This study compared receptive English grammar skills of two groups of 7‐ and 9‐year‐old Danish children at the beginning of second language (L2) instruction in English, and two groups of Spanish/Catalan children of the same age after several years of instruction. The study examined the influence of two language‐related factors (receptive vocabulary skills, cognate linguistic distance) and two context‐related factors (amount of formal instruction, frequency of exposure to English outside school), additionally focusing on the gender variable. Results revealed that the amount of formal instruction had a lesser role in the children's receptive grammar knowledge than cognate linguistic distance and out‐of‐school contact with English (particularly with audiovisual material). These factors may explain why Danish children's receptive knowledge of English prior to school instruction is largely similar to that of Spanish children after several years of instruction, revealing a sharp contrast in their respective starting points for L2 learning.

No abstract

It is commonly accepted that some financial data may exhibit long-range dependence, while other financial data exhibit intermediate-range dependence or short-range dependence. These behaviours may be fitted to a continuous-time fractional stochastic model.The estimation procedure proposed in this paper is based on a continuous-time version of the Gauss-Whittle objective function to find the parameter estimates that minimize the discrepancy between the spectral density and the data periodogram. As a special case, the proposed estimation procedure is applied to a class of fractional stochastic volatility models to estimate the drift, standard deviation and memory parameters of the volatility process under consideration. As an aplication, the volatility of the Dow Jones, S&P 500, CAC 40, DAX 30, FTSE 100 and NIKKEI 225 is estimated.