The research on language acquisition and retention has primarily focused on monolinguals and bilinguals, with comparatively few studies including trilinguals. To address this gap, the current study compares the acquisition and retention of a novel morphosyntactic rule in Spanish in twelve monolinguals, twelve bilinguals, and twelve trilinguals.…

This study examines whether adult second language (L2) learners of an ungendered first language (L1) are sensitive to gender congruency (grammatical feature absent in the L1) and noun animacy (semantic feature present in the L1) when processing L2 gender concord and whether L2 proficiency level determines such sensitivity. To address these…

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulas "ser" and "estar" is very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2…

Examines differences in metalinguistic development between monolingual and bilingual children in terms of three subcategories: word awareness, syntactic awareness, and phonological awareness. In each case, some studies have reported advantages for bilingual children, while others have found either no difference between the groups or monolingual…

A study of the relationship of language proficiency level and bilingualism or monolingualism to the comprehension of anaphoric third-person subject pronouns in 9- and 10-year-old children found that bilingual children have the same difficulty with anaphora as their monolingual counterparts. In the comprehension of the pronouns tested, partial…

This collection of six papers consists of works in progress undertaken by students and faculty of the University of Pennsylvania's Language in Education Division of the Graduate School of Education. The papers are: (1) "Language Planning and Identity Planning: An Emergent Understanding" (Rebecca Freeman); (2) "Communicative…