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Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity
Edited by Elena Babatsouli
[Studies in Bilingualism 67] 2024
► pp. 60–89

Chapter 2
The Literacy Enhancement Hypothesis in bilingual language development

| University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
| University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Literacy Enhancement Hypothesis states that the development of literacy skills and exposure to textual input during the school-age period leads to more robust linguistic representations of morphosyntactic structures that strengthen psycholinguistic processing mechanisms such as working memory. This chapter reviews general psycholinguistic findings that support the impact of written language on language development and entrenchment in different grammatical areas and discusses results of current studies of morphosyntactic aspects of Spanish designed to test the literacy enhancement hypothesis with bilingual school-aged children. The findings suggest that print exposure in the heritage language contributes to strengthen and maintain early acquired linguistic structures that form the basis for the development of more complex syntax in Spanish. These results have implications for effective assessment, instruction, and intervention strategies to promote robust language and literacy skills and academic success in bilingual children.

Keywords: literacy, text exposure, complex syntax, passives, Spanish, heritage speakers, bilingual children
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Oral language development as a scaffold for literacy
  • 2.The impact of literacy on language
  • 3.Bilingual development
  • 4.The impact of schooling on heritage language acquisition and maintenance
  • 5.The literacy enhancement hypothesis
  • 6.Testing the link between literacy, language development and processing: Gender agreement and passive sentences in Spanish
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.02mon
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