Understanding factors that influence reading achievement among bilingual children is considerably more complex than it is for monolingual children. Research on dual language development indicates that bilingual children's oral language abilities are often distributed across languages in varied ways, due to heterogeneity of dual language exposure…

Substantial research among bilingual adults indicates that exposure to words primes other semantically related words within and across languages, as well as the direct translation equivalents [e.g. Chen and Ng 1989. "Semantic Facilitation and Translation Priming Effects in Chinese-English Bilinguals." "Memory & Cognition"…

The lexical restructuring model (LRM) is a theory that attempts to explain the developmental origins of phonological awareness (PA). According to the LRM, various characteristics of words should be related to the extent to which words are segmentally represented in the lexicon. Segmental representations of words allow children to access the parts…

Research indicates that sentence-combining instruction is effective for improving writing outcomes; however, no studies to date have examined the effects of sentence-combining instruction on the writing skills of Spanish-speaking language-minority (LM) students. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effects of explicit…

This study represents an extension of the findings of Kieffer and Thompson (2018) and evaluates potential correlates of state- and district-level achievement gaps in reading and mathematics between monolingual and multilingual students. Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, this study reported that there were substantial…

Despite much research examining whether bilingual individuals demonstrate superior executive function (EF) skills compared to monolinguals, the purported bilingual advantage remains controversial. One potential reason for discrepant findings across studies examining the bilingual advantage is the difficulty in matching monolingual and bilingual…

According to the common underlying proficiency model (Cummins, 1981), as children acquire academic knowledge and skills in their first language, they also acquire language-independent information about those skills that can be applied when learning a second language. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relevance of the common underlying…

In this study we evaluated the predictive validity of conceptual scoring. Two independent samples of Spanish-speaking language minority preschoolers (Sample 1: N = 96, mean age = 54.51 months, 54.3% male; Sample 2: N = 116, mean age = 60·70 months, 56.0% male) completed measures of receptive, expressive, and definitional vocabulary in their first…

Purpose: This study examined performance of dual language learners (DLLs) on Spanish- and English-language narrative story retells and unique tells. Transcription and analysis focused on comparisons of common microstructural language sample measures in Spanish and English across tasks. Each language sample measure was evaluated for its possible…

This study evaluated the development of vocabulary knowledge over the course of two academic years, beginning in preschool, in a large sample (N = 944) of language-minority children using scores from single-language vocabulary assessments and conceptual scores. Results indicated that although children began the study with higher raw scores for…

Despite acknowledgment that language-minority children come from a wide variety of home language backgrounds and have a wide range of proficiency in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages, it is unknown whether differences across language-minority children in relative and absolute levels of proficiency in L1 and L2 predict subsequent…

Although there is a growing body of literature on the development of reading skills of Spanish-speaking language minority children, little research has focused on the development of writing skills in this population. This study evaluated whether children's Spanish early reading skills (i.e., print knowledge, phonological awareness, oral language)…

Children's self-regulation, including components of executive function such as inhibitory control, is related concurrently and longitudinally with elementary school children's reading and math abilities. Although several recent studies have examined links between preschool children's self-regulation or executive function and their academic skill…