A goal of early research on language processing was to characterize what is universal about language. Much of the past research focused on native speakers because the native language has been considered as providing privileged truths about acquisition, comprehension, and production. Populations or circumstances that deviated from these idealized norms were of interest but not regarded as essential to our understanding of language. In the past two decades, there has been a marked change in our understanding of how variation in language experience may inform the central and enduring questions about language. There is now evidence for significant plasticity in language learning beyond early childhood, and variation in language experience has been shown to influence both language learning and processing. In this paper, we feature what we take to be the most exciting recent new discoveries suggesting that variation in language experience provides a lens into the linguistic, cognitive, and neural mechanisms that enable language processing.

In this paper we make one major point: that Roma children in Europe need to be tested in their mother tongue before school placement. Roma children are in a particularly perilous position with respect to their education. We describe the problematic linguistic situation of Roma children, who are bilingual and often bidialectal, but are frequently evaluated in the language of the state for educational placement, a process that has been shown to significantly compromise their chance of success. We then review the considerable empirical evidence that bilingual children must be evaluated in both languages to give a fair assessment of their knowledge and skills. Furthermore, strength in the mother tongue has demonstrable transfer to skills in the second language. We provide a brief summary of a new assessment for Romani that has been used successfully to evaluate children aged 3 to 6 years, and present the results of a new study using it in Slovakia on 29 children aged 3 to 6 years.

Infants are exposed to the language of the environment in which they are born and, in most instances, become native speakers of that language. Although the history of research on language acquisition provides a colorful debate on the specific ways that nature and nurture shape this process (e.g., MacWhinney, 1999; Pinker, 1995), its primary focus has been on typically developing children exposed to a single language from birth. Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan (2017) turn the table on this discussion to argue that critically important lessons can be learned by shifting the focus from typically developing children to children for whom the trajectory of language learning follows a different course. Some of the variation in language development reflects attributes of child learners themselves, such as whether they are born hearing or deaf and whether they have conditions that disrupt their ability to fully perceive the speech input to which they are exposed. Other variations reflect attributes of the external conditions in which learners develop, including whether they remain in their country of birth or move to a location in which another language is spoken, whether exposure to the native language is continuous or disrupted, and whether they are exposed to a second language (L2) early or late in development. For deaf children, there is also variation in whether their parents or caregivers are themselves deaf or hearing and able to expose them to sign language during infancy. Pierce et al. use the diversity of early language experience as a tool to examine the relation between phonological working memory and language development and to begin to suggest how conditions that may produce costs or benefits in language learning may be related to one another.

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