The purpose of this study was to explore five developmental patterns of English letter-name knowledge for emergent bilingual children. We considered five patterns demonstrated by English monolingual children: visual similarity effect, uppercase familiarity effect, first name/first initial effects, consonant-order effect, and frequency effect. We…

Previous studies on bilingual children have shown a significant correlation between first language (L1) and second language (L2) morphological awareness and a unique contribution of morphological awareness in one language to reading performance in the other language, suggesting cross-linguistic influence. However, few studies have compared…

Using a large sample of longitudinal assessment data from children in publicly funded infant/toddler care, preschool, and kindergarten (analytic N = 453,468), this study modeled language and literacy trajectories from early infancy through kindergarten for dual language learners (DLLs) from homes representing many different languages and their…

Bilingual children with a limited command of the second language (L2) often yield unsatisfactory results in L2-based non-word repetition tasks (NWRT) for the assessment of working memory. In this study, monolinguals (MO) and bilinguals (BI) of preschool age acquiring German were compared in regard to their performance on German-based NWRT to…

This study investigated the influence of phonological word representations from both first language (L1) and second language (L2) on third language (L3) lexical learning in L1-dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. More specifically, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine whether L1 Spanish and L2 English phonology modulates…

When reading in a second language, a reader's first language may be involved. For word reading, the question is how and at what level: lexical, pre-lexical, or both. In three experiments, we employed an implicit reading task (color judgment) and an explicit reading task (word naming) to test whether a Chinese meaning equivalent character and its…

When bilinguals read in either their first language (L1) or their second language (L2), words from both languages are unconsciously and automatically activated in their mind (e.g., Kroll et al. 2006; Van Heuven and Dijkstra 2002). Many bilinguals, particularly in Florida, choose to learn Portuguese in college as a third language (L3), thus…

This article reports on an investigation into the bilingual development of literacy skills in Portuguese heritage language speakers in Switzerland in which we sought to put Cummins' linguistic interdependence hypothesis to the test. Three predictions were derived from this hypothesis: (1) Literacy skill levels in one of the bilinguals' languages…

The developmental process of reading acquisition is frequently conceptualized as a self-organizing mental network consisting of lexico-semantic, phonological and orthographical components. The developmental nature of this network varies across languages and is known to impact second-language learners of typologically different languages. Yet, it…

This study aimed to clarify the relations between morphological awareness and literacy skills in Spanish and English in young simultaneous bilingual learners. Guided by theoretical perspectives on the associations between morphological awareness and word- versus sentence-level literacy skills, and their transfer between bilinguals' two languages,…

This study attempts to tease apart the effect of dominant languages of communication on the acquisition of syntactic properties of L3 French in order to test the current L3 generative theories. Three groups of bilinguals took part in this study: L1 Persian/L2 English, with French as the dominant language of communication, L1 Persian/L2 English,…

While morphological awareness has received much attention to date, little is understood about how morphological awareness develops within bilingual children learning typologically different languages. Therefore, we investigated children's knowledge of inflections and derivations in Japanese and English, and also asked whether morphological…

This study reports evidence of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) that surfaced from English compositions of SiSwati learners of English in Swaziland, where English is a second language. Although CLI has been studied widely in other languages, it has not been studied in SiSwati and English, and its implications for instruction are not known.…

This study aims to examine the relationship between bilingual experience and children's development of morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness. To capture both universal and language-specific bilingual effects, the study included four groups of participants: English-speaking children from a general education programme, Spanish-speaking and…

A study of North Australia's Kriol language situation identifies the language, its speakers, its functions, and the sociopolitical factors in its emergence as an autonomous language. The first chapter reviews the development of the linguistic field concerning pidgins and creoles, looking especially at the concepts developed to explain the rise and…