This paper investigates how learners interpret definite plural noun phrases (e.g., "the tigers") and bare (article-less) plural noun phrases (e.g., "tigers") in their second language. Whereas Spanish allows definite plurals to have both generic and specific readings, English requires definite plurals to have specific, nongeneric readings. Generic…

Many studies have previously reported that the recognition of a stem target (e.g., "teach") is facilitated by the prior masked presentation of a prime consisting of a derived form of it (e.g., "teacher"). We conducted two lexical decision experiments to investigate masked morphological priming in Spanish. Experiment 1 showed…

We investigated the factors that may help understand the differential rates of language development in the home language (i.e., Spanish) of Latino preschoolers with specific language impairment. Children were randomly assigned to either bilingual or English-only small group interventions and followed from preschool to kindergarten. Predictors of…

Twenty-five children with specific language impairment (SLI; age 5 years, 3 months [5;3]-8;2), 50 typically developing children (3;3-8;2), and 31 normal adults participated in three eye-tracking experiments of spoken language comprehension that were designed to investigate the use of verb information during real-time sentence comprehension in…

In the current study we explored lexical, syntactic, and semantic processes during text comprehension in English monolinguals and Spanish/English (first language/second language) bilinguals with different experience in interpreting (nontrained bilinguals, interpreting students and professional interpreters). The participants performed an…

This paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic "se"…

Research suggests that late bilinguals may have persistent difficulties with the automatic access and use of some second language structures because of a lack of underlying integrated knowledge of those structures. In contrast, early bilinguals show advantages in aspects of language use that require this type of automatic knowledge. This study…

This study investigates the utility and validity of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for use with low-income parents and their 24- to 36-month-old Spanish-English bilingual children (n = 79). Issues in the interpretation of the integrated CDI/Inventarios del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas (IDHC) score to index…

Recent studies of heritage speakers, many of whom possess incomplete knowledge of their family language, suggest that these speakers may be linguistically superior to second language (L2) learners only in phonology but not in morphosyntax. This study reexamines this claim by focusing on knowledge of clitic pronouns and word order in 24 L2 learners…

This longitudinal study investigated changes in reported language usage between Puerto Rican mothers and their preschoolers over a 4-year period. It also examined whether differences in language usage occurred depending on the timing of children's exposure to English and children's gender. Seventy-six mothers reported the languages they and their…

Verbs are one of the basic building blocks of grammar, yet few studies have examined the grammatical, morphological, and phonological factors contributing to lexical access and production of Spanish verb inflection. This report describes an online data set that incorporates psycholinguistic dimensions for 50 of the most common early-acquired…

The Spanish-language MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (S-CDIs) are well-established parent report tools for assessing the language development of Spanish-speaking children under 3 years. Here, we introduce the short-form versions of the S-CDIs (SFI and SFII), offered as alternatives to the long forms for screening purposes or…

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation…

This study investigated the role of typological relatedness, language of the community, and age, in predicting similarities and differences between English-Italian, Spanish-Italian bilingual children and their monolingual child and adult counterparts in the acceptability of pre- and postverbal object pronouns in [[plus or minus]focus] contexts in…

Early efforts to apply knowledge of dialect differences to reading stressed the importance of the distinction between differences in pronunciation and mistakes in reading. This study develops a method of estimating the probability that a given oral reading that deviates from the text is a true reading error by observing the semantic impact of the…