Chapter 2. The Literacy Enhancement Hypothesis in bilingual language development

Abstract

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.