This study examined the effects of direct instruction in the phonology/orthography of Spanish on the native language skills and foreign language aptitude of 14 high school women at risk for foreign language learning problems. Pretest/posttest comparisons with students not at risk showed that subjects made significantly greater gains on…

A stimulus equivalence procedure for the acquisition of English and Spanish words was evaluated with two adolescents having head injuries. Following training on one task, subjects attained and maintained high scores on all matching-to-sample tasks. Results suggest the procedure is effective for teaching foreign language skills to head-injured…

This paper considers the relationship between bilingualism and intelligence in Puerto Rican children from a population perspective. A population perspective refers to the idea that many of the variables considered by psychologists to be independent are, in fact, distributed non-randomly in the population, and that this distribution needs to be…

Although the study of self-selected ethnic labels may aid scientists in their understanding of an ethnic group, the uncoordinated use of ethnic labels applied by social scientists and others can result in confusion and misinformation. A literature review yields a plethora of terms used to refer to Mexican Americans. Terms currently popular are…

A sample of 133 Spanish children (ages 8 to 13) was classified by IQ and reading level and given a lexical processing task. The study found that IQ did not explain differences between learning-disabled (LD) or nondisabled (NLD) children in lexical processing. Lexical and sublexical parameters had a greater influence on LD students than NLD…

This study investigated the effects of advance organizers on the English reading comprehension of six bilingual fifth and sixth grade learning disabled students whose primary language was Spanish. An alternating treatment design was implemented. Following each treatment, the students read an expository text written in English and answered eight…

The research team identified and tested six criteria that operationalize cultural responsiveness as a factor for evaluating school district Websites: cultural utility, representation of diverse cultures of target populations in graphics, percentage of website topics translated into Spanish, the content of topics translated, the level on which…

A study investigated whether markedness relationships within a target language influence the degree of difficulty in acquisition. The Intralingual Markedness Hypothesis was developed, stating that if structures in the target language differ from those in the native language, and if those structures in the target language are in a markedness…

Few studies on teaching culture have empirically investigated the significance between the teaching methodology and the results. To investigate the influence of specificity of cultural information and mode of presentation on attitudes toward South Americans, 113 college students in introductory Spanish classes (21 male, 92 female) participated in…

This report is designed to examine the construction of cultural memory, specifically the interpretation and transmission of historical knowledge in Spain and Catalonia. The study contends that in modern complex societies the genre commonly categorized as history represents a particular form of cultural construct devoted to the transmission,…

The Early Screening Inventory is designed to identify English- or Spanish-speaking children, ages 4-6, who may need special education services. The instrument measures the ability to acquire new skills in the areas of visual-motor/adaptive, language/cognition, and gross-motor/body-awareness. This paper describes administration, summation of data,…

Comparison of the pragmatic performance of 40 Latino bilingual adolescents receiving English-as-a-Second-Language instruction or speech-language therapy found that students receiving speech-language therapy scored more poorly in expressing themselves, establishing greetings, initiating and maintaining conversations, and other topics. The group…

A study examined second language article acquisition by analyzing the spoken interlanguage of speakers of five different native languages, three with no article system (Chinese, Japanese, and Russian) and two with article systems (Spanish and German). Informal interviews of four speakers of each language at successive levels of interlanguage…

This article discusses the role of stimulability in the assessment and treatment of phonological disorders in Spanish-speaking children and applies principles of stimulability to the evaluation and treatment of a phonological disorder in a three-year-old Spanish-speaking child. The case study demonstrated that use of stimulability resulted in…

This study examined developmental changes in lexical comprehension in 100 bilingual individuals at five age levels, all of whom had learned Spanish as a first language and English beginning at age 5. Although skills improved in both languages over time, by middle childhood performance was better in English, with this transition occurring earlier…