic‐Speaking Syrian Refugee Children
Limited research has been conducted on the literacy skills of Arabic‐speaking refugee children. This study investigated the concurrent and longitudinal roles of morphological awareness in Arabic word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 75 Syrian refugee children aged 6–13 years resettled in Canada were administered measures of nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, word reading accuracy, and re…
Age, Experience and Language and Literacy Skills in English-Arabic Speaking Syrian Refugees
Although age of acquisition (AoA) is frequently used when examining the endpoint of second language (L2) learning, it is rarely used to examine the initial phases of L2 acquisition. The present study provided a unique look at the role of AoA in early language and literacy acquisition in the L2 by a priori selecting two groups of Arabic-English speakers based on their ages, 6-8-year-olds (N = 43) and 9-13-year-olds (N = 53). These Syrian refugees …
Does the Use of Complex Sentences Differentiate Between Bilinguals With and Without DLD? Evidence From Conversation and Narrative Tasks
Over-identification of language disorder among bilingual children with typical development (TD) is a risk factor in assessment. One strategy for improving assessment accuracy with bilingual children is to determine which linguistic sub-domains differentiate bilingual children with TD from bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD). To date, little research on sequential bilinguals with TD and DLD has focussed on complex (multi-…
The role of socioemotional wellbeing difficulties and adversity in the L2 acquisition of first-generation refugee children
First-generation refugee children often experience pre- and post-migration adversity and display high levels of mental health/wellbeing difficulties, but to date, research has not examined the impact of such factors on refugee children's L2 acquisition. Accordingly, this study examined the influence of externalizing and internalizing problem behaviours (wellbeing), time in refugee camps and low socioeconomic status (SES) (adversity) on the Englis…
Sources of variation at the onset of bilingualism
Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee children ( N = 119) recently arrived in Canada using a sentence repetition task. Regression analyses showed…
What can journals do to increase the publication of research on the acquisition of understudied languages? A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022)
This commentary focuses on what editors and reviewers could do to increase the publication of research on understudied languages. Specifically, I discuss three areas in which editors and reviewers could shift their perspectives and, in so doing, support the goal of increasing diversity in our field: (1) Rethinking the criteria for novelty of contribution, (2) Contextualizing sample sizes and methods and (3) Embracing multilingualism as typical de…
Morphosyntactic Development in First Generation Arabic-English Children
This longitudinal study examined morphosyntactic development in the heritage Arabic-L1 and English-L2 of first-generation Syrian refugee children (mean age = 9.5; range = 6-13) within their first three years in Canada. Morphosyntactic abilities were measured using sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) in English and Syrian Arabic that included diverse morphosyntactic structures. Direct measures of verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills were obtained, …
Oral Language Profiles of English Second Language Learners in Adolescence
It is often claimed that child English L2 learners take up to seven years to attain English skills commensurate with those of monolingual peers; however, existing research is insufficient to know if this claim is valid for oral language abilities in particular. This study examined the lexical and morphological abilities of English L2 learners and their monolingual peers (ages 12–15; N = 227) in Canadian middle schools to determine the timeline fo…
The acquisition of relative clauses by Mandarin heritage language children
This study examined the phenomena of incomplete acquisition, attrition, and protracted acquisition of the L1 in HL children by focusing on the comprehension and production of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin HL children. A cross-sectional design (study 1) and a longitudinal design (study 2) were both included. Our results showed that HL children were comparable to monolinguals for the comprehension of RCs in both study 1 and …
How does maternal education influence the linguistic environment supporting bilingual language development in child second language learners of English
Aims: In monolingual situations, mothers with higher levels of education are more likely to provide their children with enriched linguistic input. However, in bilingual situations, the relationship between maternal education and input is more complex because education may have occurred in one, but not both, of the languages. This study details this complexity by examining the relationship between maternal education and linguistic input in a group…
Home language environment and children's second language acquisition
Previous research suggests that increased second language (L2) input at home may not support L2 acquisition in children from migrant backgrounds. In drawing this conclusion, existing work has largely aggregated across family members. This study contrasts the effect of L2 input from older siblings with that from mothers. Participants were 113 child L2 learners of English (mean age = 5;10 [range 4;10–7;2]; mean exposure to L2 in school = 16.7 month…
Effects of parental input quality in child heritage language acquisition
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 subject placement in wide focus and embedded interrogative contexts, where postverbal subjects are …
Language-level input factors are not enough to explain child bilingual acquisition
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Input effects across domains
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 are more likely to lead to non-native outcomes than strictly syntactic aspects of the language (Sorace…
Bilingual children's long‐term outcomes in English as a second language
Bilingual children experience more variation in their language environment than monolingual children and this impacts their rate of language development with respect to monolinguals. How long it takes for bilingual children learning English as a second language (L2) to display similar abilities to monolingual age‐peers has been estimated to be 4–6 years, but conflicting findings suggest that even 6 years in school is not enough. Most studies on l…
Bilingual Children's Acquisition of English Verb Morphology
This study investigated whether bilingual-monolingual differences would be apparent in school-age children's use and knowledge of English verb morphology and whether differences would be influenced by amount of exposure to English, complexity of the morphological structure, or the type of task given. French-English bilinguals (mean age = 6;10) were given a standardized test with two production probes and a grammaticality judgment probe for Englis…
Input effects across domains
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 are more likely to lead to non-native outcomes than strictly syntactic aspects of the language (Sorace…
The acquisition of articles in child second language English
The data for this study consisted of a longitudinal corpus of narratives from 17 English second language (L2) children, mean age of 5;4 years at the outset, with first languages (Lls) that do not have definite/indefinite articles (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and Lls that do have article systems (Spanish, Romanian and Arabic). We examined these children's acquisition of articles in order to determine the role of L1 transfer and, in so doing, tes…
Effects of Input Properties, Vocabulary Size, and L1 on the Development of Third Person Singular -s in Child L2 English
This study was designed to investigate the development of third-person singular (3SG) -s in children who learn English as a second language (L2). Adopting the usage-based perspective on the learning of inflection, we analyzed spontaneous speech samples collected from 15 English L2 children who were followed over a 2-year period. Assessing the contribution of a wide range of predictors, we show that word frequency, allomorph, lexicon size, inflect…
Morphosyntactic Development in First Generation Arabic-English Children
This longitudinal study examined morphosyntactic development in the heritage Arabic-L1 and English-L2 of first-generation Syrian refugee children (mean age = 9.5; range = 6-13) within their first three years in Canada. Morphosyntactic abilities were measured using sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) in English and Syrian Arabic that included diverse morphosyntactic structures. Direct measures of verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills were obtained, …
The emergence of tense and agreement in child L2 French
The present study examined the acquisition of tense and agreement by L2 learners of French. We looked at whether the features and and the categories AGRP and TP emerged simultaneously or in sequence in the learners' grammars.We conducted interviews with English-speaking children acquiring French as a second language and with grade-matched native-speaker controls once a year for three years. The data were analysed for the productive use of morphos…
Acquiring Regular and Irregular Past Tense Morphemes in English and French
The aim of this study was to use crosslinguistic data from French-English bilinguals to test two models of past tense acquisition: (a) single route (all past tense forms rely on morphophonological schemas) and (b) dual route (irregular forms are learned as words, regulars through rules). These models make similar predictions about English acquisition, the focus of most previous research. French irregular verbs are often low in token frequency but…
Morphology and Reading Skills in Arabic‐Speaking Syrian Refugee Children
Limited research has been conducted on the literacy skills of Arabic‐speaking refugee children. This study investigated the concurrent and longitudinal roles of morphological awareness in Arabic word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 75 Syrian refugee children aged 6–13 years resettled in Canada were administered measures of nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, word reading accuracy, and re…
Language differentiation in early bilingual development
It has been claimed that children simultaneously acquiring two languages go through an initial stage when they are unable to differentiate between their two languages. Such claims have been based on the observation that at times virtually all bilingual children mix elements (e.g. lexical, morphological) from their two languages in the same utterance. That most, if not all, children acquiring two languages simultaneously mix linguistic elements in…
Syntactic Acquisition in Bilingual Children
Recent research on pragmatic and syntactic development in bilingual 2-year-olds has shown that these children have differentiated language systems. However, it remains to be shown whether their grammars develop autonomously or interdependently from 2 years onward. The present study investigates the potential interference between the grammars of French-English bilingual children, aged 2–3 years. We examined their acquisition of functional categori…
The emergence of tense and agreement in child L2 French
The present study examined the acquisition of tense and agreement by L2 learners of French. We looked at whether the features and and the categories AGRP and TP emerged simultaneously or in sequence in the learners' grammars.We conducted interviews with English-speaking children acquiring French as a second language and with grade-matched native-speaker controls once a year for three years. The data were analysed for the productive use of morphos…
Beyond ‘One System or Two?’
Do bilingual two-year-olds have separate phonological systems
The present study was designed to examine whether bilingual two-year-olds have differentiated phonological systems and if so, whether there are crosslinguistic influences between them. Eighteen English-speaking monolingual, 18 Frenchspeaking monolingual and 17 French-English bilingual children (mean age=30 months) participated in a nonsense-word repetition task. The children's syllable omissions/truncations of the four-syllable target words were …
Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English
This study investigated whether crosslinguistic interference occurs in the domain of subject realization in Spanish in a bilingual acquisition context. We were also interested in exploring whether the source of the interference is due to child-internal crosslanguage contact between English and Spanish, as is commonly assumed, or due to the nature of the language input in a bilingual family, a factor which has not typically been considered in stud…
The Influence of Dominance and Sociolinguistic Context on Bilingual Preschoolers' Language Choice
Two-year-old bilingual children can show sensitivity to the language choice of their interlocutor, but do not necessarily achieve perfect separation by discourse context, e.g. speaking only French with a French interlocutor; dominance in one language is often cited as a reason for this. In this study we asked whether older bilingual preschoolers would show more absolute discourse separation than had been established with younger children because …
Lexical acquisition over time in minority first language children learning English as a second language
The English second language development of 19 children (mean age at outset = 5 years, 4 months) from various first language backgrounds was examined every 6 months for 2 years, using spontaneous language sampling, parental questionnaires, and a standardized receptive vocabulary test. Results showed that the children's mean mental age equivalency and standard scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—Third Edition nearly met native-speaker exp…
The acquisition of articles in child second language English
The data for this study consisted of a longitudinal corpus of narratives from 17 English second language (L2) children, mean age of 5;4 years at the outset, with first languages (Lls) that do not have definite/indefinite articles (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and Lls that do have article systems (Spanish, Romanian and Arabic). We examined these children's acquisition of articles in order to determine the role of L1 transfer and, in so doing, tes…
Maturation
Meisel has argued in favour of the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (FDH), a version of the Critical Period Hypothesis, for L2 acquisition. Most particularly, he has proposed that maturational changes in domain-specific, language learning mechanisms are in evidence as young as four years of age. In a nutshell, the proposal is that for certain domains of morphosyntactic acquisition, if exposure to a language does not begin before 4;0, the develop…
Assessment of English language learners
Bilingual Children's Acquisition of English Verb Morphology
This study investigated whether bilingual-monolingual differences would be apparent in school-age children's use and knowledge of English verb morphology and whether differences would be influenced by amount of exposure to English, complexity of the morphological structure, or the type of task given. French-English bilinguals (mean age = 6;10) were given a standardized test with two production probes and a grammaticality judgment probe for Englis…
The impact of input factors on bilingual development
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Individual differences in child English second language acquisition
This study investigated how various child-internal and child-external factors predict English L2 children’s acquisition outcomes for vocabulary size and accuracy with verb morphology. The children who participated (N=169) were between 4;10 and 7;0 years old (mean = 5;10), had between 3 to 62 months of exposure to English (mean = 20 months), and were from newcomer families to Canada. Results showed that factors such as language aptitude (phonologi…
Learning to liaise and elide comme il faut
Liaison and elision in French are phonological phenomena that apply across word boundaries. French-speaking children make errors in contexts where liaison/elision typically occurs in adult speech. In this study, we asked if acquisition of French liaison/elision can be explained in a constructivist framework. We tested if children's liaison/elision was sensitive to co-occurrence and meaning. We expected children's use of liaison/elision to correla…
Bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense
Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age=4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic structures. Both bilingual and monolingual children were less accurate with irregular than regular past tens…
Articles in child L2 English
In this study, the authors investigate the acquisition of the article system of English as a phenomenon at the interface between morphosyntax and semantics. L1 acquisition studies have found that children make mistakes in article use until they are at least four years old or possibly older. Also, adult L2 acquisition studies have reported that learners of English often have consistent difficulty in the use of articles until very late stages of ac…
Effects of Input Properties, Vocabulary Size, and L1 on the Development of Third Person Singular -s in Child L2 English
This study was designed to investigate the development of third-person singular (3SG) -s in children who learn English as a second language (L2). Adopting the usage-based perspective on the learning of inflection, we analyzed spontaneous speech samples collected from 15 English L2 children who were followed over a 2-year period. Assessing the contribution of a wide range of predictors, we show that word frequency, allomorph, lexicon size, inflect…
Acquiring Regular and Irregular Past Tense Morphemes in English and French
The aim of this study was to use crosslinguistic data from French-English bilinguals to test two models of past tense acquisition: (a) single route (all past tense forms rely on morphophonological schemas) and (b) dual route (irregular forms are learned as words, regulars through rules). These models make similar predictions about English acquisition, the focus of most previous research. French irregular verbs are often low in token frequency but…
Acquisition of English grammatical morphology by internationally adopted children from China
Acquisition of English grammatical morphology was examined in five internationally adopted (IA) children from China (aged 0;10–1;1 at adoption) during the first three years' exposure to English to determine whether acquisition patterns were characteristic of child second language (L2) learners or monolingual first language (L1) learners. Results from spontaneous and elicited speech showed that IA children acquired grammatical morphemes similarly …
Chinese L1 children's English L2 verb morphology over time
This study examined accuracy in production and grammaticality judgements of verb morphology by eighteen Chinese-speaking children learning English as a second language (L2) followed longitudinally from four to six years of exposure to English, and who began to learn English at age 4;2. Children's growth in accuracy with verb morphology reached a plateau by six years, where 11/18 children did not display native-speaker levels of accuracy for one o…
Introduction
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 to delays in exposure, it is a widespread assumption that these are detrimental to language outcomes…
Bilingual children's long‐term outcomes in English as a second language
Bilingual children experience more variation in their language environment than monolingual children and this impacts their rate of language development with respect to monolinguals. How long it takes for bilingual children learning English as a second language (L2) to display similar abilities to monolingual age‐peers has been estimated to be 4–6 years, but conflicting findings suggest that even 6 years in school is not enough. Most studies on l…
Introduction
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Language-level input factors are not enough to explain child bilingual acquisition
Preview this article: Language-level input factors are not enough to explain child bilingual acquisition, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/lab.18059.par-1.gif
Language Development and Disorders (42 works) · Psychology (40 works) · Linguistics (37 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (28 works) · Developmental psychology (24 works) · Language acquisition (20 works) · Mathematics education (19 works) · Language development (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (16 works)