Community colleges across the United States are increasingly linguistically diverse, with populations that often include immigrant students who have grown up with a language other than English but have spent a significant part of their childhood in the U.S. and as such received a substantial part of their -K-12 education there. In this paper, we…

Positioning theory [van Langenhove and Harré (1999). Introducing positioning theory. In R. Harre, & L. van Langenhove (Eds.), "Positioning theory: Moral contexts of intentional action" (pp. 14-31). Blackwell Publishers] provides a useful analytical lens to examine how teachers' positioning in moment-to-moment interactions can expand…

Purpose: To avoid misdiagnosis with developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children, it is recommended to evaluate both languages. However, unlike their monolingual peers, bilingual children acquire their heritage language under adverse input conditions. Focusing on Levantine Arabic, the study evaluates the clinical utility of a…

When speaking, people often produce gestures that are closely timed with the speech with which they constitute a semantically coherent unit. Analyzing the temporal patterns between the two modalities may reveal insights about how speakers plan them. Using elicited narratives, we tested English/French monolinguals and bilinguals to check whether…

Language acquisition depends on the ability to detect and track the distributional properties of speech. Successful acquisition also necessitates detecting changes in those properties, which can occur when the learner encounters different speakers, topics, dialects, or languages. When encountering multiple speech streams with different underlying…

In the present study, I draw on Canagarajah's (2019) negotiated-literacy orientation and the systemic functional linguistic (SFL) approach to discourse analysis (Eggins & Slade, 1997) to demonstrate the varying degrees to which Fatima and Chow, two multilingual doctoral students, were able to question and negotiate normative literacy practices…

Individual reports of language history, use, and proficiency are generally considered sufficient for language profiling. Yet, these variables alone neglect the contribution of contextual linguistic diversity to one's overall language repertoire. In this study we used the Contextual Linguistic Profile Questionnaire to evaluate whether there is a…

Due to their experience of managing two languages, it has been suggested that bilinguals could receive more practice in the domain of working memory (WM) leading to a WM bilingual advantage. Although some studies have shown that bilinguals can outperform monolinguals in WM tasks, the studies investigating WM capacity in bilinguals provide…

Although several studies have focused on novel word learning and lexicalization in (presumably) monolingual speakers, less is known about how bilinguals add novel words to their mental lexicon. In this study we trained 33 English-French bilinguals on novel word-forms that were neighbors to English words with no existing neighbors. The number of…

In this paper, we discuss the place of plurilingualism in Language and Literacy Education. The article problematises English-only, monolingual-centric assumptions upon which much of Australia's current literacy education policy discourse has been based, to instead advance "pluriliteracies" as an alternate, more generative lens through…

For much of the history of deaf education, spoken language bilingualism was not considered a viable goal. It was believed that given the challenges of meaningful auditory access, age-appropriate development in even one language would be daunting. However, implementation of universal newborn hearing screening during the early 2000s, along with…

Purpose: Late talkers (LTs) are a group of children who exhibit delays in language development without a known cause. Although a hallmark of LTs is a reduced expressive vocabulary, little is known about LTs' processing of semantic relations among words in their emerging vocabularies. This study uses an eye-tracking task to compare 2-year-old LTs'…

Non-word repetition tasks are widely used to assess phonological short-term memory (PSTM). Results of previous research on the performance of monolingual and bilingual children in PSTM tasks are inconclusive. Although in some studies bilinguals did outperform monolinguals in the repetition of non-words, most studies reported comparatively weak…

Understanding speech in an accent or dialect different than one's own can be challenging. McLaughlin and Van Engen (2020) were the first to quantify this increase in listening effort using Task Evoked Pupillary Response (TEPR), a common measure of cognitive arousal. They found that monolingual, English speaking adults' pupils dilated more quickly…

Bilingual children often lag behind monolinguals on standardized measures of language acquisition, such as vocabulary tests. This bilingual lag could be related bilinguals' lesser experience with the target language relative to monolinguals. In this study, we predicted that sequential Mandarin-English bilinguals would perform worse than same-aged…