The latency of the brain response to semantic anomalies (N400 effect) has been found to be longer in a bilingual's second language (L2) than in their first language (L1) and/or to that seen in monolinguals. This has been explained in terms of late exposure to L2, although age of exposure and language proficiency are often highly correlated. We thus examined the relative contributions of these f...

This study investigates L1-L2 interactions in relatively young Mandarin (L1)-English (L2) bilingual children through comparing their static and dynamic vowel acoustic features with those of age-matched corresponding monolingual children. Two groups of sequential bilingual children aged 5-6 years (one with low proficiency in English and the other with high proficiency in English) were recorded p...

The present study aimed to assess the target and present reading comprehension needs and abilities of Iranian medical students with different levels of English language proficiency. A total of 283 medical students and 23 ESP instructors were chosen through cluster sampling. The data collection instruments included the Persian version of Atai and Nazari’s (2011) needs analysis questionnaire and ...

Methods: The level of participation was measured across ten criteria over a one-semester period in four classes of beginner/intermediate level adult Korean students of English as a foreign language (EFL). The classes were divided into two test groups who had their level of participation assessed as part of their overall grade (n = 76) and two control groups whose participation was measured cove...

This study examined the interrelationships of first language (L1) literacy, second language (L2) proficiency, and L2 reading comprehension with 246 Chinese college students learning English. L1 literacy and L2 proficiency were measured with college admission exams in Chinese and English. L2 reading comprehension was measured with the reading comprehension section of a TOEFL and a researcher-dev...

OBJECTIVES Patients with limited English proficiency confront multiple barriers to health care access in the United States. Appropriate language services for families with limited English proficiency are essential; however, little is known about pediatricians' use of language services. The objective of this study was to examine pediatricians' provision of language services to patients with limi...

In the present study, it was examined whether phonotactic constraints of the first language affect speech processing by Japanese learners of English and whether L2 proficiency influences it. Seventeen native English speakers (ES), 18 Japanese speakers with high proficiency of English (JH), and 20 Japanese speakers with relatively low English proficiency (JL) took part in a monitoring task. Two ...

This study investigated the developmental change in the phonetic realization of English stress, using corpus data of Japanese English learners with varying proficiency. Previous studies demonstrated that highly proficient Japanese learners of English can produce native-like English lexical stress in terms of intensity, F0, and vowel duration, but not vowel quality. The results of our study show...

Prosody has been demonstrated to be a key component in second language acquisition and assessment. This study analyzes raters’ ability to distinguish different levels of L1 and L2 prosody when listening to filtered speech. The goal of this study is to investigate how many levels of prosodic proficiency can be made when it is isolated in a filtered speech condition. An experiment was conducted w...

the present paper investigated the effectiveness of concept mapping as a learning strategy on efl students’ self-regulation (metacognitive self-regulation, time and study environment, effort regulation, peer learning, and help seeking). sixty university students participated in the study. they were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups, each including thirty students. they were a...