In general, the vitality and social functions of a language are assessed in connection with such indices as the language's intergenerational transmission, the absolute number of speakers and proportion of speakers in the population, its present domains of use, its development within diverse domains of use, and the availability of its educational…

This monograph discusses the language situation in Japan, with an emphasis on language planning and policy. Japan has long considered itself to be a monoethnic and therefore monolingual society, despite the existence of substantial old-comer ethnic minorities, and this--with the instrumental exception of English--has been reflected in its language…

Background: A large proportion of children are exposed to more than one language, yet research on simultaneous bilingualism has been relatively sparse. Traditionally, there has been concern that bilingualism may aggravate language difficulties of children with language impairment. However, recent studies have not found specific language impairment…

The effect of word frequency on the processing of monomorphemic vs. inflected words was investigated in a morphologically relatively limited language, Swedish, with two participant groups: early Finnish-Swedish bilinguals and Swedish monolinguals. The visual lexical decision results of the monolinguals suggest morphological decomposition with…

This paper proposes a constructivist account of the development of morphosyntax in bilinguals, based on an examination of two populations--English-Spanish bilinguals in Miami and English-Welsh bilinguals in North Wales. Despite sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences across these groups, the development of bilinguals in the two groups…

The study examined two questions: (1) do the greater phonological awareness skills of bilinguals affect reading performance; (2) to what extent do the orthographic characteristics of a language influence reading performance and how does this interact with the effects of phonological awareness. We estimated phonological metalinguistic abilities and…

The educational system in many schools fails to meet the academic needs of minority students. The dramatic shifts in student demographics are demanding changes in the ways teachers are teaching them. It is essential to understand the long term effects of past educational practices and bilingual programs. Research indicates that there are many…

A tension exists for teachers in Texas bilingual third and fifth grade classrooms between state and local bilingual education policy, which encourages them to transition students gradually from Spanish into English instruction while providing bilingual support; and state and federal accountability policy, which requires them to choose a single…

In addition to the subject matter given in the title, references to the literature are given. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Traces the changes from multilingual to monolingual educational programs in the U.S., describes current bilingual programs and students, and notes the benefits for all children of treating bilingual education as a normal instructional program. (RW)

Addresses bilingual phonological development in the prosodic field, by studying the transition from a single metrical foot to the production of one foot preceded by an unstressed syllable or to the production of two consecutive feet. Uses monolingual data to form a baseline comparison with the bilingual data Establishment of two different…

Discusses three areas of development that have been shown to be fundamental to the acquisition of literacy: experience with stories and book reading, concepts of print, and phonological awareness. Research is reviewed in each area, comparing the development of these skills by bilingual and monolingual children. Research has been contradictory…

This study examines lexical performance by 3 groups of linguistically diverse school-age learners: English-only speakers with primary language impairment (LI), typical English-only speakers (EO), and typical bilingual Spanish-English speakers (BI). The accuracy and response time (RT) of 100 8- to 13-year-old children in word recognition and…

Two studies addressed the role of representation ability and control of attention on solutions to an appearance-reality task based on two types of objects, real and representational. In Study 1, 67 preschool children (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) solved appearancereality problems and executive processing tasks. There was an interaction between object…

The authors induced tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) for English words in monolinguals and bilinguals using picture stimuli with cognate (e.g., vampire, which is vampiro in Spanish) and noncognate (e.g., funnel, which is embudo in Spanish) names. Bilinguals had more TOTs than did monolinguals unless the target pictures had translatable cognate…