In a sample of Spanish–English bilingual 5-year-olds in the U.S., we found children who were nearly balanced bilinguals and children who were strongly English dominant, but the English dominant children did not have stronger English skills than the balanced children. Because this study treated profiles of dual language skill as the outcome, it was able to identify factors that support children’s development of strong skills in two languages

Rather, the root problems are prejudice against immigrant groups which results in the racialization of their bilingualism (Hoff, 2021; Flores & Rosa, 2019) and the fact that the clear benefit of bilingualism – the ability to speak and understand another language – is not particularly valued by large segments of the English-speaking population.

There was no Spanish monolingual group in this study,

Paradis uses the finding in Hoff et al. (2012) that bilingual children had significantly smaller English vocabularies than age and SES-matched monolingual children. She argues that this finding would mislead clinicians to expect that bilinguals would show delays in both their languages. She argues that this is a wrong inference because, in that same sample, the subgroup of bilinguals who heard 70% or more of their input in English did not significantly differ from the monolingual children.

There were relatively fewer children who performed at the high end of the word-recall distribution in English. For this sample of bilinguals, English was less well represented and activated. If we had had a greater number of highly performing children in English, we may have seen similar patterns of correlations.

These children were highly proficient in the two languages, and the tasks may not have stressed their attentional resources sufficiently to reveal any differences. Future research under conditions of language competition (e.g., tasks in which children are required to process two languages simultaneously or where they need to switch from one language to the other within a task) may provide further insights about the processes of bilingual acquisition, as the contexts of use and exposure to the languages may change over time (Kohnert, Bates, & Hernandez, 1999). Research with adult bilinguals using tasks in which they are required to suppress or deactivate one language to perform a given task in another has shown that performance may vary depending on the level of proficiency or exposure to the languages.

our results revealed no significant differences between fluent bilingual children and those with proficiency in only one language on either the CLPT or the DPCT. These results do not support the idea that bilinguals exhibit enhanced (or reduced) control of processing

The English DPCT included the stimuli developed by Ellis Weismer (1996), adapted from a task used by Campbell and McNeil (1985). It consisted of 20 commands to manipulate tokens (circles and squares) or objects (toy house, truck, shoe, star, and boat). The commands contained 8-9 words with a range of 9 to 10 syllables per sentence. For the Spanish DPCT, similar but not identical commands were constructed. The Spanish commands preserved syntactic structure and were 8-10 words long, with a range of 15 to 18 syllables per sentence. Examples are found in Appendix B. Two bilingual speakers (one male, one female) recorded the two language versions of the task. Psyscope was used to combine the sentences and to create the competing condition (i.e., 2 sentences presented at the same time) for both the English and the Spanish tasks.

For example, the bilinguals studied by Ardila and colleagues performed better in L1 (Spanish) than in L2 (English) for some tasks, in spite of the fact that over half of them reported better proficiency in L2 and were considered highly fluent in the two languages.

In this task, participants are asked to listen to sets of unrelated sentences while simultaneously attempting to retain the last word of each sentence. In addition, we will examine an alternative task, the Dual Processing Comprehension Task (DPCT), in which participants are asked to reenact each of two sentences presented at the same time (Ellis Weismer, 1996).

During the Spanish colonisation, Spanish was thegovernment’s language, although Tagalog remained thelanguage of the governed. Meanwhile, Emilio Aguinaldo,the first President of the Philippine Republic, declaredTagalog as the official language of the Republic.