This two-year longitudinal study examined the role of linguistic interdependence between Spanish and English among a group of first, second, and third generation immigrant Spanish-English bilingual children. Starting from a theoretical perspective on linguistic interdependence that takes into account linguistic constructs and their measurement,…

Models of monolingual literacy propose that reading acquisition builds upon children's semantic, phonological, and orthographic knowledge. The relationships between these components vary cross-linguistically, yet it is generally unknown how these differences impact bilingual children's literacy. A comparison between Spanish-English bilingual and…

In this correlational study, we analyzed data from 71 Spanish-English biliterate students in grades 3 (n=21), 4 (n=23), and 5 (n=27) with the goal of investigating the applicability of the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) in English and in Spanish for this population. The simple view posits that decoding…

This study explored effects of Spanish oral language skills (vocabulary and syntax) on the development of English oral language skills (vocabulary, morphology, semantics, syntax) and reading comprehension among 156 bilingual Latino children in second through fifth grade whose first language was Spanish and whose second language was English. Using…