In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the role of transfer has been theorized and studied to account for the influence of the native language on an interlanguage. However, stemming from behaviorist mentality, the concept of "transfer" has become widely associated with the direct transfer of habits and fails to take into…

We represent events as composed of participants. In "Joan was eating lasagna in the lecture hall," for example, this eating event is "partitioned" into participants, including at least Joan, the lasagna, and the lecture hall. In this dissertation, I address two questions about events and the participants that populate them:…

This paper presents several "tips" for Spanish speaking adults who start a reading comprehension course in English. The document is the product of my twenty-five years of experience as a language teacher. By using these practical pieces of advice, learners understand the differences between English and their own language, are able read,…

The goal of this study is to provide an inventory of the Analytic Causative constructions that were in use in Peninsular Spanish from the 12th to the 16th centuries from the constructional perspective of Cognitive Grammar. A detailed profile of each construction was made including its constructional schema along with relevant semantic, syntactic,…

This article details a study conducted to determine the effectiveness of a professional development model for inservice Spanish teachers. Subjects were participants in intensive summer immersion programs abroad that included a rigorous methodology course advocating sound pedagogical models for lessons and stressed 90%+ target language use in the…

Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon. The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments. The critical manipulations were…

This study examined how emergent bilingual children's English and Spanish proficiencies moderated the relationships between Spanish and English input at home (bilingual home language input [BHLI]) and children's oral language skills in each language. The sample comprised over 1,400 Spanish-dominant kindergartners in California and Texas. BHLI was…

Purpose: Spanish-dominant Latinos make up 13% of the U.S. population, and this group is poorer and faces multiple threats to health compared with the general population. Additionally, Spanish speakers face challenges accessing health information that is often not available in Spanish. This study provides a descriptive epidemiology of a unique,…

This study explores the widely documented difficulty children have with object clitics in the acquisition of Romance languages. It reports on two experiments: a production task and a comprehension task. Results from the elicitation task confirm that object omission occurs at nonnegligible rates in 2- and 3-year-olds. Findings from the…

The purpose of this paper is to compare structured input (SI) with other input-based instructional treatments. The input-based instructional types include: input flood (IF), text enhancement (TE), SI activities, and focused input (FI; SI without implicit negative feedback). Participants included 145 adult learners enrolled in an intermediate…

Because reading for meaning only can lead to low rates of second language (L2) vocabulary learning and because previous research has demonstrated the benefits of word retrieval opportunities for intentional L2 vocabulary learning (Barcroft, 2007; McNamara & Healy, 1995a, Experiment 2; Royer, 1973), the present study assessed the effect of…

The present study examined the use and effectiveness of a large corpus--the Corpus del Español (Davies, 2002)--in a 300-level Spanish grammar university course. Students conducted hands-on corpus searches with the goal of finding concordances containing particular types of collocations (combinations of words that tend to co-occur) and tokens (any…

This study investigates the self-reported experiences of students participating in a Galician language and culture course. Galician, a language historically spoken in northwestern Spain, has been losing ground with respect to Spanish, particularly in urban areas and among the younger generations. The research specifically focuses on informal…

The increase of dual language learners in today's classrooms has caused serious implications when examining how the country educates children (McWayne, Melzi, Schick, Kennedy, & Mundt, 2013). Because of the cultural and linguistic differences of these children, it is essential to study teaching practices at the early childhood level. Examining…

As communications in U.S. society become more digitally focused, many schools have transitioned toward using more digital technology for school-home communications. Across the country, many schools and teachers now disseminate information to students' parents using email listserv, text message, Twitter, Facebook, and other applications such as…