This book presents a set of contributions to the current flow of psycholinguistic research, with new and challenging data gathered from Spanish that may illuminate issues about the generality of language processing models. Although it is possible to find a considerable amount of papers on psycholinguistic research with the Spanish language published in English-speaking journals, unfortunately, the scientific community does not have access to an overview of psycholinguistics in Spain. This book overcomes these limitations because it brings together state-of-the-art descriptions of the research and theory of the different subareas of psycholinguistics currently being studied in Spain. Spanish, the third most widely-used language in the world, differs from English in a number of important respects. Since English has been predominant in psycholinguistic research, contrasting properties of Spanish may help to test the generality of language processing mechanisms and to refine their description. The set of contrasting features considered in this book includes acoustical and syllabic transparency, shallow orthography, a much richer morphology, flexibility in word order, less variability in intonational contours, and the existence of null pronominal subjects for inflected verbs. There are also interesting contrasts in the frequency of different linguistic units, whose impact on language processing is also evaluated. One of the main lines of argument throughout this book deals with the tension between universality and variation as a way of characterizing the functioning of language capacities and processes. The variety of topics covered by this book ranges from one end of the spectrum of language related behavior to the other: speech perception, lexical access in word recognition, relations between phonological and orthographic representations, sentence processing, discourse comprehension, and language production. All chapters focus on questions of general interest within each topic, and in most cases they appeal to one particular feature of the Spanish language that is relevant for a given question. Most chapters show the indisputable importance of crosslinguistic research in psycholinguistics to improve understanding on whether universal cognitive mechanisms and language specific routines underlie the ability of understanding and producing language.

Prominent researchers from the US, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Spain contribute experimental reports on language development of children who are acquiring Spanish. The chapters cover a wide range of dimensions in acquisition: comprehension and production; monolingualism and bilingualism; typical development, children who are at risk and children with language disorders, phonology, semantics, and morphosyntax. These studies will inform linguistic theory development in clinical linguistics as well as offer insights on how language works in relation to cognitive functions that are associated with when children understand or use language. The unique data from child language offer perspectives that cannot be drawn from adult language. The first part is dedicated to the acquisition of Spanish as a first or second language by typically-developing children, the second part offers studies on children who are at risk of language delays, and the third part focuses on children with specific language impairment, disorders and syndromes.

The revised edition of this comprehensive graduate-level text gives SLPs the most current information on language development and disorders of Spanish-English bilingual children. Includes 5 new chapters on literacy and other hot topics.;

The cross-linguistic differences documented in studies of relative clause attachment offer an invaluable opportunity to examine a particular aspect of bilingual sentence processing: Do bilinguals process their two languages as if they were monolingual speakers of each? This volume provides a review of existing research on relative clause attachment, showing that speakers of languages like English attach relative clauses differently than do speakers of languages like Spanish. Fernández reports the findings of an investigation with monolinguals and bilinguals, tested using speeded ("on-line") and unspeeded ("off-line") methodology, with materials in both English and Spanish. The experiments reveal similarities across the groups when the procedure is speeded, but differences with unspeeded questionnaires: The monolinguals replicate the standard cross-linguistic differences, while bilinguals have language-independent preferences determined by language dominance — bilinguals process stimuli in either of their languages according to the general preferences of monolinguals of their dominant language.

Thinking Spanish Translation is a comprehensive and revolutionary 20-week course in translation method with a challenging and entertaining approach to the acquisition of translation skills.

This volume is the first dedicated to the growing field of theory and research on second language processing and parsing. The fourteen papers in this volume offer cutting-edge research using a number of different languages (e.g., Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, English) and structures (e.g., relative clauses, wh-gaps, gender, number) to examine various issues in second language processing: first language influence, whether or not non-natives can achieve native-like processing, the roles of context and prosody, the effects of working memory, and others. The researchers include both established scholars and newer voices, all offering important insights into the factors that affect processing and parsing in a second language.

This volume provides a sample of the most recent studies on Spanish-English codeswitching both in the Caribbean and among bilinguals in the United States. In thirteen chapters, it brings together the work of leading scholars representing diverse disciplinary perspectives within linguistics, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, theoretical linguistics, and applied linguistics, as well as various methodological approaches, such as the collection of naturalistic oral and written data, the use of reading comprehension tasks, the elicitation of acceptability judgments, and computational methods. The volume surpasses the limits of different fields in order to enable a rich characterization of the cognitive, linguistic, and socio-pragmatic factors that affect codeswitching, therefore, leading interested students, professors, and researchers to a better understanding of the regularities governing Spanish-English codeswitches, the representation and processing of codeswitches in the bilingual brain, the interaction between bilinguals’ languages and their mutual influence during linguistic expression.