The underlying premise of this study was that the two phonetic subsystems of a bilingual interact. The study tested the hypothesis that the vowels a bilingual produces in a second language (L2) may differ from vowels produced by monolingual native speakers of the L2 as the result of either of two mechanisms: phonetic category assimilation or phonetic category dissimilation. Earlier work reveale...

Previous literature on the study of identity representation in political discourse has been mainly concerned with the spoken discourse and the representation of self. However, the way different groups of political agents represent others’ identities across languages has not attracted much attention. Using Wodak’s (2007) Discourse Historical approach to CDA, the present study investigates the wa...

The paper reports findings of a production experiment investigating the realisation of post-vocalic /r/ produced by native (L1) speakers of English and German and late second language (L2) learners of two varieties of English; one rhotic variety spoken in Belfast and one non-rhotic variety spoken in Oxford. The study aims to explore whether there is a difference in the realisation of post-vocal...

The mothers of 29 Spanish English bilingual 25-month-olds kept diary records of their children's dual language exposure and provided information on their children's English and Spanish language development using the MacArthur-Bates inventories. Relative amount of exposure predicted language outcomes in English and Spanish. In addition, the number of different speakers from whom the children hea...

this study was motivated by three factors, which also contribute to its significance for today’s academic writing. first, research articles are the significant means of communication between the writers all over the world. second, persuasion and organization are crucial notions in academic writing where the authors have to consider the academic audiences and their needs.  third, some writers ar...

This study investigates the use of discourse markers by Spanish learners of English. It is intended as an initial contribution to the study of how discourse markers are used by foreign language learners. We conduct two pilot studies involving the use of English discourse markers by native speakers of Spanish. We first study if these speakers use English discourse markers at all in their writing...

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African children preferred speakers of their first langua...

This study compared the effects of syntactic focus and context on word processing speed and word recall in L1 and L2, using 80 adult native German L2 learners of English and 30 native speakers of British English as controls. Recorded sentence stimuli were used to compare cleft and non-cleft sentences, native and non-native language speakers, and presence and absence of additional context inform...

This paper examines the English particle placements of EFL learners’ writings in three East Asian countries (Chinese, Japan, and Korea). Three parts of the TOEFL11 corpus were chosen, and all the sentences with particles were extracted. The ICE-GB was chosen as a native speakers’ English. Then, eleven linguistic factors were manually encoded. The collected data were analyzed with R. Correlation...

Native speakers of English who are good readers can “sound out” words or names from printed text, even if they have never seen them before, although they may not be conscious of the strategies they use. No tools are available today that can convey that knowledge to learners, showing them the rules that apply in English text. We have adapted the letter-to-phoneme component of a text-to-speech sy...