This study investigates the changes in the Spanish lexical and grammatical skills of 26 Spanish–English dual language learners during their first year of preschool. We also explore the impact of age, gender, and maternal cultural orientation on children’s language outcomes over time. The results show that, despite one year of English-only instruction, the children’s Spanish productions became more intelligible, lexically diverse, and grammatical between 3;7 and 4;7. However, Spanish productions were mostly limited to sentence fragments and contained errors in grammatical gender, verb morphology, object clitic pronouns, and prepositions. Girls had an advantage over boys, as attested by the higher lexical diversity, mean length of utterance, and grammaticality of their Spanish productions. Both maternal enculturation and acculturation predicted the grammaticality of children’s utterances, suggesting that mothers with high levels of orientation to both Latinx and American culture may be the most successful at promoting Spanish in the United States.

Earlier acquisition of English is associated with better academic performance for dual language learners (DLLs), but large-scale, prospective, longitudinal studies examining how trajectories for English acquisition relate to school-based outcomes, accounting for relevant covariates, are rare. We explored how the grade in which DLLs (N = 17,548; 47% female; 80% free/reduced-price lunch; 86% Latino, 10% Black, and 4% White/Other) acquire English proficiency, defined by the school district, relates to academic outcomes (grade retention, GPA, reading and math test scores) in 5th grade, controlling for gender, ethnicity, poverty, and school readiness skills at age 4. Earlier acquisition of English, especially before 2nd grade, predicted better performance on each 5th grade outcome. Earlier proficiency in English was even more important for 5th grade outcomes for those with initially high cognitive skills, Latino/Hispanic DLLs (compared to Black DLLs), and those not in poverty. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

The unprecedented growth of Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) in new destination states (e.g., Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Tennessee) calls for better understanding of the relation between their bilingual vocabulary skills and English reading achievement. The current study focused on school-age Spanish-English DLLs (N = 60) in Tennessee and explored how various vocabulary knowledge conceptualizations predict English reading comprehension achievement, controlling for English word reading skills and grade level. Vocabulary knowledge was assessed using monolingual (English-only and Spanish-only) and bilingual (conceptual and total) scoring methods. Results showed that, while DLLs performed below the national mean for English-only and Spanish-only vocabulary, they performed within the average to above-average range for bilingually scored conceptual vocabulary. More uniquely, the expressive vocabulary knowledge emerged as a robust predictor of English reading comprehension above and beyond the influence of English word reading skills. Findings suggest practical and theoretical value of bilingually driven vocabulary assessment approaches. As expected, bilingually scored vocabulary provided a more comprehensive understanding of DLLs’ vocabulary knowledge by accounting for vocabulary knowledge in both Spanish and English, compared to monolingually scored vocabulary. We discuss theoretical and instructional implications, with a focus on asset-driven and scientific assessment understandings for supporting DLLs’ vocabulary and reading achievement in new destination states.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have impairments in their language-learning abilities that may influence interactions with environmental opportunities to learn two languages. This study explores relationships between proficiency in L1 and L2 and a set of environmental and personal variables within a group of school-age Spanish–English bilingual children with DLD and a group of typically-developing peers. Within each group, current usage in the home, length of L2 exposure, gender, maternal education, analytical reasoning, and number of L1 conversational partners were used to predict proficiency in each language. Results showed that home language environment, particularly home L2 usage, strongly predicted L1 proficiency but had less influence on the L2. Female gender predicted L1 skills in both groups, whereas analytical reasoning predicted both L1 and L2 but only for children with DLD. This study expands the limited literature on how children with DLD interact with their environment to learn two languages.

This study examines language mixing in 26 Spanish–English dual language learners over the course of their first year of preschool. The children's patterns of language choice while interacting in monolingual language contexts were analyzed at age 3;6 and 4;5 to examine: (1) whether the frequency of language mixing changed during the year; (2) whether mixing was related to proficiency as measured by utterance length and lexical diversity; and (3) whether there were different subgroups of children, among the participants, with similar proficiency and language use patterns. The results indicate that language mixing, which was low at both ages, was related to limited lexical resources only at 3;6. However, by age 4;5, language choice was more constrained by sociolinguistic variables – children's awareness of the language prescribed by the majority culture – than by proficiency. An exploratory cluster analysis further reveals different profiles of learners sharing similar proficiency and language mixing characteristics.

The role of dual language exposure in children's cognitive development continues to be debated. The majority of the research with bilingual children in the US has been conducted with children becoming literate in only one of their languages. Dual language learners who are becoming literate in both their languages are acutely understudied. We compared dual language learners (n = 61) in a Spanish–English dual language immersion program to monolingual English speaking children (n = 55) who were in a traditional English only school. Children (kindergarten to 3rd grade) completed standardized vocabulary tasks and two measures of executive functions. Despite having significantly smaller English vocabularies, the dual language learners outperformed the monolingual children on the executive function measures. Implications for our understanding of the relations between oral language development and executive function in bilingual children are discussed.