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 monolinguals. Only the older children showed a by-object effect of French gender. The bilinguals' and monolinguals' classifications were highly correlated. In Study 3, English-speaking adults classified object names as boys or girls. The adults' classifications were highly correlated with the children's. The authors argue that the classification of objects by gender is affected by cultural biases as well as knowledge of French. The effect of French knowledge is modified by age.Many researchers have argued that the habitual use of a language can influence adults' thinking

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Bilingual children sometimes perform better than same-aged monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tasks, such as a grammaticality judgment. Some of these differences can be attributed to bilinguals having to learn to control attention to language choice. This study tested the hypothesis that bilingual children, as young as preschool age, would score overall higher than monolingual children on a grammaticality judgment test. French-English bilingual preschoolers judged the acceptability of three constructions in French and English (i.e. adjective-noun ordering, obligatoriness of a determiner, and object pronoun placement). Their performance was compared with that of a group of age-matched English monolinguals. The results showed that the bilingual children scored higher than the monolingual children. These results demonstrate that syntactic awareness develops quite early for bilinguals. Additionally, the bilingual children demonstrated cross-linguistic influence of core syntactic structure in French, as their judgments were affected by English acceptability.

This paper describes an investigation into the function of child-directed speech (CDS) across development. In the first experiment, 10-21-month-olds were presented with familiar words in CDS and trained on novel words in CDS or adult-directed speech (ADS). All children preferred the matching display for familiar words. However, only older toddlers in the CDS condition preferred the matching display for novel words. In Experiment 2, children 3-6 years of age were presented with a sentence comprehension task in CDS or ADS. Older children performed better overall than younger children with 5- and 6-year-olds performing above chance regardless of speech condition, while 3- and 4-year-olds only performed above chance when the sentences were presented in CDS. These findings provide support for the theory that CDS is most effective at the beginning of acquisition for particular constructions (e.g. vocabulary acquisition, syntactic comprehension) rather than at a particular age or for a particular task.