This study examines the quantity and quality of child-directed speech across household activities in a socioeconomically diverse sample of Argentinian Spanish-speaking children, an understudied population. Thirty children (mean: 14.3 months) and their families were audio-recorded for four hours. The middle two hours were transcribed and analysed…

This paper reports on the family language policy (FLP) of three families in a Nahuatl community in Mexico. It investigates the role of: (1) parental experiences, beliefs, attitudes and expectations; (2) child practices; and (3) broader societal attitudes in shaping these policies. Drawing on survey and interview data, the study points to a tension…

Out-of-school time (OST) programs that work with historically marginalized youth, employ staff that match the demographics of participants, and are well connected to mental health resources are uniquely positioned to support participants to recognize the risks and assets linked to their mental health and well-being. Such programs can…

As Spanish heritage language (SHL) programs grow nationwide, SHL program directors (PD) are tasked with negotiating the intricacies of either building an SHL program from scratch or carving space for a program that, unlike second language (L2) programs, are not institutionalised. Considering the evidence of deeply embedded dominant language…

The Latino English Language Learner population continues to rise each year in our schools, currently accounting for over 10% of all K-12 students in the United States (Cheung, 2019). Even with this growth in population, Latinos continue to lag behind other races in academic attainment and advancement in postsecondary success (NCES, 2019). This…

Speaking in a foreign/second language is a challenge for many learners, even when they have linguistic knowledge. Drawing on González-Lloret and Ortega's (2014) framework for technology-mediated tasks and MacIntyre's (2007) framework for willingness to communicate in a second language, this mixed methods study investigated the impact of…

Drawing on life stories and classroom observations, this qualitative study examined how six bilingual maestras enacted and embodied critical biliteracies through bilanguaging love. These maestras were born, raised, and now teach bilingual education on the Texas-Mexico border. Their stories revealed contradictory and complex beliefs about literacy…

This study analyzes Chinese, Spanish, English, Thai, Japanese, Korean, French and German speakers' motivation to teach their first language as a foreign language (FL) online without being trained as a second language teacher (SLT) and compares them with professionally trained SLTs. The threshold for starting SLT without teacher certification in…

This dissertation focused on comparing the academic achievement and language proficiency in both English and Spanish of students at risk for language and learning difficulties, with bilingual typically developing students in two bilingual educational contexts: English as a Second Language program and Spanish two-way immersion program. Data was…

Rhotics, particularly the trill, are late acquired sounds in Spanish. Reports of Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers document age-appropriate articulations, but studies do not explore productions once exposure to English increases. This paper reports on the rhotic productions of a cross-sectional sample of 31 Spanish-English bilingual children,…

Several studies have found that, after repeated exposure to new words, children form orthographic representations that allow them to read those words faster and more fluently. However, these studies did not take into account variables related to the words. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of sublexical variables on the…

This paper studies the role of two different types of motivation that have been proposed to explain the use of subject personal pronouns in Spanish, namely their function as indications for the addressee to identify the subject's referent, and their suitability for expressing informational values such as contrastiveness or focus. This study…

The role of morphological processing has been shown to be highly relevant in learning to read. However, there is little evidence on the processing of derivational suffixes from a developmental perspective. The aim of this study is to assess the developmental emergence of suffixes as meaningful processing units in word recognition. To that aim, 96…

This study examines word order variation in negative word + "más" constructions in Caracas Spanish, with "más" pre-posed or post-posed in relation to the negative word. We empirically analyze the effect of formal syntactic and semantic constraints, the contribution of priming and frequency, as well as several social factors on…

The present study examined the factor structure of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition, Spanish (WISC-IV Spanish, Wechsler, 2005a) with normative sample participants aged 6-16 years (N = 500) using confirmatory factor analytic techniques not reported in the WISC-IV Spanish Manual (Wechsler, 2005b). For the 10 core subtest…