An in-depth exploration of lexical selection errors in Spanish-English heritage children

• Reinaldo Cabrera Pérez, University of California, Irvine

The present mixed-methods study examines lexical errors in 538 bilingual children (ages 4 -11) during a Spanish semantic matching game called Palabras en Parejas. Participants, receiving either English-only (n = 120) or dual-language instruction (n = 418) in California and New York, demonstrated lexical errors in semantic relationships, including synonym, antonym, syntagmatic, thematic, superordinate, and subordinate. Preliminary analysis identified syntagmatic errors (e.g., lápiz-estudiante ‘pencil-student’; lodoso-jabón ‘muddy-soap’), where connections rely on collocations or grammar rather than meaning. Ongoing analysis explores nuances in participant selections, considering part of speech, lexical frequency, cognate status, and educational context. This study aims to enhance our understanding of lexical error sources in bilingual children, contributing insights to word-matching difficulties.

Assessing narrative performance using a translanguaging perspective in bilingual children

• Alejandro Granados Vargas, University of California, Irvine
• Cecilia del Carmen Pérez, University of California, Irvine

Would the performance on a narrative task differ for a bilingual child with a potential language disability when using a translanguaging approach to narrative language sample analysis compared to restricting narratives to one language per task? We found that when assessing narrative language measures, a translanguaging approach coupled with dynamic assessment yields growth for children who are not disabled compared with monolingual qualitative reports. There is a dearth of peer-reviewed research on translanguaging approaches to assessment of children with language-based disabilities. A translanguaging approach can honor the child’s linguistic repertoire over approaches that separate languages through socially-constructed linguistic barriers.

Heritage speakers reveal the dynamics of bilingual language regulation

• Jasmin Hernández Santacruz, University of California, Irvine

Bilingual speakers are prompted to remain in a single language, switch between languages, or mix both languages by regulating the concurrent activation of their language systems and adapting to the demands of the communicative context. Unlike studies that examine language switching in bilinguals in distinct interactional and geographical contexts; this study investigates heritage bilinguals who may be required to manage their home and societal languages differently within the course of a day; and how this variation affects linguistic and cognitive factors in spoken production. The findings revealed that lexical production in Spanish and English relied on different mechanisms of cognitive control: greater reliance on proactive control led to decreased performance in Spanish picture naming, but increased performance in English. Although convergent with findings that L2-immersed bilinguals prefer proactive control strategies, the findings reveal that recruitment of cognitive control in heritage bilinguals is more dynamic than has previously been proposed.

Being able to switch is a plus: The benefit of code-switching

• Yanting Li, University of California, Irvine

As bilinguals, heritage speakers are usually frequent code-switchers (CSers) between languages. However, this is often viewed as a proficiency deficit. Our study examined written and spoken Chinese-English corpora, comparing CS words and non-CS words. We found evidence that in the meaning space where words with similar meanings are close to each other, English CS words are generally farther away from any words in Chinese. This means that the meaning represented by the English CS words cannot be accurately expressed in Chinese. In this sense, CS could be a communicative strategy that helps us achieve our communication goals effectively and efficiently.