Elena Nicoladis
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 209650 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Elena Nicoladis |
| PRENOMES | Elena |
| SOBRENOME | Nicoladis |
| ASSINATURA | NICOLADIS E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5065-9159 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 85 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 59 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 85 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1995 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ use of gestures when telling a story
Researchers have speculated that proficiency in a language could affect the production of both referential and beat gestures. The primary purpose of the present study was to test whether bilinguals produced more referential and beat gestures than monolinguals, particularly in their second language. We also tested for possible effects of culture on gesture production by comparing speakers of both Farsi and Canadian French (on the one hand; English…
Does pointing predict bilingual children’s vocabulary
Previous studies have shown that children’s and parents’ pointing predicts monolingual children’s vocabulary, both concurrently and longitudinally. In this study, we predicted that children’s and parents’ pointing would positively predict bilingual children’s vocabulary growth in both languages. However, the strength of that link could differ depending on the child’s dominance, as parents often play a more didactic role when interacting in childr…
Subjective linguistic vitality (SEV) of German among minority German speakers in an English-majority-language community
Purpose: One important motivation to maintain a minority language is the perception that it allows people to connect meaningfully with other people who speak that language. Subjective ethnolinguistic vitality (SEV) refers to the perception that a language is important and useful. The primary purpose of this study was to test whether the language of the interview affected SEV of German among participants living in an English-majority-language part…
Arabic speakers gesture more than English speakers in a storytelling task
Some studies have shown cross-cultural differences in the frequency of representational gesture production. There have been anecdotal reports of Arabic speakers gesturing frequently in order to depict their message. The primary purpose of the present study was to test whether Arabic speakers use more representational gestures than English speakers when telling a story. Secondarily, we tested whether that difference was mediated by story quality. …
What is/are the goal(s) of translanguaging
Do children treat adjectives and nouns differently as modifiers in prenominal position
Usage-based theories of children’s syntactic acquisition (e.g., Tomasello, 2000a) predict that children’s abstract lexical categories emerge from their experience with particular words in constructions in their input. Because modifiers in English are almost always prenominal, children might initially treat adjectives similarly to nouns when used in a prenominal position. In this study, we taught English-speaking preschoolers (between 2 and 6 year…
Executive function's structure in monolingual and bilingual adults using confirmatory factor analysis
In processing their two languages, bilinguals have to selectively attend to the target language and reduce interference from the non-target language. This experience may have specific cognitive consequences on Executive Functions (EF) through bilingual language processing. Some studies found cognitive consequences in executive functioning skills. However, other studies did not replicate these findings or found a bilingual disadvantage. The aim of…
Effects of object familiarity on children’s silent gestures
When gesturing (with or without speech) actions done with objects, young children and adults with apraxia often produce a body-part-as-object (BPO), like an extended finger for a toothbrush. In contrast, older children and neurotypical adults often produce an imagined object (IO), like pretending to hold a toothbrush. The purpose of this study was to test whether IOs are produced when children have a rich conceptual understanding of the functions…
Pronoun comprehension and cross-linguistic influence in monolingual and bilingual children
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: Pronoun comprehension can present challenges for young bilingual and monolingual children. The current study aimed to assess cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and pronoun comprehension in early childhood. Several studies have demonstrated the role of overlap across languages and its impact on language development. The present study investigates the influence of the acquisition of another language con…
Complex sentence production in bilingual and monolingual children
Bilingual children often lag behind monolinguals on standardized measures of language acquisition, such as vocabulary tests. This bilingual lag could be related bilinguals’ lesser experience with the target language relative to monolinguals. In this study, we predicted that sequential Mandarin-English bilinguals would perform worse than same-aged English monolinguals on a standardized measure of complex sentence production. As predicted, the bili…
Monolingual and bilingual children’s production of complex syntactic structures
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 …
HL Mandarin Speakers Toss the Same Way as Fluent Mandarin Speakers
Heritage language ( HL ) speakers often show weaker semantics in HL words than speakers who continue to learn and use the language. In this study, we tested whether HL Mandarin speakers simplified near-synonyms of throw verbs by diminishing the difference between the near-synonyms and/or by diminishing the difference between the generic throw verb and other near-synonyms. Two participant groups, HL Mandarin speakers and English second-language le…
Task effects in Farsi-English bilinguals’ use of gestures
The primary purpose of this study was to test whether there were task differences (storytelling vs. language learning history) in gesture frequency among Farsi-English bilinguals. Given the importance of visuospatial processing for representational gestures, we predicted that participants would produce more representational gestures when telling a story than when recounting their language learning history (i.e., how they learned English as second…
Establishing rapport with Punjabi-English bilinguals
This study tested whether Punjabi-English bilinguals feel a stronger rapport with another bilingual stranger when communicating in L1 Punjabi or their dominant L2 English. Some previous studies have shown greater emotional reactions to a dominant language. We predicted that participants would feel more comfortable speaking their dominant language. Participants completed an origami task via Zoom with a confederate while communicating in English an…
Do gestures reflect children’s lexical retrieval difficulties
According to the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis, one important function of representational gestures is to help speakers retrieve words for production. In this study, we test whether gestures help preschoolers access words for production. We tested two predictions generated from the LRH. First, since bilinguals often have greater difficulties with lexical access than monolinguals, we predicted that bilinguals will gesture more than monolinguals. Se…
It’s easier to kill a baby to save oneself than a fat man to save other people
Previous research has shown that bilinguals respond differently to moral dilemmas posed in each of their languages, tending to make deontologically-based decisions (based on right or wrong) in their first language and utilitarian decisions (bringing about the most good) in their second language. In the present study, we tested several predictors of bilinguals’ moral reasoning: language (L1 Russian or L2 English), gender, proficiency, age, and dil…
Les francophones canadiens gesticulent‐ils fréquemment
Selon les stéréotypes, les francophones font plus de gestes en parlant que les anglophones. L’objectif principal de cette étude est de vérifier cette hypothèse en comparant la fréquence des gestes entre des francophones et des anglophones monolingues au Canada. Le second objectif est lié au bilinguisme : la majorité des francophones au Canada parlent aussi anglais. Comme des études ont montré que les locuteurs bilingues font plus de gestes que le…
Bringing children’s museums to the children through pop-up museums
Compiled by Aila ReN Coordinator, Glenda El Gamal, Khalifa University, [email protected]
Is There a Correlation Between the Use of Representational Gestures and Self-adaptors
How bilinguals refer to Mandarin throwing actions in English
Aims and Objectives: In the present study, we tested how Mandarin-English bilinguals choose English words to refer to prototypical Mandarin throwing actions. Languages differ in how they refer to events. In Mandarin and English, words for throwing actions differ notably on a variety of dimensions so there are few perfect translation equivalents. In previous studies, when faced with the challenge of how to speak about such events, bilinguals somet…
Literacy within a language affects bilinguals’ spoken language processing
Bilinguals can be proficient in oral language without necessarily knowing how to read and write in at least one of their languages. Literacy has been shown to affect language processing in monolinguals. In the present study, we test if literacy affects grammaticality judgments for Cantonese–English bilinguals who varied in Chinese literacy abilities. There are grammatical differences between oral Cantonese and written Chinese (e.g. modal verb pla…
Validity of parents’ classifications of bilingual children’s language dominance
Bilingual children’s dominance can predict a variety of language and cognitive outcomes. The purpose of this study was to test the validity of parents’ classifications of 3- to 6-year-old bilingual children’s dominance against relative receptive vocabulary scores. In Study 1, the parents’ classifications of Mandarin-English bilingual children’s dominance corresponded to relative vocabulary scores only for children reported to be very Mandarin dom…
Hand Preference in Children’s Referential Gestures During Storytelling
Adults, preschool children, and infants gesture more with their right hand than with their left hand. Since gestures and speech are related in production, it is possible that this right-hand preference reflects left-hemisphere lateralization for gestures and speech. The primary purpose of the present study was to test if children between the ages of 6 and 10 years show a right-hand preference in referential gestures while telling a story. We also…
Co-speech gestures can interfere with learning foreign language words
Co-speech gestures can help the learning, processing, and memory of words and concepts, particularly motoric and spatial concepts such as verbs. The purpose of the present studies was to test whether co-speech gestures support the learning of words through gist traces of movement. We asked English monolinguals to learn 40 Cantonese words (20 verbs and 20 nouns). In two studies, we found support for the gist traces of congruent gestures being move…
Gesture and early bilingual development
The relationship between speech and gestural proficiency was investigated longitudinally (from 2 years to 3 years 6 months, at 6-month intervals) in 5 French-English bilingual boys with varying proficiency in their 2 languages. Because of their different levels of proficiency in the 2 languages at the same age, these children's data were used to examine the relative contribution of language and cognitive development to gestural development. In te…
Do French-English Bilingual Children Gesture More Than Monolingual Children
Gestures by advanced Spanish-English second-language learners
We examined the role of deictic (i.e., point) and symbolic (i.e., imagistic) gestures in advanced Spanish-English second-language learners to determine whether the role of gestures is consistent with that of intermediate second-language learners (i.e., Gullberg, 1998). Participants (10 L1 Spanish and 10 L1 English) watched two short cartoons and re-told the stories in both of their languages to native-speaking listeners who had never seen the fil…
A Longitudinal Study of Pragmatic Differentiation in Young Bilingual Children
Current evidence indicates that young bilingual children can use their languages differentially and appropriately in different language contexts at about two years of age. We examined whether there is an even earlier developmental stage when bilingual children do not use their languages in pragmatically differentiated ways. We recorded natural language samples from 4 French-English bilingual children during free play sessions with their mothers a…
Language and Culture Effects on Gender Classification of Objects
The present studies test whether French grammatical gender affects bilingual children's classification of objects as boys or girls in English, in children aged 3 to 5 years (Study 1) and aged 8 to 10 years (Study 2), compared to monolingual children to control for possible cultural biases. In both studies, children tended to classify more objects as boys than as girls. In Study 1, the bilingual children showed a reduced boy bias relative to monol…
Bilingual children’s gesture use
Previous studies have shown that bilinguals use more manual gestures than monolinguals (Pika et al., 2006; Nicoladis et al., 2009), suggesting that gestures may facilitate lexical retrieval or may reduce the cognitive load on working memory during speech production. In this study, we tested the generalizability of these findings by comparing the use of gestures in three groups of children (English monolinguals, Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals…
It’s easier to kill a baby to save oneself than a fat man to save other people
Previous research has shown that bilinguals respond differently to moral dilemmas posed in each of their languages, tending to make deontologically-based decisions (based on right or wrong) in their first language and utilitarian decisions (bringing about the most good) in their second language. In the present study, we tested several predictors of bilinguals’ moral reasoning: language (L1 Russian or L2 English), gender, proficiency, age, and dil…
How Referential Gestures Align With Speech
When speaking, people often produce gestures that are closely timed with the speech with which they constitute a semantically coherent unit. Analyzing the temporal patterns between the two modalities may reveal insights about how speakers plan them. Using elicited narratives, we tested English/French monolinguals and bilinguals to check whether bilinguals, known to experience a higher degree of competition in lexical access, show a different patt…
Gesture Frequency Linked Primarily to Story Length in 4-10-Year Old Children's Stories
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…
Le Carte Blanc or la Carte Blanche? Bilingual Children's Acquisition of French Adjective Agreement
Because of less exposure to either language, bilingual children's language acquisition can be delayed relative to monolingual children in domains related to input frequency. This study predicted that the acquisition of gender agreement with adjectives in French would be delayed in bilingual children on a picture description task. The results showed that French-English bilingual preschoolers were less accurate with feminine noun-adjective agreemen…
Clausal order and the acquisition of Dutch deverbal compounds
How to Order a Beer
It is said that conventional gestures for numbers differ by culture. Conventional gestures are thought to imply consistency of form both across and within individuals. The present study tests the consistency of finger gestures of 60 participants of three different cultures and in three different mother tongues in nine different hypothetical scenarios. The first subject of analysis is whether participants differentiate between counting and signali…
The Influence of Child-Directed Speech on Word Learning and Comprehension
Word Family Size and French-Speaking Children's Segmentation of Existing Compounds
The family size of the constituents of compound words, or the number of compounds sharing the constituents, affects English-speaking children's compound segmentation. This finding is consistent with a usage-based theory of language acquisition, whereby children learn abstract underlying linguistic structure through their experience with particular words. The family-size effect is particularly strong for the modifier or the leftmost element. The p…
The Acquisition of Complex Deverbal Words by a French-English Bilingual Child
This study explores the acquisition of complex words composed of both verbs and nouns through novel forms produced spontaneously by a French-English bilingual child. Diary recordings were kept by the child's mother from ages 2:8 to 5:0. The results showed little support for a proposed developmental sequence based on cross-sectional data (e.g., Clark & Barron, 1988). Instead, the child usually produced grammatical forms in both languages, though f…
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…
Talking with strangers
An important component of the communicative competence of proficient bilinguals is the ability to use each of their languages differentially and appropriately according to relevant characteristics of the interlocutors and communicative situations. The research reported here examined the communicative competence of four young children (average age of 2;2, average MLU of 1·56) who were acquiring English and French simultaneously in the home. We obs…
Word awareness in second language learners and bilingual children
It has often been claimed that early bilingualism confers some cognitive advantages on children, including enhanced word awareness. Evidence for the hypothesis has been mixed. Some studies have shown enhanced word awareness in bilingual children, while others have not. The present study examined word awareness in 4‐year‐old children, comparing bilinguals and second language learners with monolingual children. The study controlled for many of the …
A Longitudinal Study of Pragmatic Differentiation in Young Bilingual Children
Current evidence indicates that young bilingual children can use their languages differentially and appropriately in different language contexts at about two years of age. We examined whether there is an even earlier developmental stage when bilingual children do not use their languages in pragmatically differentiated ways. We recorded natural language samples from 4 French-English bilingual children during free play sessions with their mothers a…
Parental Discourse and Codemixing in Bilingual Children
Various explanations for young bilingual children's codemixing have been offered, including that it is influenced by the particular discourse strategies parents use in conversation with their children. To date, Lanza (1992) has proposed the most explicit version of this hypothesis. She suggested that certain parental speech acts in response to children's codemixing encourage continued codemixing while others discourage it. The present study was u…
What Two-way Bilingual Programmes Reveal About the Controversy Surrounding Race and Intelligence
One of the most promising ways of developing bilingual skills of students in the United States is through 'two-way immersion' programmes, where 50% of the students are native English speakers and 50% speakers of a minority language and where half the teaching is done by professional teachers who use either English only or the minority language only. In 'two-way immersion' programmes, little attention has been paid to the experiences of African-Am…
Gesture and early bilingual development
The relationship between speech and gestural proficiency was investigated longitudinally (from 2 years to 3 years 6 months, at 6-month intervals) in 5 French-English bilingual boys with varying proficiency in their 2 languages. Because of their different levels of proficiency in the 2 languages at the same age, these children's data were used to examine the relative contribution of language and cognitive development to gestural development. In te…
The role of a child's productive vocabulary in the language choice of a bilingual family
While bilingual children's code-mixing was once taken as a sign that they had confused their languages, many studies have now shown that bilingual children can differentiate their languages from very early in development. Why, then, do they code-mix? This study examined several factors that might contribute to a Brazilian Portuguese-English bilingual boy's code-mixing within the context of the family's language use. He was filmed every week in tw…
Learning English and losing Chinese
Studies of early language acquisition show that children focus on the language in their environment toward the end of the first year. This study concerned the acquisition of English and the loss of Chinese by a child adopted from China into an English-speaking family in Canada at the age of 17 months. As she was adopted after the age of one year, her switch to English might be expected to be slow and difficult. The child's production and comprehe…
What's the difference between ‘toilet paper’ and ‘paper toilet’? French-English bilingual children's crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns
Bilingual acquisition can shed light on the cues children use in acquiring language. The purpose of this paper was to examine whether frequency, ambiguity or language dominance could explain crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns. Crosslinguistic transfer would appear in the form of compound reversals. 25 monolingual English children between the ages of three and four years and 25 age-matched French-English bilingual children were asked to cr…
Large constituent families help children parse compounds
The family size of the constituents of compound words, or the number of compounds sharing the constituents, has been shown to affect adults' access to compound words in the mental lexicon. The present study was designed to see if family size would affect children's segmentation of compounds. Twenty-five English-speaking children between 3;7 and 5;9 were asked to explain the meaning of existing compounds with constituents of varying family size to…
When level-ordering is not used in the formation of English compounds
To explain the fact that children avoid using regular plurals in modifiers of English compounds by three years, it has been argued that level-ordering constrains all their compounds (e.g., Gordon, 1985). If so, children should avoid regular plurals in ungrammatical compounds like Verb-Object and Verb-Object-er which they use while acquiring grammatical Object-Verb-er compounds (like ‘truck driver’). Children between 3 and 5 years were asked to fo…
Gestures by advanced Spanish-English second-language learners
We examined the role of deictic (i.e., point) and symbolic (i.e., imagistic) gestures in advanced Spanish-English second-language learners to determine whether the role of gestures is consistent with that of intermediate second-language learners (i.e., Gullberg, 1998). Participants (10 L1 Spanish and 10 L1 English) watched two short cartoons and re-told the stories in both of their languages to native-speaking listeners who had never seen the fil…
The Acquisition of Complex Deverbal Words by a French-English Bilingual Child
This study explores the acquisition of complex words composed of both verbs and nouns through novel forms produced spontaneously by a French-English bilingual child. Diary recordings were kept by the child's mother from ages 2:8 to 5:0. The results showed little support for a proposed developmental sequence based on cross-sectional data (e.g., Clark & Barron, 1988). Instead, the child usually produced grammatical forms in both languages, though f…
Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective–noun strings by preschool bilingual children
One hypothesis holds that bilingual children's cross-linguistic transfer occurs in spontaneous production when there is structural overlap between the two languages and ambiguity in at least one language (Döpke, 1998; Hulk and Müller, 2000). This study tested whether overlap/ambiguity of adjective–noun strings in English and French predicted transfer. In English, there is only one order (adjective–noun) while in French both adjective–noun and nou…
When answer-phone makes a difference in children's acquisition of English compounds
Over the course of acquiring deverbal compounds like truck driver , English-speaking children pass through a stage when they produce ungrammatical compounds like drive-truck . These errors have been attributed to canonical phrasal ordering (Clark, Hecht & Mulford, 1986). In this study, we compared British and Canadian children's compound production. Both dialects have the same phrasal ordering but some different lexical items (e.g. answer-phone e…
Gestures and communicative development
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 …
Word Family Size and French-Speaking Children's Segmentation of Existing Compounds
The family size of the constituents of compound words, or the number of compounds sharing the constituents, affects English-speaking children's compound segmentation. This finding is consistent with a usage-based theory of language acquisition, whereby children learn abstract underlying linguistic structure through their experience with particular words. The family-size effect is particularly strong for the modifier or the leftmost element. The p…
Developing spatial localization abilities and children's interpretation of where
Two-year-old children often start asking questions with where . In this study we test whether children understand where to mean route or absolute location and whether the size of the space or elevation made a difference. Previous research has documented developmental changes over the preschool years in children's non-verbal spatial reasoning. Forty-eight children between two and five years of age were interviewed. We asked them to point in respon…
Introduction to Special Issue
What does hand movement have to do with language and communicative development? This Introduction proposes that language acquisition researchers have at least four reasons to be interested in gesture and communicative development. First, children begin to gesture before talking. Second, children continue to gesture even after they start to talk, and through to adulthood. Third, recent theoretical perspectives on language acquisition have advanced…
How the parts relate to the whole
This study explores different frequency effects on children's interpretations of novel noun–noun compounds (e.g. egg bag as ‘bag FOR eggs’). We investigated whether four- to five-year-olds and adults use their knowledge of related compounds and their modifier–head relations (e.g. sandwich bag (FOR ) or egg white (PART-OF )) when explaining the meaning of novel compounds and/or whether they are affected by overall frequency of modifier–head relati…
A Level Playing-Field
To explain why English compounds generally avoid internal inflectional suffixation (e.g., key-chain rather than keys-chain ), linguists have often invoked the Level Ordering Hypothesis, that is, that particular types of morphology, in this case inflectional suffixation, are derivationally ordered after compounding. However, a broad range of counter-examples and conceptual objections to Level Ordering have emerged. We propose an alternative accoun…
Do French-English Bilingual Children Gesture More Than Monolingual Children
Clausal order and the acquisition of Dutch deverbal compounds
Psychology (78 obras) · Linguistics (76 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (44 obras) · Reading and Literacy Development (34 obras) · Neuroscience of multilingualism (31 obras) · Developmental psychology (27 obras) · Cognitive psychology (25 obras) · Computer Science (25 obras) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (22 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras)