This research analyzes data collected by the Young Lives project on childhood poverty. It addresses the effect of socio-demographic, individual, and linguistic variables -- focusing on the latter -- on reading comprehension in Spanish by 502 Peruvian Quechua-Spanish bilingual children aged 8 years. The regression model tested explained 46% of the…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

Past research suggests that bilingualism positively affects children's performance in false belief tasks. However, researchers have yet to fully explore factors that are related to better performance in these tasks within bilingual groups. The current study includes an assessment of proficiency in both languages (which was lacking in past work)…

Language experience shapes infants' abilities to process speech sounds, with universal phonetic discrimination abilities narrowing in the second half of the first year. Brain measures reveal a corresponding change in neural discrimination as the infant brain becomes selectively sensitive to its native language(s). Whether and how bilingual…

Recently it has been proposed that sensitivity to nonarbitrary relationships between speech sounds and objects potentially bootstraps lexical acquisition. However, it is currently unclear whether preverbal infants (e.g., before 6 months of age) with different linguistic profiles are sensitive to such nonarbitrary relationships. Here, the authors…

Conventional wisdom suggests that students classified as learning disabled will exhibit difficulties with foreign language (FL) learning, but evidence has not supported a relationship between FL learning problems and learning disabilities. The simple view of reading model posits that reading comprehension is the product of word decoding and…

Heritage Spanish is often influenced by English, and previous research on late Spanish-English bilinguals suggests that their relative clause attachment preferences in Spanish are affected by English exposure. Nevertheless, recent work with heritage speakers has revealed that early (high-proficiency) Spanish-English bilinguals demonstrate a…

Purpose: Our proof-of-concept study tested the feasibility of virtual testing using child assessments that were originally validated for in-person testing only. Method: Ten adult-child dyads were assigned to complete both in-person and virtual tests of language, cognition, and narratives. Child participants fell between the ages of 4 and 8 years;…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare masked English speech recognition thresholds between Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children and to evaluate effects of age, maternal education, and English receptive language abilities on individual differences in masked speech recognition. Method: Forty-three Spanish-English…

In this study, monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) five- and six-year-old children completed a grammaticality judgment test in order to assess their awareness of the grammaticality of two types of syntactic constructions in English: word order and gender representation. All children were better at detecting…

Given concerns about the reading achievement of Dual Language Learners (DLLs) in comparison to English Monolinguals (EMs), this study examined individual difference variables contributing to English reading comprehension growth in Spanish-speaking DLLs and their EM counterparts in Grades 1-4. The participants, who included 578 DLLs and 412 EMs,…

About one-third of children under age 8 in the United States have at least one parent who speaks a language other than English at home. And as of 2016, 9.6 percent of all U.S. public school students were identified as English language learners. It is obvious that the American student population is becoming increasingly multilingual. This trend is…

In the current anti-immigrant context, Latinx families, children, and communities experience language as a highly contested and surveilled practice with consequential effects. In this study, I drew on the concept of literacies of surveillance and translanguaging to examine how language was embodied and rationalized in the context of three homes of…

This study examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of…

Bilingual therapists may use Spanish to create trust and enhance therapeutic relationships with bilingual clients, but less is known about working with monolingual Spanish-speaking clients. This study explores clinical Spanish language skills and perceived clinical Spanish efficacy of bilingual (Spanish/English) mental health clinicians who…