A number of studies have documented the cognitive outcomes associated with bilingualism. To gain a clear understanding of the extent and diversity of these cognitive outcomes, the authors conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examined the cognitive correlates of bilingualism. Data from 63 studies (involving 6,022 participants) were extracted and analyzed following established protocols and procedures for conducting systematic reviews and guidelines for meta-analysis. Results indicate that bilingualism is reliably associated with several cognitive outcomes, including increased attentional control, working memory, metalinguistic awareness, and abstract and symbolic representation skills. Overall mean effect sizes varied from small to large, depending on the cognitive outcomes measured, and were moderated by methodological features of the studies.

The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb-learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants’ well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather surprising failures to do so in many laboratory-based tasks. We presented 24-month-old infants with dynamic scenes (e.g., a man waving a balloon), and asked a) whether infants could construe these scenes flexibly, noticing the consistent action (e.g., waving) as well as the consistent object (e.g., the balloon) and b) whether their construals of the scenes were influenced by the grammatical form of a novel word used to describe them (verb or noun). Infants successfully mapped novel verbs to event categories (e.g., waving events) and novel nouns to object categories (e.g., balloons). Moreover, infants’ representations were sufficiently abstract to permit them to extend novel verbs and nouns appropriately beyond the precise scenes on which they had been taught.

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Mean effect sizes vary from small to large, depending on instructional interventions and outcome constructs. Across several different grade levels, settings, and methodological features, pedagogical strategies used in teaching ESL to immigrant students are associated with increased competence in reading and writing. Collaborative reading interventions, in which peers engage in oral interaction and cooperatively negotiate meaning and a shared understanding of texts, produced larger effects than systematic phonics instruction and multimedia-assisted reading interventions. The results show that the pedagogical strategies examined in this meta-analysis produced statistically significant benefits for students in all grade levels. The findings also show that students from low socio-economic status (SES) background benefit from ESL literacy interventions. However, significant heterogeneity was found in each subset. Educators and policy makers are encouraged to consider specific school contexts when making decisions about optimal pedagogical strategies. It is possible that contextual factors as well as ESL learner characteristics may influence the effectiveness of these strategies. To ensure literacy acquisition for immigrant students whose primary language is not English, it is important to continue to research successful literacy practices in ways that better inform educators and policy makers.

This chapter presents a multifactor view of word learning, opting for a social explanation based in cultural factors. Using a modification of Gillette and Gleitman's human simulation paradigm, researchers asked adult subjects (Western students, Japanese students, and second-generation Japanese students) to guess the words an American mother was saying to her child in the play scenes. They did not specify the form class of the word to be supplied. The general prediction was that Japanese students would focus on actions more than nouns and vice versa for the Western students. They found that all three groups identified more nouns than verbs but that this effect was more pronounced with the Western students. However, there were no differences in the number of correct matches for nouns between the three groups or for the accuracy of the verbs guessed. These results suggest that cultural factors may indeed influence the English-speaking child to learn more nouns than verbs.