Lexical development is a key facet of later language development. To characterize the linguistic knowledge of school age children, performance in the written modality must also be considered. This study tracks the growth of written text-embedded lexicon in Catalan-speaking children and adolescents. Participants (N = 2161), aged from 5 to 16 years…

A robust finding from studies investigating the Aspect Hypothesis is that learners at the early stages of acquisition show a strong preference for using the progressive aspect as associated with activity verbs. As they advance in their acquisition of the second or foreign language, learners move from this prototypical association to associations…

Today, more and more universities in Spain are starting to design language policies, usually including Spanish and English. At the same time, Spain has a special socio-political context since part of its territory is already bilingual. This paper examines the opinions and attitudes of academics at a bilingual Valencian-Spanish university which is…

We report on the case of an elderly bilingual woman presenting with a diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia. The participant's native language was Friulian (L1), a predominantly oral Romance language, and her second language was Italian (L2), formally learned at primary school in oral and written forms. We investigated her linguistic abilities…

Undoubtedly, different learning contexts offer different opportunities for foreign language practice. This article focuses on context effects, and reports on the findings of the "Study Abroad and Language Acquisition" (SALA) project, which has examined in depth the impact of two learning contexts, SA within the European Community Action…

The present paper aims to briefly describe the manner in which intercultural education is perceived in the Romanian school system, as well as the solutions that are being proposed (mainly in the form of activities) for reconsidering and strengthening interculturality as a dimension of education. We report on the results of semi-structured…

A shift from language-general to language-specific sound discrimination abilities has been largely attested in different populations of infants during the second half of the first year of life; however, data are still scarce regarding bilingual populations. Previous research with 4-, 8- and 12-month-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants had…

Researchers (Ball, 2003; Ma, 1999; Schulman, 1986) have long investigated how a teacher's subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge impact on students' learning of mathematics. In an attempt to account for the relationship between teacher knowledge and student learning, this study examined four Romanian first grade teachers' knowledge about…

"Promoting public understanding" is what the programming mandate asks the Swiss public broadcasting company SRG SSR to do. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this means linking speech communities with other speech communities, both between and within the German-, French-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking parts of Switzerland. In the…

This paper investigates whether the semantic and phonological levels in speech production are specific to spoken languages or universal across modalities. We examined semantic and phonological effects during Catalan Signed Language (LSC: Llengua de Signes Catalana) production using an adaptation of the picture-word interference task: native and…

The present study investigated the development of linguistic awareness in children exposed to the early learning of a second language in Grades 3-5 of primary school, i.e. between the ages of 8 and 10. The aim was to determine whether this bilingual experience enhanced the development of phonological awareness in beginning readers in a bilingual…

Two cross-modal priming experiments tested whether lexical access is constrained by syllabic structure in Italian. Results extend the available Italian data on the processing of stressed syllables showing that syllabic information restricts the set of candidates to those structurally consistent with the intended word (Experiment 1). Lexical…

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children,…

This paper draws on Wenger's model of community of practice to present preliminary findings on how processes of negotiation of meaning and identity formation occur in knowledge construction, meaning-making and interaction in two secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) science classrooms. It uses a multimodal conversation analysis…

Psychometric properties of Romanian translations of the "Behavior Problems Inventory-01" ("BPI-01"; Rojahn, Matson, Lott, Esbensen, & Smalls, 2001) and the "Nisonger Child Behavior Rating Form" ("NCBRF"; Aman, Tasse, Rojahn, & Hammer, 1996) were explored. Respondents completed the instruments for 115…