This study investigated the influence of first language (L1) phonology on second language (L2) early reading skills in Sylheti-English bilinguals (N = 58; 48% girls; British Bangladeshi) and their monolingual-English peers (N = 43; 45% girls; 96% White British, 4% multiethnic British) in a diaspora context. Language-specific phonological awareness…

This research examined the ability of young (N = 96) children to learn about a change in the location of a hidden object, either via an adult's verbal testimony or from direct observation. Thirty-month-olds searched with equal accuracy whether they were told about the change or directly observed it. By contrast, when 23-month-olds were told about…

Third- and sixth-grade readers were asked to label sets of pictures printed with distracting words (either nouns, adjectives, or functors) and nonsense syllables. (Author/JMB)

Analysis of the performance of second-, fourth-, sixth-grade, and college-level subjects on picture-word interference tasks indicated that distractor words belonging to the same semantic category as pictures produced more interference than either unrelated words or nonsense trigrams. (Author/JMB)

Studied bilingual children and children learning a second language using a picture-word interference task. The printed distractors interfered with naming both on trials where the distractor and naming language were the same and on trials where they were different. These and other results question whether an "input switch" operates for bilingual…

The logical extension of results may be valuable in adding to our understanding of the variety of phenomena involving mediational processes, such as transposition, reversal and nonreversal shifts, imagery, concept formation, word meaning, and the effectiveness of verbal stimuli in discrimination and generalization. (Authors)

Hebrew-English bilingual children, monolingual English children, and Hebrew monolingual children ranging in age from 5 to 8 years were tested for flexibility in syntactic rule usage, symbol substitution, semantic knowledge, and nonverbal system understanding. (JMB)