Abstract This study investigates child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects. A task designed to elicit objects was completed in and English by 40 speakers of the U.S., 24 monolingual children Mexico. Both participant groups varied their object forms, following same ranking: clitics>lexical NPs>omission>doubling. Animate referents promoted clitics; inanimate lexical NPs. Among spea...

Translation ambiguity, out of vocabulary words and missing some translations in bilingual dictionaries make dictionary-based Crosslanguage Information Retrieval (CLIR) a challenging task. Moreover, in agglutinative languages which do not have reliable stemmers, missing various lexical formations in bilingual dictionaries degrades CLIR performance. This paper aims to introduce a probabilistic tr...

The Character Sequence Modeling (CSM), typically called the Language Modeling, has not received sufficient attention in the current transliteration research. We discuss the impact of various CSM factors like word granularity, smoothing technique, corpus variation, and word origin on the transliteration accuracy. We demonstrate the importance of CSM by showing that for transliterating into Engli...

Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels, systematically reducing unstressed vowels to th...

It is unclear what roles native language (L1) and second language (L2) play in the perception of lexical tones in a third language (L3). Listeners with different language backgrounds use different F0 cues in tonal perception. While English listeners use F0 height, Mandarin listeners rely more on F0 direction. The present study addresses whether knowledge of Mandarin as an L2 results in listener...

A series of three experiments was carried out in order to better characterize the representations that support long-term cognate priming. In Experiment 1, robust priming was obtained between orthographically similar French/English cognates in bilingual speakers, and this priming was mediated, in part, by orthographic codes, given that priming for these items was dramatically reduced following a...

This paper investigates the use of subtitles by Arabic-English bilingual speakers in UAE. While extant research on effects language acquisition focuses either first children or second foreign monolingual speakers, this study examines and their preference for different contexts via an online questionnaire. Results from 28 revealed that were used more frequently films English over Arabic films, w...