Error patterns in vocabulary learning data were used as a window into the mechanisms that underlie vocabulary learning performance in bilinguals vs. monolinguals. English-Spanish bilinguals (n = 18) and English-speaking monolinguals (n = 18) were taught novel vocabulary items in association with English translations. At testing, participants produced English translations for the newly-learned words. Findings revealed broad learning advantages in the bilingual data. Moreover, bilinguals made proportionately more deep (within-category) semantic errors than monolinguals when tested immediately after learning. We interpret these data to suggest that bilingual learners may encode the information associated with the novel words to a deeper semantic level than monolinguals.

The developmental process of reading acquisition is frequently conceptualized as a self-organizing mental network consisting of lexico-semantic, phonological and orthographical components. The developmental nature of this network varies across languages and is known to impact second language learners of typologically different languages. Yet, it remains largely unknown whether such cross-linguistic differences interact within young bilingual learners of two typologically different languages. In the present study, we compared Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals (ages 6-12, N=134) born and raised in the US on their English language and reading skills including vocabulary, phonological and morphological awareness, and word reading. We conducted whole group and subgroup analyses on younger participants to examine the extent of the effect. In monolinguals, phonological abilities directly predicted English word reading. In contrast, in bilinguals, both phonological and morphological abilities made an indirect contribution to English literacy via vocabulary knowledge, even though bilinguals had monolingual-like language and reading abilities in English. These findings offer new insights into the flexibility of the phonological and lexical pathways for learning to read.

This study examines the response patterns of 288 Spanish-English dual language learners on a standardized test of receptive Spanish vocabulary. Investigators analyzed responses to 54 items on the (TVIP) (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) focusing on differential accuracy on items influenced by a) cross-linguistic overlap, b) context (home/school), and c) word frequency in Spanish. The response patterns showed cross-linguistic overlap in phonology was a significant predictor of accuracy at the item level. After accounting for item number (expected difficulty level), context of exposure was a significant predictor of the likelihood of obtaining a correct response. Spanish word frequency was not a significant predictor of accuracy. The current findings substantiate the influence of cross-linguistic overlap in phonology and context on Spanish vocabulary recognition by Spanish-English speaking children. Children were more likely to obtain correct responses on lexical items that were associated with the home context. Researchers and practitioners should consider phonological cross-linguistic overlap in addition to context of word exposure and word frequency when designing and utilizing vocabulary assessments for children from linguistic minority backgrounds.

This study examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of familiar words is high. Bilingual Spanish-English-speaking second- graders (age 7-9) with typical development (=40) were matched individually with monolingual peers on age, sex, and speech skills. Participants learned to name sea monsters as part of five computerized word learning tasks. Dependent -tests revealed bilingual children were less accurate than monolingual children in producing codas unique to English; however, the groups demonstrated equivalent levels of accuracy on codas that occur in both Spanish and English. Results suggest that, even at high levels of English proficiency, bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children may demonstrate lower accuracy than their monolingual English-speaking peers on targets that pattern differently in their two languages. Differences between a bilingual's two languages can be used to reveal targets that may be more vulnerable to error, which could be a result of cross-linguistic effects or more limited practice with English phonology.

Though a number of language socialization processes are theorized to promote children's heritage language proficiency (HLP), little research has considered these processes in a single study and examined their prospective relations to multiple domains of HLP in school-age children. In a two-wave longitudinal study of Chinese American children of immigrant parents ( = 258, age = 7-11 years), language socialization processes (e.g., adult HL use at home, parental attitudes towards HL, child participation in HL classes or extracurricular activities) were assessed using parent reports and behavioral observation at Time 1 (1 to 2 grade). Children's HLP (Cantonese or Mandarin) was assessed using vocabulary and literacy tests at Time 2. Results of structural equation modeling showed that adults' Chinese language use with children at home predicted children's higher Chinese receptive and expressive vocabulary two years later, and children's participation in Chinese language extra-curricular activities predicted their higher Chinese receptive and expressive vocabulary and higher Chinese word reading. By contrast, parental valuing of Chinese language and children's exposure to Chinese media did not predict children's Chinese proficiency. These findings provided support for the benefits of HL use at home and HL classes in promoting HL development in children in immigrant families.

Extensive evidence indicates that early vocabulary skills predict later reading development among monolingually developing children. Some evidence suggests that a relationship between vocabulary and later reading also holds across languages among children whose home language differs from the school language. However, these findings have been mixed and it remains unclear if, and under what circumstances, vocabulary in one language supports reading comprehension development in another. The present study followed 84 Spanish-English bilingual children, assessing their vocabulary skills at 5 years and their reading comprehension at 6, 7, 8, and 9 years. Longitudinal multilevel models revealed significant within-language relations between early vocabulary knowledge and subsequent reading comprehension in both English and Spanish and no across-language relations. There were significant concurrent across-language relations between English and Spanish reading comprehension skills. These findings suggest that the contribution of vocabulary knowledge to reading comprehension is language specific but that there are also language general components to reading comprehension, which result in significant concurrent relations between reading comprehension skill across languages.

The current work investigates whether language dominance predicts transfer of skills across cognitive-linguistic levels from the native language (Spanish) to the second language (English) in bilingual preschoolers. Sensitivity to cognates ( in English/Spanish) and metalinguistic awareness (MLA) have both been shown to transfer from the dominant to the nondominant language. Examining these types of transfer together using a continuous measure of language dominance may allow us to better understand the effect of the home language in children learning a majority language in preschool. Forty-six preschool-aged, Spanish-English bilinguals completed English receptive vocabulary and metalinguistic tasks indexing cognate effects and MLA. Language dominance was found to predict crosslinguistic (cognate) facilitation from Spanish to English. In addition, MLA skills also transferred from Spanish to English for children with lower English proficiency, and no transfer of MLA was evident for children with higher English proficiency. Altogether, findings suggest that transfer from a dominant first language to a nondominant second language happens at linguistic and cognitive-linguistic levels in preschoolers, although possibly influenced by second language proficiency. The current study has implications for supporting the home language for holistic cognitive-linguistic development.

Past studies examining the cognitive function of bilingual school-aged children have pointed to enhancements in areas of executive control relative to age-matched monolingual children. The majority of these studies has tested children from a middle-class background and compared performance of bilinguals as a discrete group against monolinguals. The objective of the present study was to determine if cognitive enhancement from bilingualism is sensitive to the child's degree of bilingualism in a sample of eight- and nine-year old Spanish-English bilingual children of low socioeconomic status. The results showed that the more balanced the children were in their language skills, the better they performed on non-verbal tasks of cognitive function. These results support an additive view of bilingualism, where more balanced proficiency in two languages is associated with more enhanced cognitive function, regardless of socioeconomic background.

As the U.S. population who speaks a language other than English at home continues to grow, few studies have focused on the effect of parental beliefs on the importance of bilingualism have on language outcomes of their children. In this study, we surveyed families raising Spanish-English bilingual children on their beliefs concerning both languages, language practices they implement at home, at school, and in the community, and language outcomes of their children. Using a single mediator model, this study aimed to understand the impact of parental beliefs on language outcomes in Spanish and English and the mediating effects of language practices. We then examined the individual mediating effects of language practices at home, school, and community on the relationship between parental beliefs and language outcomes for each language using a multiple mediator model. Our results suggest that parental beliefs in Spanish predict Spanish language outcomes and parental beliefs in English predict English outcomes and that practices in each language mediated this effect. In particular, we found that Spanish practices at home mediated the effect of language outcomes in Spanish and that English practices at home and in the community mediated English language outcomes.

This paper presents a longitudinal examination of Spanish and English phonological, lexical, and morpho-syntactic abilities in 20 low-SES bilingual preschoolers with mothers who had either completed primary or secondary education in Spanish in their country of origin, Mexico. We focused on the link between maternal education and the following spontaneous production measures: 1) phonological accuracy as measured by Percent of Consonants Correct-Revised, 2) lexical variety as measured by Number of Different Words, and 3) utterance length as measured by Mean Length of Utterance in words; the relation between maternal education and spontaneous production was examined both a) at preschool entry, when children were on average 3;6 and dominant in Spanish, and b) a year later, after one year of exposure to the majority language (English) and culture. The results showed that although children of more educated mothers performed significantly better on all English measures than children of less educated mothers, maternal education was not related to Spanish outcomes. The same differences persisted a year later. These results suggest that maternal education may play a different, but long-lasting role in English compared to Spanish development possibly due to language input differences attributable to distinct cultural values and practices associated with different languages.

Previous research has shown that cognitive development is sensitive to socio-economic status (SES) and multilinguistic experiences. However, these effects are difficult to disentangle and SES may modulate the effects of multilingualism. The present study used data from a large cohort of pupils who took part in the Study of Cognition, Adolescents and Mobile Phones (SCAMP) at ages 11-12 (T1) and 13-15 years old (T2). Cognitive measures were derived from tasks of cognitive flexibility, verbal, spatial and visuo-spatial working memory, speech processing and non-verbal reasoning. Using SES information collected through questionnaires (school type, level of deprivation, parental education and occupation), the sample was clustered into high/medium/low SES groups. Comparisons focused on 517 monolingual and 329 multilingual pupils in the high/low SES groups. Having controlled for multiple comparisons, the results indicated a significant beneficial effect of bilingualism in measures of working memory, visuo-spatial processing and non-verbal reasoning. These effects were present in both high and low SES individuals and sustained at both times of development, with a particularly significant improvement of working memory abilities in low SES bilinguals at T2 as compared to monolingual peers. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are considered and guidance for educators is discussed.

In bilingual children, more so than in monolingual children, comprehension abilities exceed production abilities. While this receptive-expressive gap in bilinguals has been well documented, little is known about its development. The present study tracked growth in the Spanish and English receptive and expressive vocabularies of 52 bilingual children from 4.5 to 10 years. The children's English vocabularies grew faster than their Spanish vocabularies, more so in the expressive domain than the receptive domain. The proportion of children who were English-dominant also increased more in the expressive than the receptive domain. By age 10, the children's expressive skills were almost always English dominant while their receptive skills were most frequently balanced. Among children who hear a heritage language at home and a societal language at school, trajectories of dual language development differs in the expressive and receptive domains. These longitudinal data suggest continuity between the receptive-expressive gap observed in bilingual children and the receptive bilingualism often observed in adults.

This study aimed to clarify the relations between morphological awareness and literacy skills in Spanish and English in young simultaneous bilingual learners. Guided by theoretical perspectives on the associations between morphological awareness and word- versus sentence-level literacy skills, and their transfer between bilinguals' two languages, we asked bilingual children ( = 90; = 8.07 years old) to complete dual-language literacy assessments. First, we observed cross-linguistic differences in the associations between morphology and reading. In English, morphological awareness was directly related to word reading and reading comprehension, whereas in Spanish, the association with reading comprehension was fully mediated by vocabulary and single word reading. Second, we observed cross-linguistic associations from English word reading to Spanish reading comprehension, and from Spanish reading comprehension to English reading comprehension. Our findings inform bilingual literacy theory by revealing both cross-linguistic differences and bidirectional associations between literacy skills across typologically-distinct orthographies. In particular, children's word-level skills transferred from the language of schooling (English) into their heritage language (Spanish), and their broader reading comprehension skills transferred from the heritage language to support English. Taken together, these findings support the value of bilingual heritage language maintenance for reading achievement in children's dominant language of literacy instruction.

Models of monolingual literacy propose that reading acquisition builds upon children's semantic, phonological, and orthographic knowledge. The relationships between these components vary cross-linguistically, yet it is generally unknown how these differences impact bilingual children's literacy. A comparison between Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children (ages 6-13, N=70) from the U.S. revealed that bilinguals had stronger associations between phonological and orthographic representations than monolinguals during English reading. While vocabulary was the strongest predictor of English word reading for both groups, phonology and morpho-syntax were the best predictors of Spanish reading for bilinguals. This comparison reveals distinct developmental processes across learners and languages, and suggests that early and systematic biliteracy exposure at home and through afterschool programs can influence children's sound-to-print associations even in the context of language-specific (monolingual) reading instruction. These findings have important implications for bilingual education as well as theories that aim to explain how learning to read across languages has a positive impact on the acquisition of literacy.

Although a appears to be a universal feature of early bilingualism, little is known about its development. We sought to determine if the magnitude of the discrepancy between receptive and expressive standard scores changed over time in bilingual children's two languages.

Bilingual education has been an educational option in many countries for over 50 years but it remains controversial, especially in terms of its appropriateness for all children. The present review examines research evaluating the outcomes of bilingual education for language and literacy levels, academic achievement, and suitability for children with special challenges. The focus is on early education and the emphasis is on American contexts. Special attention is paid to factors such as socioeconomic status that are often confounded with the outcomes of bilingual education. The conclusion is that there is no evidence for harmful effects of bilingual education and much evidence for net benefits in many domains.

This study investigated the relationship among home language use, parents' beliefs about dual language development, and Spanish-speaking children's vocabulary knowledge. Parents ( = 162) completed a questionnaire about their home language use and beliefs about dual language development, and elementary-age children ( = 190)-Kindergarten ( = 5.71, = .56), second grade ( = 7.52, = .31), and fourth grade ( = 9.35, = .45)-completed conceptually-scored vocabulary assessments. Principal component analyses revealed that Spanish-speaking parents' beliefs about dual language development are heterogeneous. Further, parents' beliefs can be characterized differently according to their children's English proficiency designations and grade levels. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that the parental belief factor was associated with home language use practices, which in turn were associated with children's vocabulary. However, this association only applied to limited English proficient students and their parents. These results underscore the importance of attending to Spanish-speaking parents' beliefs, as they appear to relate to home language use practices and, importantly, they also relate to their children's vocabulary achievement.

Differences between monolingual and multilingual vocabulary development have been observed but few studies provide a longitudinal perspective on vocabulary development before and following school entry. This study compares vocabulary growth profiles of 106 multilingual children to 211 monolingual peers before and after school entry to examine whether: (1) school entry coincides with different rates of vocabulary growth compared to prior to school entry, (2) compared to monolingual peers, multilingual children show different vocabulary sizes or rates of vocabulary growth, (3) the age of onset of second-language acquisition for multilingual children is associated with vocabulary size or rate of vocabulary growth, and (4) the sociolinguistic context of the languages spoken by multilingual children is associated with vocabulary size or rate of vocabulary growth. Results showed increases in vocabulary size across time for all children, with a steeper increase prior to school entry. A significant difference between monolingual and multilingual children who speak a minority language was observed with regards to vocabulary size at school entry and vocabulary growth prior to school entry, but growth rate differences were no longer present following school entry. Taken together, results suggest that languages children speak may matter more than being per se.

Numerous studies on reading comprehension with monolingual children have shown that oral language, such as vocabulary, is an important factor in predicting reading comprehension success. However, few studies have looked at the reading comprehension performance of bilinguals, and less is known about the contributors to its success, linguistic or otherwise. Based on previous research showing weaker oral language among bilingual children, the goals of the present study are to examine how bilinguals perform in reading comprehension, along with possible contributors such as oral language and home literacy practices, in comparison with their monolingual peers. Participants were 82 children in the third grade who completed standardized language measures assessing vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension and whose parents completed a home literacy questionnaire. Bilingual children's reading comprehension was comparable to monolinguals having lower language, and bilingual parents reported reading rate was higher than that of the monolinguals. Moreover, the contributors to this success in reading comprehension were different for the bilingual group, with oral language and home literacy playing a role. Overall, this suggests bilinguals are unique from monolinguals in the manner in which they make use of the resources available to them, linguistic and otherwise, to achieve reading comprehension success.

The purpose of the current study was to explore the influence of language experience on the presence of the receptive-expressive gap. Each of 778 Spanish-English bilingual children screened pre-kindergarten in Utah and Texas were assigned to one of five language experience groups, ranging from functionally monolingual to balanced bilingual. Children's scores from the language screener semantics subtest administered in both Spanish and English were standardized, and receptive and expressive semantic scores were compared. Children presented with a meaningful gap between receptive and expressive semantic knowledge in English but not Spanish. This gap increased as target-language exposure decreased. Results indicate that current language experience plays a dominant role in influencing the appearance and magnitude of the receptive-expressive gap.

Few studies have considered bilingualism's impact on cognitive development within the sociolinguistic and cultural context of the immigrant communities where bilingualism is commonly practiced. In the United States, many Mexican-origin bilingual youth practice their bilingual skills by (i.e., translating/interpreting between languages) for their immigrant parents who have low English proficiency. Meanwhile, these youth may also experience discrimination in their daily life. The present study focuses on Mexican-origin bilingual youth brokers (=334) in order to examine how discriminatory experiences (i.e., daily and ethnic discrimination) and bilingual brokering experiences captured by profiles are related to cognitive control performance (i.e., attentional control and inhibition). We found no significant direct influence of either bilingual broker profiles or discriminatory experiences on cognitive control. However, the associations between discriminatory experiences and cognitive control performance depended upon brokering experiences. Specifically, greater discrimination was associated with lower cognitive control performance among moderate brokers (with moderate bilingual experiences), but the association was attenuated among efficacious brokers (with positive bilingual experiences). Findings highlight the need to consider the sociolinguistic heterogeneity of both discriminatory experiences and language use when investigating cognitive control performance in bilinguals.