Lechner and Siemund (2014) set out to determine whether bilinguals have an advantage for learning additional languages over monolinguals, purporting to evaluate the Threshold Hypothesis of Cummins (1979a) in this context. The study investigated the attainment of English literacy by Turkish-German, Vietnamese-German, and RussianGerman simultaneous and sequential bilinguals for whom English is a ...

How does bilingual exposure impact children's neural circuitry for learning to read? Theories of bilingualism suggests that exposure to two languages may yield a functional and neuroanatomical adaptation to support the learning of two languages (Klein et al., 2014). To test the hypothesis that this neural adaptation may vary as a function of structural and orthographic characteristics of biling...

We present the case study of MB-a bilingual child with Down syndrome (DS) who speaks Russian (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]) and has learned to read in two different alphabets with different symbol systems. We demonstrate that, in terms of oral language, MB is as proficient in Russian as English, with a mild advantage for reading in English, her language of formal instr...

T he central purpose of this Translation is to articulate the evidence from a range of scholarly disciplines for the importance of promoting bilingualism, particularly SpanishEnglish bilingualism, among American children. A parallel— but related—aim of this piece is to argue for the clinical and public health importance of promoting Spanish proficiency (and, hence, Spanish-English bilingualism)...

40 The Hearing Journal January 2017 H ow does bilingualism affect listening? We think of bilingualism— and language experience more broadly—as a form of auditory learning. Children who grow up speaking multiple languages have enriched auditory environments. They need to focus on making multiple sound-tomeaning connections in their ongoing interactions. While they are speaking one language, they...

The notion of bilingualism refers to all those people who use or simply know two or more languages, including dialects (Grosjean, 1994 ). Just to provide some fi gures, let us consider that something like 7,000 languages are spoken in barely 160 countries. Furthermore, in many of these countries the number of spoken languages is constantly growing due to massive immigration. This means that ove...

background and aim: bilingualism is an important phenomenon with different effects on each aspect of language processing. auditory temporal processing is a major component of the auditory processing ability. since bilingual and monolingual individual’s brain process are different, and no studies have yet been conducted on the effect of temporal processing on speech recognition performance of az...

We examined the influence of bilingual experience and inhibitory control on the ability to learn a novel language. Using a statistical learning paradigm, participants learned words in two novel languages that were based on the International Morse Code. First, participants listened to a continuous stream of words in a Morse code language to test their ability to segment words from continuous spe...

The clinical assessment of language impairment (LI) in bilingual children imposes challenges for speech-language pathology services. Assessment tools standardized for monolingual populations increase the risk of misinterpreting bilingualism as LI. This Perspective article summarizes recent studies on the assessment of bilingual LI and presents new results on including non-linguistic measures of...

Bilingual speakers often have less language experience compared to monolinguals as a result of speaking two languages and/or a later age of acquisition of the second language. This may result in weaker and less precise phonological representations of words in memory, which may cause greater retrieval effort during spoken word recognition. To gauge retrieval effort, the present study compared th...