This longitudinal study tracked ten L1 English-speaking learners' acquisition of Spanish voiceless stops /ptk/ by measuring their voice onset time (VOT) over an academic year in two distinct contexts of learning. Living in a Spanish-speaking dorm, participants in the experimental group experienced a "domestic partial-immersion," in which…

As Two-Way Dual Language Programs continue in their nascent stages in the United States, some teachers, administrators, and researchers have reported issues of interest convergence. This construct refers to a Critical Theory principle that proposes alignment between the interests of whites and marginalized groups for a perceived common benefit,…

The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish…

Despite frequent reliance on teacher and parent ratings of children's behavior for multi-informant assessment, agreement between teachers' and parents' ratings is low. This study examined the predictive utility of teacher and parent ratings for children's self-regulatory outcomes (i.e., executive function, continuous performance task) in four…

This study examined the oral language use and classroom involvement of 1,124 preschool children in the United States, focusing on three home languages: English, Spanish, and Burmese. Two-way ANOVA analysis revealed distinct patterns among the language groups. Burmese-speaking children were more likely to listen to teachers and engage in academic…

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…

Due to the scarcity of studies analysing Spanish-speaking students' acquisition of pragmatic competence in English, this paper focuses on the preliminary stage of a longitudinal study on the impact that Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication (SCMC) has on the use of apologies and the acquisition of intercultural communicative competence. In…

At the intersection of social studies and world language curricula are opportunities to explore students' prior learning with vocabulary-rich content designed to support language acquisition goals. "Funds of knowledge" is defined as socio-cultural, economic, and historical knowledge from home and community settings. The instructional…

The present study reports on the findings of a cross-sectional acoustic study of the production of Spanish vowels by three different groups of speakers: 1) native Spanish speakers; 2) native English intermediate learners of Spanish; and 3) native English advanced learners of Spanish. In particular, we examined the production of the five Spanish…

Located in East Oakland, Bridges Academy serves nearly 430 students, the majority of whom are Spanish speakers. Students who are considered socio-economically disadvantaged comprise 98% of the population and English Learners make up 83%. The school also hosts one of Oakland Unified School District's (OUSD) bilingual programs. In 2016, Bridges…

Defining what makes a person bilingual is notoriously difficult and dependent on various factors like fluency, age of acquisition, and situational context, among others. The notion of a "balanced bilingual" is even more elusive and fraught with limitations regarding the proper assessment and linguistic profiling of bilinguals, leading to…

This experimental study tests the Interface Hypothesis by looking into processes at the syntax-discourse interface, teasing apart acquisition of syntactic, semantic and discourse knowledge. Adopting Lopez's (2009) pragmatic features [[plus or minus]a(naphor)] and [[plus or minus]c(ontrast)], which in combination account for the constructions of…

Considerable research has demonstrated that English-speaking children extend nouns on the basis of shape. Here we asked whether the development of this bias is influenced by the structure of a child's primary language. We tested English- and Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 1 ; 10 and 3 ; 4 in a novel noun generalization task. Results…

Research Findings: This study explored the relations between Spanish-English dual language learner (DLL) children's home language and literacy experiences and their expressive vocabulary and oral comprehension abilities in Spanish and in English. Data from Spanish-English mothers of 93 preschool-age Head Start children who resided in central…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the validity of the Culture-Language Interpretive Matrix (C-LIM; Flanagan, Ortiz, & Alfonso, 2013) when applied to scores from the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, 2nd Edition (KABC-II; Kaufman & Kaufman, 2004). Data were analyzed from the KABC-II standardization sample as well as…