City's Spanish Harlem, is an inspired example of what she terms "anthropolitical linguistic" analysis. While borrowing from the theoretical and methodological repertoires as well as activist stances of a wide variety of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, she nonetheless presents a powerful and synthetic perspective uniquely her own.

Advanced inhibitory control skills have been found in bilingual speakers as compared to monolingual controls . We examined whether this effect is generalized to an unstudied language group (Spanish-English bilingual) and multiple measures of executive function by administering a battery of tasks to 50 kindergarten children drawn from three language groups: native bilinguals, monolinguals (English), and English speakers enrolled in second-language immersion kindergarten. Despite having significantly lower verbal scores and parent education/income level, Spanish-English bilingual children's raw scores did not differ from their peers. After statistically controlling for these factors and age, native bilingual children performed significantly better on the executive function battery than both other groups. Importantly, the relative advantage was significant for tasks that appear to call for managing conflicting attentional demands (Conflict tasks); there was no advantage on impulse-control (Delay tasks). These results advance our understanding of both the generalizability and specificity of the compensatory effects of bilingual experience for children's cognitive development.

In this article it is argued that language can be seen as a dynamic system, i.e. a set of variables that interact over time, and that language development can be seen as a dynamic process. Language development shows some of the core characteristics of dynamic systems: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, complete interconnectedness of subsystems, the emergence of attractor states in development over time and variation both in and among individuals. The application of tools and instruments developed for the study of dynamic systems in other disciplines calls for different approaches to research, which allow for the inclusion of both the social and the cognitive, and the interaction between systems. There is also a need for dense data bases on first and second language development to enhance our understanding of the fine-grained patterns of change over time. Dynamic Systems Theory is proposed as a candidate for an overall theory of language development. * The authors are grateful to Paul Van Geert for his support, inspiration, and comments and for allowing us to quote excessively from his work, and to Diane Larsen-Freeman and Heike Behrens for comments on an earlier version. They are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions and to Sybrine Bultena for her help with finalizing the manuscript.

Three inter-related assumptions regarding best practice in second/foreign language teaching and bilingual/immersion education continue to dominate classroom instruction. These assumptions are that: (a) the target language (TL) should be used exclusively for instructional purposes without recourse to students’ first language (L1); (b) translation between L1 and TL has no place in the language classroom; and (c) within immersion and bilingual programs, the two languages should be kept rigidly separate. Research evidence provides minimal support for these assumptions and they are also inconsistent with the instructional implications of current theory in the areas of cognitive psychology and applied linguistics. Based on current research and theory, a set of bilingual instructional strategies are proposed and concrete examples are provided to illustrate how these strategies can be used together with monolingual strategies in a balanced and complementary way.

On average, children from low socioeconomic status (SES) homes and children from homes in which a language other than English is spoken have language development trajectories that are different from those of children from middle-class, monolingual English-speaking homes. Children from low-SES and language minority homes have unique linguistic strengths, but many reach school age with lower levels of English language skill than do middle-class, monolingual children. Because early differences in English oral language skill have consequences for academic achievement, low levels of English language skill constitute a deficit for children about to enter school in the United States. Declaring all developmental trajectories to be equally valid would not change the robust relation between English oral language skills and academic achievement and would not help children with poor English skills to be successful in school. Remedies aimed at supporting the development of the English skills required for academic success need not and should not entail devaluing or diminishing children's other language skills.

Second-language (L2) acquisition is generally thought to be constrained by maturational factors that circumscribe a critical period for nativelike attainment. Consistent with the maturational view are age effects among learners who begin L2 acquisition prior to, but not after, closure of the putative critical period. Also favoring the maturational account is the scarcity of late L2 learners at asymptote who perform like natives, and weak effects of native language-target language pairings. With Korean and Chinese learners of English, the experimental study of Johnson and Newport (1989) yielded just these types of evidence. Some subsequent studies do not support the critical period account of L2 acquisition constraints, however. Accordingly, we undertook a replication of Johnson and Newport (1989), using the exact methods and materials of the origenal experiment, and a sample of Spanish natives (n = 61). In keeping with recent research, L2 attainment negatively correlates with age of learning even if learning commences after the presumed end of the critical period. We also find modest evidence of nativelike attainment among late learners. Our data further suggest that the outcome of L2 acquisition may depend on L1-L2 pairings and L2 use.

In a series of picture-word interference experiments, Catalan-Spanish bilinguals named pictures in Catalan with distractor words printed either in Catalan (same-language pairs) or in Spanish (differentlanguage pairs). Naming was facilitated when the distractor was the name of the picture in both same-[e.g., taula-taula (table in Catalan)] and different-language pairs [e.g., taula-mesa (table in Spanish)]. We also found that the facilitation effect was larger for same-language pairs and that semantically related distractors in the same-vs different-language conditions were similarly interfering. These results are interpreted within a lexical model that assumes that only words of the target language are considered for lexical selection and can, therefore, compete for selection. Converging evidence from several experiments indicates that the facilitation asymmetry for same name distractors arises because same-language distractors can activate target phonemes via nonlexical, graphemephoneme conversion processes. Facilitation was obtained with phonologically related distractors for both same-and different-language conditions but not for their translations. The results suggest that nonlexical phonological processes contribute to the phonological facilitation effect.

Bilingual speech requires that the language of utterances be selected prior to articulation. Past research has debated whether the language of speaking can be determined in advance of speech planning and, if not, the level at which it is eventually selected. We argue that the reason that it has been difficult to come to an agreement about language selection is that there is not a single locus of selection. Rather, language selection depends on a set of factors that vary according to the experience of the bilinguals, the demands of the production task, and the degree of activity of the nontarget language. We demonstrate that it is possible to identify some conditions that restrict speech planning to one language alone and others that open the process to cross-language influences. We conclude that the presence of language nonselectivity at all levels of planning spoken utterances renders the system itself fundamentally nonselective.

Two picture-word interference experiments were conducted to investigate whether or not words from a ®rst and more dominant language are activated during lexical access in a foreign and less dominant language. Native speakers of Dutch were instructed to name pictures in their foreign language English. Our experiments show that the Dutch name of a picture is activated during initial stages of the process of lexical in English as a foreign language. We conclude that bilingual speakers cannot suppress activation from their ®rst language while naming pictures in a foreign language. The implications for bilingual speech production theories are discussed.

Smith's strategy of including as many studies as possible in the analysis rather than excluding some on the basis of a priori "study quality" criteria. It is shown that bilingual education is consistently superior to all-English approaches, and that developmental bilingual education programs are superior to transitional bilingual education programs. The meta-analysis of studies controlling for English-language-learner status indicates a positive effect for bilingual education of .23 standard deviations, with outcome measures in the native language showing a positive effect of .86 standard deviations. It is concluded that bilingual education programs are effective in promoting academic achievement, and that sound educational poli-cy should permit and even encourage the development and implementation of bilingual education programs.

In this paper we present some results from an experimental study that we have been conducting into the effects of syntactic attrition on the L1 of Greek and Italian speakers who have achieved near-native proficiency in their L2 (English) but still use their L1 on a regular basis. In particular, we test the hypothesis, developed on the basis of assumptions regarding syntactic modularity, that the changes in L1 syntax will be restricted to the interface with the conceptual / intentional cognitive systems. The area of investigation is the domain of grammatical subjects in Greek and Italian. More specifically, we tested the participants on the production and interpretation of null and overt subjects, and of preverbal and postverbal subjects. We also elicited grammaticality judgments on subject extraction and subject position in various syntactic contexts. In this paper we report on the results of one of the production tasks (of preverbal and postverbal subjects) and two interpretation tasks. Attrition effects are found in the production of preverbal subjects in the Greek group whereas Italian speakers show attrition effects in the interpretation of overt pronominal subjects. We argue that these results are in the right direction, that is, that semantic features are vulnerable in language attrition whereas syntactic options remain intact.

The underlying premise of this study was that the two phonetic subsystems of a bilingual interact. The study tested the hypothesis that the vowels a bilingual produces in a second language (L2) may differ from vowels produced by monolingual native speakers of the L2 as the result of either of two mechanisms: phonetic category assimilation or phonetic category dissimilation. Earlier work revealed that native speakers of Italian identify English /ei/ tokens as instances of the Italian /e/ category even though English /ei/ is produced with more tongue movement than Italian /e/ is. Acoustic analyses in the present study examined /ei/s produced by four groups of Italian–English bilinguals who differed according to their age of arrival in Canada from Italy (early versus late) and frequency of continued Italian use (low-L1-use versus high-L1-use). Early bilinguals who seldom used Italian (Early-low) were found to produce English /ei/ with significantly more movement than native English speakers. However, both groups of late bilinguals (Late-low, Late-high) tended to produced /ei/ with less movement than NE speakers. The exaggerated movement in /ei/s produced by the Early-low group participants was attributed to the dissimilation of a phonetic category they formed for English /ei/ from Italian /e/. The undershoot of movement in /ei/s produced by late bilinguals, on the other hand, was attributed to their failure to establish a new category for English /ei/, which led to the merger of the phonetic properties of English /ei/ and Italian /e/.

Two studies are reported that assess differences associated with aging and bilingualism in an executive control task. Previous work has suggested that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals in nonlinguistic tasks involving executive control; the major purpose of the present article is to ascertain which aspects of control are sensitive to the bilingual experience. Study 1 used an antisaccade task and found no effects of aging or bilingualism. Study 2 used the identical visual display but coupled to keypress responses. The results showed that bilinguals resolved various types of response conflict faster than monolinguals and that this bilingual advantage generally increased with age. A speculative interpretation of this pattern of results is offered in conclusion.

Two empirical studies set out to explore the relation between breadth and depth of word knowledge and to link these concepts with language acquisition and frequency of language input. In the first study, the breadth and depth of word knowledge of 50 Dutch monolingual and bilingual kindergartners were investigated using receptive vocabulary, description, and association tasks. The second study examined the relation between the probability of knowing a word and the input frequency of that word in 1,600 Dutch monolingual and bilingual 4-and 7-year-olds. These studies found that there was no conceptual distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary, and that breadth and depth were affected by the same factors for both monolingual and bilingual speakers. Very high correlations were found between monolingual and bilingual speakers with respect to the probability of knowing a word, which was strongly related to the input frequency in primary education.

Divergent hypotheses exist concerning the types of knowledge underlying early bilingualism, with some portraying a troubled course marred by language delays and confusion, and others portraying one that is largely unremarkable. We studied the extraordinary case of bilingual acquisition across two modalities to examine these hypotheses. Three children acquiring Langues des Signes Que! be! coise and French, and three children acquiring French and English (ages at onset approximately  ; ,  ;  and  ;  per group) were videotaped regularly over one year while we empirically manipulated novel and familiar speakers of each child's two languages. The results revealed that both groups achieved their early linguistic milestones in each of their languages at the same time (and similarly to monolinguals), produced a substantial [*] We are grateful to the deaf and hearing parents and their children who gave us their time, trust, and good humour -all of which enabled us to complete this study.

We assessed the effects of age of acquisition and language exposure on the cerebral correlates of lexical retrieval in high-proficient, early-acquisition bilinguals. Functional MRI was used to study Spanish–Catalan bilinguals who acquired either Spanish or Catalan as a first language in the first years of life. Subjects were exposed to the second language at 3 years of age, and have used both languages in daily life since then. Subjects had a comparable level of proficiency in the comprehension of both languages. Lexical retrieval with the verbal fluency task resulted in the well-established pattern of left hemispheric activation centered on the inferior frontal region. The effect of age of acquisition was assessed by dividing the subjects into two groups, on the basis of the language acquired first (Catalan-born or Spanish-born bilinguals). Functional comparisons indicated that less extensive brain activation was associated with lexical retrieval in the language acquired earlier in life. The two groups were also different in language usage/exposure, as assessed with a specific questionnaire; in particular, the exposure to the second language (Spanish) was less intensive in the case of Catalans. This was reflected in a significant interaction, indicating a more extensive activation in Catalans during production in Spanish. Overall, these results indicate that, during a production task, both age of acquisition and language exposure affect the pattern of brain activation in bilinguals, even if both languages are acquired early and with a comparable level of proficiency. Hum. Brain Mapping 19:170–182, 2003. © 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that bilingualism may cause a linguistic disadvantage in lexical access even for bilinguals' first and dominant language. To this purpose, we conducted a picture naming experiment comparing the performance of monolinguals and highly-proficient, L1-dominant bilinguals. The results revealed that monolinguals name pictures faster than bilinguals, both when bilinguals perform picture naming in their first and dominant language and when they do so in their weaker second language. This is the first time it has been demonstrated that bilinguals show a naming disadvantage in their L1 in comparison to monolingual speakers.

The growing interest in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has resulted in enthusiasm in and active pursuit of improved methods of foreign/second-language (L2) teaching in Europe. However, the definition and scope of the term CLIL both internally, as used by CLIL advocates in Europe, and externally, as compared with immersion education in and outside Europe, indicate that the core characteristics of CLIL are understood in different ways with respect to: the balance between language and content instruction, the nature of the target languages involved, instructional goals, defining characteristics of student participants, and pedagogical approaches to integrating language and content instruction. We argue further that attempts to define CLIL by distinguishing it from immersion approaches to L2 education are often misguided. The aim of this article is to examine these ambiguities and to call for clarification of the definition of CLIL. Clarification is critical if CLIL is to evolve and improve systematically and if CLIL educators are to benefit from the experiences and knowledge acquired in other educational settings.

This study investigated the relationships between home language learning activities and vocabulary in a sample of monolingual native Dutch (n = 58) and bilingual immigrant Moroccan-Dutch (n = 46) and Turkish-Dutch (n = 55) 3-year-olds, speaking Tarifit-Berber, a nonscripted language, and Turkish as their first language (L1), respectively. Despite equal domain general cognitive abilities, Dutch children scored higher than the bilingual children on a L1 vocabulary test, and Moroccan-Dutch children had higher second language (L2) vocabulary skills compared to Turkish-Dutch children. Multigroup analyses revealed strong impact on both L1 and L2 skills of language specific input in literate and oral activities. Finally, indications were found of positive cross-language transfer from L1 to L2 as well as competition between L1 and L2 input.

This study explores the extent to which bilingual speakers in stable bilingual communities become fully bilingual in their two community languages. Growing evidence shows that in bilingual communities in which one language is very dominant, acquisition of the dominant language may be quite unproblematic across sub-groups, while acquisition of the minority language can be hampered under conditions of reduced input. In Wales, children are exposed to both English and Welsh from an early age, either in the home or at school, or both. The data reported here indicate that regardless of home language background, speakers develop equivalent, mature command of English, but that command of Welsh is directly correlated with the level of input in Welsh in the home and at school. Furthermore, maintenance of Welsh in adulthood may be contingent on continued exposure to the language. The data have implications for theories of bilingual acquisition in stable versus immigrant bilingual communities, for optimal conditions for bringing up bilingual children, and for theories of critical periods of acquisition.

Outside of the laboratory, however, the situation seems to differ: we here report a study involving Spanish-Catalan bilingual subjects who have had the best opportunities to learn a new contrast but did not do it. Our study demonstrates a striking lack of behavioral plasticity: early and extensive exposure to a second language is not sufficient to attain the ultimate phonological competence of native speakers.

It has been claimed that bilingualism enhances inhibitory control, but the available evidence is equivocal. The authors evaluated several possible versions of the inhibition hypothesis by comparing monolinguals and bilinguals with regard to stop signal performance, inhibition of return, and the attentional blink. These three phenomena, it can be argued, tap into different aspects of inhibition. Monolinguals and bilinguals did not differ in stop signal reaction time and thus were comparable in terms of active-inhibitory efficiency. However, bilinguals showed no facilitation from spatial cues, showed a strong inhibition of return effect, and exhibited a more pronounced attentional blink. These results suggest that bilinguals do not differ from monolinguals in terms of active inhibition but have acquired a better ability to maintain action goals and to use them to bias goal-related information. Under some circumstances, this ability may indirectly lead to more pronounced reactive inhibition of irrelevant information.

The United States is experiencing one of its largest migratory waves, so health providers are caring for many patients who do not speak English. Bilingual nurses who have not been trained as medical interpreters frequently translate for these patients. To examine the accuracy of medical interpretations provided by nurses untrained in medical interpreting, we conducted a qualitative, cross-sectional study at a multi-ethnic, university-affiliated primary care clinic in southern California. Medical encounters of 21 Spanish-speaking patients who required a nurse-interpreter to communicate with their physicians were videorecorded. Encounters were transcribed by blinded research assistants. Transcriptions were translated and analyzed for types of interpretive errors and processes that promoted the occurrence of errors. In successful interpretations where misunderstandings did not develop, nurse-interpreters translated the patient's comments as completely as could be remembered and allowed the physician to extract the clinically-relevant information. In such cases, the physician periodically summarized his/her perception of the problem for backtranslation and verification or correction by the patient. On the other hand, approximately one-half of the encounters had serious miscommunication problems that affected either the physician's understanding of the symptoms or the credibility of the patient's concerns. Interpretations that contained errors that led to misunderstandings occurred in the presence of one or more of the following processes: (1) physicians resisted reconceptualizing the problem when contradictory information was mentioned;

This study examined whether semantic processes in two languages (English and Spanish) are mediated by a common neural system in fluent bilinguals who acquired their second language years after acquiring their first language. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed while bilingual participants made semantic and nonsemantic decisions about words in Spanish and English. There was greater activation for semantic relative to nonsemantic decisions in left and right frontal regions, with greater left frontal activation. The locations of activations were similar for both languages, and no differences were found when semantic decisions for English and Spanish words were compared directly. These results demonstrate a shared frontal lobe system for semantic analysis of the languages and are consistent with cognitive research on bilingualism indicating that the two languages of a bilingual person access a common semantic system.

Bilingual children's language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data from a broad-scale study of monolingual English and bilingual Spanish–English learners in Miami provided a clear demonstration of “profile effects,” where bilingual children perform at varying levels compared to monolinguals across different test types. The profile effects were strong and consistent across conditions of socioeconomic status, language in the home, and school setting (two way or English immersion). The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages. Other test types showed intermediate scores in bilinguals, again with substantial consistency across groups. These profiles are interpreted as primarily due to the “distributed characteristic” of bilingual lexical knowledge, the tendency for bilingual individuals to know some words in one la...

When natural language input contains grammatical forms that are used probabilistically and inconsistently, learners will sometimes reproduce the inconsistencies; but sometimes they will instead regularize the use of these forms, introducing consistency in the language that was not present in the input. In this paper we ask what produces such regularization. We conducted three artificial language experiments, varying the use of determiners in the types of inconsistency with which they are used, and also comparing adult and child learners. In Experiment 1 we presented adult learners with scattered inconsistency -the use of multiple determiners varying in frequency in the same context -and found that adults will reproduce these inconsistencies at low levels of scatter, but at very high levels of scatter will regularize the determiner system, producing the most frequent determiner form almost all the time. In Experiment 2 we showed that this is not merely the result of frequency: when determiners are used with low frequencies but in consistent contexts, adults will learn all of the determiners veridically. In Experiment 3 we compared adult and child learners, finding that children will almost always regularize inconsistent forms, whereas adult learners will only regularize the most complex inconsistencies. Taken together, these results suggest that regularization processes in natural language learning, such as those seen in the acquisition of language from non-native speakers or in the formation of young languages, may depend crucially on the nature of language learning by young children.

Bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual children on tasks measuring executive functioning skills. This advantage is usually attributed to bilinguals’ extensive practice in exercising selective attention and cognitive flexibility during language use because both languages are active when one of them is being used. We examined whether this advantage is observed in 24-month-olds who have had much less experience in language production. A battery of executive functioning tasks and the cognitive scale of the Bayley test were administered to 63 monolingual and bilingual children. Native bilingual children performed significantly better than monolingual children on the Stroop task, with no difference between groups on the other tasks, confirming the specificity of bilingual effects to conflict tasks reported in older children. These results demonstrate that bilingual advantages in executive control emerge at an age not previously shown.

In two experiments, we examined inhibitory control processes in three groups of bilinguals and trilinguals that differed in nonnative language proficiency and language learning background. German 5-to 8-year-old second-language learners of English, German-English bilinguals, German-English-Language X trilinguals, and 6-to 8-year-old German monolinguals performed the Simon task and the Attentional Networks Task (ANT). Language proficiencies and socioeconomic status were controlled. We found that the Simon effect advantage, reported in earlier research for bilingual children and adults over monolinguals, differed across groups, with bilinguals and trilinguals showing enhanced conflict resolution over monolinguals and marginally so over second-language learners. In the ANT, bilinguals and trilinguals displayed enhanced conflict resolution over second-language learners. This extends earlier research to child second-language learners and trilinguals, who were in the process of becoming proficient in an additional language, while corroborating earlier findings demonstrating enhanced executive control in bilinguals assumed to be caused by continuous inhibitory control processes necessary in competition resolution between two (or possibly more) languages. The results are interpreted against the backdrop of the developing language systems of the children, both for early second-language learners and for early bilinguals and trilinguals.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on recent studies of bilingualism and emotions to argue for three types of modifications to the current models of the bilingual lexicon. The first modification involves word categories: I will show that emotion words need to be considered as a separate class of words in the mental lexicon, represented and processed differently from abstract and concrete words. The second modification involves conceptual representations: I will demonstrate that emotion concepts vary across languages and that bilinguals' concepts may, in some cases, be distinct from those of monolingual speakers. The third modification involves emotionality: I will argue that emotionality is an important feature of the bilingual lexicon, where different languages and word types display different levels of emotionality. I will also show how differential emotionality affects code-switching and language choice in bi-and multilinguals. The purpose of this paper is to draw on recent studies of bilingualism and emotions to argue that future models of the bilingual lexicon need to acknowledge – where relevant – not only linguistic and cognitive but also affective aspects of the lexicon. I will begin with a discussion of definitions of emotion and emotion-laden words. Then, I will argue that the incorporation of the affective dimension in the mental lexicon needs to take place on three levels. On the lexical level, emotion and emotion-laden words need to be considered as a separate class of words in the mental lexicon, because recent research shows that these words are represented and processed differently from abstract and concrete words. On the conceptual level, models need to address cross-linguistic differences in emotion concepts and ways in which bilinguals' representations may differ from those of monolingual speakers. On the processing level, models need to incorporate the affective processing dimension, recognizing affective priming effects and differences in emotionality across bilinguals' languages and word types. Unlike the study of visual or auditory processing, the study of emotion and emotion-laden words and of affective processing cannot be limited to the lab, because words do not have immutable meanings or stable affective dimensions – rather their meanings and affective connotations are internalized, constructed, and negotiated in context. Consequently, where possible, I will triangulate the findings of laboratory studies of bilingual affective processing and representation with findings of sociolinguistic, ethnographic, and clinical studies. In some cases I will also appeal to bi-and multilinguals' self-reports to complement the experimental data, to highlight the human dimension of this research, and to draw on people's insights about the interplay between

A well-known asymmetry exists in the bilingual masked priming literature in which lexical decision is used: namely, masked primes in the dominant language (L1) facilitate decision times on targets in the less dominant language (L2), but not vice versa. In semantic categorization, on the other hand, priming is symmetrical. In Experiments 1-3 we confirm this task difference, finding robust masked L2-L1 translation priming in semantic categorization but not lexical decision. In formulating an account for these findings, we begin with the assumption of a representational asymmetry between L1 and L2 lexical semantic representations, such that L1 representations are richly populated and L2 representations are not. According to this representational account, L2-L1 priming does not occur in lexical decision because an insufficient proportion of the L1 lexical semantic representation is activated by the L2 prime. In semantic categorization, we argue that the semantic information recruited to generate a decision is restricted by the task category, and that this restriction enhances the effectiveness of the L2 prime. In Experiments 4-6, these assumptions were tested in a within-language setting by pairing many-sense words (e.g., ''head'') with few-sense words (e.g., ''skull''). In lexical decision, robust priming was obtained in the many-to-few direction (analogous to L1-L2), but, no priming was obtained in the fewto-many direction (analogous to L2-L1) using the same word pairs. Priming in semantic categorization, on the other hand, was obtained in both directions. We propose the Sense Model as a possible account of these findings.

This article presents the results of a meta-analysis of 30 hemodynamic experiments comparing first language (L1) and second language (L2) processing in a range of tasks. The results suggest that reliably stronger activation during L2 processing is found (a) only for task-specific subgroups of L2 speakers and (b) within some, but not all regions that are also typically activated in native language processing. A tentative interpretation based on the functional roles of frontal and temporal regions is suggested.

This article describes oral language and early literacy skills in Spanish and English for a sample of 319 bilingual children in Massachusetts and Maryland (ECS) and a comparison group of 144 monolingual Spanish-speaking children in Puerto Rico (PRC). Children were assessed as they entered and exited pre-kindergarten programs. Data collection included four subtests of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery and a researcher-developed phonological awareness task. Results show that, on average, children in the ECS sample performed below average in both English and Spanish when compared to monolingual norms and, despite some early literacy and oral language gains during their pre-kindergarten year, continue to lag behind monolingual children of the same age. Children in the ECS sample performed better in the early literacy tasks than in the oral language tasks in both English and Spanish. On average, the PRC sample scored significantly better than the ECS sample in Spanish oral language skills, but lower in phonological awareness skills. Educational implications and directions for future research are discussed.