The author of this chapter argues that the failure of Spanish language education policies in the United States to educate both Latinos and non-Latinos has to do with the clash between three positions--(a) the English language, characterized by U.S. educational authorities as the unique and powerful lingua franca; (b) the Spanish language, as…

Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate what linguistic variables best predict bilingual recognition of acoustically degraded sentences and how to identify bilingual individuals who might have more difficulty than their monolingual counterparts on such tasks. Method: Four hundred English speech-perception-in-noise (SPIN) sentences…

This study examines L1-L2 interaction in semantic categorization in early and late L2 learners. Word categories that overlapped but were not identical in Arabic and English were tested. Words always showed a "wider" range of application in one language, "narrower" in the other. Three types of categories--"classical", "radial", and…

We examined theoretical issues concerning the development of reading fluency and language proficiency in 390 English Language Learners (ELLs,) and 149 monolingual, English-as-a-first language (EL1) students. The extent to which performance on these constructs in Grade 5 (i.e., concurrent predictors) contributes to reading comprehension in the…

Background: A significant number of pupils in UK schools learn English as an additional language (EAL). Relative differences between the educational attainment of this group and monolingual, English-speaking pupils call for an exploration of the literacy needs of EAL learners. Aims: This study explores the developmental progression of reading and…

This paper examines the influence of age of immersion and proficiency in a second language on speech movement consistency in both a first and a second language. Ten monolingual speakers of English and 20 Bengali-English bilinguals (10 with low L2 proficiency and 10 with high L2 proficiency) participated. Lip movement variability was assessed based…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare narrative abilities in children with specific language impairment (SLI) who are monolingual and those who are dual language learners. Method: The participants were 26 children with SLI, 14 monolingual English speakers and 12 dual language learners. The dual language learners were English dominant and…

A. Karmiloff-Smith's (1990) task of drawing a nonexistent object is considered to be a measure of cognitive flexibility. The notion of earlier emergence of cognitive flexibility in bilingual children motivated the current researchers to request 4- and 5-year-old English-Hebrew and Arabic-Hebrew bilingual children and their monolingual peers to…

If access to the bilingual lexicon takes place in a language independent way, monolingual repetition and masked form priming accounts should be directly applicable to bilinguals. We tested such an account (Grainger and Jacobs, 1999) and extended it to explain bilingual effects from L2 to L1. Dutch-English bilinguals made a lexical decision on a…

English, French, and bilingual English-French 17-month-old infants were compared for their performance on a word learning task using the Switch task. Object names presented a /b/ vs. /g/ contrast that is phonemic in both English and French, and auditory strings comprised English and French pronunciations by an adult bilingual. Infants were…

Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5-6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word…

Parental input represents an important source of language socialization. Particularly in bilingual contexts, parents may model pragmatic language use and metalinguistic strategies to highlight language differences. The present study examines multiparty interactions involving 28 bilingual English- and Marathi-speaking parent-child pairs in the…

Bilingual children are frequently misdiagnosed as having Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Misdiagnosis may be minimized by tests with high degrees of sensitivity and specificity. The current study used a new test, the School-Age Sentence Imitation Test-English 32 (SASIT-E32), to investigate sentence repetition in monolingual and bilingual…

The possible advantage of bilingual children over monolinguals in analyzing word meanings from verbal context was examined. The subjects were 40 third-grade children (20 bilingual and 20 monolingual) recruited from independent schools in the USA. The two groups of participants were compared on their performance on a standardized test of receptive…

Despite the growing body of research investigating the nature of text-reading fluency and its relationship to comprehension among monolingual children, very little is known about text-reading fluency for language minority (LM) learners reading in English. The present study investigated the nature of text-reading fluency--its relationship to…