Research on the effects on early bilingualism on reading development is scarce. Here, we tackle this question by investigating whether the exposure to dual-language contexts (use of two languages in the same conversational situation) induces a boost in phonological and reading performance through more balanced spatial auditory attentional skills.…

By 12 months of age, infants exhibit behavioral sensitivity to sound symbolism (e.g. sound-shape correspondences) when they hear universally sound symbolic pseudowords (e.g. "bouba," "kiki"). Here, we investigated whether infant's sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences is affected when they hear language-specific sound…

Background: Spelling acquisition requires the assimilation of the regularities of the writing system, but these regularities may differ between the native and a foreign language. English spelling acquisition is a challenge for Spanish-speaking children due to differences in the orthographic systems. The aim of this study was to examine to what…

Previous research has established that phonetics has been marginalized within language teaching, proving to be particularly challenging for learners in EFL contexts. This paper presents EPSSML (https://www.usc.gal/multimlab/), an e-learning platform designed within Mayer's (2008, 2009) Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning to instruct English…

The main objective of this study is to assess the Spanish literacy competence of students enrolled in bilingual and trilingual programs by analyzing the developmental process and evolutionary course of reading during the first cycle of Primary Education. This analysis aims to determine whether the reading skills in Spanish of students in…

The current study presents the delayed naming task as an effective tool for testing the robustness of phonotactic constraints. A delayed naming task was employed to test for quantity sensitivity among nonwords in Spanish. Results reveal a robust effect of stress modulation by syllable weight as evidenced by differential rates of error between…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

This study examines the role of language proficiency and other individual factors (attitudes, input) in the acquisition of language-specific [ð] and dialect-specific [Ø] allophones of Spanish intervocalic /d/ in the /ado/ context by L2 and heritage Spanish speakers during a short-term study abroad in Sevilla, Spain. Twenty L2-intermediate, 10…

This study investigates the knowledge of bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish regarding the production of object pronominal clitics (excluding non-reflexive third-person clitics), with a focus on: (i) their morphology, considering the variants that coexist for each form, and (ii) their syntactic placement (proclitic or enclitic) with respect…

This study investigated which components of the writing production process are impaired in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia (DD) aged 8 to 12 years. Children with and without dyslexia (n = 60) were assessed in their use of the lexical and the sublexical routes of spelling as well as the orthographic working memory system by…

Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds. Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a…

Traditionally, Basque has three voiceless affricates that are different in their place of articulation. More precisely, affricates can have a lamino-alveolar, apico-alveolar, and prepalatal place of articulation and the graphemes used to represent them are respectively. Likewise, Basque has been described as having three fricatives with the same…

The authors examined the relationship between cochlear implants (CIs) and reading acquisition and attempted to determine the part played by phonological and orthographic resources in this task. Four groups of Spanish-speaking deaf children were examined: children with either early- or late-implanted CIs, and children without CIs who had either…

Pronunciation is an essential aspect in the teaching of the English language, especially those aspects of pronunciation such as stress and vowel quality as they are crucial elements to ensure intelligibility in communication. The general objective of this study is to investigate whether the theoretical-practical instruction on pronunciation has a…

Recent language attitude research has attended to the processes involved in identifying and evaluating spoken language varieties. This article investigates the ability of second-language learners of English in Spain (N = 71) to identify Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GenAm) speech and their perceptions of linguistic variation…