This dissertation offers new approaches to an old and well-known problem in the study of the development of Romance varieties: duplicate lexis or doublets. Traditional analyses of duplication are narrow in scope both in what qualifies as a doublet (the popular/learned opposition has dominated, to the exclusion of other pairs) and in channels of…

This study analysed the capacity of the Catalan and Spanish versions of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) to distinguish between normal and pathological aging. Both versions of the test were administered to 45 bilingual subjects: 15 healthy aging subjects, 15 patients with mild cognitive impairment and 15 patients with Alzheimer's disease. To…

Adult learners have persistent difficulty processing second language (L2) inflectional morphology. We investigate associative learning explanations that involve the blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones in the first language (L1; i.e., transfer) and the L2 (i.e., proficiency). Sagarra (2008) and Ellis and Sagarra (2010b) found…

In recent years, scholars have voiced the need for research which focuses on the ability of multilinguals to write across multiple languages rather than on the limitations that they face when composing in a non-native language. In order to better understand multilingual writers as resourceful and creative problem-solvers, the current study aims to…

Given that the linguistic articulators for sign language are also used to produce co-speech gesture, we examined whether one year of academic instruction in American Sign Language (ASL) impacts the rate and nature of gestures produced when speaking English. A survey study revealed that 75% of ASL learners (N = 95), but only 14% of Romance language…

An analysis of the language attitudes in the adjacent regions of Els Ports (in the province of Castellon, Spain) and Matarranya (in the province of Teruel, Spain) using the matched-guise technique shows that in both areas, Catalan and Spanish coexist today in a diglossic situation in which Catalan has instrumental values that are lower than those…

This study examines to what extent L2 gains obtained during a study abroad (SA) experience are durable. Participants were 16 Catalan/Spanish bilingual children, learning English as an L2, who were distributed into two groups depending on their learning context (SA vs. at home [AH]). Participants completed a pre-test before the SA participants'…

Since the introduction of gender themes into university teaching in geography in Spain in 1989, significant gains have been made but challenges remain in relation to placing gender into undergraduate curricula and developing teaching resources in local languages. Geographers in Spain have to meet those challenges in the near future in order to…

In this article, I explore language identities and processes of negotiation concerning parts of these identities as seen by a group of students from a bilingual mathematics classroom. A collection of 10 students' individual writings on the questions "What language do you use during group work in your mathematics class and why?" is…

What is the relationship between the awareness of linguistic prestige and the security or insecurity in the use of minoritised languages? Is formal linguistic insecurity (as initially described by Labov) the same as the speakers' perception of linguistic insecurity? Which are the variables related to the various types of linguistic insecurity in…

While research on early simultaneous bilingual acquisition is well-documented, studies on multiple language acquisition in early childhood are still needed. Existing studies have mainly focused on early simultaneous acquisition of three or more languages. Some attention has already been paid to early pragmatic differentiation and cross-linguistic…

The left inferior frontal cortex, the caudate and the anterior cingulate have been proposed as the neural origin of language switching, but most of the studies were conducted in low proficient bilinguals. In the present study, we investigated brain areas involved in language switching in a sample of 19 early, high-proficient Spanish-Catalan…

In studies dealing with language learning strategies in the school context, the variables of proficiency and age are often difficult to isolate since students accumulate more hours of foreign language instruction as they move up from grade to grade. This study aimed to deal with these two variables independently by analysing learning strategy use…

Lexical development is a key facet of later language development. To characterize the linguistic knowledge of school age children, performance in the written modality must also be considered. This study tracks the growth of written text-embedded lexicon in Catalan-speaking children and adolescents. Participants (N = 2161), aged from 5 to 16 years…

This dissertation is a variationist account of two non-standard relative clause (RC) structures in Spanish: resumptive pronouns (RPs) and prepositional-phrase (PP) chopping. Previous typological studies considered RP explanations based on difficulty of processing (Hawkins, 1994), while Spanish-specific quantitative studies proposed a number of…