Adriana Soto-Corominas

• Assistant Professor at Autonomous University of Barcelona

The Arabic development of Syrian refugee children (N = 133; mean age = 9;4 at Time 1) was examined over 3 time periods during their first five years in Canada. Children were administered sentence repetition and receptive vocabulary tasks in English and Arabic, and information about age-of-arrival (AOA), schooling in Arabic and language environment...

This study on child HL (heritage language) speakers of Mandarin examines the associations between parental characteristics (attitudes and proficiency), children’s HL use (at home and through schooling), and children’s HL outcomes (in vocabulary and simple syntax). Forty-seven Mandarin-English bilingual children of Chinese heritage (mean age: 10.5;...

Research on the effects of bilingualism on third language (L3) development set in bilingual communities is scarce, outdated, and has provided mixed results. This study investigated the effects of exposure and age of onset of acquisition (AOA) of L3-English, as well as first and second language (L1/L2) skills and use, in the development of L3-Englis...

Previous studies show that even though monolingual children find subject relatives easier than object relatives, their comprehension of object relatives can be facilitated by morphological cues. Given that in heritage contexts functional morphology is a vulnerable domain, a question that needs to be addressed is whether bilingual children, who are...

Research on the implementation of CLIL at the onset of primary school is limited and has largely overlooked the role of other sources of individual differences. This study investigated the effects of the CLIL approach to English learning, together with the effects of out-of-school exposure to the language through media and other sources of individu...

Although age of acquisition (AoA) is frequently used when examining the endpoint of second language (L2) learning, it is rarely used to examine the initial phases of L2 acquisition. The present study provided a unique look at the role of AoA in early language and literacy acquisition in the L2 by a priori selecting two groups of Arabic-English spea...

First-generation refugee children often experience pre- and post-migration adversity and display high levels of mental health/wellbeing difficulties, but to date, research has not examined the impact of such factors on refugee children's L2 acquisition. Accordingly, this study examined the influence of externalizing and internalizing problem behavi...

Le but de la présente étude est d’examiner les remplacements des clitiques par les enfants de langue catalane, quelle que soit leur dominance linguistique, qui acquièrent variablement les clitiques obliques hi et en . Nous analysons la plupart de ces cas de substitution à l’aide de la sous-spécification et de la géométrie des traits, mais pour un d...

This study reports an oral production experiment investigating the expression of existentiality in the Catalan of adult Catalan–Spanish early bilinguals ( N = 58) with comparable proficiencies but different language dominance. The results show qualitative differences among the bilinguals in existential predicate selection and in their supply of par...

Children who are refugees become bilingual in circumstances that are often challenging and that can vary across national contexts. We investigated the second language (L2) syntactic skills of Syrian children aged 6-12 living in Canada ( n = 56) and the Netherlands ( n = 47). Our goal was to establish the impact of the first language (L1 = Syrian Ar...

Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee childre...

This longitudinal study examined morphosyntactic development in the heritage Arabic-L1 and English-L2 of first-generation Syrian refugee children (mean age = 9.5; range = 6–13) within their first three years in Canada. Morphosyntactic abilities were measured using sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) in English and Syrian Arabic that included diverse m...

Research on the bilingual development of refugee children is limited, despite this group having distinct characteristics and migration experiences that could impact language development. This study examined the role of language environment factors, alongside age and cognitive factors, in shaping the Arabic as a first/heritage language and English a...

It is often claimed that child English L2 learners take up to seven years to attain English skills commensurate with those of monolingual peers; however, existing research is insufficient to know if this claim is valid for oral language abilities in particular. This study examined the lexical and morphological abilities of English L2 learners and t...

Child-level factors such as input quantity and quality have received little attention by studies of bilingual language acquisition in situations of societal bilingualism. The present study addresses this gap by investigating the acquisition of quantified partitivity in Catalan-Spanish bilingualism. The two languages present different licensing cond...

Using one lexicographical tool, the Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico (DECH), and two corpora, the HathiTrust’s digital library and the Google Books Ngrams, we tracked the occurrence of thousands of loanwords in Spanish to describe their use, origin, and historical context. In doing so, we used computational methodologies to pa...

This study investigates two apparently distinct morphological processes that occur in some specific Vernacular Central Catalan clitic clusters: Fission and Impoverishment. In Fission, a cluster of first and second person clitics (e. g. te me) generates a third clitic in the sequence (e. g. se te me), while Impoverishment involves the replacement of...

This study uses information gleaned from the front matter, or preliminaries, of Spanish Golden Age texts to model the social networks underpinning the early modern publication industry. Using a data-driven approach, we examine the historical and political conditions that influenced the process of approval, censorship, and publication in the Spanish...

The objectives of this paper are to point out the different trends prevalent in the analysis and study of culture by digital means, to define the concept of "cultural network", and to explain why this concept can help us to understand the past and to solve social and economic issues facing our modern world.