Children growing up bilingual face a unique linguistic environment. The current study investigated whether early bilingual experience influences the developmental trajectory of associative word learning, a foundational mechanism for lexical acquisition. Monolingual and bilingual infants (N=98) were tested on their ability to learn dissimilar-sounding words (lif and neem) in the Switch task. Twe...

CONTE PORARY ISSUES IN COMMU ICATION SCIENCE AND DISORDERS • Volume 31 • 162–172 • Fall 2004 © NSSLHA 1092-5171/04/3102-0162 ABSTRACT: The discrimination of English vowel contrasts in real and novel words by 40 native English and 40 bilingual Spanish/English participants was examined, with novel words representing new words in a second language. Discrimination was investigated because this fact...

Recognizing speech in adverse listening conditions is a significant cognitive, perceptual, and linguistic challenge, especially for children. Prior studies have yielded mixed results on the impact of bilingualism on speech perception in noise. Methodological variations across studies make it difficult to converge on a conclusion regarding the effect of bilingualism on speech-in-noise performanc...

PURPOSE Bilingual aphasia generally affects both languages. However, the age of acquisition of the second language (L2) seems to play a role in the anatomo-functional correlation of the syntactical/grammatical processes, thus potentially influencing the L2 syntactic impairment following a stroke. The present study aims to analyze the influence of late age of acquisition of the L2 on syntactic i...

Monolingual infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language around 6 to 9 months of age, a fact marked by the development of preferences for predominant prosodic patterns and a decrease in sensitivity to non-native prosodic properties. The present study evaluates the effects of bilingual acquisition on speech perception by exploring how stress pattern perception may diff...

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...

In this paper, I argue that current approaches to modeling of concepts in bilingual memory privilege word representation at the expense of concept representation. I identify four problems with the study of concepts in bilingual memory: con ̄ation of semantic and conceptual levels of representation; scarcity of methods targeting conceptual representation; assumption of the static nature of the co...

This study addresses whether/how monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking children differ in their acquisition of grammar by examining direct object clitics in contexts where either proclisis or enclisis is possible (Lo voy a ver vs. Voy a verlo). The current study examines variable clitic placement in sociolinguistic interviews conducted with 21 Spanish-English bilingual children of Mexican ...