The purpose of this study is to determine if heritage speakers can effectively instruct pronunciation to their non-native speaker peers to support faculty. The researcher of this study assessed non-native speaker participants' pronunciation of Spanish using pronunciation instruction and instructor background as variables (N=111: 91 underwent…

US Latine adults who prefer the Spanish language for healthcare encounter communication have high risk of health disparitiesm in part from low organizational health literacy, mental health stigma and discrimination. Organizational health literacy includes the provision of culturally responsive, language concordant health information, which…

Background: The Social Emotional Distress Scale-Secondary (SEDS-S) is a short measure designed for comprehensive school-based mental health screening, particularly for using very brief self-reported measures of well-being and distress. Whereas prior studies have shown validity and reliability evidence for the English version, there is a lack of…

Aims: We investigate the relationship between narrative macrostructure, current language exposure, and microstructure in second-grade Spanish-English bilingual children in the United States. Macrostructure knowledge has been claimed to be shared across languages in multilingual individuals. We examine the role of current language exposure and…

In Modern Standard Arabic punctuation marks are less frequent than in European languages. Using discourse markers is instead preferred, which tends to yield long clauses. This, in turn, is assumed to foster sentence splitting in translation from Arabic into English and into Spanish. This assumption was tested on a sample of 470 554 words from a…

Now more than ever before, language learners can autonomously engage with the target culture beyond the classroom through international television shows, online forums, video clips, and study abroad. Still, much of the literature has deemed the target-language dominant speaker (TLDS) as a key source of cultural knowledge, and, thus, the principal…

Interest in the cognitive precursors of literacy has been increasing in recent years since reading and writing are essential components of functional learning in the first years of schooling and of school success in later educational stages. However, it can be observed that while studies on the relationship between cognitive variables and reading…

This study explores the mental lexicon of Polish learners of Spanish as a foreign language (L2) through a qualitative analysis of lexical availability. Based on prototype theory and semantic network models, it analyzes learners' responses to two thematic prompts--'The Human Body' and 'The City'--to explore lexical associations, prototypicality,…

For many Spanish speakers, Spanglish is perceived as a bastardized form of Spanish that does not count as "real" Spanish. This view rests on the assumption that there is a "real" Spanish, which operates by a set of grammatical, lexical and morphological rules such that when bilingual speakers mix into these rules elements that…

COVID-19 continues to disproportionately impact the health of Hispanics/Latinos. While Hispanics/Latinos are considered one of the fastest-growing racial/ethnic groups, media news coverage in Spanish concerning COVID-19 is stunningly low. The Hispanic/Latino population comprises close to 25% of COVID-19 cases and 17% of COVID-19 deaths. Lack of…

This article argues for the need to center Latine students' experiences and language practices in Spanish programs at Hispanic Serving Institutions. We describe the work and possibilities of designing programs informed by Latine Studies perspectives as well by culturally and linguistically sustaining approaches to teaching Heritage Language…

This study investigates the extent to which (a) Spanish heritage (HL) and second language (L2) writers' linguistic complexity differs across register contexts and (b) Spanish proficiency and writing motivational beliefs differentially affect HL and L2 writers' performance. Participants were 58 HL and 54 L2 Spanish learners who completed two…

This article analyzes the graphic novel "El cielo en la cabeza" by Antonio Altarriba, Sergio García Sánchez, and Lola Moral, examining how it portrays a racialized character and transforms his struggles into a matter of concern for a predominantly White readership in Spain. Using Susan Sontag's critique of visual representation in…

Cross-linguistic research has shown that object which-questions are the hardest types of wh-questions for children to comprehend and are acquired late. The present study asks when Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM), an early cue to object marking, is actively used to successfully comprehend object which-questions in Spanish-speaking…

This study investigates the organization of the mental lexicon in Spanish as a foreign language in contrast to its structure in Spanish as a native language through semantic networks derived from lexical availability or semantic fluency tasks. To this end, we collected the responses of 75 American learners of Spanish and 75 native speakers in…