Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on initial parsing decision. However, whether prosody functions in the same way in adult second language (L2) sentence processing is not known. In visual world eyetracking experiments, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing locally ambiguous sentences with L1 speakers (native Engli...

We investigate the uses and limitations of MFCC analysis for feature extraction from music files in the domain of genre recognition. Intra-genre and Inter-genre classification is explored. We implement a method of genre classification based on MFCC extraction, K-means clustering, and KNN analysis. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through testing, yielding a 99% accuracy rate.

This special issue of Linguistics and the Human Sciences offers a collection of original contributions to the study of languages in contrast from discourse, corpus, and functional perspectives. The papers were presented at the Sixth International Conference on Contrastive Linguistics, held in Berlin 29 September–3 October 2010, in the context of two panels: ‘Discourse analysis and contrastive l...

Error Analysis is one of the major topics in the field of second language acquisition research. Errors are an integral part of language learning. The learner of English as a second language is unaware of the existence of the particular system or rule in English language. The learner’s errors have long been interested for second and foreign language researchers. The basic task of error analysis ...

Successful language comprehension often requires comprehenders to infer contrastive focus alternatives, but the mechanisms used to establish contrastive alternatives are still poorly understood. We propose that comprehenders establish contrastive alternatives by using selection mechanisms that distinguish contrastive from non-contrastive candidates. To examine this proposal, we investigated the...

This paper explores how electronic health record (EHR) systems have introduced a new genre for physicians to use (a genre we refer to as check-list) that is used in addition to their traditional narrative genre as part of a single patient health record. Our analysis suggests that it is because the overlap between these two genres is created and used interdependently that breakdowns occur in the...

Several authors within psychology, neuroscience and philosophy take for granted that standard empirical research techniques are applicable when studying consciousness. In this article, it is discussed whether one of the key methods in cognitive neuroscience – the contrastive analysis – suffers from any serious confounding when applied to the field of consciousness studies; that is to say, if th...