We use a special Canadian dataset containing both literacy test scores and standard labour market variables to examine the impact of literacy on immigrant earnings. Having a literacy measure allows us to examine issues related to discrimination and the sources of lower returns to foreign acquired education and experience among immigrants. We find that the native-born literacy distribution (asse...

This study introduces the concept of ‘digital diversity’ to refer to the increasing workforce heterogeneity that stems from the recent rise of digital natives in the workforce. While digital diversity is expected to promise innovation and efficiency, it may also give rise to organizational challenges. The nature of the promise and challenge of digital diversity as well as how it is perceived ac...

This article reports key findings of a study which investigated the use of technology by 569 'digital natives' students for English Language learning and recreational purposes. Their views on the applicability of technological tools such as facebook, blogging and skype for English Language teaching and learning were also investigated. The findings showed that although the students expressed pos...

Previous research suggests that infant speech perception reorganizes in the first year: young infants discriminate both native and non-native phonetic contrasts, but by 10-12 months difficult non-native contrasts are less discriminable whereas performance improves on native contrasts. In the current study, four experiments tested the hypothesis that, in addition to the influence of native langu...

Although speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions, some are perceptually weighted more than others and there are residual effects of native-language weightings in non-native speech perception. Recent research on nonlinguistic sound category learning suggests that the distribution characteristics of experienced sounds influence perceptual cue weights: Increasing variability ...

Models of second language acquisition predict that adults are unlikely to learn to produce a non-native vowel very quickly due to their reduced sensitivity to acoustic features not phonological in their native language. Earlier studies show that attention focusing training and articulatory instructions can facilitate learning of non-native speech sounds. We used an instructed listen-and-repeat ...