This study investigates perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel /e/-/[epsilon]/ contrast by two groups of 4.5-year-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual children, differing in language dominance. Perception was assessed with an XAB discrimination task involving familiar words and non-words. Production accuracy was measured using a familiar-word…

This paper presents a longitudinal examination of Spanish and English phonological, lexical, and morpho-syntactic abilities in 20 low-SES bilingual preschoolers with mothers who had either completed primary or secondary education in Spanish in their country of origin, Mexico. We focused on the link between maternal education and the following…

Background: Health education materials translated for limited English proficiency audiences should be clear and easy to understand. They should be reviewed by fluent and culturally competent reviewers using a standardised and validated assessment tool. Design/Setting: A total of 139 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19-translated…

In this article, we compare holistic, analytic and cross-linguistic measures of assessment in writing considering the whole linguistic repertoire of multilingual writers. We explore different ways to look at their three languages by focusing on the relationships between these languages rather than looking at each language in isolation. We analyse…

Professional interpreters are obliged by their codes of ethics to interpret the speakers' speech faithfully, including offensive, profane or vulgar language. In order to achieve this goal, interpreters need to be pragmatically competent, so as to understand the intention and effect of the offensive remark in the source language and be able to…

Teachers' language ideologies shape their classroom language policy-making, which in turn shapes students' opportunities to learn. Attention to language ideologies is therefore critical for teacher educators who seek to support pre- and in-service teachers in becoming pro-multilingual policymakers. This mixed methods, survey-based study explores…

Cuisine and restaurants are powerful tools for cultural, social and tourist image-building, and projection for tourist promotion, particularly in the case of major tourist places and destinations which boast a well-deserved, long-standing history and reputation for gastronomical beacons. When menus are not properly translated (or transcreated)…

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…

This study compares the language proficiency gains of two groups of students taking a business English course module in a bilingual university in Catalonia (Spain). Whereas one of these groups followed a 'translanguaging' or 'plurilingual' pedagogy, the other followed a strictly monolingual approach. Participants were 54 mostly Catalan/Spanish…

The present study investigates whether the emotional content of words has the same effect in the different languages of bilinguals by testing the effects of word concreteness, the type of task used, and language status. Highly proficient bilinguals of Catalan and Spanish who learned Catalan and Spanish in early childhood in a bilingual immersion…

One of the most researched challenges in learning Spanish is the acquisition and use of the past aspect, namely, the preterit and imperfect. L2 learners encounter this challenge due to differences in how native English and Spanish speakers view past events. Numerous studies on the Spanish past aspect have analyzed L2 learners' past aspectual…

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the…

This thesis examines whether native, heritage, and L2 speakers of Spanish engage a morphological layer of representation in the processing of inflected words, and whether they do so with both regularly- and irregularly-inflected words. Also examined is whether this tendency towards compositional (i.e. morphological rule-based) processing is…

Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. "Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/."…

In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…