This study examined the interrelationships among and combined effects of word reading skills and syntactic knowledge on reading prosody in fifth-grade monolingual Spanish-speaking students. We used Spanish standardized tests to assess the participants (n = 169, 79 girls) on word and pseudoword reading skills, syntactic knowledge, and reading…

Letter knowledge and word identification are key skills for reading and spelling. Letter knowledge facilitates the application of sublexical letter-sound mappings to decode words. With reading experience, word identification becomes a key lexical skill to support decoding. In transparent orthographies, however, letter knowledge might be an…

Background: Letter knowledge is crucial in the first stages of reading development. It supports learning letter-sound mappings and the identification of the letters that make up words. Previous studies have investigated the longitudinal impact of early letter knowledge on children's further word reading abilities. This study employed an artificial…

Does saying a novel word help to recognize it later? Previous research on the effect of production on this aspect of word learning is inconclusive, as both facilitatory and detrimental effects of production are reported. In a set of three experiments, we sought to reconcile the seemingly contrasting findings by disentangling the production from…

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…

We compared 2 learning methods for the acquisition of vocabulary in a second language (L2). In addition, the use of the new L2 words was evaluated both in isolation and within sentences. In the semantic method, L2 words and pictures denoting their meanings were presented and participants learned by practicing a semantic categorization task (to…

This article is on pedagogical translanguaging, understood as planned instructional strategies used with a pedagogical purpose in a multilingual educational context. The paper reports a study on cognate identification and cognate awareness carried out in a multilingual primary school. The study aims at analyzing whether the identification of…

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the…

We assessed the effect of bilingualism on metacognitive processing in the artificial language learning task, in 2 experiments varying in the difficulty to segment the language. Following a study phase in which participants were exposed to the artificial language, segmentation performance was assessed by means of a dual forced-choice recognition…

Though concept maps and graphic organisers are useful tools for bilinguals to organise the information being managed and learned, its systematic use is not widened and decisive in CLIL domains. Apart from helping students to acquire meaningful learning, concept mapping might promote in them word-recognition skills for the identification and…

The connections between music and language are still to be clarified in educational terms; despite the great deal of literature on the common mechanisms underlying their working in learning, memory, and some other related factors, there is not robust research on their combined potential. Educational bilingualism and musical instruction have been…

Repeated viewing of the same video is a common strategy among autonomous language learners as well as a much used pedagogical strategy among foreign language (FL) teachers. Learners may watch the same video more than once, to increase global comprehension of the target language or to focus their attention on linguistic aspects, such as new…

Some inconsistency is observed in the results from studies of reading development regarding the role of the syllable in visual word recognition, perhaps due to a disparity between the tasks used. We adopted a word-spotting paradigm, with Spanish children of second grade (mean age: 7 years) and sixth grade (mean age: 11 years). The children were…

Learning to compose texts adequate for different purposes is crucial for becoming literate. We examined developmental changes in the rhetorical structure of written texts produced by Spanish children throughout the early years of elementary school in the light of descriptive writing purposes. Children had also performed tasks to test…

The results of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey paint a troubling portrait of the literacy skills of adults in the United States. The survey included a direct assessment of skills and was conducted in 23 countries with nationally representative samples of adults ages 16 through 65. Assessed were…