Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on…

Using the 2.4-million-word written Spanish subsection of the Corpus of Utah Dual Language Immersion, collected from a large-scale standardized writing assessment of K-12 Spanish second language (L2) students, this study focuses on lexical complexity as operationalized by three measures: lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical…

The population of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States continues to increase and there is a significant need to develop psychometrically sound early language and literacy screening measures to accurately capture children's ability in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the innovative design and calibration process of the new…