Purpose: Bilingual individuals have been shown to be more proficient on visual tasks of inhibition compared with their monolingual counterparts. However, the bilingual advantage has not been evidenced in all studies, and very little is known regarding how bilingualism influences inhibitory control in the perception of auditory information. The…

Aotearoa New Zealand is a diverse multicultural nation, with a vibrant indigenous culture and language. However, levels of bilingualism are relatively low, with less than 20% of the population using more than one language. English is the dominant language, and monolingualism in English the taken for granted norm. In the New Zealand Curriculum…

This article draws on data generated through a multi-site collaborative inquiry with students across five English and French schools in Canada and France to investigate children's social representations of plurilingualism. Children were asked to draw a sequence of reflexive drawings of a monolingual, a bilingual and a plurilingual individual, as…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the diagnostic accuracy of traditional measures of phonological ability developed for monolingual English-speaking children with their bilingual peers in both English and Spanish. We predicted that a composite measure, derived from a combination of English and Spanish phonological measures, would…

Some evidence suggests that the home numeracy environment (HNE) is related to children's numeracy. Socioeconomic status (SES) and language minority status can also influence children's HNE and numeracy. Limited HNE research focuses on dual language learners (DLLs). Using a sample of preschool-aged children (n = 98) from low socioeconomic status…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

Framing ethnography as a form of democratic inquiry, this study examines how the author worked with a group of Mexican and Vietnamese American adolescents to learn and apply ethnographic tools to interrogate language and literacy ideologies in their school and community. Examination of the students' findings reveals circulating ideologies and…

Purpose: Performance on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), among the most widely used global screens of adult cognitive status, is affected by demographic variables including age, education, and ethnicity. This study extends prior research by examining the specific effects of bilingualism on MMSE performance. Method: Sixty independent…

Studies have shown that U.S. learners' proficiency in reading and listening comprehension lags behind their ability to decode words. Recent studies have found that even after 3 years of high school L2 courses, U.S. students fail to develop minimal proficiency in reading comprehension. This paper suggests that while cognitive factors (word decoding…

This study examined whether the proposed bilingual advantage in inhibitory control and working memory can be extended to a trilingual advantage, and assessed any age-related effects on a continuum in young adults to older adults. Trilinguals, bilinguals and monolinguals' performance on the Simon task and a numerical version of the N-back task was…

Maternal scaffolding and four-year-old children's linguistic skills were examined during toy play. Participants were 21 American-English monolingual and 21 Thai monolingual mother-child dyads. Results revealed cross-cultural differences in conversation styles between the two groups. American dyads adopted a high-elaborative style relative to Thai…

This study aimed to explore the differences between Arabic-English bilingual and monolingual Arabic children on a battery of executive functions. Prior research on the influence of bilingualism on cognitive abilities and executive functions has shown mixed results. Some results suggested that bilinguals perform significantly better than…

Children categorize native-accented speakers as local and non-native-accented speakers as foreign, suggesting they use accent (i.e., phonological proficiency) to determine social group membership. However, it is unclear if accent is the strongest--AND ONLY--group marker children use to determine social group membership, or whether other aspects of…

Background & Aims: Given that standardized language measures alone are inadequate for identifying functionally defined developmental language disorder (fDLD), this study investigated whether non-linguistic cognitive abilities (procedural learning, motor functions, executive attention, processing speed) can increase the prediction accuracy of…

Word-initial stops in Mandarin and English show a distinctive phonological categorization but a similar phonetic realization along the VOT (Voice Onset Time) continuum. Previous research reported that native Mandarin adults produce measurably longer long-lag VOTs than native English adults. The present study examined whether and how the difference…