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This study describes the emergent literacy skills of 48 4-year-old migrant Mexican American preschoolers and the extent to which the home and Head Start literacy environments affected those skills. Children's emergent literacy skills were assessed individually in their dominant language. Information about the amount of print available in the home and at the Head Start center and the frequency of reading with each child was collected from parents and teachers. Scores on the emergent literacy measures showed mixed performance overall. Results suggested that the home literacy environment had the greatest influence on children's emergent literacy skills.

The purpose was to examine the effect of language familiarity on magnitude-estimation scaling of loudness by young adults. Two groups of subjects participated in this study. Group 1 of 20 subjects (M age = 23.95 yr.) were familiar with English and not familiar with Hindi. Group 2 of 20 subjects (M age = 24.30 yr.) were familiar with English as well as Hindi. Two separate magnitude-estimation scaling tasks were performed. On the first scaling task, an English sentence was used as the stimulus, and on the second scaling task, a Hindi sentence was used as the stimulus. Statistical analysis showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups in loudness judgments of the English and Hindi sentences. Subjects scaled the loudness of an unfamiliar language in the same manner as they scaled the loudness of a familiar language. The findings suggest that magnitude-estimation scaling is an effective measure of loudness whether the language being listened to is familiar to the listener.

This paper is an empirical investigation of the use of hesitation phenomena, specifically filled pauses (ums and ers), automatisms (sort of, at the end of the day), repetitions and reformulations, in both the mother tongue (L1) and second language (L2) of highly proficient adult bilingual speakers (English and German). Its purpose is to ascertain: i) whether speakers who are highly proficient in L2 produce an approximately similar amount of hesitation phenomena in both languages; and ii) whether the production of such elements (in both languages) is linked to working memory capacity. Results show that: i) despite high proficiency, speakers produced a higher overall rate of hesitation phenomena in their L2, indicating that there was an additional cognitive load imposed by working in L2; and ii) in each language there was an underlying negative relationship between memory capacity and the production of hesitation phenomena, implying that speakers with lower memory ability rely more heavily on such time-buying devices. Furthermore, it was shown that the individual types of hesitation phenomena produced by speakers in their L1 were carried over into their L2, which suggests that a speaker's planning behaviour is mirrored in both languages.

To sound native-like, nonnative speakers need to approximate the articulatory patterns of native speakers. When nonnative speakers deviate from native speakers' production patterns, it gives rise to a nonnative accent. This study examines how proficiency in a second language (L2) is related to processing skills in L2, as measured by the accuracy of consonant production. 10 monolingual speakers of American English, 10 Bengali-English bilinguals with high proficiency in English, and 10 Bengali-English bilinguals with low proficiency in English participated. The participants spoke 16 nonwords of four different syllable lengths. Productions were phonetically transcribed. Results suggested that nonnative speakers' L2 proficiency differentially interacted with overall phonemic accuracy, usage of appropriate place, manner and voicing features, position of consonants within target words, and syllable length. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of customized strategies for modification of nonnative accents.