This study examined transfer facilitation effect of first language morphological awareness on second language lexical inference ability among Grade 6 Chinese-speaking English as a foreign language learners in China. A set of paper and pencil tests was administered to measure children's morphological awareness and lexical inference ability in both…

This study examined whether high-variability auditory training on natural speech can benefit experienced second-language English speakers who already are exposed to natural variability in their daily use of English. The subjects were native French speakers who had learned English in school; experienced listeners were tested in England and the less…

Knowledge of compound word structures in Chinese and English was investigated, comparing 435 Chinese and 258 Americans, including second, fourth, and sixth graders, and college undergraduates. As anticipated, the results revealed that Chinese speakers performed better on a word structure analogy task than their English-speaking counterparts. Also,…

Using a self-paced reading task, the study aimed to investigate (a) whether English learners in Taiwan immediately resolve main verb versus reduced relative clause ambiguities in a similar way as native English speakers and (b) whether the learners at various English proficiency levels show diverse profiles. With analyses and syntheses of reading…

This study aims to explain how the practice of two languages (French and Creole) in French overseas departments affects the first educational competencies acquired by children. The students' performance in both languages was investigated at the beginning of kindergarten, and their reading capacities were measured at the end of Grade 1. The data…

The Keynote Article is a very welcomed, timely, and incisive review article that examines theoretical and clinical implications of research on bilingual development and specific language impairment (SLI). Paradis provides a considered examination of the available evidence and takes into account a number of potential influencing factors. In…

Few researchers would doubt that ultimate attainment in second language grammar is negatively correlated with age of acquisition, but considerable controversy remains about the nature of this relationship: the exact shape of the age-attainment function and its interpretation. This article presents two parallel studies with native speakers of…

Adult second-language (L2) learners' perception of L2 phonetic segments is influenced by first-language phonological and phonetic properties. It was recently proposed that L2 vocabulary size in adult learners is related to changes in L2 perception (perceptual assimilation model), analogous to the emergence of first-language phonological function…

Research in monolingual populations indicate that vocabulary knowledge is essential to reading achievement, but how vocabulary develops in bilingual children has been understudied. The current study investigated the role of home and school factors in predicting English vocabulary among 284 bilingual kindergartners (168 Chinese, 65 Malay, 51…

This study investigated the relationships between home language learning activities and vocabulary in a sample of monolingual native Dutch (n = 58) and bilingual immigrant Moroccan-Dutch (n = 46) and Turkish-Dutch (n = 55) 3-year-olds, speaking Tarifit-Berber, a nonscripted language, and Turkish as their first language (L1), respectively. Despite…

The objectives of this study are (a) to determine if native speakers of Canadian French at different English proficiencies can use primary stress for recognizing English words and (b) to specify how the second language (L2) learners' (surface-level) knowledge of L2 stress placement influences their use of primary stress in L2 word recognition. Two…

Inuktitut, the Eskimo language spoken in Eastern Canada, is one of the few Canadian indigenous languages with a strong chance of long-term survival because over 90% of Inuit children still learn Inuktitut from birth. In this paper I review existing literature on bilingual Inuit children to explore the prospects for the survival of Inuktitut given…

Investigates the validity of phoneme recognition as an indicator of phonemic awareness at kindergarten age. Six paper and pencil phonemic awareness tests, phoneme recognition among them, were administered to a group of Dutch children a few months before they began formal literacy instruction and 10 months later. (VWL)

Examines the perception of /r/ and /l/ by adult Japanese learners of English as a function of their exposure to authentic English. Results indicate that while extended exposure may improve /r/-/l/ identification accuracy, it does not ensure perfect perceptual mastery. (32 references) (Author/CK)

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relations between early bilingualism and phonological awareness in a sample of 75 Turkish-Dutch bilingual kindergarten children living in The Netherlands. In a longitudinal design, the children's first (L1) and second (L2) language abilities were measured at the beginning and end of…