The present study explores how classroom participants invoke a monolingual target-language policy in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom, specifically focusing on one method of doing language policy through self-initiated language policing sequences, which I have called "self-policing." Language policing refers to the…

We assessed the language, cognitive, and socioemotional abilities of 27 internationally adopted children from China, adopted by French-speaking parents, 12 of whom had been assessed previously by Gauthier and Genesee. The children were on average 7 years, 10 months old and were matched to nonadopted monolingual French-speaking children on age,…

Language immersion students' lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic competencies are well documented, yet their phonological skill has remained relatively unexplored. This study investigates the Spanish vowel productions of a cross-sectional sample of 35 one-way Spanish immersion students. Learner productions were analyzed acoustically and compared to…

This study examined teachers' language use across the school year in 6th grade urban middle-school classrooms (n = 24) and investigated the influence of this classroom-based linguistic input on the reading comprehension skills of the students (n = 851; 599 language minority learners and 252 English-only) in the participating classrooms. Analysis…

In 3 experiments, we investigated the effect of grammatical gender on object categorization. Participants were asked to judge whether 2 objects, whose names did or did not share grammatical gender, belonged to the same semantic category by pressing a key. Monolingual speakers of English (Experiment 1), Italian (Experiments 1 and 2), and Spanish…

Children growing up in a dual-language environment have to constantly monitor the dynamic communicative context to determine what the speaker is trying to say and how to respond appropriately. Such self-generated efforts to monitor speakers' communicative needs may heighten children's sensitivity to, and allow them to make better use of,…

Research based on naturalistic and checklist methods has revealed differences between English and Chinese monolingual children in their trajectories of learning nouns and verbs. However, studies based on controlled laboratory designs (e.g., Imai et al., 2008) have yielded a more mixed picture. Guided by a multidimensional view of word learning (in…

Literature on the so-called bilingual advantage is directed towards the investigation of whether the mastering of two languages fosters cognitive skills in the non-verbal domain. The present study aimed to evaluate whether the bilingual advantage in non-verbal skills could be best defined as domain-general or domain-specific, and, in the latter…

A controversial topic in research on second-language acquisition is whether residual variability and optionality in high-proficiency late second-language (L2) learners is merely the outcome of cross-linguistic transfer, competition, and processing limitations, or whether late learners have an underlying representational deficit due to maturational…

Previous research has demonstrated that being bilingual from birth is advantageous for the development of skills of social cognition, executive functioning, and metalinguistic awareness due to bilingual children's extensive experience of processing and manipulating two linguistic systems. The present study investigated whether these cognitive…

Arizona is the site of many explicit language policies as well as ongoing scholarly discussions of related language ideologies--beliefs about the role of language in society. This study adds a critical piece to the investigation of the role of ideologies in language policy processes by thoroughly documenting language ideologies expressed by a…

The present study investigates the possible influence of foreign language learning on individuals' divergent thinking abilities. Unlike the large body of research devoted to unfolding the effect of bilingualism on cognitive functions, foreign language learning has gained little attention. This study aimed at bringing into attention the distinctive…

This study aimed to investigate the capacity of coordinating comprehension and production processes and the role of phonological working memory in simultaneous interpreting. To this end we evaluated the Articulatory Suppression (AS) effect in three groups of participants, monolingual controls, students of interpreting and professional…

Previous studies have shown that preschool bilingual children lag behind same-aged monolinguals in their production of correct past tense forms. This lag has been attributed to bilinguals' less frequent exposure to either language. If so, bilingual children acquire the past tense like monolinguals, only later. In this study, we compared the…

Purpose: The authors assessed adult selective auditory attention to determine effects of (a) differences between the vocal/speaking characteristics of different mixed-gender pairs of masking talkers and (b) the rhythmic structure of the language of the competing speech. Method: Reception thresholds for English sentences were measured for 50…