Evidence that certain semantic and pragmatic skills follow a similar developmental trajectory cross-linguistically suggests an important role for semantic-pragmatic tasks in the assessment of bilingual children. This study investigates whether quantifiers constitute a language-neutral linguistic category in this context. Forty-three Polish–English bilingual children aged 4–7 years completed the Quantifier Comprehension Task (QCT) and the Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG-2), a standardized morphosyntactic assessment, in both languages. The results indicated that children’s performance on QCT is strongly correlated between their two languages. This correlation was significantly stronger than that observed for the TROG-2, indicating that quantifier comprehension may be less language dependent than general grammar comprehension measures. These findings highlight the diagnostic value of semantic-pragmatic tasks, particularly quantifier interpretation, in evaluating bilingual language development. While the children in this study are all typically developing bilinguals, our goal is to explore whether quantifier comprehension tasks can support the development of language-neutral tools for assessing bilingual language skills.

Research on how non-natives process and learn binomials (black and white) is limited. The present study addresses this gap using online (eye-tracking) and offline (familiarity rating) tasks. Sixty non-native speakers of English (L1 = Arabic) read six stories seeded with 21 novel binomials in three conditions: one exposure, six exposures, and no exposure (i.e., only in post-test) in a counter-balanced design. Each item was also presented in the reversed order (white and black). The non-natives read the stories as their eye movements were monitored and answered comprehension questions. In addition to the novel binomials, 12 existing binomials (congruent with Arabic) were included in the passages as a baseline for comparison. After completing the reading task, the participants completed an offline rating task as a measure of declarative knowledge of the binomial configuration (i.e., word order). All items were rated twice, once in the forward direction and once in the reversed direction. Online results showed that non-natives were not sensitive to the configuration of existing binomials, and there was limited evidence of any sensitivity to novel binomials. Offline, non-natives showed sensitivity to the configuration restrictions of existing binomials but not novel ones.

In the continued effort to identify creative talent, divergent thinking (DT) assessments are commonly employed to objectively assess aspects of individual creative ability. Despite their common usage, the selection of DT prompts remains unstandardized. This is concerning because it is unclear if all prompts can be employed equally or if certain characteristics associated with the acquisition and usage of said prompt in a given language affect the magnitude of response originality. Researchers administered a computer-based DT assessment to 386 elementary students and compared the originality scores of the respondents to the originality scores predicted by prompts’ psycholinguistic features. Hierarchical linear modeling was employed to control individual DT ability and examine the effects of psycholinguistics on originality at two levels, with individual response originality scores (level 1) nested within individual respondents (level 2). Results indicated statistically significant main effects for word frequency, semantic diversity, prompt type, and item reaction time. There were also several significant interaction effects between prompt type and word frequency, prompt type and word length, and prompt type and semantic diversity. The resulting final model explained approximately 18% of the variance in originality scores, suggesting the need for further consideration of DT prompt choice.