In the last four decades, many Latin American governments have positioned English learning and teaching as a national priority and incorporated it into state-supported "políticas sobre lenguas extranjeras" (foreign language policies) that position the English language as a desirable characteristic of their citizenry. I argue that this…

Singapore is an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse nation-state that has always practiced deliberate language policy and planning. The bilingual education policy, introduced shortly after the young nation's independence has led to the emergence of English-knowing bilinguals who are proficient in both English and their ethnically…

In this preregistered, longitudinal study of early code-switching, 34 US-born, Spanish-English bilingual children were recorded with a bilingual family member at 2;6 and 3;6, in Spanish-designated and English-designated interactions. Children's Spanish and English expressive vocabulary and their exposure to code-switching were measured through…

Despite the worldwide prevalence of multilingualism, the knowledge of the relationship between domain-general cognitive control and multilingual language control remains scant. Here we provide new insights into this issue by examining systematically how different components of inhibitory control (i.e., response inhibition and interference…

While formal L3 morphosyntactic acquisition research has focused on the roles of the L1 versus L2 during the L3 initial stages, we examine their roles during development. Specifically, we explore whether the L3 (here, Portuguese) revision process after non-facilitative transfer differs whether the initial L3 representation reflects the L1 or L2.…

Purpose: The current study examined language control and code-switching in bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) compared to bilingual peers with typical language development (TLD). In addition, proficiency in each language and cognitive control skills were examined as predictors of children's tendency to engage in…

This dissertation research examines the acquisition of second language vowels. For second language learners, learning a new languages' sound inventory, particularly its vowels, presents a challenge perceptually and in terms of production. Incorrectly perceiving and producing sounds in a second language results in a foreign accent in many adult…

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…

This research project sought to explore the influence of English L2 on Spanish L1 in an environment where the L1 (Spanish) is the dominant language. Participants were recruited through voluntary response sampling at the University of Puerto Rico Secondary School (UHS). They completed a language survey on Google Forms that collected general…

Research on inner speech is still in a nascent stage. The present paper investigates consecutive multilinguals' self-reported language use for inner speech with a focus on the L1 (first language) and L2 (second language). Its aim is to identify influential variables in these processes and to investigate if findings from previous studies are…

This paper highlights the political and ideological entanglements of language policy and English language teaching with neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and development aid. It does so by examining the explicit and implicit goals and practices of an educational development aid project in Mindanao, Philippines. The US-funded Job Enabling English…

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 examined how language proficiency and age of acquisition affect a bilingual language user's reliance on the dominant language during lexical access. Two bilingual groups performed a translation recognition task: Mandarin-English classroom bilinguals who acquired their dominant language (Mandarin) from birth and their non-dominant…

Over the past decades, various teaching methods adopted from time to time have placed pronunciation teaching in the forefront or in the backend. This has resulted in second language facilitators to completely disregard or relentlessly correct pronunciation depending on their intuition due to the lack of research on pronunciation teaching or proper…

The U.S. government encourages the study of critical languages spoken in geographic areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security and the global economy through a variety of discretionary grants and scholarship programs. U.S. students are traditionally underrepresented in the study of these languages; however, many of the nation's K-12…