HMO enrollees with limited English proficiency, and particularly those in poorer health, face communication barriers despite language assistance regulations. More than 1.3 million California HMO enrollees ages 18 to 64 do not speak English well enough to communicate with medical providers and may experience reduced access to high-quality health care if they do not receive appropriate language a...

A two-month pilot study comprised of 34 second through fourth grade Hispanic students from four bilingual education classrooms was conducted to compare the efficacy of the 2004 version of the Project Listen Reading Tutor against the standard practice of sustained silent reading (SSR). The Reading Tutor uses automated speech recognition to “listen” to children read aloud. It provides both spoken...

In 2000, 4.4 million households were linguistically isolated, meaning that no one in the household aged 14 or over spoke English at least " very well " ; up from 2. These demographic changes of the United States present unique challenges to the delivery of quality health care to individuals with LEP. Researchers have noted that when language barriers exist in provider-patient communication, a p...

California is home to one-third of the U.S. population with limited English proficiency (LEP). Studies indicate that treating LEP patients without professional interpreters can result in miscommunication, decreased patient satisfaction, and serious medical errors. To address this problem, federal laws require all health care institutions receiving federal monies to provide interpretation servic...

BACKGROUND Patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) represent a growing proportion of the US population and are at risk of receiving suboptimal care due to difficulty communicating with healthcare providers who do not speak their language. Medical school curricula are required to prepare students to care for all patients, including those with LEP, but little is known about how well they ...

This study investigates cross-language lexical competition in the bilingual mental lexicon. It provides evidence for the occurrence of inhibition as well as the commonly reported facilitation during the production of cognates (words with similar phonological form and meaning in two languages) in a mixed picture naming task by highly proficient Welsh-English bilinguals. Previous studies have typ...

Speech production research has shown that Japanese monolingual speakers use mora-sized phonological units, not phoneme-sized units, when phonologically encoding Japanese words. Recent bilingual research has indicated that proficient Japanese-English bilinguals nevertheless use phoneme-sized units when phonologically encoding English words, suggesting that use of a phonological unit that is smal...

The article by Cheri Wilson, "Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality: The Case for Language Access", highlights the challenges of providing Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) to patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). As the US pursues high-value, high-performance healthcare, our ability to meet the needs of our most vulnerable will determine whether we succeed or...