The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) is the most commonly used intelligence test for children. Five years ago, a Spanish version of the WISC-IV was published (WISC-IV Spanish; Wechsler, 2005), but a limited amount of published information is available regarding its utility when assessing clinical samples. The current study included 107 children who were Spanish speaking and of Pu...

We offer an acoustic study of variation in the realization of intervocalic alveolar fricatives in Catalan and Spanish. We consider the effects of phonological inventory (Catalan has a distinction between /s/ and /z/ that Spanish lacks) and position in word (i.e. effects of word boundaries). An analysis of a corpus of Map Task interviews in Catalan and Spanish revealed that Spanish word-medial a...

Childhood experience with a language seems to help adult learners speak it with a more native-like accent. Can analogous benefits be found beyond phonology? This study focused on adult learners of Spanish who had spoken Spanish as their native language before age 7 and only minimally, if at all, thereafter until they began to re-learn Spanish around age 14 years. They were compared with native ...

This paper evaluates the different tasks carried out in the translation of pronominal anaphora in a machine translation (MT) system. The MT interlingua approach named AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation) improves upon other proposals presented to date because it is able to translate intersentential anaphors, detect co-reference chains, and translate Spanish zero pronoun...

In this paper we focus on Spanish polarity classification in a corpus of hotel reviews (COAH) and we introduce a new lexical resource called CRiSOL. This new resource is built on the list of Spanish opinion words iSOL. CRiSOL appends to each word of iSOL the polarity value of the related synset of SentiWordNet. Due to the fact that SentiWordNet is not a Spanish linguistic resource, a Spanish ve...

Dutch and Spanish differ in how predictable the stress pattern is as a function of the segmental content: it is correlated with syllable weight in Dutch but not in Spanish. In the present study, two experiments were run to compare the abilities of Dutch and Spanish speakers to separately process segmental and stress information. It was predicted that the Spanish speakers would have more difficu...

There is a strong demographic association between Spanish place-names and the share of the Hispanic population in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas. After controlling for county xed e ects and a host of observable variables, two otherwise observably-similar and geographically-proximate communities that only di er by Spanish-name origin can be expected to contain a share of Hisp...

Literature on young infants’ discrimination abilities for fricative consonants is controversial. The voicing distinction between /s/ and /z/, a phonemic contrast present in Catalan but not in Spanish, was selected to analyze early discrimination capacities and the effect of language experience in Catalan monolingual, Spanish monolingual and Catalan-Spanish bilingual populations. By 4 months of ...

This study used a copying task to examine spelling acquisition in French and Spanish from a perception and action perspective. Experiment 1 compared French and Spanish-speaking monolingual children’s performance. Experiment 2 analysed the behaviour of bilingual children when copying words in French and Spanish. Gaze lift analysis showed that in French, first graders tend to use letter and sylla...

It is well known that canonical Spanish, the dialectal variant ‘central’ of Spain, so called Castilian, can be transcribed by rules. This paper deals with the automatic grapheme to phoneme transcription rules in several Spanish dialects from Latin America. Spanish is a language spoken by more than 300 million people, has an important geographical dispersion compared among other languages and ha...