Bilingual Hispanics Research Articles

H - 02 Unveiling the Effects of Bilingualism on Autobiographical Memory in Hispanics: Implications for Cognitive Aging.

Episodic autobiographical memory (EAM) may be particularly sensitive to age-related cognitive decline and risk for Alzheimer's disease. Virtually nothing is known about EAM specificity in Hispanic individuals. Bilingualism is a cognitive factor that may influence EAM specificity among Hispanics. The present study aimed to 1) examine if EAM is sensitive to age in Hispanics and 2) reveal whether bilingualism influences EAM specificity in Hispanics. A sample of 150 young and middle-aged/older adults (50 English-Spanish bilingual Hispanics; 50 monolingual English-speaking Hispanics; 50 monolingual English speaking Non-Hispanic Whites) narrated EAMs using the established Autobiographical Interview (Levine et al., 2002). Using the scoring protocol of the Autobiographical Interview, we evaluated the narratives for episodic and non-episodic detail. We replicated the often-found age-related reduction in episodic detail generation in Hispanics. Bilingual Hispanics' memories were more episodically specific than monolingual Hispanics and Non-Hispanic Whites. We also found that, among bilingual Hispanics, the language used at encoding versus language used at memory retrieval was not associated with episodic specificity. Our findings suggest that episodic autobiographical memory is sensitive to age and bilingualism in Hispanics, making it a culturally appropriate cognitive measure among this population.

A - 187 A Comparison of Reliable Digit Span and Reliable Digit Span - Revised Failure Rates among a Highly Educated Sample of Bilingual Hispanics.

Patient's bilingual status has significant implications for neuropsychological assessment, namely, performance validity. However, linguistic diversity has made the evaluation of non-credible performance difficult for clinicians and researchers alike. The goal of this research is to supplement the current understanding of Hispanic bilingual individuals' performance on a commonly administered working memory task. Participants included 82 Hispanic, Spanish-English bilingual adults. (Age: Education: M = 15.68, SD = 2.26; Gender: Female (n = 44; 53.7%). Measures included the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale -Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) Digit Span subtest and Language and Social Background Questionnaire (LSBQ). Participants were collected via snowball sampling method within the general community and social media, i.e., Twitter, LinkedIn. Participants were administered Digit Span in English. Statistical analyses indicate 2.4% of participants met failure rate criteria for Reliable Digit Span (RDS; ≤ 7) and 1.2% of participants for Reliable Digit Span - Revised (RDS-R; ≤ 11). Results suggest highly educated Hispanic Spanish-English bilingual individuals perform within the expected range when using traditional cut-off scores of embedded performance validity measures for the Digit Span subtest.

Speech Discrimination Outcomes in Adult Cochlear Implant Recipients by Primary Language and Bilingual Hispanic Patients.

Compare cochlear implant (CI) outcomes in English speakers, Spanish speakers, and bilingual Hispanics. Retrospective review. Academic tertiary care center. Eighty-five postlingually deafened adults unilaterally implanted between January 2014 and December 2018 were stratified by primary language. Primary outcomes were: (1) English consonant-nucleus-consonant and Spanish bisyllables word tests in quiet, and (2) English AzBio and Latin American Hearing In Noise Test (LA-HINT) sentence tests in quiet and in noise at multiple time-intervals postactivation. In the respective languages, primary Spanish speakers(n = 24), and English speakers (n = 61) experienced the greatest increases in average scores for word and sentence tests in quiet during the first 6 months postactivation, with gradual increases in average scores over time. English speakers performed significantly worse on AzBio tests in noise, compared to quiet, while the addition of noise did not significantly affect average LA-HINT scores in Spanish speakers across multiple time intervals. An early ceiling effect was also demonstrated for LA-HINT. Although not significant, bilingual Hispanics (n = 12) had lower average AzBio in quiet scores than English speakers and higher average LA-HINT in quiet scores than the Spanish speakers across multiple time intervals. English and Spanish CI users experienced the greatest increases in speech understanding in quiet the first few months after implant activation. An early ceiling effect is demonstrated with LA-HINT, indicating LA-HINT is not appropriate for evaluating longitudinal CI outcomes in Spanish speakers. Bilingual Hispanics represent a unique group, and further investigations are necessary to understand speech perception patterns in both languages and develop the best CI test strategies for these individuals.

Clinical perspectives and strategies for confronting disparities in social determinants of health for Hispanic bilinguals with aphasia

Disparities in social determinants of health (SDOH) such as socioeconomic status and access to quality healthcare present serious barriers to enrollment in clinical rehabilitation programs for individuals who have experienced a stroke, especially for those who identify with a racial-ethnic minority group. Hispanic bilinguals with aphasia (HBWA) are one marginalized group who face even greater enrollment challenges since post-stroke language impairment and limited English proficiency make it difficult to advocate for one's needs and identify appropriate rehabilitation programs. Given the increasing representation of Hispanic individuals in the U.S. (projected to be 30% of the population in 2050), it is imperative that clinicians counter disparities in stroke care by facilitating access to clinical services for HBWA. However, the Hispanic population remains largely understudied in the stroke and aphasia literature, due in part to reduced opportunities to enroll in large-scale clinical research studies. In this paper we highlight how our team at Boston University has designed and implemented a variety of recruitment practices, assessment modifications, and treatment accommodations to circumvent the known barriers to participation in clinical research experienced by HBWA. Furthermore, we discuss the importance of cultural responsiveness and demonstrate how including principles of sensitivity and humility in clinical trial protocols improves participant enrollment and retention. Although clinical adjustments in this study were developed for use with HBWA, the effectiveness of the procedures suggests they may be useful blueprints for expanding access to research opportunities for various marginalized groups.

Linguistic factors associated with phonemic fluency performance in a sample of bilingual Hispanic undergraduate students

ABSTRACTResearch has demonstrated that bilingualism impacts neuropsychological performance, but the findings on its effects on verbal fluency have been mixed. This study compared the verbal fluency performance of non-Hispanic White monolingual speakers with a Hispanic bilingual population. Ninety-nine Spanish-English bilingual Hispanic and thirty English-speaking monolingual non-Hispanic White undergraduates completed the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT). Students also completed a general cognitive and English reading measure. Bilingual students completed an in-depth language questionnaire to gauge language dominance, age of acquisition of second language (AoA), and first language learned. Results revealed that both language dominance and AoA influence phonemic fluency performance in bilingual Hispanics. English-dominant and balanced bilingual students performed similarly to monolingual students. Spanish-dominant bilingual students scored lower than monolinguals or the other bilingual groups. Bilingual students with early AoA (<7 years) performed on par with monolingual students. Late AoA bilinguals performed significantly lower than early AoA bilinguals. Results illustrate the clinical importance of obtaining a full linguistic history of bilingual clients in order to accurately interpret verbal fluency performance, as this is essential for proper diagnoses and treatments.

How Hispanic bilinguals' cultural stereotypes shape advertising persuasiveness

Given the size of the Hispanic bilingual market in the United States, it is important to understand the relative effectiveness of using English versus Spanish when advertising to these consumers. This research proposes that Hispanic bilinguals' cultural stereotypes about the users of Spanish living in America are a potent determinant of which language is most effective in advertising. Depending on the favorableness of these cultural stereotypes, our results show that Spanish may be persuasively superior, inferior, or functionally equivalent to English in creating favorable attitudes toward the advertised product. The uniqueness of cultural stereotypes about Spanish users in shaping the influence of an ad's language is underscored by our findings that cultural stereotypes about English users do not exert similar effects in determining the relative persuasiveness of advertising in English or Spanish. The paper offers suggestions for advertising practice and future research.

The effects of Hispanic bilinguals language use and stereotype activation on negotiations outcomes

Service encounters often become negotiations between the customer and the service provider. For speakers of multiple languages, the language used in a negotiation can be a critical factor in the success of that encounter. By investigating how U.S. bilinguals negotiate in either English or Spanish, this research examines the effect that the activation of the stereotype related to the minority language-speakers has on negotiation outcomes. The results of two experiments support the general notion that, among U.S. Hispanic bilinguals, the majority language (English) yields more favorable outcomes compared to the minority language (Spanish); a third study with a comparison group of bilinguals in Mexico, where no language-related stereotype exists, shows no effect of the negotiation language on the outcome. The paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of the findings and areas for future research.

Acoustic correlates of spanish speech rhythms

This paper describes a study of the acoustic correlates of speech rhythms of Hispanic Bilinguals living in California and Mexican Monolinguals living in Mexico City in order to study the effect of bilingualism on language, especially on rhythm classes, and the reliability of acoustic correlates in distinguishing these classes. This study addresses stress-timing versus syllable-timing as described in Pike's pioneering work (1945). Ten monolingual speakers from Mexico and ten bilingual Spanish–English speakers born and raised in California to Mexican parents were recorded speaking spontaneously. Fifty vowel durations per speaker were collected from phrases in these recordings and explored statistically and graphically with R.2.12.2 (R Development Core Team, 2011) in order to determine the reliability of various acoustical correlates of language rhythms in differentiating speech rhythms between varieties of Spanish. Specifically the Pairwise Variability Index, introduced by Low and Grabe (1995), and interval measures, such as the standard deviation and normalized standard deviation of vowel durations, were explored. The effects of word frequencies, as determined by relevant files from the Corpus del Espa'ol (Davies, 2002), were also considered in the analysis of the data. [Work supported by a grant for the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC Mexus).]

Validating and Promoting Spanish in the United States: Lessons from Linguistic Science

With U.S. Hispanics constituting a culturally, racially, and economically diverse group, the Spanish language represents a key identity factor for this community. Regrettably, the derisive attitudes about Spanish in the United States, as well as abroad, present a serious obstacle to the preservation of Spanish in this country. This paper argues that the Spanish for native speakers (SNS) curriculum represents the single most important forum where such attitudes can be exposed as groundless, and where the dual task of validating the regional variants represented in the classroom while teaching the standard language can be accomplished. Well-chosen linguistic examples hold the key to demonstrating four issues that are vital to the education of bilingual Hispanics and the preservation of Spanish in the United States. These are: (a) the arbitrary nature of linguistic prejudice, (b) the linguistic validity of all dialects of a language including nonstandard variants, (c) the overwhelming linguistic overlap between nonstandard and standard dialects of Spanish, and (d) the instrumental value of learning the standard language.

Verbal Fluency and Repetition Skills in Healthy Older Spanish-English Bilinguals

The influence of bilingualism on cognitive test performance in older adults has received limited attention in the neuropsychology literature. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of bilingualism on verbal fluency and repetition tests in older Hispanic bilinguals. Eighty-two right-handed participants (28 men and 54 women) with a mean age of 61.76 years (SD = 9.30; range = 50-84) and a mean educational level of 14.8 years (SD = 3.6; range 2-23) were selected. Forty-five of the participants were English monolinguals, 18 were Spanish monolinguals, and 19 were Spanish-English bilinguals. Verbal fluency was tested by electing a verbal description of a picture and by asking participants to generate words within phonemic and semantic categories. Repetition was tested using a sentence-repetition test. The bilinguals' test scores were compared to English monolinguals' and Spanish monolinguals' test scores. Results demonstrated equal performance of bilingual and monolingual participants in all tests except that of semantic verbal fluency. Bilinguals who learned English before age 12 performed significantly better on the English repetition test and produced a higher number of words in the description of a picture than the bilinguals who learned English after age 12. Variables such as task demands, language interference, linguistic mode, and level of bilingualism are addressed in the Discussion section.

Effectiveness of Spanish versus English Language TV Commercials Targeted to the Hispanic Market

This paper explores the effectiveness of television commercials transmitted in Spanish with those delivered in English. The research contrasts advertising recall of commercials for an Hispanic population, comparing the recall of Hispanics watching programs in Spanish with Hispanics viewing programs in English. The research suggests that for Hispanics, whether Spanish dominant or bilingual, recall increases when advertising is broadcast in Spanish rather than in English. A counter-intuitive finding is that bilingual Hispanics recall Spanish-language ads to a greater extent than those shown in English.

Self-Assessment of Linguistic Skills by Bilingual Hispanics

This study examines the ability of bilinguals to judge their linguistic competence. Participants evaluated their Spanish and English language skills both before and after administration of the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey, which provided an objective measure of these skills. Self-assessments were more accurate for Spanish than for English and, in the case of English, varied with the skill being rated. Feedback from the objective test improved self-rating accuracy more for Spanish than for English. There was little support for the conclusion that the language in which the self-assessments are presented influences bilinguals’ self-ratings of their linguistic skills. Implications for the use of self-assessments in applied situations are discussed.

A Comparison of the Codeswitching Patterns of Aphasic and Neurologically Normal Bilingual Speakers of English and Spanish

Conversational discourse samples were obtained from four aphasic and four neurologically normal Hispanic bilinguals in monolingual English, monolingual Spanish, and bilingual contexts to identify codeswitching patterns. Analysis of the samples based on the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) Model (Myers-Scotton, 1993a) revealed consistent matching of the language context by the aphasic and normal subjects. The aphasic subjects demonstrated a greater frequency of MLF constituents and codeswitching patterns not evident in the speech samples of the normal subjects. Results suggest an increased dependence on both languages for communication following neurological impairment.

Symptom severity in bilingual Hispanics as a function of clinician ethnicity and language of interview.

Symptom severity in bilingual Hispanics as a function of clinician ethnicity and language of interview.

Symptom severity in bilingual Hispanics as a function of clinician ethnicity and language of interview.

Research on bilingual patients is equivocal about how language influences clinical judgment in psychiatric interviews. In this study, 148 Hispanics with schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorders were interviewed in English, Spanish, or both. Hispanic clinicians rated symptoms more severe than did Anglo clinicians, and severity was rated highest in bilingual interviews, followed by Spanish, and lowest in English. Results have implications for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th edition; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) cultural considerations.

Los Cinco Grandes across cultures and ethnic groups: multitrait multimethod analyses of the Big Five in Spanish and English.

Spanish-language measures of the Big Five personality dimensions are needed for research on Hispanic minority populations. Three studies were conducted to evaluate a Spanish version of the Big Five Inventory (BFI) (O. P. John et al., 1991) and explore the generalizability of the Big Five factor structure in Latin cultural groups. In Study 1, a cross-cultural design was used to compare the Spanish and English BFI in college students from Spain and the United States, to assess factor congruence across languages, and to test convergence with indigenous Spanish Big Five markers. In Study 2, a bilingual design was used to compare the Spanish and English BFI in a college-educated sample of bilingual Hispanics and to test convergent and discriminant validity across the two languages as well as with the NEO Five Factor Inventory in both English and Spanish. Study 3 replicated the BFI findings from Study 2 in a working-class Hispanic bilingual sample. Results show that (a) the Spanish BFI may serve as an efficient, reliable, and factorially valid measure of the Big Five for research on Spanish-speaking individuals and (b) there is little evidence for substantial cultural differences in personality structure at the broad level of abstraction represented by the Big Five dimensions.

Teaching Spanish to Hispanic Bilinguals: A Look at Oral Proficiency Testing and the Proficiency Movement

A little over ten years ago, very few members of the Spanish-teaching profession had begun to concern themselves with teaching the language to Hispanic bilinguals. Normally, the term native-speaking or Spanish-speaking was applied by members of our profession to those individuals who came from Spain or Latin America and who had been raised with Spanish as both a home and societal language. The question of what to do with Chicano and Puerto Rican students who had grown up in Spanish-speaking homes in this country and who had received all of their education in English-language schools had not yet surfaced in our classes nor in our thinking in any significant way. What little work had been done up to that time has taken the position that Hispanic bilinguals were a problem and had focused on the differences between the varieties spoken by these students and the prestige variant normally used in the classroom. Curriculum guides and masters theses had appeared, as had two textbooks, all of which took the position that Spanish instruction for these students had best undo the damage that had been done at home.' Now, many years later, most members of our profession are aware of the fact that special approaches are needed for teaching Spanish to Hispanic bilinguals. At this point, it is generally accepted that, while some attention may need to be given to the stigmatized features present in students' regional and/or class varieties, the objectives of classes for such speakers must include the development of their overall proficiency in the Spanish language. This means that attention must be given to: (1) developing students' command of the written language so that their ability to read and write in Spanish mirrors these same abilities in English, and (2) developing their oral language so that they will be able to interact in Spanish in both informal and formal contexts.

Comprehending Premises: Effects of Negations and Training Among Anglos and Hispanics

Abstract College students who were either monolingual speakers of English or bilingual Hispanics participated in two studies dealing with the comprehension of sentences containing negations. Both the influence of different sentence constructions on comprehension, as well as the heuristics and misconceptions exhibited by subjects as they attempted to comprehend the sentences were investigated. The second experiment was designed primarily to determine whether it was possible to develop an intervention strategy that eliminated the use of erroneous strategies. In the first experiment, bilinguals took longer than monolinguals to comprehend sentences containing negations, although there were no interactions between sentence construction and language background that would suggest the use of qualitatively different strategies by the two groups. The intervention procedure used in the second experiment was extremely effective for monolinguals and for most bilinguals, as measured by performance a week later. When su...

Language skills and school achievement of bilingual Hispanics

This paper investigates the interrelationships between linguistic skills, ability, and school achievement of bilingual Hispanics using the first wave 1980 of the High School and Beyond survey. The measurement model reveals that self-reported proficiency in English and Spanish is partly a measure of general ability, and that the negative correlations between English proficiency and Spanish language background is small for these seniors, suggesting little cost to bilingualism. English proficiency has little effect on school achievement, while Hispanicity has positive effects on GPA and educational expectations. Sociolinguistic and educational implications of these results and others are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the potential effects on results of systematic sample selection due to high Hispanic dropout rates.

Bilingualism and Hispanic scholastic achievement: Some baseline results

The effects of background characteristics and language factors on scholastic achievement are estimated for four groups: Hispanic bilinguals, Hispanic English monolinguals, white bilinguals, and white English monolinguals. For both bilingual samples, proficiency in both English and the other language is positively related to achievement, but frequent use of the non-English language is negatively associated with achievement. The longer the family has resided in the United States, the lower school achievement. Although the process is generally similar for Hispanic bilinguals and other language minorities, some of the results suggest a specific handicap associated with Hispanic minority status.