Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a vocabulary deficit. One of the most effective interventions for increasing children's lexicon size is the semantic and phonological approach, an approach that has been used mainly with adolescents. The goals of our study are (1) to test whether the semantic-phonological approach…

Purpose: Older native speakers of English have difficulty in understanding Spanish-accented English compared to younger native English speakers. However, it is unclear if this age effect would be observed among native speakers of Spanish. The current study investigates the effects of age and native language experience with Spanish on the ability…

Language experience clearly affects the perception of speech, but little is known about whether these differences in perception extend to non-speech sounds. In this study, we investigated rhythmic perception of non-linguistic sounds in speakers of French and German using a grouping task, in which complexity (variability in sounds, presence of…

Do learners of a second language (L2) need frequent contact with native speakers of that language in order to master its phonology? What if they hear audio recordings of native speakers and receive immediate corrective feedback about their perception? We used a randomized controlled experiment with 135 Chinese speakers (with English as their L2)…

Background: Although some investigations of phonological development have found that segmental accuracy is comparable in monolingual children and their bilingual peers, there is evidence that language use affects segmental accuracy in both languages. Aims: To investigate the influence of age of first exposure to English and the amount of current…

This paper compared the vocabulary size of a group of 250 bilinguals aged 24-36 months acquiring six different language pairs using an analogous tool, and attempted to identify factors that influence vocabulary sizes and ultimately place children at risk for language delay. Each research group used adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative…

Three studies are presented in this paper that address how nonsigners perceive the visual prosodic cues in a sign language. In Study 1, adult American nonsigners and users of American Sign Language (ASL) were compared on their sensitivity to the visual cues in ASL Intonational Phrases. In Study 2, hearing, nonsigning American infants were tested…

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we neuroimaged deaf adults as they performed two linguistic tasks with sentences in American Sign Language, grammatical judgment and phonemic-hand judgment. Participants' age-onset of sign language acquisition ranged from birth to 14 years; length of sign language experience was substantial and…

A. Karmiloff-Smith's (1990) task of drawing a nonexistent object is considered to be a measure of cognitive flexibility. The notion of earlier emergence of cognitive flexibility in bilingual children motivated the current researchers to request 4- and 5-year-old English-Hebrew and Arabic-Hebrew bilingual children and their monolingual peers to…

Could a second language (L2) influence how bilinguals process their native language (L1)? The work described in this dissertation examined this issue focusing on the way bilinguals interpret the meanings of words. Capitalizing on the prevalence of words that can be translated in more than one way across languages (i.e., "translation ambiguity,"…

The current dissertation investigated segmental and prosodic aspects of first- (L1) and second-language (L2) speech production. Forty Korean-speaking adults and children varying in L2 experience (6 months-inexperienced vs. 6 years-experienced) as well as twenty age-matched native English speaking adults and children participated. Experienced…

One of the central challenges globalization and immigration present to education is how to construct school language policies, procedures, and curricula to support academic success of immigrant youth. This case-study compares and contrasts language experience narratives along Elena's developmental trajectory of becoming an urban science teacher.…

This paper will compare the uses of selected formal and informal assessments of English language learners (ELLs) in the Language Experience class [TRANSLANGEXP7(&8)-008] at Kimball Middle School, Illinois School District U-46, Elgin, Illinois, during school year 2007- 2008. See figure 1 (page 14) for a graphic display of these assessments…

This study was made on behalf of the Foreign Language Innovative Curricula Study, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Compared phonological awareness of younger prereading children and older literate children from different linguistic backgrounds (Hong Kong and Guangzhou children speaking Chinese and New Zealand children speaking English). Found that both orthographic and spoken language experience affect the development of phonological skills, implying a…