Purpose: Speech disfluencies are common in individuals who do not stutter, with estimates suggesting a typical rate of six per 100 words. Factors such as language ability, processing load, planning difficulty, and communication strategy influence disfluency. Recent work has indicated that bilinguals may produce more disfluencies than monolinguals,…

Purpose: Bilingual children's speech often contains high percentages of disfluencies in both their languages; however, the distribution of disfluency types and the difference across bilinguals' two languages have received insufficient and inconsistent empirical support. The present research aims to profile "typical" bilingual disfluency…

Developing emotional competence during childhood is critical because it is a significant resource for building psychological well-being, social relationships and even school achievement. Language plays an important role in fostering emotional competence among monolingual children but for bilingual children, the relationship between culture,…

As the U.S. population who speaks a language other than English at home continues to grow, few studies have focused on the effect of parental beliefs on the importance of bilingualism have on language outcomes of their children. In this study, we surveyed families raising Spanish-English bilingual children on their beliefs concerning both…

Purpose: Bilingual children often demonstrate a high rate of disfluencies, which might impact the diagnostic evaluation of fluency disorders; however, research on the rates and types of disfluencies in bilinguals' two languages is limited. The purpose of this research is to profile disfluencies of two types, stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and…

This paper explores the position of 'linguistic expert', and how being positioned as an expert affects the linguistic and ethnic identity construction of a group of Polish-English bilingual adolescents living in the UK. Findings indicate that while the participants are often positioned as linguistic experts in English and/or Polish, this may not…

In this article, we study a simple mathematical model of a bilingual community in which all agents are fluent in the majority language but only a fraction of the population has some degree of proficiency in the minority language. We investigate how different distributions of proficiency, combined with the speakers' attitudes toward or against the…

Individuals with lower proficiency in a second language tend to produce more disfluent speech patterns in the second language. Speech disfluencies refer to interruptions in the forward flow of speech and are distinct from the colloquial use of "fluency," to characterize knowledge of a language. Prior research indicates that some speech…

This study investigated the Family Language Policy of second- and third-generation Turkish parents in Melbourne, Australia. Earlier research has shown that the family home is a crucial site for language maintenance [Fishman 1991. "Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages."…

Metalinguistic awareness (MLA) is a predictor of adult foreign language (FL) learning in instructed settings. Following Bialystok and Ryan (1985) two-component model of MLA, we distinguish ML analysis as the ability to compare and select language items from ML control as the ability to detect and manipulate rule-based linguistic patterns. So far,…

This longitudinal study examined the development of narrative micro- and macrostructure in Japanese-English bilingual returnee children. Returnees are children of immigrant families who move to a foreign country, spending a significant portion of their formative developmental years in the foreign majority language context before returning to their…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

Over the past 40 years, Jim Cummins has proposed a number of highly influential theoretical concepts, including the threshold and interdependence hypotheses and the distinction between conversational fluency and academic language proficiency. In this book, he provides a personal account of how these ideas developed and he examines the credibility…

This study compares the language proficiency gains of two groups of students taking a business English course module in a bilingual university in Catalonia (Spain). Whereas one of these groups followed a 'translanguaging' or 'plurilingual' pedagogy, the other followed a strictly monolingual approach. Participants were 54 mostly Catalan/Spanish…

In vocabulary research there has been a shift from focusing on single words to considering multiword sequences, such as collocations. Despite the general consensus among language researchers that collocation is essential to effective language use in real-world communication, particularly oral communication, language-testing researchers have made…