This dissertation investigates Voice Onset Time (VOT), which serves as an essential property for differentiating plosive consonants in L1 and L2 Mandarin Chinese. It surveys VOT variations and demonstrates that they are affected by several phonetic and phonological properties, e.g., lexical tone, place of articulation (POA), speech rate,…

Cognitive flexibility (switching) and control (inhibition) are among widely accepted cognitive advantages of bilingualism. Switch Cost (SC), i.e., the time difference to complete a switch versus non-switch task, is a construct for measuring the switching ability. The need to control the interference and switching between one's languages leads to…

Purpose: This exploratory study describes the emergent literacy skills of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who speak Spanish, a language with a simple phonological structure and transparent orthography. We examine differences between children with DLD and their typically developing (TD) peers on a battery of emergent literacy…

The effects of relevant factors related to self-assessment have not been systematically investigated. We explored four factors and their effects on self-assessment and self-efficacy: (1) feedback (with vs without), (2) subject matter (Spanish vs mathematics), (3) year level (K7 vs K10 vs K11), and (4) gender. The participants included 64 secondary…

This study compares the beliefs and practices of Mexican university students with conventions of resume writing in English. Due to the nonexistence of a single definitive source on resume writing and the differences between conventions in English-speaking countries and in Mexico, students may make incorrect assumptions. Forty up-to-date, credible…

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the…

This paper depicts how exiles are psychologically damaged by language loss and how the latter engenders identity crises that affect the characters and destabilize their identity constructs. Linguistically speaking, although expatriates living outside their home countries master English more than their native words, they can circulate both…

Child peer interaction in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings has recently received increasing attention with respect to age, instruction type and first language (L1) use, but longitudinal studies remain scarce and the effects of proficiency pairing and language choice on meaning negotiation strategies are still rather unexplored. Within…

Children's books work to balance many opposing forces. For instance, they are simultaneously written to be read aloud as well as independently and are written for children as well as the adults who purchase and often read them (Nodelman, 2008). Children's books also attempt to impart ideas while avoiding being overtly didactic (Hunt, 1999), yet…

Located in Catalonia (Spain), and based on the Acculturation Theory applied to the field of linguistics, the objectives of this article are: (i) to detect and study the linguistic acculturation strategies of young people; (ii) to analyse the effects of origin and linguistic acculturation profiles relating to self-identifications with Spain and…

This study investigates whether dynamic visual enhancement affects the recall of second language (L2) vocabulary and whether working memory interacts with visual enhancement and vocabulary recall. Participants in four groups completed a pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test that measured the effects of the type of dynamic…

We describe the integration of telecollaborative language coaching sessions into an online Spanish program as the unifying thread for asynchronous learning and reflection activities. In survey responses, students reported improved language skills and cultural knowledge, and the ability to apply linguistic skills to "real-life" situations…

Background: Detecting reading comprehension difficulties is challenging because many factors are involved in comprehension ability. Various reading comprehension tests can be used to detect difficulties but often do not yield the same results. Method: Our aim was to analyse the agreement between three commonly used standardised reading…

This article investigates the results of a book sprint experience whose main objective was the development of instructional modules for an open textbook for the teaching of Spanish as a second language. Six graduate students at a public American university participated in the project for a week, working in pairs in the creation of activities that…

While an elicited imitation test (EIT) has been widely used as a measure of oral proficiency in second language acquisition (SLA) research, it is still unclear the extent to which memory capacity impacts EIT performance. In light of this gap, the present study sought to clarify the nature of elicited imitation by examining the relative…