The ability to read on grade level is a fundamental skill required for children to achieve academic success. Students who are English language learners (ELLs) and/or those who have learning disabilities often find it extremely difficult to achieve at the reading expectation level. This study examines English phonemic awareness and phonic skills in…

Recent research on monolingual (L1) and bilingual (2L1) language acquisition is exploring the idea that children's early deviant structures involving omission of obligatory subjects and objects might be due not so much to performance limitations or purely syntactic deficits, but rather to an immature interface between syntax and discourse. For…

Recent research shows that speakers of languages with obligatory plural marking (English) preferentially categorize objects based on common shape, whereas speakers of nonplural-marking classifier languages (Yucatec and Japanese) preferentially categorize objects based on common material. The current study extends that investigation to the domain…

Survey data from a large and diverse urban university in the US revealed a significant commitment among incoming students to the value of a multi-ethnic student body; students who were the children of immigrants expressed this value most strongly. However, follow-up interviews with these second-generation Americans, now in their third year at the…

This longitudinal study examined growth in the English productive vocabularies of bilingual and monolingual children between ages 24 and 36 months and explored the utility and validity of supplementing parent reports with teacher reports to improve the estimation of children's vocabulary. Low-income, English-speaking and English/Spanish-speaking…

Phonological acquisition traditionally has been measured using constructs that focus on segments rather than the whole words. Findings from recent research have suggested whole-word productions be evaluated using measures such as phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU) and the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). These measures have been…

A number of studies have shown that bilingual children have an advantage when performing on phonological awareness tasks, particularly in their stronger language. Little research has been done to date, examining the effects of bilingualism on both languages of bilingual children. In this study Mandarin-English bilingual children's performance on…

We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn-DRAW), irregular change stem (ran-RUN), and regular past tense-present tense verb pairs that were either low…

The study's purpose was to assess, through mixed methods, written linguistic features of 20 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in middle school. Students came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Participants wrote two expository and two narrative formal texts, each in Spanish and English, for a total of eight…

In our second millennium, oral translation has become very significant due to the speedy globalization phenomenon. However, many elders in Taiwan might not effortlessly integrate into this global village because they did not obtain their opportunity of learning English in their childhood. Therefore, some of the bosses of industries or…

We reported three experiments investigating subsyllabic unit preference in young Chinese children. In Experiment 1, a Chinese sound similarity judgment task was designed in which 48 pair of stimuli varied in terms of shared subsyllabic units (i.e., vowel, body, rime, onset-coda). Grade 1 Chinese-speaking monolingual children judged pairs with…

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…

Two member onset consonant clusters with /s/ as the first member (#sC onsets) behave differently from other double onset consonant clusters in English. Phonological explanations of children's consonant cluster production have been posited to predict children's speech acquisition. The aim of this study was to consider the role of the Sonority…

The study argues that, in addition to advantages in conscious attention-demanding processing, bilinguals may also exhibit enhanced unconscious divergent thinking. To investigate this issue, the performance of Russian-English bilingual immigrants and English monolingual native speakers was compared on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, which…

Various studies analyzing pronominal subject expression in Spanish have found that switch-reference, the relationship between two consecutive subjects, is the factor that most commonly constrains speakers' choice of a null or explicit subject personal pronoun (SPP) (Cameron, 1995; Flores-Ferran, 2002). When the second subject in a sequence differs…