This study tested three hypotheses about the direct and indirect contributions of derivational morphological awareness to English reading comprehension in sixth-grade students from differing language backgrounds (n= 952). Students included Spanish-speaking, Filipino-speaking, and Vietnamese-speaking language minority learners as well as native…

In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whether grammatical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2)…

This paper presents a synthesis of a pioneering study that approaches the sociolinguistic and educational reality of the area of Navia-Eo, a region in the western part of Asturias (Spain). This research aims to provide an insight into the language attitudes and the sociolinguistic awareness of students in the final year of primary education. Using…

When participants are asked to translate an ambiguous word, they are slower and less accurate than in the case of single-translation words (e.g., Laxen & Lavour, 2010; Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). We report an experiment to further examine this multiple-translation effect by investigating the influence of variables shown to be relevant in bilingual…

An experiment was carried out to compare the time course of the acquisition of two basic spelling mechanisms in Spanish, a shallow system, and French, a deep system. The first was lexical. It relies on the orthographic lexicon, a hypothetical structure containing the orthographic representations of words accessible for word spelling. To evaluate…

The study compared the invented spelling of vowels in kindergarten native Spanish speaking children with that of English monolinguals. It examined whether, after receiving phonics instruction for short vowels, the spelling of native Spanish-speaking kindergartners would contain phonological errors that were influenced by their first language.…

Spanish filmmakers Alejandro Amenabar, Antonio Naharro, and Alvaro Pastor have recently focused on disability and personal identity by presenting the disabled subject in the foreground and by posing an array of ethical questions. This essay explores representations of disability as they appear in "Mar adentro" and "Yo, tambien"…

Purpose: Vocabulary assessment holds promise as a way to identify young bilingual children at risk for language delay. This study compares 2 measures of vocabulary in a group of young Spanish-English bilingual children to a single-language measure used with monolingual children. Method: Total vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary were used to…

At its most basic sense, the sensorimotor/emergentist (S/E) model suggests that early second language (L2) learning is preferentially reliant upon sensory and motor processes, while later L2 learning is accomplished by greater reliance on executive abilities. To investigate the S/E model using fMRI, neural correlates of L2 age of acquisition were…

Numbers are ubiquitous in life. At the same time, the symbols for numbers are highly abstract and their visual appearance does not carry any direct relation to their magnitude. This poses an important question for researchers interested in how numbers are mentally processed. Whereas research on numeric cognition suggests that culturally based…

This work develops a computational methodology new to linguistics that empirically evaluates competing linguistic theories on Spanish verbal mood choice through the use of computational techniques to learn mood and other hidden linguistic features from Spanish belief statements found in corpora. The machine learned probabilistic linguistic models…

There is a concern in Galicia (Spain) about possible negative effects on academic performance caused by the introduction of CLIL (content and language integrated learning) in schools. It has been said that when three languages coexist in the same context as vehicles of education, it is too much for the students, especially in primary education. In…

Convergent and discriminant validity evidence was examined for scores on the Spanish Record Form of the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, Third Edition (BSRA-3). Participants included a sample of 68 Hispanic, Spanish-speaking children ages 4 to 5 years enrolled in preschool programs in Puerto Rico. Scores obtained from the BSRA-3 Spanish Record…

Background: Evidence on the treatment effectiveness for bilingual children with primary language impairment (PLI) is needed to advance both theory and clinical practice. Of key interest is whether treatment effects are maintained following the completion of short-term intense treatments. Aims: To investigate change in select language and cognitive…

Purpose: This study examined the role of the language of vocabulary instruction in promoting English vocabulary in preschool Latino dual language learners (DLLs). The authors compared the effectiveness of delivering a single evidence-informed vocabulary approach using English as the language of vocabulary instruction (English culturally responsive…