This study examined Spanish spelling errors among 166 native Spanish-speaking students from Kindergarten to Grade 3 based on a spelling-to-diction task. Fifteen types of spelling errors were analyzed in a latent class analysis. Results suggested three phases of spellers: Phase 1 students had a high chance of committing almost all types of errors.…

If maximal exposure were the key to success in language learning, then adult learners at the university level would be doomed to fail. Not only are they presumably too old to learn additional languages effectively, but target language (TL) input appears to be insufficient, especially when other languages are allowed in class. Nevertheless,…

Despite the extensive research on bilingual development, our understanding of how lexical competition unfolds in the bilingual mind remains limited. Previous studies have predominantly focused on crosslinguistic competition, neglecting the examination of the competition process within each language and the influence of diverse bilingual…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify which morphological markers have the best diagnostic accuracy to identify developmental language disorders (DLD) in monolingual Spanish-speaking children. Method: The participants in this study included 50 Spanish-speaking monolingual children with (n = 25) and without (n = 25) DLD. Data…

This paper examines the strategies used by speakers of Spanish as a second language (L2) for marking Information Focus, a phenomenon found at the syntax-discourse interface. Sorace and colleagues have proposed the Interface Hypothesis, according to which the syntax-discourse interface poses unique challenges for bilinguals (Sorace, 2011). With…

The goal of this paper is to describe a group of adult Mexican English learners' ideologies about different APPRAISAL patterns in English-language scientific texts. APPRAISAL is a descriptive framework of the linguistic resources used to convey feelings and attitudes (Martin & White, 2005). This topic is particularly interesting in EAP…

This study is an initial exploration of students' abilities to analyze critically authenticity of physics problems, carried out with Spanish translation of the eight Edition of popular physics textbook "Fundamentals of Physics", written by Halliday, Resnick and Walker. Students (N = 34) involved in the study were those of applied physics…

Despite a growing amount of research on collaborative dialogue during task performance, little attention has been given to the occurrence of collaborative dialogue across task modality and its impact on language development. To expand our current understanding of task modality effects on learning opportunities, we examined the process of engaging…

This study compares Spanish morphosyntax error types and magnitude in monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and language impairment (LI). Performance across groups was compared using cloze tasks that targeted articles, clitics, subjunctives, and derivational morphemes in 57 children.…

This study examined multimedia instruction (MI) effects on the development of the French prototypical and non-prototypical past forms among Hispanophone learners. During 4 weeks of classroom instruction, participants were exposed to MI in one of 4 conditions: learners at early stages of past-tense development received MI including prototypical (n…

In native speakers of gender-marking languages, mechanisms of gender production appear to be affected by the morphophonological cues to gender present in the noun phrase. This influence is manifested in higher levels of production accuracy when more transparent cues to gender are present in comparison to when they are not. The goal of the present…

Due to the growing number of plurilingual learners in the world today (Hammarberg, 2010), the present multiple case study examines four plurilingual participants' beliefs toward first language (L1) and second language (L2) mediation in the acquisition of French as a third language (L3). During a 16-week classroom-based study in a French university…

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the…

In this study, we investigate whether specific language impairment (SLI) manifests itself grammatically in the same way in Spanish and English with respect to nominal plural marking. English-speaking children with SLI are very proficient at marking plural on nouns. Spanish has two main nominal plural allomorphs: /s/ and /es/. The /es/ allomorph…