Bilingual performance on the boston naming test: preliminary norms in Spanish and English

A total of 100 young educated bilingual adults were administered the Boston Naming Test (BNT) (Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983) in both Spanish and English. Three group performance scores were obtained: English only, Spanish only, and a composite score indicating the total number of items correctly named independent of language. The scores for the entire group were significantly greater in English than in Spanish. An additional set of analyses explored individual differences in picture naming performance across the two languages as measured by the BNT. For a subset of the larger group (n = 25) there were significant differences in composite over single language scoring, but no significant differences between Spanish and English. Item analyses of correct responses were conducted in both languages to explore the construct validity of the standardized administration of the BNT with this population. There was much greater variability in responses over the Spanish items for this bilingual group. The results of a correlation analysis of information obtained from the initial questionnaire with the BNT scores in each language is also reported. The practical implications of this preliminary bilingual BNT normative data are discussed.     

Pictures and words: Spanish and English vocabulary in classrooms.

The current study evaluated the relation between Spanish and English vocabulary. Whereas previously reported correlations have revealed strong differences among types of vocabulary measures used and the ages of the students tested, no prior study had used a multilevel model to control for classroom-level differences. The current study used multiple measures of vocabulary—picture vocabulary and narrative production tasks—in multilevel models of 1,300 Spanish-speaking students in 247 kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms in English immersion and bilingual transitional programs. The current results highlight the need to separate classroom effects from student effects, since for vocabulary measures, student-level correlations were strongly biased toward zero when classroom-level correlations were opposite in direction from student-level correlations. Most important, the current results support a strong distinction between types of vocabulary measure (e.g., picture vs. narrative) and suggest sizable influence of instruction for questions of bilingual performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading achievement across three language groups: Growth estimates for overall reading and reading subskills obtained with the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey.

This study estimated normative reading trajectories for the population of English-proficient language minority students attending U.S. public elementary schools. Achievement of English-language learners (ELLs) was evaluated in terms of native English speakers' progress, and estimates were adjusted for the effects of socioeconomic status (SES). The ELL group was disaggregated into native Spanish speakers and native speakers of Asian languages. Multilevel latent variable growth modeling indicated that achievement trends of Asian-language ELLs are more similar to those of native English speakers than to those of Spanish ELL groups. Spanish ELLs had lower initial reading achievement than both Asian-language ELLs and native English speakers, and Asian students had higher initial achievement than did the native English speaking group. Additionally, Spanish ELLs had statistically significantly less growth over time than did Asian ELLs, with differences being most notable on reading evaluation–related tasks. Language-related differences in total reading were minimized when SES effects were specifically modeled, suggesting that SES may be the more significant factor explaining the lower achievement rates of English-proficient native Spanish speakers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A psychometric comparison of the Beck Depression Inventory-II in English and Spanish.

The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; A. T. Beck, R. A. Steer, & G. K. Brown, 1996) is a widely used measure of depressive symptomatology originally authored in English and then translated to Spanish. However, there are very limited data available on the Spanish translation. This study compared the psychometric characteristics of the BDI-II in Spanish and English in a sample of 895 college students. The instrument was administered twice with a 1-week interval, either in the same language on both occasions or in a different language on each occasion. Results show strong internal consistency and good test-retest reliability in both languages. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the published English-language factor structure showed good fit with data from the Spanish instrument. Among bilingual participants who took the BDI-II in both languages, there was no significant language effect. These data provide initial evidence of comparable reliability and validity between the English and Spanish BDI-II in a nonclinical sample. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingual telephone-assisted computerized speech-recognition assessment: is a voice-activated computer program a culturally and linguistically appropriate tool for screening depression in English and Spanish?

The purpose of this study was to evaluate an automated voice-interactive program for screening depression in English and Spanish. The Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D) was administered in two interview formats: a speech recognition program presented by cellular telephone, and a face-to-face method. In a single-session counterbalanced design, 32 English speakers and 23 Spanish speakers completed randomly ordered administrations of the two CES-D methods, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and the Short Acculturation Scale (SAS). There was strong evidence that the two CES-D methods were psychometrically equivalent, reliable, and valid in both languages. The two methods were highly rated by both language groups. The Spanish speakers did not display a preference for either method, but the English speakers preferred the face-to-face method. The results also suggested that verbal response latency time was positively correlated with depression scores. Last, the Spanish-speakers' acculturation levels were not correlated with depression scores. Differences in age, education, and income between the language groups were confounded by unequal sample sizes. The findings generally supported the viability of the automated CES-D as a culturally and linguistically appropriate tool for screening depression in English and Spanish. Furthermore, the analyses of respondent voice characteristics show promise as a method for screening depression in both languages.     

Contextual effects of bilingual programs on beginning reading.

This study of 1,338 Spanish-speaking 1st graders examined contextual effects of bilingual programs on reading comprehension and the effect of language of instruction within these contexts. The study included 128 classrooms in 32 schools located in border Texas and in urban Texas and California. These classrooms used either English immersion or Spanish maintenance bilingual programs. Detailed observations of teachers' instructional language were made, sampled within the year. The analyses allowed classroom-level differences to be separated from student-level differences, and for Spanish and English passage comprehension to be considered simultaneously. While mean differences between programs were reduced for English passage comprehension, maintenance programs still outperformed immersion programs in Spanish. Results also indicated large program and locale covariance differences at the classroom level, implying important differences in how these programs operate in these locales. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

English speakers attend more strongly than Spanish speakers to manner of motion when classifying novel objects and events.

Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in a Spanish-speaking context at sorting novel, animated objects and events into categories on the basis of manner of motion, an attribute that is prominently marked in English but not in Spanish. In contrast, English and Spanish speakers performed similarly at classifying on the basis of path, an attribute that is prominently marked in both languages. Similar results were obtained regardless of whether categories were labeled by novel words or numbered, suggesting that an English-speaking tendency to focus on manner of motion is a general phenomenon and not limited to word learning. Effects of age of acquisition of English were also observed on the performance of bilinguals, with early bilinguals performing similarly in the 2 language contexts and later bilinguals showing greater contextual variation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Language discrimination by newborns: Toward an understanding of the role of rhythm.

Three experiments investigated the ability of French newborns to discriminate between sets of sentences in different foreign languages. The sentences were low-pass filtered to reduce segmental information while sparing prosodic information. Infants discriminated between stress-timed English and mora-timed Japanese (Experiment 1) but failed to discriminate between stress-timed English and stress-timed Dutch (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, infants heard different combinations of sentences from English, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. Discrimination was observed only when English and Dutch sentences were contrasted with Spanish and Italian sentences. These results suggest that newborns use prosodic and, more specifically, rhythmic information to classify utterances into broad language classes defined according to global rhythmic properties. Implications of this for the acquisition of the rhythmic properties of the native language are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A developmental study of Spanish-English production in bilingual children.

30 Spanish–English bilingual and 30 English monolingual children aged 3–7 yrs were asked to imitate Spanish and English lexical and syntactic constructions. Lexical items contained phonemes that have been previously identified as "high risk" for monolingual speakers of Spanish or English. Therefore, specific error patterns were predictable. Sentence constructions emphasized plurality, possessiveness, and adjective–noun word order. Monolinguals and bilinguals did not significantly differ on English imitations: Both groups scored near 100% correct. As expected, bilinguals scored significantly higher than monolinguals on all Spanish tasks. Errors for both bilinguals and monolinguals on Spanish sentence tasks took the form of omissions. Results indicate that Spanish competency on tasks like these does not "handicap" similar competencies in English for bilingual children at these age levels. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of language and task on children's patterns of sentence verification and denial.

Japanese-speaking and English-speaking children differ in performance on sentence-verification and denial tasks (M. M. Akiyama, see PA, Vol 71:14618 and PA, Vol 72:16907). Although the Japanese and Korean languages are similar, Korean-speaking children performed like English speakers on such tasks. In Experiment 1, 32 monolingual Korean and 24 English speakers with a mean age of 4 years, 5 months were asked to respond "right" or "wrong" on a sentence–picture or a sentence–knowledge verification task. Both language groups found true negatives the hardest sentences to verify in both tasks. In Experiment 2, 16 Korean speakers aged 4–7 years were asked to deny statements. Like English speakers, they produced more affirmative denials than negative ones. The common performances of Korean-speaking and English speaking children were accounted for by considering differences in pragmatics and the types of negative constructions found in the 3 languages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Domain Specificity of Trilingual Teachers' Verbal Self-Concepts.

Teachers from Hong Kong (N=437) responded to English, math, Cantonese, and Mandarin self-concept items. Confirmatory factor analysis found good support for the distinction of 4 domain-specific self-concepts. English self-concept had a low correlation with Mandarin self-concept (r = .09) and a negative correlation with Cantonese self-concept (r = -.19). Cantonese and Mandarin, which presumably pertain to a single Chinese language domain, were also negatively correlated (r = -.11). These very low correlations did not allow the 3 language constructs to form a single verbal factor. The results challenge the assumption of a single verbal self-concept construct for speakers of multiple languages. For trilinguals, the verbal self-concept constructs can be very distinct and unrelated to each other. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of language and socioeconomic status on children's understanding of false belief.

Study 1 investigated whether differences in the lexical explicitness with which languages express false belief influence children's performance on standard false belief tasks. Preschoolers speaking languages with explicit terms (Turkish and Puerto Rican Spanish) were compared with preschoolers speaking languages without explicit terms (Brazilian Portuguese and English) on questions assessing false belief understanding either specifically (the think question) or more generally (the look for question). Lexical explicitness influenced responses to the think question only. Study 2 replicated Study I with groups of both speakers differing in socioeconomic status (SES). A local effect of explicitness was found again as well as a more general influence of SES. The findings are discussed with regard to possible relations among language, SES, and understanding of mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Should I stay or should I switch? A cost–benefit analysis of voluntary language switching in young and aging bilinguals.

Bilinguals spontaneously switch languages in conversation even though laboratory studies reveal robust cued language switching costs. The authors investigated how voluntary-switching costs might differ when switches are voluntary. Younger (Experiments 1–2) and older (Experiment 3) Spanish–English bilinguals named pictures in 3 conditions: (a) dominant-language only, (b) nondominant-language only, and (c) using “whatever language comes to mind” (in Experiment 2, “using each language about half the time”). Most bilinguals, particularly balanced bilinguals, voluntarily mixed languages even though switching was costly. Unlike with cued switching, voluntary switching sometimes facilitated responses, switch costs were not greater for the dominant language, and age effects on language mixing and switching were limited. This suggests that the freedom to mix languages voluntarily allows unbalanced and older bilinguals to function more like balanced and younger bilinguals. Voluntary switch costs reveal an expanded role for inhibitory control in bilingual language production and imply a mandatory separation by language in bilingual lexical selection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingualism, Language Proficiency, and Learning to Read in Two Writing Systems.

Two hundred and four 5- and 6-year-olds who were monolingual English-, bilingual English-Chinese-, or Chinese-speaking children beginning to learn English (2nd-language learners) were compared on phonological awareness and word decoding tasks in English and Chinese. Phonological awareness developed in response to language exposure and instruction but, once established, transferred across languages for both bilinguals and 2nd-language learners. In contrast, decoding ability developed separately for each language as a function of proficiency and instruction in that language and did not transfer to the other language. Therefore, there was no overall effect of bilingualism on learning to read: Performance depended on the structure of the language, proficiency in that language, and instructional experiences with that writing system. These results point to the importance of evaluating the features of the languages and instructional context in which children become biliterate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cross-language postevent misinformation effects in Spanish–English bilingual witnesses.

Three experiments examined whether postevent misinformation affects eyewitness memory across languages in bilingual witnesses. Participants watched a videotaped simulation of a robbery, read a postevent narrative that contained misleading information about the robbery, and answered either forced-choice or cued-recall questions about 6 target items from the videotape. Experiment I was conducted entirely in English, but Experiments 2 and 3 tested Spanish–English bilingual participants who were exposed to 1 of 3 language combinations of the postevent narrative and memory test—Spanish–Spanish, English–Spanish, or Spanish–English (as well as English–English in Experiment 3). Across all 3 experiments, the effects of postevent misinformation were as large in the cross-language conditions as in the same-language conditions. This study has important implications for the justice system, and the results suggest new ways to study postevent misinformation effects and bilingual memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Early home language use and later vocabulary development.

This longitudinal study examined the association between early patterns of home language use (age 4.5 years) and vocabulary growth (ages 4.5 to 12 years) in English and Spanish for 180 Spanish-speaking language minority learners followed from ages 4.5 to 12 years. Standardized measures of vocabulary were administered to children from ages 4.5 to 12 years, and home language use was assessed via parent survey at study entry. Three predominant home language use patterns were identified: mostly Spanish, equal amounts of Spanish and English, and mostly English. Individual growth modeling results demonstrated initial English vocabulary differences between the three language groups, with the mostly English group outperforming the other two language groups. However, the rate of growth for the equal amounts and mostly Spanish groups surpassed that of the mostly English group; by age 12 years, the gaps among the 3 groups had narrowed, but participants' vocabulary skills remained below national norms. In contrast, students' patterns of Spanish vocabulary growth did not vary, resulting in parallel but widening gaps through age 12 years. Results suggest that early Spanish use in language minority learners' homes, in and of itself, does not interfere with the development of English vocabulary. However, despite their English instructional context, all learners' vocabulary knowledge was below average and the gap compared with national norms persisted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Therapists’ views on working with bilingual Spanish–English speaking clients: A qualitative investigation.

Through semistructured interviews, language switching in therapy was examined with 9 bilingual Spanish and English therapists. Therapists were asked about how and when they switched from one language to another during treatment, as well as the ways in which their clients’ switched languages. After the use of consensual qualitative research methods (C. E. Hill et al., 2005; C. E. Hill, B. J. Thompson, & E. N. Williams, 1997), the results revealed that therapists used language switching as a mechanism to establish trust, bond with clients, and promote disclosure through the use of specific phrases or specific words; particularly, the use of Spanish idiomatic expressions (dichos) served to engage, redirect, and increase client self-understanding and awareness. Therapists reported that their clients switched from English to Spanish when recounting experiences that involved certain emotions (e.g., anger) and represented themselves differently depending on the language they were speaking. Therapists also reported that their clients switched from English to Spanish to improve communication and to connect with them. Future directions for research and implications for training and practice are outlined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of bilingualism and biliteracy on children's emerging concepts of print.

Three groups of 4- and 5-year-old children were examined for their concepts of how print refers to language. All of the children could identify printed letters and their sounds but not read alone. The groups studied were monolingual speakers of English, bilingual speakers of French and English, and bilingual speakers of Chinese (Mandarin) and English. Bilingual children were equally proficient in both languages and were familiar with print and storybooks in both languages. The tasks assessed children's understanding of the general correspondence between print and language in which the printed form represents a word and the specific correspondence between a constituent of print and one of language that determines representation in a given writing system. The general correspondence relation applies to all writing systems, but the specific correspondence relation changes for different kinds of writing systems. Bilingual children understood better than monolingual children the general symbolic representation of print. The older Chinese-English bilingual children also showed advanced understanding of the specific correspondence relations in English print. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Within- and between-language priming differ: Evidence from repetition of pictures in Spanish-English bilinguals.

In the current study, the authors used an immediate repetition paradigm with pictures to observe whether repetition enhances word production in bilinguals. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to name pictures that were named previously in the same language (Spanish-Spanish or English-English) or in the opposite language (Spanish-English or English-Spanish). Results revealed a repetition effect both within languages and between languages. Furthermore, there was an asymmetry within language, with repetition priming being larger in Spanish than in English. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that lag interacted with language for both within- and between-language priming. However, lag resulted in a decrease in the asymmetry for within- but not between-language priming. The results are consistent with the view that within- and between-language repetition priming are mediated by different mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Familiarization effects for bilingual letter detection involving translation or exact text repetition.

In two experiments, English-Spanish bilinguals read passages, performing letter detection on some passages by circling target letters as they read. Detection passages were sometimes familiarized (primed) by prior reading of the same passage or a translation of it. Participants detected letters in English passages in Experiment 1 and in Spanish passages in Experiment 2. For both experiments, a missing letter effect occurred (depressed detection accuracy on frequent function words relative to less frequent content words). Familiarization promoted overall improvements in letter detection only for English passages, suggesting that reprocessing benefits depend on high language fluency. For Spanish passages, cognates engendered greater error rates than noncognates; the visual similarity of Spanish and English cognates apparently enabled faster identification of Spanish cognates in a way unaffected by familiarization of the whole text passage. Priming by familiarized text was significantly higher when the passages were in the same language than when they were in different languages, suggesting that the reprocessing benefits are at the word level instead of the semantic level. These results are consistent with the GO model of reading (Greenberg, Healy, Koriat, & Kreiner, 2004) but require an expanded consideration of attention redistribution processes in that model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)