To what extent are the processing patterns for nouns and verbs universal across languages? Under conditions of semantic strain, English speakers tend to adapt the meaning of the verb to fit the noun in the sentence. We asked Japanese and English speakers to paraphrase simple sentences of the form “The noun verbed,” varying in semantic strain (e.g., “The blender talked”). We then assessed the de...

Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in a Spanish-spea...

The reiterant speech of ten native speakers of French was analyzed to develop baseline measures for syllable and consonant/vowel timing for a series of two-, three-, four-, and five-syllable French words spoken in isolation. Ten native speakers of English, who learned French as a second language, produced reiterant versions of both the French words and a comparable set of English words. The nat...

Past research finds that monolingual and bilingual children prefer native speakers to individuals who speak in unfamiliar foreign languages or accents. Do children in bilingual contexts socially distinguish among familiar languages and accents and, if so, how do their social preferences based on language and accent compare? The current experiments tested whether 5- to 7-year-olds in two bilingu...

This paper proposes a supervised speaker adaptation method that is effective for both non-native (i.e. Japanese) and native English speakers’ pronunciation of English speech. This method uses English and Japanese phoneme acoustic models and a pronunciation lexicon in which each word has both English and Japanese phoneme transcriptions. The same utterances are used for adaptation of both acousti...

condolence is part of austin’s expressive speech act and is related to searle’s behabitives illocutionary act. although a theoretically sound issue in pragmatics, condolence speech act has not been investigated as much as other speech acts in discourse-related studies. this paper aims at investigating interjections and intensifiers while performing condolence speech act among persian and englis...

Relatively little is known about differences in English-administered, clinical neuropsychological test performance between native versus non-native English speakers, with prior literature yielding mixed findings. The purpose of this study was to examine the performance of native and non-native English speakers with similar age and educational backgrounds on a variety of cognitive tests. Partici...