Purpose: This longitudinal study investigated the emergence of English tense marking in young (Spanish-English) dual language learners (DLLs) over 4 consecutive academic semesters, addressing the need for longitudinal data on typical acquisition trajectories of English in DLL preschoolers. Method: Language sample analysis was conducted on 139…

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…

This study investigated the motion event language children and their parents engaged in while playing a board game. Children are sensitive to differences in manner and path at infancy, yet adult-like motion event expression appears relatively late in development. While multiple studies have examined how exposure to parent speech generally relates…

This study compared the use of English past tense in a group of Spanish-English bilingual children with language impairment (BLI) to younger groups of bilinguals with typical and atypical language development reported in an earlier study. Ten children with BLI enrolled in 3rd-6th grade participated. Children supplied 12 regular, 12 irregular, and…

English learners of French whose first language (L1) does not mark the perfective/imperfective distinction have shown verb semantic influence and an overall preference for perfective over imperfective in their use of second language (L2) tense-aspect markers. This study investigated whether learners whose L1 marks the perfective/imperfective…

As a preface to future studies on language impairment in bilingual children, an exploratory analysis of lexical diversity and depth in the production of mental state verbs was conducted on the oral narratives of 9- and 11-year-old children who differed by language status. English-only (EO), bilingual (Spanish-English), and Spanish-only (SO)…

Grammatical measures that distinguish language differences from language disorders in bilingual children are scarce. This study examined English past tense morphology in sequential bilingual Spanish/English-speaking children, age 7;0-9;0 (years;months). Twelve bilingual children with language impairment (LI) or history of LI and 15 typically…

The relation between thought and language was explored using 2 experiments testing monolingual Spanish- and English-speaking children's responses to visual motion event stimuli. In a match-to-sample task (Experiment 1) 7-year-old English speakers fixated on videos matching the manner (rather than path) of a target video more often than…

Discusses hybrid verbs as a linguistic product of the anglophone cultural influence on the Spanish spoken by Cubans in southeastern Florida. (NCR)

The Spanish tense system was chosen as a starting point to establish the systematic character of the Spanish used in situations of intense code switching between Spanish and English. The tense system was chosen for two reasons: (1) the distinction among past tenses (in particular, the imperfect indicative vs. the preterite and the past continuous)…

This memorandum is a systematic listing and description of the salient features of English phonology and morphology, accompanied by a listing of parallel features in nonstandard dialects that account for the difficulties the speakers of nonstandard speech experience in the acquisition of standard English. The dialects considered are English as…