The use of mazes over time in Spanish heritage speakers in the US.

Introduction: Mazes are linguistic disfluencies such as filled pauses, repetitions, or revisions of grammatical, phonological, or lexical aspects of words that do not contribute to the meaning of a sentence. Bilingual children are believed to increase the numbers of mazes in their native or heritage language, the minority language, as they become more proficient in the second language, the societal language. Mazes may increase over time in bilingual Spanish-speaking children as they become more proficient in English, the societal language in the United States.

Vulnerability of Clitics and Articles to Bilingual Effects in Typically Developing Spanish-English Bilingual Children.

This study examines bilingual effects in Spanish-English bilingual children with good maintenance of the minority language. The present study compares the performance of a group of Spanish-monolingual children (MON; =30) with two groups of Spanish-speaking bilingual children (Low English proficiency group: LEP; =36; High English proficiency group, HEP; =36) on the elicited productions of Spanish articles and object clitics. Our results suggest that children with LEP performed significantly lower than MON children of the same age on both articles and clitics in Spanish.

Performance of Low-Income Dual Language Learners Attending English-Only Schools on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fourth Edition, Spanish.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the performance of a group of Spanish-speaking, dual language learners (DLLs) who were attending English-only schools and came from low-income and low-parental education backgrounds on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fourth Edition, Spanish (CELF-4S; Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 2006).

Method: Spanish-speaking DLLs (N = 656), ages 5;0 (years;months) to 7;11, were tested for language impairment (LI) using the core language score of the CELF-4S and the English Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test (Dawson, Stout, & Eyer, 2003). A subsample (n = 299) was additionally tested using a Spanish language sample analysis and a newly developed Spanish morphosyntactic measure, for identification of children with LI and to conduct a receiver operating characteristics curve analysis.