This study tested the hypothesis that heritage speakers of a minority language, due to their childhood experience with two languages, would outperform late learners in producing contrast: language-internal phonological contrast, as well as cross-linguistic phonetic contrast between similar, yet acoustically distinct, categories of different languages. To this end, production of Mandarin and Eng...

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...

The spatial relation of support has been regarded as universally privileged in nonlinguistic cognition and immune to the influence of language. English, but not Korean, obligatorily distinguishes support from nonsupport via basic spatial terms. Despite this linguistic difference, previous research suggests that English and Korean speakers show comparable nonlinguistic sensitivity to the support...

Focus is of communication function in discourse. How it is realized by native speakers has long been in vigorous discussion. However, studies on focus concerning language learners are few, with the ones taking dialects into account even fewer. This study takes eight Zhenjiang dialect speakers as the subjects and investigates if their phonetic and phonological realization of narrow focus in Engl...

Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (L2) acquisition after the critical period. In this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from Persian speaking learners of English as an L2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (RPs) as uniterpretable features. Unlike English which does not allow RPs, Persian shows various b...

This study examined the processing correlates of aspectual coercion among native and non-native speakers of English. For native English speakers, results suggested that the processing delay associated with aspectual coercion is minimal. Aspectual coercion was perhaps cognitively easy to perform. By contrast, non-native speakers of English from unlike first language (L1) backgrounds differed in ...

This paper examines the use of glottal stops in English as a second language and Polish by Polish native speakers and in English by native speakers. The study compares glottal stop frequency in utterance-initial accented and unaccented positions. The major finding is that Polish native speakers use more glottal stops in English in unaccented than in accented syllables. This tendency is compared...

This paper presents an empirical study on the difficulties in learning Chinese as a second language based on learners’ corpora written by native English speakers and native Japanese speakers at CEFR-based A2 and B1 levels. The first part of this paper will discuss the procedures for how to collect learners’ corpora, proofread, establish an error tag system and annotate errors. Later it will foc...

This paper examined the intelligibility of English / / and / / followed by the vowel / / produced by 20 native speakers of Japanese (JE / /, JE / /), and the acoustic characteristics of JE / / and / / according to the different levels of intelligibility. Five native English speakers evaluated the intelligibility of JE /s/ and / / in the word-initial position of “seat” and “sheet.” The major ene...