The current study explores the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) and bilingualism on the linguistic skills and verbal short-term memory of preschool children. In previous studies comparing children of low and mid-high SES, the terms "a child with low-SES" and "a child speaking a minority language" are often interchangeable, not enabling differentiated evaluation of these two variables. Th...

This paper introduces a first outline of a typology of distributed knowledge co-creation in virtual communities based on Porter‘s typology of virtual communities. The typology is based on empirical results from the analyses of social media, and a discussion of case study results from India proves the adaptability as well as usefulness of the typology. At the same time, the case study serves as ...

Until recently, research on language processing and its cognitive basis assumed that monolingual speakers were the model subjects of study and that English provided an adequate basis on which universal principles might be generalized. In this view, bilinguals were considered a special group of language users, much like brain-damaged patients, children with language disorders, or deaf individual...

It is a timely issue to understand the impact of bilingualism upon brain structure in healthy aging and upon cognitive decline given evidence of its neuroprotective effects. Plastic changes induced by bilingualism were reported in young adults in the left inferior parietal lobule (LIPL) and its right counterpart (RIPL) (Mechelli et al., 2004). Moreover, both age of second language (L2) acquisit...

Cross-linguistic differences in emotionality of autobiographical memories were examined by eliciting memories of immigration from bilingual speakers. Forty-seven Russian-English bilinguals were asked to recount their immigration experiences in either Russian or English. Bilinguals used more emotion words when describing their immigration experiences in the second language (English) than in the ...

This study investigated whether observers can identify what language was being spoken in visual-only speech stimuli, and whether or not this ability depends on an observers’ prior linguistic experience. Participants watched visual-only speech stimuli and were asked to decide if the talker in the video was speaking English or Spanish. Four groups of participants were studied: monolinguals and bi...

While several scholars have examined the influence of emotions on bilingual performance (Anooshian and Hertel 1994; Bond and Lai 1986; Javier and Marcos 1989) and second language learning and use (Arnold 1999; Schumann 1994, 1997, 1999), to date very little is known about ways in which bilinguals talk about emotions in their two languages. The present study investigates discursive construction ...