I would like to begin by thanking the editors of the journal, and in particular Carmen Silva-Corvalan, for inviting such a wonderful group of commentators, united in their commitment to spirited yet courteous academic debate and diverse in their academic allegiances, theories, and methodologies. I also thank the commentators for the kindness and…

How does age of first bilingual language exposure affect reading development in children learning to read in both of their languages? Is there a reading advantage for monolingual English children who are educated in bilingual schools? We studied children (grades 2-3, ages 7-9) in "bilingual" Spanish-English schools who were either from…

The study argues that, in addition to advantages in conscious attention-demanding processing, bilinguals may also exhibit enhanced unconscious divergent thinking. To investigate this issue, the performance of Russian-English bilingual immigrants and English monolingual native speakers was compared on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, which…

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and…

In our research we addressed the question what the relationship is between phonological short-term and working memory capacity and performance in an end-of-year reading, writing, listening, speaking and use of English test. The participants of our study were 121 secondary school students aged 15-16 in the first intensive language training year of…

The current study addresses the challenge of investigating the SLA of "estar" with adjectives when highlighting two specific contextual meanings: comparisons within an individual frame of reference and speaker reactions as a result of immediate experience with the referent. "Estar" is examined within these contexts using a picture-description task…

The use of social vs. cognitive approaches to the study of second language acquisition (SLA) has engendered considerable debate in the field. For instance, the recent "Modern Language Journal" Focus Issue (Lafford, 2007a) reviewed the ongoing debate between scholars espousing socially- and cognitively-grounded approaches to SLA research and…

This study investigates the developmental rate of "estar" production by Chinese-speaking learners in planned written production. The forms of Spanish copula verbs have no equivalent forms in Chinese in pre-adjectival position (i.e. no copula verb exists between a referent and an adjective in Chinese). This contrast between languages provides a…

Initial studies on the acquisition of two Spanish copulas, "ser" and "estar", emerged from a research agenda exploring whether second language (L2) development was driven by universal mechanisms manifested in stages rather than an accumulation of entities (Rutherford, 1987). Concerning the Spanish copulas, the stages of acquisition through which…

This paper reports on an empirical study that examined knowledge of eventive and stative passives in the L2 Spanish grammar of L1 speakers of English. Although the two types of passive exist in English, the difference between them is not signaled in any specific way. In Spanish, in contrast, the distinction is marked by the choice of copula: "ser"…

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulas "ser" and "estar" is very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2…

This article studies the acquisition of copulas by a Spanish-English bilingual between the ages of 1;6 and 3;0, examines the possibility of interlanguage influence, and considers the distributional frequencies of copular constructions in the speech of the child and in the language input from adults. The study is of interest because the bilingual…

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition.…

In some contact situations between Spanish and English there is an acceleration of the process of the extension of "estar" that may be due to lack of access to the formal written standard, features of English in particular or general processes of simplification that result from the cognitive demands of bilingualism (Silva-Corvalan, 1994). In our…

The role of language contact in linguistic change remains a polemic issue in the field of contact linguistics. Many researchers (Weinreich, 1953; Lefebvre, 1985; Prince, 1988; Silva-Corvalan, 1994; King, 2000; Sankoff, 2002; Labov, 2007) believe that there are limits on the types of linguistic patterns that can be transmitted across languages,…