During the Spanish regimen, Puerto Rican education was limited and restricted to Spanish language as the medium of instruction. It was not until the U.S. colonization of the island that public education was introduced. As a result, English replaced Spanish as medium of instruction in the new educational system. Immediately after, Puerto Rican…

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations…

Although it is commonly thought that people who are bilingual have an advantage in the labor market, studies on this topic have not borne out this perception.The literature, in fact, has found an earnings penalty is associated with bilingualism--people who are bilingual often make less than people who are monolingual in similar jobs. This report…

This article describes oral language and early literacy skills in Spanish and English for a sample of 319 bilingual children in Massachusetts and Maryland (ECS) and a comparison group of 144 monolingual Spanish-speaking children in Puerto Rico (PRC). Children were assessed as they entered and exited pre-kindergarten programs. Data collection…