This article will examine the sociopolitical language contexts that exist in institutions of Canadian post-secondary education, through investigating how government policies affect the consumption and teaching of language in writing classrooms. A survey of Canadian multiculturalist policy, multilingualism, and post-secondary education in terms of…

In this study we examine how native language, sex, and college major interact to influence accuracy and preferred strategy when performing mental rotation (MR). Native monolingual Chinese and English speakers rotated 3-D shapes while maintaining a concurrent verbal or spatial memory load. For English speakers, male physical science majors were…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of an Internet-delivered universally designed depth of vocabulary intervention that targeted both English-speaking and Spanish-English-speaking students. Two hundred forty students, 49% of whom were Spanish-English bilinguals, participated in the 16-week intervention. Intervention students…

We examined how the semantics of causal expressions in Russian and English might differ and how these differences might lead to changes in the way second language learners understand causal expressions in their first language. According to the dynamics model of causation (Wolff, 2007), expressions of causation based on CAUSE verbs (make, force)…

A number of recent studies have argued that bilingual children's language comprehension and production may be affected by cross-linguistic influence. The overall aim of this study was to investigate whether the ability to judge the grammaticality of a construction in one language is affected by knowledge of the corresponding construction in the…

The study investigated the eye movements of Thai-English bilinguals when reading both Thai and English with and without interword spaces, in comparison with English monolinguals. Thai is an alphabetic orthography without interword spaces. Participants read sentences with high and low frequency target words embedded in same sentence frames with and…

Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual…

Purpose: Identifying children with primary or specific language impairment (LI) in languages other than English continues to present a diagnostic challenge. This study examined the utility of English and Spanish nonword repetition (NWR) to identify children known to have LI. Method: Participants were 4 groups of school-age children (N = 187).…

Research using online comprehension measures with monolingual children shows that speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition are correlated with lexical development. Here we examined speech processing efficiency in relation to vocabulary development in bilingual children learning both Spanish and English (n=26 ; 2 ; 6). Between-language…

This study examined strategies for spelling accuracy in Grade 3 children. Thirty bilingual, Afrikaans-English speaking children and 30 monolingual, English-speaking children were assessed on their ability to spell English words and non-words. The bilingual children were also assessed on their Afrikaans word and non-word spelling abilities. In…

This study compared the English spelling of native Spanish-speaking children receiving English-only instruction with monolingual native English speaking children at the end of kindergarten. In invented spelling, young bilingual children can show us how they perceive the unique sounds of English by the way they map English letters onto non-Spanish…

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which bilingual speakers maintain language-specific phonological contrasts for homorganic stops when a cue is shared across both languages. To this end, voice onset time (VOT) was investigated in three groups of participants: early bilinguals speakers of Canadian French and Canadian English (n =…

From studies of bilingual education practices, some authors have suggested that bilingualism, in a favourable environment, facilitates development of metaphonological abilities. In a monolingual context, these abilities develop in interaction with literacy. The objective of the present study is to determine if bilingual children have some…

This paper deals with cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in early trilingualism involving the languages German, English and Farsi. The data come from the case study of the author's two children growing up in a trilingual family within a monolingual German-speaking environment. Specific types of CLI from the non-dominant language Farsi on German and…

Previous studies have highlighted early differences in bilinguals' rate of language acquisition in comparison with monolinguals. However, these differences seem to disappear with increasing age and exposure to the language, and do so quicker in dominant community languages than in minority status languages. This study aimed to replicate these…