A central question in the field of foreign language acquisition is whether the processes involved in reading development in a foreign language are universal or dependent on characteristics of the specific language involved. We investigated the impact of orthographic depth and writing system on word reading acquisition in a foreign orthography, by…

LaRocque, Kleiman, and Darling (2011) characterized parental involvement as the "missing link" in school achievement. For this reason, especially, middle grades teachers and teacher leaders want very much to reach out to newcomer Latino families--and they do. Although Google Translate™ has emerged as a go-to tool for many teachers and…

Higher Education is demanding the need of a greater connection between its academic offer and the necessary civic engagement of the graduates. This has given Spain the opportunity, for just over a decade, to develop the methodology of service-learning, which combines both the theoretical and practical aspect of university learning with the…

This study tested the impact of child-directed language input on language development in Spanish-English bilingual infants (N = 25, 11- and 14-month-olds from the Seattle metropolitan area), across languages and independently for each language, controlling for socioeconomic status. Language input was characterized by social interaction variables,…

The aim of the study is to describe the performance of deaf and hearing people while speechreading Spanish, a language with transparent orthography, and to relate this skill to reading efficiency. Three groups of 27 participants each were recruited: a group of deaf participants, a chronological age-matched hearing group and a reading age-matched…

The extensive literature on subject expression in Spanish makes for rich comparisons between generative (formal) and usage-based (functional) approaches to language acquisition. This article explores how the problem of subject expression has been conceptualized within each research tradition, as well as unanswered questions that both approaches…

Purpose: This study investigates the production of voiceless alveolar and postalveolar fricatives and affricates by bilingual and monolingual children with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs) and their peers with normal hearing (NH). Method: Fifty-four children participated in our study, including 12 Spanish-English bilingual CI users (M…

Historically, black women's hair has been a site where power and social relations are defined. In Puerto Rico, cultural production has been critical in perpetuating as well as in contesting the prevailing white European ideal of beauty and its impact on women's hairstyling practices. Nevertheless, the link between aesthetic preferences and the…

In recent years, the World Languages field has witnessed an increased interest in service-learning (SL) initiatives. Many SL projects focus on the potential that Spanish-speaking communities offer students of Spanish, as a foreign language, to increase their language skills and cultural understanding of these communities. Some authors, however,…

Purpose: This study examined whether the language sample elicitation technique (i.e., storytelling and story-retelling tasks with pictorial support) affects lexical diversity (D), grammaticality (grammatical errors per communication unit [GE/CU]), sentence length (mean length of utterance in words [MLUw]), and sentence complexity (subordination…

Background: A limited number of studies have analyzed grammaticality in monolingual Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). Most of the available data are based on bilingual speakers. Aims: To extend previous studies by doing a more detailed analysis of grammatical types in monolingual Spanish-speakers with and without…

A word-spotting task is used in Spanish to test the way in which polysyllabic letter-strings are parsed in this language. Monosyllabic words (e.g., "bar") embedded at the beginning of a pseudoword were immediately followed by either a coda-forming consonant (e.g., "barto") or a vowel (e.g., "baros"). In the former…

Latino children in the US are systematically underdiagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); therefore, it is important that recent changes to the diagnostic process do not exacerbate this pattern of under-identification. Previous research has found that the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) algorithm, based on the Diagnostic and…

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)…

In recent years, writing in Spanish as a foreign or heritage language has assumed more prominence in research and curricular policy in the United States. Increasing numbers of heritage language learners, the emergence of social media tools, renewed interest in writing genres, and changing instruction methods have all influenced how we understand…