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Heritage Language Instruction (HLI) is a resource used in many immigration-receiving countries that allows students with an immigrant background to continue to be in contact with their Heritage Language (HL). However, many of the psycholinguistic effects of this instruction are still unknown. This study aims to provide an in-depth view of the effects of HLI on the development of the HL and the languages of the host country. For this purpose, the sample consisted of 108 students (20 HL learners, 88 controls) of Romanian origin who had emigrated to Catalonia. Their language skills in the phonetic, orthographic, morphosyntactic, lexical, and semantic domains were analysed using linear regression statistics and covariance analysis. The results showed that HLI exerted a mitigating effect on HL attrition, as well as a significant improvement of the linguistic competencies in the autochthonous languages. These results indicate that HLI is an effective tool in the psycholinguistic development of immigrant students, capable of facilitating their academic and social performance.

Previous research indicates that developmental contexts influence language development. These developmental contexts include bilingualism, which is the focus of the current paper. This study analyses the influence that the acquisition of a language, Catalan, has when the simultaneous acquisition of another similar language, Spanish, occurs. This influence is examined according to degree of exposure to the languages. The parents of 801 children completed the Catalan version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI-II questionnaire, which assesses the acquisition of vocabulary, morphology and grammatical complexity. Subjects were divided into three groups according to age and linguistic context (Catalan monolingual, medium bilingual and familiar bilingual). The results do not reveal substantial differences according to linguistic context. However, children aged 26--30 months with a medium bilingual profile show a higher level of vocabulary as compared to the other groups. The results are discussed in relation to the sociolinguistic context, caregiver diversity, typological distance between the languages and developmental stages of language acquisition. [Translation from Spanish by Jennifer Martin.]

Children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) and born to hearing parents have delays in their social-cognitive development and in particular in their theory of mind (ToM). These delays are often attributed to the difficulties they encounter in acquiring age-appropriate linguistic and communicative skills. The present study asks whether this developmental delay extends to problems with understanding pretend emotions and if linguistic difficulties are related to this area. A total of 173 children (82 DHH and 91 hearing) between 3 and 8 years of age received a set of emotion and language measures. Results showed that children who are DHH were delayed in understanding pretend emotions, and this was strongly related to their difficulties with expressive vocabulary and pragmatics. In summary, children who are DHH and have experienced reduced access to language and communicative interaction have a restricted understanding of the communicative intentions of emotional expressions. These delays may have implications for their social relationships with surrounding family and other children.

Previous research has found a link between theory of mind and cooperation. The aim of this study is to deepen into this relationship, to identify which theory of mind skills are more related to the cooperative ability on a referential communication task. A total of 50 children from first and fifth grade completed a battery of theory of mind tasks, and also a cooperative task where children worked in pairs to build block models. Each pair was composed by a builder and a guide, who gave instructions to his partner about how to build a replica of the model. The results show a significant relationship between the theory of mind skills and cooperation. Specifically, we found that the second-order false-belief task was the variable most related to cooperation after controlling the effect of age. In addition, we observed that the mentalist skills were more important for cooperation in the builders than in the guides. Finally, we discuss the findings of this study and make suggestions for the future.

Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., "good is up-bad is down" and "good is right-bad is left"). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants' hands while responding to the task--regardless of the location of their dominant hand--facilitates the judgment of positive and negative-valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor--congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context.

In this article we examine language processing and development in Catalan or Spanish-speaking children with SLI, focusing on the study of the verb. We analyse the key initial phase of its process of acquisition and aim to define common features of the SLI group that distinguish them from children with normal language development. We intend to identify more precisely the kind of delay shown by these children in a language with a rich verb morphology, in terms of both structure and chronology. The sample comprised 18 Catalan-Spanish bilingual pre-school children, assigned to three groups of six; an SLI group and two control groups, one matched for age and the other matched for MLU-w. Developmental data were obtained by recording situations of spontaneous speech at two different time points. Certain differences were found between groups in verb production. Production of verb inflection by children with SLI was only partial at the first evaluation; they maintained the same percentage of errors after a year. The patterns of correct and incorrect verb forms found in Catalan and Spanish do not corroborate the EOI hypothesis, but they support the Surface Hypothesis, given that the number of errors is not particularly high. This suggests the presence of limitations in subjects' processing ability, linked to the typological characteristics of the specific language being learnt. (Contains 13 tables and 7 notes.)