A study investigated the factors influencing the English word identification performance of Spanish-speaking beginning readers. Beginning readers were administered tests of letter naming, Spanish phonological awareness, Spanish and English word recognition, and Spanish and English oral proficiency. Multiple-regression analyses revealed that the readers' performance on English word and pseudoword recognition tests was predicted by the levels of both Spanish phonological awareness and Spanish word recognition, thus indicating cross-language transfer. In contrast, neither English nor Spanish oral proficiency affected word-identification performance. Results suggest a specific way in which first-language learning and experience can aid children in the beginning stages of reading.The number of students from linguistically diverse backgrounds who are enrolled in U.S. schools is increasing rapidly (Hakuta & Garcia, 1989). For these students, learning to read in English is one of the crucial components of academic success. Hence, how these students' first-language knowledge may affect their reading in a second language is of great pedagogical importance. In addition, the effects of first language on second-language reading (i.e., cross-language transfer) is also of theoretical interest, as evidenced by the increase in research devoted to this issue in the last few years. After two decades of little attention to cross-linguistic transfer, researchers in the area of second-language acquisition have returned to studying acquisition and production of second-language structures as a function of the characteristics of the first language (for reviews, see Gass &

A study was conducted to determine how Hispanic bilingual students' knowledge of Spanish vocabulary and ability to identify Spanish-English cognates relate to their comprehension of English expository text. Subjects, 74 upper elementary Hispanic students able to read in both Spanish and English, were tested for Spanish and English vocabulary knowledge, and after reading each of four expository texts containing English words with Spanish cognates (e.g., English transform and Spanish transformar) were given a multiple-choice test on their understanding of key concepts from these texts. After a brief explanation of the concept cognate, they were asked to identify the words in these texts that had Spanish cognates. Performance on the multiple-choice test was found to be related to students' ability to recognize cognate relationships. The relationship between Spanish vocabulary knowledge and English reading comprehension also appeared to depend on students' ability to recognize cognates.

This study investigates the development of two levels of morphological knowledge that contribute to Spanish-English bilingual students’ ability to recognize cognates: the ability to recognize a cognate stem within a suffixed English word, and knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes (e.g., the fact that words ending in -ty in English often have a Spanish cognate ending in -dad). A total of 196 Latino bilingual students in 4th, 6th, and 8th grade were asked to give the Spanish equivalent for English words, some of which had derivational and inflectional suffixes. The results indicated that the students’ ability to translate cognates increased with age above and beyond any increase in their vocabulary knowledge in Spanish and English. There was also marked growth in the students’ knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes. Students recognized cognate stems of suffixed words more easily than noncognate stems, suggesting that, in closely related languages such as Spanish and English, cross-language transfer may play a role, not just in recognizing individual words, but also in the learning of derivational morphology.

This article presents the foundations of the Feature Competition Model (FCM) of segment transfer. The FCM is a proposal to explain how L2 sounds are mapped on to L1 phonological categories. Like previous analyses on segment transfer, the FCM assumes that not all features are of the same prominence in a given phonemic inventory and that feature prominence can be determined through underspecification. Unlike previous analyses, the FCM adopts a dynamic approach to phonology, one which assumes that features do not have discrete values, rather ones which are continuous, of greater or lesser prominence in an inventory. A specific metric for calculating prominence is given, and hypotheses for three L1-L2 contexts are generated and tested. The results of an experiment suggest that the metric has predictive power, but that certain refinements of the formula are necessary. Finally, implications the FCM has for our understanding of developing L2 speech patterns are discussed.

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