Accurately differentiate between errors that are related to second-language influence or are due to a communication disorder. Is your student having difficulty because they have an impairment or because they are learning a second language? Improve instructional targets for culturally and linguistically diverse students in the general education classroom as well as make gains and improve referrals for special education. The framework used in this book makes it easy for any education professional to distinguish between language differences and language disorders regardless of your own language background.
The scholarly articles included in this volume represent significant contributions to the fields of formal and descriptive syntax, conversational analysis and speech act theory, as well as language development and bilingualism. Taken together, these studies adopt a variety of methodological techniques—ranging from grammaticality judgments to corpus-based analysis to experimental approaches—to offer rich insights into different aspects of Ibero-Romance grammar. The volume consists of three parts, organized in accordance with the topics treated in the chapters they comprise. Part I focuses on structural patterns, Part II analyzes pragmatic ones, and Part III investigates the acquisition of linguistic aspects found in the speech of L1, L2 and heritage speakers. The authors address these issues by relying on empirically rooted linguistic approaches to data collection, which are coupled with current theoretical assumptions on the nature of sentence structure, discourse dynamics and language acquisition. The volume will be of interest to anyone researching or studying Hispanic and Ibero-Romance linguistics.
This book is concerned with three central issues: the universality of constraints on code-switching, the nature of the relation between language contact and bilingualism, and the social and linguistic components that facilitate code-switching.
Four studies explored patterns of language growth and processing in 64 19-31-month-old bilingual children acquiring English and Spanish. In the first study, cross-sectional and longitudinal methods revealed significant relationships between vocabulary size and grammatical development, replicating previous studies with monolingual children. The compositions of children's lexicons in each language were linked to vocabulary size in that language. With few exceptions, utterance length and complexity and the emergence of closed class and predicate terms in each language were linked more closely to vocabulary size in the same language than to total conceptual vocabulary (TCV) size. In the second study, performance on English and Spanish sentence repetition tests was compared for bilingual and monolingual children matched for vocabulary size in each language. The performance of the bilingual children was similar to that of their monolingual controls, indicating links between grammatical ability and vocabulary development within the same language. The slightly better performance of the bilingual children on a few comparisons suggested some degree of cross-linguistic bootstrapping. In the third study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the neural activity of bilingual children as they processed known and unknown words. There were differences in the timing and distribution of the ERP amplitude differences to known vs. unknown words for each language, and differences in these effects when children with larger TCV sizes were compared to those with smaller TCV sizes. These results thus replicated studies with monolingual children that found links between vocabulary development and the organization of ERP effects, although the exact patterns were different for the bilingual and monolingual children. In the fourth study the effects of mixed vs. blocked language testing conditions on ERP patterns were investigated. Results indicated that some of the differences in ERP effects between the monolingual and bilingual children noted in the third study may have been due to processing demands created by the mixed-language testing condition in which the bilingual children were tested. The results of these four studies support experience-based accounts of early language acquisition, and further establish the use of combined behavioral-neural imaging approaches for studying language development in bilingual toddlers.
How is language acquired when infants are exposed to multiple language input from birth and when adults are required to learn a second language after early childhood? How do adult bilinguals comprehend and produce words and sentences when their two languages are potentially always active and in competition with one another? What are the neural mechanisms that underlie proficient bilingualism? What are the general consequences of bilingualism for cognition and for language and thought? This handbook will be essential reading for cognitive psychologists, linguists, applied linguists, and educators who wish to better understand the cognitive basis of bilingualism and the logic of experimental and formal approaches to language science.
For decades, bilingualism has resisted definition. If bilingualism is defined as habitual, fluent, correct and accent-free use of two languages, few individuals would qualify as bilinguals. A more viable approach may be to concede that ‘bilingual’ can be seen instead as a range of points on a continuum that allows for differences. The psychological study of bilingualism encompasses a wide range of phenomena including the organization and representation of the grammar, the perception and production of language mixing, cerebral lateralization of language functions, and patterns of recovery of aphasic patients. This book collects together an international array of researchers in experimental psychology, linguistics and neuropsychology, who bring their expertise to bear on the critical issues that are raised by the bilingual phenomena.
Children who grow up as second- or third-generation immigrants typically acquire and speak the minority language at home and the majority language at school. Recurrently, these children have been the subject of controversial debates about their linguistic abilities in relation to their educational success. However, such debates fail to recognise that variation in bilinguals’ language processing is a phenomenon in its own right that results from the dynamic influence of one language on another. This volume provides insight into cross-linguistic influence in Turkish-German and Turkish-French bilingual children and uncovers the nature of variation in L1 and L2 oral motion event descriptions by evaluating the impact of language-specific patterns and language dominance. The results indicate that next to typological differences between the speakers’ L1 and L2, language dominance has an impact on the type and direction of influence. However, the author argues that most variation can be explained by L1/L2 usage preferences. Bilinguals make frequent use of patterns that exist in both languages, but are unequally preferred by monolingual speakers. This finding underlines the importance of usage-based approaches in SLA.
This handbook provides an introduction to research findings related to bilingualism in minority-language children, and describes the implications of these findings for issues of current concern in Canadian education. Bilingualism is defined as the production and/or comprehension of two languages by the same individual. The phrase "minority-language children" refers to children whose first language is different from the language of the wider community. The topic is discussed under five headings: (1) issues dealing with bilingual and bicultural education, providing for instruction in a variety of languages, psychological and educational ramifications, and a case study; (2) the historical perspective and the context for bilingualism and bilingual education at present in Canada and in other countries; (3) a presentation of research findings and a consideration of the patterns of bilingualism and cultural identity typically developed by minority children; (4) a review of theories related to learning two languages and a formulation of a cognitive "think tank model" for language learning; and (5) a consideration of the practical implications of the research findings for "heritage-language" teachers and minority parents who are eager to promote a high level of first language proficiency. The book concludes with a summary of what is known about bilingualism and children's development. (AMH)
