Purpose: This report compares device use in a cohort of Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children who are deaf and hard of hearing, including children fitted with traditional hearing aids, cochlear implants (CIs), and/or bone-conduction hearing devices. Method: Participants were 84 Spanish-English bilingual children and 85 English…

Bilingualism has been systematically associated with better self-regulatory skills (), however, this advantage does not seem to automatically transfer for most dual language learners. This suggests that there are other contextual factors that are necessary to trigger this advantage. This study examines the role of teacher-child interactions in the…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare Basque and Catalan bilinguals' performance on the letter verbal fluency test and determine whether significant differences are present depending on the letters used and the language of administration. Method: The sample consisted of 87 Spanish monolinguals, 139 Basque bilinguals, and 130 Catalan…

Since there are no systematic pauses delimiting words in speech, the problem of word segmentation is formidable even for monolingual infants. We use computational modeling to assess whether word segmentation is substantially harder in a bilingual than a monolingual setting. Seven algorithms representing different cognitive approaches to…

By 12 months of age, infants exhibit behavioral sensitivity to sound symbolism (e.g. sound-shape correspondences) when they hear universally sound symbolic pseudowords (e.g. "bouba," "kiki"). Here, we investigated whether infant's sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences is affected when they hear language-specific sound…

The authors assessed a battery of number skills in a sample of over 500 preschoolers, including both monolingual and bilingual/ multilingual learners from households at a range of socio-economic levels. Receptive vocabulary was measured in English for all children, and also in Spanish for those who spoke it. The first goal of the study was to…

Studies on multilingual word learning have focused on identifying a bilingual advantage over monolingual peers, paying little attention to the relationships between bilinguals' existing vocabulary size and novel word learning. This study compared monolingual and bilingual school-age children on word learning tasks in familiar and unfamiliar…

Recent research has demonstrated that individual differences in infant attention to faces and voices of women speaking predict language outcomes in childhood. These findings have been generated using two new audiovisual attention assessments appropriate for infants and young children, the Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP) and the…

In a study comparing executive functions among US Spanish-English bilinguals from low socio-economic (SES) backgrounds to monolinguals of each language, Grote et al. find that bilingual advantages already manifest themselves in pre-school children. This commentary recommends building on this finding, and further investigate the causes underlying…

Individual differences in infants' native phonological development have been linked to the quantity and quality of infant-directed speech (IDS). The effects of parental and infant bilingualism on this relation in 131 five- and nine-month-old monolingual and bilingual Spanish and Basque infants (72 male; 59 female; from white middle-class…

We identify language and discourse skills in 54-month-old Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers and their English-speaking monolingual peers, using multiple measures. Forty-one Spanish-English bilingual and 25 English monolingual children, all US born, viewed an eight-minute wordless video. The bilingual children recounted the story once in…

The present study examined the production of inalienable possession with body parts in Spanish among 20 school-age children of Mexican-born parents born and raised in the United States. The results were compared to those of 20 first-generation immigrant parents (main input providers), 27 Spanish-dominant children of similar age, and 12 Spanish…

We presented 28 Spanish monolingual and 28 Catalan-Spanish close-language bilingual 5-year-old children with a video of a talker speaking in the children's native language and a nonnative language and examined the temporal dynamics of their selective attention to the talker's eyes and mouth. When the talker spoke in the children's native language,…

The present study explores Spanish-English speakers' attitudes toward bilingual discourse in the Upstate of South Carolina. Implementing a mixed methods approach, survey data and sociolinguistic interviews targeting bilinguals' attitudes toward English-origin nonce borrowings, loanshifts, and codeswitching were examined. Quantitative analyses…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…