The study examines emergent literacy skills in a group of young English Language Learners who are dominant in their native language, Spanish. We investigate the relative contribution of syntactic comprehension in the L1 and L2 to the development of emergent reading skills in English. Participants were bilingual kindergarteners from two public…

Reliable and valid assessment of individuals who are English language learners (ELL) has presented a dilemma to psychologists, and school psychologists in particular, as it is complicated by the small number of professionals qualified to serve as bilingual examiners. Some psychologists use ancillary examiners during testing when no bilingual…

This study explores the extent to which a bilingual advantage can be observed for executive function tasks in children of varying levels of language dominance, and examines the contributions of general cognitive knowledge, linguistic abilities, language use and socio-economic level to performance. Welsh-English bilingual and English monolingual…

The lack of consistency in how bilingual language dominance is assessed currently impedes cross-experiment comparisons (Grosjean, 1998). We present a paper-and-pencil dominance scale that can be used to quantify the language dominancy of bilingual participants. The scale targets three main criteria important in gauging dominance (Grosjean, 1998;…

Purpose: English and Mandarin are the 2 most spoken languages in the world, yet it is not known how stuttering manifests in English-Mandarin bilinguals. In this research, the authors investigated whether the severity and type of stuttering is different in English and Mandarin in English-Mandarin bilinguals, and whether this difference was…

This study investigates the potential incomplete acquisition of binding interpretations in Korean-English bilinguals by asking whether and how the majority language of these bilinguals (English) influences their family or heritage language (Korean), especially when exposure to and use of English starts very early. The experiment tested the…

Bilinguals spontaneously switch languages in conversation even though laboratory studies reveal robust cued language switching costs. The authors investigated how voluntary-switching costs might differ when switches are voluntary. Younger (Experiments 1-2) and older (Experiment 3) Spanish-English bilinguals named pictures in 3 conditions: (a)…

In multilingual Asian communities, determining language dominance for clinical assessment and intervention is often complex. The aim of this study was to develop a self-report classification tool for identifying the dominant language in English-Mandarin bilinguals. Participants (N = 168) completed a questionnaire on language history and…

A survey of 724 families of dual language enrichment students in the South-west USA explored what kinds of families had chosen dual language education for their children and why. Of those parents who chose dual language for their children, 45.4% speak primarily English with their child, while 54.6% speak primarily Spanish. English-dominant parents…

Past research demonstrates that first language (L1)-like competence in each language can be attained in simultaneous acquisition of bilingualism by mere exposure to the target languages. The question is whether this is also true for the "weaker" language (WL). The WL hypothesis claims that the WL differs fundamentally from monolingual L1 and…

This paper reports the fifth-year results of a study comparing the English and Spanish language and reading performance of Spanish-dominant children randomly assigned beginning in kindergarten to Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) or Structured English Immersion (SEI). This is the first randomized study to compare TBE and SEI reading…

This study addresses the question of whether language dominance and cross-linguistic influence are related by investigating the acquisition of determiner omission in four bilingual German-Italian children. The study begins by showing that monolingual Italian learners omit determiners less extensively than monolingual German learners. If bilingual…

The representation of L2 words and non-words was analysed in a series of three experiments. Catalan-Spanish bilinguals, differing in terms of their L1 and the age of exposure to their L2 (since birth-simultaneous bilinguals-or starting in early childhood-early sequential bilinguals), were asked to perform a lexical decision task on Catalan words…

This paper explores interpreting in three-generational Italian-English bilingual families as a complex language brokering activity. Recent studies approach non-professional interpreting as language brokering in which bilinguals (often children) interpret for non-bilinguals (adults) in institutional settings (Hall 2004; Valdes 2003). These studies…

Two-year-old bilingual children can show sensitivity to the language choice of their interlocutor, but do not necessarily achieve perfect separation by discourse context, e.g. speaking only French with a French interlocutor; dominance in one language is often cited as a reason for this. In this study we asked whether older bilingual preschoolers…