Previous research has shown that young infants easily discriminate both native and non-native consonant contrasts, but by 10-12 months of age infants perform like adults and easily discriminate only native consonant contrasts. The present study was designed to determine what kind of experience is required to maintain discrimination of native consonants. To address this question, English listene...

AIMS To test the hypothesis that exposure to ambient language in the womb alters phonetic perception shortly after birth. This two-country study aimed to see whether neonates demonstrated prenatal learning by how they responded to vowels in a category from their native language and another non-native language, regardless of how much postnatal experience the infants had. METHOD A counterbalanc...

the power of media lies in its persuasive function, which gives media a potential to maneuver on the mind of audience (van dijk 1996). this potential is realized via different linguistic resources, one important group of which is metadiscoursal resources. the major aim of this study was to explore how and in what distribution these resources are employed by writers with different cultural backg...

Cross-language perception of phonetic features was investigated via an experiment in which native speakers of Korean and English identified speech sounds varying across voicing (voiced vs. voiceless), place of articulation (labial vs. coronal), and manner of articulation (stop vs. fricative) features as well as prosodic context (syllable initial vs. syllable final). Because Korean has no anteri...

teachers are the most important players of every educational system in different societies; accordingly, understanding their personal reflections may help us gain valuable insights into what it means to be a teacher in a specific cultural and social context. the purpose of this case study was to investigate the life and career of 6 non-native english speaking teachers in state educational syste...

*Globally, exotic invaders threaten biodiversity and ecosystem function. Studies often report that invading plants are less affected by enemies in their invaded vs home ranges, but few studies have investigated the underlying mechanisms. *Here, we investigated the variation in prevalence, species composition and virulence of soil-borne Pythium pathogens associated with the tree Prunus serotina ...

Implicit, abstract knowledge acquired through language experience can alter cortical processing of complex auditory signals. To isolate prelexical processing of linguistic tones (i.e., pitch variations that convey part of word meaning), a novel design was used in which hybrid stimuli were created by superimposing Thai tones onto Chinese syllables (tonal chimeras) and Chinese tones onto the same...