Comparing Bilingual to Monolingual Learners on English Spelling: A Meta-analytic Review.

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Zhao, Jing; Quiroz, Blanca; Dixon, L Quentin; Joshi, R Malatesha

2016-08-01

This study reports on a meta-analysis to examine how bilingual learners compare with English monolingual learners on two English spelling outcomes: real-word spelling and pseudo-word spelling. Eighteen studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 1990 and 2014 were retrieved. The study-level variables and characteristics (e.g. sample size, study design and research instruments) were coded, and 29 independent effect sizes across the 18 retrieved studies were analysed. We found that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on real-word spelling overall and more so in early grades, but monolinguals outperformed bilinguals on pseudo-word spelling. Further, bilinguals at risk for reading difficulties did better on real-word spelling than monolinguals at risk for reading difficulties. Having investigated systematic sources of variability in effect sizes, we conclude that in comparison with their monolingual peers, bilingual learners, especially those from alphabetic L1 backgrounds, are able to master constrained skills, such as English spelling, in the current instructional context. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The relationship between spoken English proficiency and participation in higher education, employment and income from two Australian censuses.

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Blake, Helen L; Mcleod, Sharynne; Verdon, Sarah; Fuller, Gail

2018-04-01

Proficiency in the language of the country of residence has implications for an individual's level of education, employability, income and social integration. This paper explores the relationship between the spoken English proficiency of residents of Australia on census day and their educational level, employment and income to provide insight into multilingual speakers' ability to participate in Australia as an English-dominant society. Data presented are derived from two Australian censuses i.e. 2006 and 2011 of over 19 million people. The proportion of Australians who reported speaking a language other than English at home was 21.5% in the 2006 census and 23.2% in the 2011 census. Multilingual speakers who also spoke English very well were more likely to have post-graduate qualifications, full-time employment and high income than monolingual English-speaking Australians. However, multilingual speakers who reported speaking English not well were much less likely to have post-graduate qualifications or full-time employment than monolingual English-speaking Australians. These findings provide insight into the socioeconomic and educational profiles of multilingual speakers, which will inform the understanding of people such as speech-language pathologists who provide them with support. The results indicate spoken English proficiency may impact participation in Australian society. These findings challenge the "monolingual mindset" by demonstrating that outcomes for multilingual speakers in education, employment and income are higher than for monolingual speakers.

Novel Morpheme Learning in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

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Gross, Megan; Sheena, Enanna; Roman, Rachel

2017-01-01

Purpose The purpose of the present study was to examine the utility of a novel morpheme learning task for indexing typical language abilities in children characterized by diverse language backgrounds. Method Three groups of 5- to 6-year-old children were tested: monolingual speakers of English, native speakers of Spanish who also spoke English (Spanish-L1 bilinguals), and native speakers of English who also spoke Spanish (English-L1 bilinguals). All children were taught a new derivational morpheme /ku/ marking part–whole distinction in conjunction with English nouns. Retention was measured via a receptive task, and sensitivity and reaction time (RT) data were collected. Results All three groups of children learned the novel morpheme successfully and were able to generalize its use to untaught nouns. Furthermore, language characteristics (degree of exposure and levels of performance on standardized measures) did not contribute to bilingual children's learning outcomes. Conclusion Together, the findings indicate that this particular version of the novel morpheme learning task may be resistant to influences associated with language background and suggest potential usefulness of the task to clinical practice. PMID:28399578

Temporal features of word-initial /s/+stop clusters in bilingual Mandarin-English children and monolingual English children and adults.

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Yang, Jing

2018-03-01

This study investigated the durational features of English word-initial /s/+stop clusters produced by bilingual Mandarin (L1)-English (L2) children and monolingual English children and adults. The participants included two groups of five- to six-year-old bilingual children: low proficiency in the L2 (Bi-low) and high proficiency in the L2 (Bi-high), one group of age-matched English children, and one group of English adults. Each participant produced a list of English words containing /sp, st, sk/ at the word-initial position followed by /a, i, u/, respectively. The absolute durations of the clusters and cluster elements and the durational proportions of elements to the overall cluster were measured. The results revealed that Bi-high children behaved similarly to the English monolinguals whereas Bi-low children used a different strategy of temporal organization to coordinate the cluster components in comparison to the English monolinguals and Bi-high children. The influence of language experience and continuing development of temporal features in children were discussed.

Monolingual versus multilingual acquisition of English morphology: what can we expect at age 3?

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Nicholls, Ruth J; Eadie, Patricia A; Reilly, Sheena

2011-01-01

At least two-thirds of the world's children grow up in environments where more than one language is spoken. Despite the global predominance of multilingualism, much remains unknown regarding the language acquisition of children acquiring multiple languages compared with monolingual children. A greater understanding of multilingualism is crucial for speech-language pathologists given the increasing number of children being raised in linguistically diverse environments. To investigate the expressive morphological abilities of multilingual children acquiring English, compared with monolingual children, at 3 years of age. Participants were 148 children (74 multilingual children; 74 matched monolingual children; mean age of 3 years 4 months) already participating in a larger prospective longitudinal cohort study of language development in Melbourne, Australia. Thirty-one languages in addition to English were represented within the embedded cohort. All participants completed a direct language assessment to measure their expressive abilities across a range of English morphemes. The parents of the multilingual participants completed an interview regarding the children's language backgrounds and experiences. The Multilingual Group typically performed below the Monolingual Group in terms of their accurate use and mastery of English morphemes at 3 years of age, although variable expressive abilities were indicated within each group. The same morphemes were shown to be mastered by relatively higher proportions of each group. Likewise, the same forms were mastered by relatively lower proportions of each group. The results indicated similarities between the children's acquisition of English morphology, regardless of whether they were acquiring English only or in combination with another language(s) at 3 years of age. This study found a range of similarities and differences between multilingual compared with monolingual children's acquisition of English morphology at 3 years of

Perception of English palatal codas by Korean speakers of English

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Yeon, Sang-Hee

2003-04-01

This study aimed at looking at perception of English palatal codas by Korean speakers of English to determine if perception problems are the source of production problems. In particular, first, this study looked at the possible first language effect on the perception of English palatal codas. Second, a possible perceptual source of vowel epenthesis after English palatal codas was investigated. In addition, individual factors, such as length of residence, TOEFL score, gender and academic status, were compared to determine if those affected the varying degree of the perception accuracy. Eleven adult Korean speakers of English as well as three native speakers of English participated in the study. Three sets of a perception test including identification of minimally different English pseudo- or real words were carried out. The results showed that, first, the Korean speakers perceived the English codas significantly worse than the Americans. Second, the study supported the idea that Koreans perceived an extra /i/ after the final affricates due to final release. Finally, none of the individual factors explained the varying degree of the perceptional accuracy. In particular, TOEFL scores and the perception test scores did not have any statistically significant association.

7 CFR 247.13 - Provisions for non-English or limited-English speakers.

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2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 4 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Provisions for non-English or limited-English speakers... § 247.13 Provisions for non-English or limited-English speakers. (a) What must State and local agencies do to ensure that non-English or limited-English speaking persons are aware of their rights and...

The Comparison of the Monolingual and Bilingual Japanese Students in The English Achievement

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Ienneke Indra Dewi

2007-11-01

Full Text Available Article is intended to know whether the monolingual or bilingual Japanese students are better in the English achievement and whether the exposure of English influences the ability. The data were taken from 60 Japanese students who are supposed to fill in the questionnaires regarding their language background. The English achievement data were taken from the students’ scores in Senior High School National Examination and the data further were compared to the TOEFL English score. The analysis is carried out using ANOVA analysis. This research indicates that monolinguals are better learners in English and exposure is proved to influence the students’ ability in English.                                                  

Conceptualising English as a lingua franca (ELF) as a tertiary ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Department of English Studies, University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 2, Hof 8. 1090 Vienna .... warning tone on the use of English as medium of higher education as regards various concerns ... of monolingual English speakers will surely not work.

The Prevalence of English Monolingualism and Its Association with Generational Status among Hmong Americans, 2005-2009

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Yang Sao Xiong; Nao Xiong

2011-01-01

Using the American Community Survey's multi-year (2005-2009) Public Use Microdata Sample, we estimate the prevalence of English monolingualism and statistically analyze the association between English monolingualism and generational status within the U.S. Hmong population. Our findings show that the odds of speaking only English among the second generation is almost three times more compared to the first generation. Data from the 2009 ACS PUMS further indicate that there is a linear an...

Orthographic Context Sensitivity in Vowel Decoding by Portuguese Monolingual and Portuguese-English Bilingual Children

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Vale, Ana Paula

2011-01-01

This study examines the pronunciation of the first vowel in decoding disyllabic pseudowords derived from Portuguese words. Participants were 96 Portuguese monolinguals and 52 Portuguese-English bilinguals of equivalent Portuguese reading levels. The results indicate that sensitivity to vowel context emerges early, both in monolinguals and in…

Proficiency in English sentence stress production by Cantonese speakers who speak English as a second language (ESL).

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Ng, Manwa L; Chen, Yang

2011-12-01

The present study examined English sentence stress produced by native Cantonese speakers who were speaking English as a second language (ESL). Cantonese ESL speakers' proficiency in English stress production as perceived by English-speaking listeners was also studied. Acoustical parameters associated with sentence stress including fundamental frequency (F0), vowel duration, and intensity were measured from the English sentences produced by 40 Cantonese ESL speakers. Data were compared with those obtained from 40 native speakers of American English. The speech samples were also judged by eight native listeners who were native speakers of American English for placement, degree, and naturalness of stress. Results showed that Cantonese ESL speakers were able to use F0, vowel duration, and intensity to differentiate sentence stress patterns. Yet, both female and male Cantonese ESL speakers exhibited consistently higher F0 in stressed words than English speakers. Overall, Cantonese ESL speakers were found to be proficient in using duration and intensity to signal sentence stress, in a way comparable with English speakers. In addition, F0 and intensity were found to correlate closely with perceptual judgement and the degree of stress with the naturalness of stress.

Exploring problem solving strategies on multiple-choice science items: Comparing native Spanish-speaking English Language Learners and mainstream monolinguals

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Kachchaf, Rachel Rae

The purpose of this study was to compare how English language learners (ELLs) and monolingual English speakers solved multiple-choice items administered with and without a new form of testing accommodation---vignette illustration (VI). By incorporating theories from second language acquisition, bilingualism, and sociolinguistics, this study was able to gain more accurate and comprehensive input into the ways students interacted with items. This mixed methods study used verbal protocols to elicit the thinking processes of thirty-six native Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs), and 36 native-English speaking non-ELLs when solving multiple-choice science items. Results from both qualitative and quantitative analyses show that ELLs used a wider variety of actions oriented to making sense of the items than non-ELLs. In contrast, non-ELLs used more problem solving strategies than ELLs. There were no statistically significant differences in student performance based on the interaction of presence of illustration and linguistic status or the main effect of presence of illustration. However, there were significant differences based on the main effect of linguistic status. An interaction between the characteristics of the students, the items, and the illustrations indicates considerable heterogeneity in the ways in which students from both linguistic groups think about and respond to science test items. The results of this study speak to the need for more research involving ELLs in the process of test development to create test items that do not require ELLs to carry out significantly more actions to make sense of the item than monolingual students.

The Role of Oral Language Skills in Reading and Listening Comprehension of Text: A Comparison of Monolingual (L1) and Bilingual (L2) Speakers of English Language

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Babayigit, Selma

2014-01-01

The study examined the role of oral language skills in reading comprehension and listening comprehension levels of 125 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) English-speaking learners (M = 121.5 months, SD = 4.65) in England. All testing was conducted in English. The L1 learners outperformed their L2 peers on the measures of oral language and text…

Request Strategies in Everyday Interactions of Persian and English Speakers

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Shiler Yazdanfar

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Cross-cultural studies of speech acts in different linguistic contexts might have interesting implications for language researchers and practitioners. Drawing on the Speech Act Theory, the present study aimed at conducting a comparative study of request speech act in Persian and English. Specifically, the study endeavored to explore the request strategies used in daily interactions of Persian and English speakers based on directness level and supportive moves. To this end, English and Persian TV series were observed and requestive utterances were transcribed. The utterances were then categorized based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Pattern (CCSARP for directness level and internal and external mitigation devises. According to the results, although speakers of both languages opted for the direct level as their most frequently used strategy in their daily interactions, the English speakers used more conventionally indirect strategies than the Persian speakers did, and the Persian speakers used more non-conventionally indirect strategies than the English speakers did. Furthermore, the analyzed data revealed the fact that American English speakers use more mitigation devices in their daily interactions with friends and family members than Persian speakers.

Influence of English-Language Proficiency on the Cognitive Processing of Survey Questions

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Park, Hyunjoo; Sha, M. Mandy; Willis, Gordon

2016-01-01

When recruiting respondents for cognitive interviews testing translated survey questionnaires, researchers often recommend interviewing monolingual non-English speakers because they are the likely users of the translations. However, these individuals are hard to recruit, and there is no standard definition of monolingual. Using cognitive interview…

Expressive Vocabulary Development in Children from Bilingual and Monolingual Homes: A Longitudinal Study from Two to Four Years.

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Hoff, Erika; Rumiche, Rosario; Burridge, Andrea; Ribot, Krystal M; Welsh, Stephanie N

2014-10-01

The early course of language development among children from bilingual homes varies in ways that are not well described and as a result of influences that are not well understood. Here, we describe trajectories of relative change in expressive vocabulary from 22 to 48 months and vocabulary achievement at 48 months in two groups of children from bilingual homes (children with one and children with two native Spanish-speaking parents [ n s = 15 and 11]) and in an SES-equivalent group of children from monolingual English homes ( n = 31). The two groups from bilingual homes differed in their mean levels of English and Spanish skills, in their developmental trajectories during this period, and in the relation between language use at home and their vocabulary development. Children with two native Spanish-speaking parents showed steepest gains in total vocabulary and were more nearly balanced bilinguals at 48 months. Children with one native Spanish- and one native English-speaking parent showed trajectories of relative decline in Spanish vocabulary. At 48 months, mean levels of English skill among the bilingual children were comparable to monolingual norms, but children with two native Spanish-speaking parents had lower English scores than the SES-equivalent monolingual group. Use of English at home was a significant positive predictor of English vocabulary scores only among children with a native English-speaking parent. These findings argue that efforts to optimize school readiness among children from immigrant families should facilitate their access to native speakers of the community language, and efforts to support heritage language maintenance should include encouraging heritage language use by native speakers in the home.

Delexical Structures Contrastively: A Common Trap for Non-Native Speakers

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Marjeta Vrbinc

2004-12-01

Full Text Available This article deals with delexical structures and in particular with the problems non-native speakers are faced with when encoding. First, it gives reasons why it is necessary to study the structures and then it discusses the delexical structures in English (monolingual context. The second part of the article focuses on the bilingual aspect, i.e. the translation of English delexical structures into Slovene. Some problems concerning the bilingual context are presented, especially as regards aspect and the difference between the translation of English delexical structures in isolation (e.g. in a dictionary and within the context. The last part of the article concentrates on the dictionary treatment of delexical structures and provides some examples taken from the latest editions of the leading EFL monolingual dictionaries.

Stress Judgment and Production in English Derivation, and Word Reading in Adult Mandarin-Speaking English Learners.

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Chung, Wei-Lun; Jarmulowicz, Linda

2017-08-01

For monolingual English-speaking children, judgment and production of stress in derived words, including words with phonologically neutral (e.g., -ness) and non-neutral suffixes (e.g., -ity), is important to both academic vocabulary growth and to word reading. For Mandarin-speaking adult English learners (AELs) the challenge of learning the English stress system might be complicated by cross-linguistic differences in prosodic function and features. As Mandarin-speakers become more proficient in English, patterns similar to those seen in monolingual children could emerge in which awareness and use of stress and suffix cues benefit word reading. A correlational design was used to examine the contributions of English stress in derivation with neutral and non-neutral suffixes to English word and nonword reading. Stress judgment in non-neutral derivation predicted word reading after controlling for working memory and English vocabulary; whereas stress production in neutral derivation contributed to word reading and pseudoword decoding, independent of working memory and English vocabulary. Although AELs could use stress and suffix cues for word reading, AELs were different from native English speakers in awareness of non-neutral suffix cues conditioning lexical stress placement. AELs may need to rely on lexical storage of primary stress in derivations with non-neutral suffixes.

Compositions in English: Comparing the Works of Monolinguals, Passive Bilinguals, and Active Bilinguals

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Julia Eka Rini

2010-01-01

Full Text Available This study tries to see whether the subjects’ “monolingualism” and “bilingualism” (monolinguals learning an L2 and bilinguals learning an L3 influence their study on English, especially writing. The term “bilinguals” also means “multilinguals” in this study. Bilinguals in this paper are classified into two; first, passive bilinguals who are only exposed to another local language, besides speaking Bahasa Indonesia at home, and second, active bilinguals who are exposed to and also speak other language(s and Bahasa Indonesia at home. The findings show that the monolingual and the active bilingual are better than the passive one; the active bilingual is better than the monolingual. However, if the passive and the active bilingual are combined, the monolingual is better than the bilinguals.

How much exposure to English is necessary for a bilingual toddler to perform like a monolingual peer in language tests?

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Cattani, Allegra; Abbot-Smith, Kirsten; Farag, Rafalla; Krott, Andrea; Arreckx, Frédérique; Dennis, Ian; Floccia, Caroline

2014-11-01

Bilingual children are under-referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However, despite these recommendations, a majority of speech and language professionals report that they assess bilingual children only in English as bilingual children come from a wide array of language backgrounds and standardized language measures are not available for the majority of these. Moreover, even when such measures do exist, they are not tailored for bilingual children. It was asked whether a cut-off exists in the proportion of exposure to English at which one should expect a bilingual toddler to perform as well as a monolingual on a test standardized for monolingual English-speaking children. Thirty-five bilingual 2;6-year-olds exposed to British English plus an additional language and 36 British monolingual toddlers were assessed on the auditory component of the Preschool Language Scale, British Picture Vocabulary Scale and an object-naming measure. All parents completed the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (Oxford CDI) and an exposure questionnaire that assessed the proportion of English in the language input. Where the CDI existed in the bilingual's additional language, these data were also collected. Hierarchical regression analyses found the proportion of exposure to English to be the main predictor of the performance of bilingual toddlers. Bilingual toddlers who received 60% exposure to English or more performed like their monolingual peers on all measures. K-means cluster analyses and Levene variance tests confirmed the estimated English exposure cut-off at 60% for all language measures. Finally, for one additional language for which we had multiple participants, additional language CDI production scores were

Differences between Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in their calculation of entailment-based scalar implicatures

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Kristen Syrett

2017-04-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we extend investigations of the possible effects of cross-linguistic influence at the pragmatics-syntax interface (Hulk & Müller 2000; Müller & Hulk 2001; Serratrice, Sorace & Paoli 2004, by presenting two experiments designed to probe how Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual preschool-age children approach the ‘some, but not all’ 'scalar implicature '(SI associated with 'algunos '(‘some’. We compare 'algunos 'and 'unos '(also a ‘some’ indefinite, but one that is not context-linked and does not induce an SI, and 'algunos 'and 'todos '(the universal quantifier ‘every/all’. The performance of the children is compared to fluent adult Spanish heritage speakers. Experiment 1 is a variation of Noveck’s (2001 statement evaluation task, also replicated by Guasti et al'. '(2005. Experiment 2 is a forced-choice picture selection task. Results demonstrate that adults were the only group to consistently calculate the SI associated with 'algunos '– a finding that was expected to some extent, given that our tasks were stripped of the contextual support that could benefit children’s pragmatic reasoning. While bilingual and monolingual children displayed comparable performance across tasks, bilinguals in Experiment 2 appeared to experience difficulty with judgments related to 'todos '– a pattern we attribute (in light of independent findings to the cognitive overload in the task, not the lexical entry of this quantifier. We conclude that young monolingual and bilingual children confront the same challenges when called upon to deploy pragmatic skills in a discourse context. This article is part of the special collection:Acquisition of Quantification

Apology Strategy in English By Native Speaker

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Mezia Kemala Sari

2016-05-01

Full Text Available This research discussed apology strategies in English by native speaker. This descriptive study was presented within the framework of Pragmatics based on the forms of strategies due to the coding manual as found in CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realization Project.The goals of this study were to describe the apology strategies in English by native speaker and identify the influencing factors of it. Data were collected through the use of the questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Test, which was distributed to 30 native speakers. Data were classified based on the degree of familiarity and the social distance between speaker and hearer and then the data of native will be separated and classified by the type of strategies in coding manual. The results of this study are the pattern of apology strategies of native speaker brief with the pattern that potentially occurs IFID plus Offer of repair plus Taking on responsibility. While Alerters, Explanation and Downgrading appear with less number of percentage. Then, the factors that influence the apology utterance by native speakers are the social situation, the degree of familiarity and degree of the offence which more complicated the mistake tend to produce the most complex utterances by the speaker.

A Study on Metadiscoursive Interaction in the MA Theses of the Native Speakers of English and the Turkish Speakers of English

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Köroglu, Zehra; Tüm, Gülden

2017-01-01

This study has been conducted to evaluate the TM usage in the MA theses written by the native speakers (NSs) of English and the Turkish speakers (TSs) of English. The purpose is to compare the TM usage in the introduction, results and discussion, and conclusion sections by both groups' randomly selected MA theses in the field of ELT between the…

Processing advantage for emotional words in bilingual speakers.

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Ponari, Marta; Rodríguez-Cuadrado, Sara; Vinson, David; Fox, Neil; Costa, Albert; Vigliocco, Gabriella

2015-10-01

Effects of emotion on word processing are well established in monolingual speakers. However, studies that have assessed whether affective features of words undergo the same processing in a native and nonnative language have provided mixed results: Studies that have found differences between native language (L1) and second language (L2) processing attributed the difference to the fact that L2 learned late in life would not be processed affectively, because affective associations are established during childhood. Other studies suggest that adult learners show similar effects of emotional features in L1 and L2. Differences in affective processing of L2 words can be linked to age and context of learning, proficiency, language dominance, and degree of similarity between L2 and L1. Here, in a lexical decision task on tightly matched negative, positive, and neutral words, highly proficient English speakers from typologically different L1s showed the same facilitation in processing emotionally valenced words as native English speakers, regardless of their L1, the age of English acquisition, or the frequency and context of English use. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Vowel reduction in word-final position by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals.

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Emily Byers

Full Text Available Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels, systematically reducing unstressed vowels to the central vowel space can be problematic. Failure to maintain this pattern of stressed-unstressed syllables in American English is one key element that contributes to a "foreign accent" in second language speakers. Reduced vowels, or "schwas," have also been identified as particularly vulnerable to the co-articulatory effects of adjacent consonants. The current study examined the effects of adjacent sounds on the spectral and temporal qualities of schwa in word-final position. Three groups of English-speaking adults were tested: Miami-based monolingual English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals, and late Spanish-English bilinguals. Subjects performed a reading task to examine their schwa productions in fluent speech when schwas were preceded by consonants from various points of articulation. Results indicated that monolingual English and late Spanish-English bilingual groups produced targeted vowel qualities for schwa, whereas early Spanish-English bilinguals lacked homogeneity in their vowel productions. This extends prior claims that schwa is targetless for F2 position for native speakers to highly-proficient bilingual speakers. Though spectral qualities lacked homogeneity for early Spanish-English bilinguals, early bilinguals produced schwas with near native-like vowel duration. In contrast, late bilinguals produced schwas with significantly longer durations than English monolinguals or early Spanish-English bilinguals. Our results suggest that the temporal properties of a language are better integrated into second language phonologies than

Native Speakers' Perception of Non-Native English Speech

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Jaber, Maysa; Hussein, Riyad F.

2011-01-01

This study is aimed at investigating the rating and intelligibility of different non-native varieties of English, namely French English, Japanese English and Jordanian English by native English speakers and their attitudes towards these foreign accents. To achieve the goals of this study, the researchers used a web-based questionnaire which…

Environmental Considerations: Home and School Comparison of Spanish-English Speakers' Vocalizations

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Jackson, Carla W.; Callender, Maya F.

2014-01-01

This study examined differences in the quantity of child vocalizations (CVs) between preschool and home environments using the Language Environmental Analysis (LENA). The sample included monolingual English-speaking children (n = 27) and Spanish-English speaking dual language learners (n = 30). A two-way mixed effects analysis of variance with one…

THE ROLE OF NON-NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER TEACHERS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING

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Lutfi Ashar Mauludin

2017-04-01

Full Text Available Native-English Speaker Teachers (NESTs and Non-Native English Speaker Teachers (NNESTs have their own advantages and disadvantages. However, for English Language Learners (ELLs, NNESTs have more advantages in helping students to acquire English skills. At least there are three factors that can only be performed by NNESTs in English Language Learning. The factors are knowledge of the subject, effective communication, and understanding students‘ difficulties/needs. The NNESTs can effectively provide the clear explanation of knowledge of the language because they are supported by the same background and culture. NNESTs also can communicate with the students with all levels effectively. The use of L1 is effective to help students building their knowledge. Finally, NNESTs can provide the objectives and materials that are suitable with the needs of the students.

Non-Native English Speakers and Nonstandard English: An In-Depth Investigation

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Polat, Brittany

2012-01-01

Given the rising prominence of nonstandard varieties of English around the world (Jenkins 2007), learners of English as a second language are increasingly called on to communicate with speakers of both native and non-native nonstandard English varieties. In many classrooms around the world, however, learners continue to be exposed only to…

Cognitive Reserve in Parkinson's Disease: The Effects of Welsh-English Bilingualism on Executive Function

OpenAIRE

Hindle, John V.; Martin-Forbes, Pamela A.; Bastable, Alexandra J. M.; Pye, Kirstie L.; Martyr, Anthony; Whitaker, Christopher J.; Craik, Fergus I. M.; Bialystok, Ellen; Thomas, Enlli M.; Mueller Gathercole, Virginia C.; Clare, Linda

2015-01-01

Objective. Bilingualism has been shown to benefit executive function (EF) and delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease. This study aims at examining whether a bilingual advantage applies to EF in Parkinson's disease (PD). Method. In a cross-sectional outpatient cohort of monolingual English (n = 57) and bilingual Welsh/English (n = 46) speakers with PD we evaluated the effects of bilingualism compared with monolingualism on performance on EF tasks. In bilinguals we also assessed the effects of ...

English as a Foreign Language in Bilingual Language-minority Children, Children with Dyslexia and Monolingual Typical Readers.

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Bonifacci, Paola; Canducci, Elisa; Gravagna, Giulia; Palladino, Paola

2017-05-01

The present study was aimed at investigating literacy skills in English as a foreign language in three different groups of children: monolinguals with dyslexia (n = 19), typically developing bilinguals (language-minority) (n = 19) and a control group of monolinguals (Italian) (n = 76). Bilinguals were not expected to fail in English measures, and their gap with monolinguals would be expected to be limited to the instructional language, owing to underexposure. All participants were enrolled in Italian primary schools (fourth and fifth grades). A non-verbal reasoning task and Italian and English literacy tasks were administered. The Italian battery included word and non-word reading (speed and accuracy), word and non-word writing, and reading comprehension; the English battery included similar tasks, except for the non-word writing. Bilingual children performed similarly to typical readers in English tasks, whereas in Italian tasks, their performance was similar to that of typical readers in reading speed but not in reading accuracy and writing. Children with dyslexia underperformed compared with typically developing children in all English and Italian tasks, except for reading comprehension in Italian. Profile analysis and correlational analyses were further discussed. These results suggest that English as a foreign language might represent a challenge for students with dyslexia but a strength for bilingual language-minority children. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Measures of speech rhythm and the role of corpus-based word frequency: a multifactorial comparison of Spanish(-English speakers

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Michael J. Harris

2011-12-01

Full Text Available In this study, we address various measures that have been employed to distinguish between syllable and stress- timed languages. This study differs from all previous ones by (i exploring and comparing multiple metrics within a quantitative and multifactorial perspective and by (ii also documenting the impact of corpus-based word frequency. We begin with the basic distinctions of speech rhythms, dealing with the differences between syllable-timed languages and stress-timed languages and several methods that have been used to attempt to distinguish between the two. We then describe how these metrics were used in the current study comparing the speech rhythms of Mexican Spanish speakers and bilingual English/Spanish speakers (speakers born to Mexican parents in California. More specifically, we evaluate how well various metrics of vowel duration variability as well as the so far understudied factor of corpus-based frequency allow to classify speakers as monolingual or bilingual. A binary logistic regression identifies several main effects and interactions. Most importantly, our results call the utility of a particular rhythm metric, the PVI, into question and indicate that corpus data in the form of lemma frequencies interact with two metrics of durational variability, suggesting that durational variability metrics should ideally be studied in conjunction with corpus-based frequency data.

Defining "Native Speaker" in Multilingual Settings: English as a Native Language in Asia

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Hansen Edwards, Jette G.

2017-01-01

The current study examines how and why speakers of English from multilingual contexts in Asia are identifying as native speakers of English. Eighteen participants from different contexts in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, and The Philippines, who self-identified as native speakers of English participated in hour-long interviews…

Vowel reduction in word-final position by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals

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2017-01-01

Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels, systematically reducing unstressed vowels to the central vowel space can be problematic. Failure to maintain this pattern of stressed-unstressed syllables in American English is one key element that contributes to a “foreign accent” in second language speakers. Reduced vowels, or “schwas,” have also been identified as particularly vulnerable to the co-articulatory effects of adjacent consonants. The current study examined the effects of adjacent sounds on the spectral and temporal qualities of schwa in word-final position. Three groups of English-speaking adults were tested: Miami-based monolingual English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals, and late Spanish-English bilinguals. Subjects performed a reading task to examine their schwa productions in fluent speech when schwas were preceded by consonants from various points of articulation. Results indicated that monolingual English and late Spanish-English bilingual groups produced targeted vowel qualities for schwa, whereas early Spanish-English bilinguals lacked homogeneity in their vowel productions. This extends prior claims that schwa is targetless for F2 position for native speakers to highly-proficient bilingual speakers. Though spectral qualities lacked homogeneity for early Spanish-English bilinguals, early bilinguals produced schwas with near native-like vowel duration. In contrast, late bilinguals produced schwas with significantly longer durations than English monolinguals or early Spanish-English bilinguals. Our results suggest that the temporal properties of a language are better integrated into second language phonologies than spectral

English exposed common mistakes made by Chinese speakers

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Hart, Steve

2017-01-01

Having analysed the most common English errors made in over 600 academic papers written by Chinese undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers, Steve Hart has written an essential, practical guide specifically for the native Chinese speaker on how to write good academic English. English Exposed: Common Mistakes Made by Chinese Speakers is divided into three main sections. The first section examines errors made with verbs, nouns, prepositions, and other grammatical classes of words. The second section focuses on problems of word choice. In addition to helping the reader find the right word, it provides instruction for selecting the right style too. The third section covers a variety of other areas essential for the academic writer, such as using punctuation, adding appropriate references, referring to tables and figures, and selecting among various English date and time phrases. Using English Exposed will allow a writer to produce material where content and ideas-not language mistakes-speak the loudest.

Shhh… I Need Quiet! Children's Understanding of American, British, and Japanese-accented English Speakers.

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Bent, Tessa; Holt, Rachael Frush

2018-02-01

Children's ability to understand speakers with a wide range of dialects and accents is essential for efficient language development and communication in a global society. Here, the impact of regional dialect and foreign-accent variability on children's speech understanding was evaluated in both quiet and noisy conditions. Five- to seven-year-old children ( n = 90) and adults ( n = 96) repeated sentences produced by three speakers with different accents-American English, British English, and Japanese-accented English-in quiet or noisy conditions. Adults had no difficulty understanding any speaker in quiet conditions. Their performance declined for the nonnative speaker with a moderate amount of noise; their performance only substantially declined for the British English speaker (i.e., below 93% correct) when their understanding of the American English speaker was also impeded. In contrast, although children showed accurate word recognition for the American and British English speakers in quiet conditions, they had difficulty understanding the nonnative speaker even under ideal listening conditions. With a moderate amount of noise, their perception of British English speech declined substantially and their ability to understand the nonnative speaker was particularly poor. These results suggest that although school-aged children can understand unfamiliar native dialects under ideal listening conditions, their ability to recognize words in these dialects may be highly susceptible to the influence of environmental degradation. Fully adult-like word identification for speakers with unfamiliar accents and dialects may exhibit a protracted developmental trajectory.

Measuring growth in bilingual and monolingual children's english productive vocabulary development: the utility of combining parent and teacher report.

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Vagh, Shaher Banu; Pan, Barbara Alexander; Mancilla-Martinez, Jeannette

2009-01-01

This longitudinal study examined growth in the English productive vocabularies of bilingual and monolingual children between ages 24 and 36 months and explored the utility and validity of supplementing parent reports with teacher reports to improve the estimation of children's vocabulary. Low-income, English-speaking and English/Spanish-speaking parents and Early Head Start and Head Start program teachers completed the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, Words and Sentences for 85 children. Results indicate faster growth rates for monolingual than for bilingual children and larger vocabularies for bilingual children who spoke mostly English than mostly Spanish at home. Parent-teacher composite reports, like parent reports, significantly related to children's directly assessed productive vocabulary at ages 30 and 36 months, but parent reports fit the model better. Implications for vocabulary assessment are discussed.

Comparison of Iranian Monolingual and Bilingual EFL Students' Listening Comprehension in Terms of Watching English Movie with Latinized Persian Subtitles

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Yamchi, Roghayeh; Kumar, Vishal

2016-01-01

The main concern of the present study was to compare Iranian monolingual and bilingual EFL students' listening comprehension in terms of Latinized Persian subtitling of English movie to see whether there was a significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals on immediate linguistic comprehension of the movie. Latinized Persian subtitling…

Correlation between low-proficiency in English and negative perceptions of what it means to be an English speaker

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Kavarljit Kaur Gill

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Learning another language is very much affected by positive or negative connotations attached to the new language by the language learner. Entering Malaysian public universities there are many students with a low proficiency in English, despite spending eleven years studying English in schools. Could it be that the lack of progress among these students could be attributed to a negative view of what it means to be a speaker of English? This study investigated the perceptions of students at a public university, to determine whether there is a correlation between low-proficiency and negative perceptions of what it means to be an English speaker. Analysis of the results showed that Malaysian students have a very positive perception of what it means to be an English speaker.

The Acquisition of English Focus Marking by Non-Native Speakers

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Baker, Rachel Elizabeth

This dissertation examines Mandarin and Korean speakers' acquisition of English focus marking, which is realized by accenting particular words within a focused constituent. It is important for non-native speakers to learn how accent placement relates to focus in English because appropriate accent placement and realization makes a learner's English more native-like and easier to understand. Such knowledge may also improve their English comprehension skills. In this study, 20 native English speakers, 20 native Mandarin speakers, and 20 native Korean speakers participated in four experiments: (1) a production experiment, in which they were recorded reading the answers to questions, (2) a perception experiment, in which they were asked to determine which word in a recording was the last prominent word, (3) an understanding experiment, in which they were asked whether the answers in recorded question-answer pairs had context-appropriate prosody, and (4) an accent placement experiment, in which they were asked which word they would make prominent in a particular context. Finally, a new group of native English speakers listened to utterances produced in the production experiment, and determined whether the prosody of each utterance was appropriate for its context. The results of the five experiments support a novel predictive model for second language prosodic focus marking acquisition. This model holds that both transfer of linguistic features from a learner's native language (L1) and features of their second language (L2) affect learners' acquisition of prosodic focus marking. As a result, the model includes two complementary components: the Transfer Component and the L2 Challenge Component. The Transfer Component predicts that prosodic structures in the L2 will be more easily acquired by language learners that have similar structures in their L1 than those who do not, even if there are differences between the L1 and L2 in how the structures are realized. The L2

English Language Schooling, Linguistic Realities, and the Native Speaker of English in Hong Kong

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Hansen Edwards, Jette G.

2018-01-01

The study employs a case study approach to examine the impact of educational backgrounds on nine Hong Kong tertiary students' English and Cantonese language practices and identifications as native speakers of English and Cantonese. The study employed both survey and interview data to probe the participants' English and Cantonese language use at…

During Threaded Discussions Are Non-Native English Speakers Always at a Disadvantage?

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Shafer Willner, Lynn

2014-01-01

When participating in threaded discussions, under what conditions might non¬native speakers of English (NNSE) be at a comparative disadvantage to their classmates who are native speakers of English (NSE)? This study compares the threaded discussion perspectives of closely-matched NNSE and NSE adult students having different levels of threaded…

Non-English speakers attend gastroenterology clinic appointments at higher rates than English speakers in a vulnerable patient population

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Sewell, Justin L.; Kushel, Margot B.; Inadomi, John M.; Yee, Hal F.

2009-01-01

Goals We sought to identify factors associated with gastroenterology clinic attendance in an urban safety net healthcare system. Background Missed clinic appointments reduce the efficiency and availability of healthcare, but subspecialty clinic attendance among patients with established healthcare access has not been studied. Study We performed an observational study using secondary data from administrative sources to study patients referred to, and scheduled for an appointment in, the adult gastroenterology clinic serving the safety net healthcare system of San Francisco, California. Our dependent variable was whether subjects attended or missed a scheduled appointment. Analysis included multivariable logistic regression and classification tree analysis. 1,833 patients were referred and scheduled for an appointment between 05/2005 and 08/2006. Prisoners were excluded. All patients had a primary care provider. Results 683 patients (37.3%) missed their appointment; 1,150 (62.7%) attended. Language was highly associated with attendance in the logistic regression; non-English speakers were less likely than English speakers to miss an appointment (adjusted odds ratio 0.42 [0.28,0.63] for Spanish, 0.56 [0.38,0.82] for Asian language, p gastroenterology clinic appointment, not speaking English was most strongly associated with higher attendance rates. Patient related factors associated with not speaking English likely influence subspecialty clinic attendance rates, and these factors may differ from those affecting general healthcare access. PMID:19169147

Disadvantages of publishing biomedical research articles in English for non-native speakers of English

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Mohsen Rezaeian

2015-05-01

Full Text Available OBJECTIVES: English has become the most frequently used language for scientific communication in the biomedical field. Therefore, scholars from all over the world try to publish their findings in English. This trend has a number of advantages, along with several disadvantages. METHODS: In the current article, the most important disadvantages of publishing biomedical research articles in English for non-native speakers of English are reviewed. RESULTS: The most important disadvantages of publishing biomedical research articles in English for non-native speakers may include: Overlooking, either unintentionally or even deliberately, the most important local health problems; failure to carry out groundbreaking research due to limited medical research budgets; violating generally accepted codes of publication ethics and committing research misconduct and publications in open-access scam/predatory journals rather than prestigious journals. CONCLUSIONS: The above mentioned disadvantages could eventually result in academic establishments becoming irresponsible or, even worse, corrupt. In order to avoid this, scientists, scientific organizations, academic institutions, and scientific associations all over the world should design and implement a wider range of collaborative and comprehensive plans.

Disadvantages of publishing biomedical research articles in English for non-native speakers of English.

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Rezaeian, Mohsen

2015-01-01

English has become the most frequently used language for scientific communication in the biomedical field. Therefore, scholars from all over the world try to publish their findings in English. This trend has a number of advantages, along with several disadvantages. In the current article, the most important disadvantages of publishing biomedical research articles in English for non-native speakers of English are reviewed. The most important disadvantages of publishing biomedical research articles in English for non-native speakers may include: Overlooking, either unintentionally or even deliberately, the most important local health problems; failure to carry out groundbreaking research due to limited medical research budgets; violating generally accepted codes of publication ethics and committing research misconduct and publications in open-access scam/predatory journals rather than prestigious journals. The above mentioned disadvantages could eventually result in academic establishments becoming irresponsible or, even worse, corrupt. In order to avoid this, scientists, scientific organizations, academic institutions, and scientific associations all over the world should design and implement a wider range of collaborative and comprehensive plans.

Promoting Communities of Practice among Non-Native Speakers of English in Online Discussions

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Kim, Hoe Kyeung

2011-01-01

An online discussion involving text-based computer-mediated communication has great potential for promoting equal participation among non-native speakers of English. Several studies claimed that online discussions could enhance the academic participation of non-native speakers of English. However, there is little research around participation…

Instrumental Analysis of the English Stops Produced by Arabic Speakers of English

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Noureldin Mohamed Abdelaal

2017-07-01

Full Text Available This study reports the findings of a research that was conducted on ten (10 Arab students, who were enrolled in a master of English applied linguistics program at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The research aimed at instrumentally analyzing the English stops produced by Arab learners, in terms of voice onset time (VOT; identifying the effect of their mother tongue on producing the English stops; and the extent Arabic speakers of English differentiate in terms of pronunciation between minimal pairs. The findings of the study showed that some of the subjects’ VOT values were similar to native speakers of English. It was also found that the subjects could differentiate in terms of aspiration or voicing between /p/ and /b/, which refutes the assumption that Arab learners have a problem in producing the /p/ sound with appropriate aspiration. However, they did not show significant difference in pronunciation between the /t/ and /d/ or between the /k/ and /g/. Moreover, there is a kind of limited effect of the L1 on producing some stops (e.g. /t/ and /g/. However, for the /b/ sound, it cannot be inferred that there is interference from the mother tongue because its VOT value is almost the same in English and Arabic. This research suggests that teachers need to enhance Arab learners’ pronunciation of some minimal pairs such as /t/ and /d/ or /k/ and /g/.

The native-speaker fever in English language teaching (ELT: Pitting pedagogical competence against historical origin

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Anchimbe, Eric A.

2006-01-01

Full Text Available This paper discusses English language teaching (ELT around the world, and argues that as a profession, it should emphasise pedagogical competence rather than native-speaker requirement in the recruitment of teachers in English as a foreign language (EFL and English as a second language (ESL contexts. It establishes that being a native speaker does not make one automatically a competent speaker or, of that matter, a competent teacher of the language. It observes that on many grounds, including physical, sociocultural, technological and economic changes in the world as well as the status of English as official and national language in many post-colonial regions, the distinction between native and non-native speakers is no longer valid.

Multilingual Researchers Internationalizing Monolingual English-Only Education through Post-Monolingual Research Methodologies

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Michael Singh

2017-02-01

Full Text Available The argument advanced in this Special Issue of Education Sciences favors democratizing knowledge production and dissemination across the humanities and social sciences through the mainstreaming of multilingual researchers capabilities for theorizing using their full linguistic repertoire. An important contribution of the papers in this Special Issue is the promise that post-monolingual research methodology holds for collaborative projects among multilingual and monolingual researchers that tap into intercultural divergences across languages. Together these papers give warrant to multilingual researchers, including Higher Degree Researchers develop their capabilities for theorizing using their full linguistic repertoire, an educational innovation that could be of immense benefit to scholars working predominantly monolingual universities. Through their thought provoking papers presented in this Special Issue, these researchers invites those working in the education sciences to seriously consider the potential benefits of multiplying the intellectual resources used for theorizing that is possible through activating, mobilizing and deploying researchers’ multilingual resources in knowledge production and dissemination.

An acoustic analysis of English vowels produced by speakers of seven different native-language backgrounds

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Heuven, van V.J.J.P.; Gooskens, C.

2017-01-01

We measured F1, F2 and duration of ten English monophthongs produced by American native speakers and by Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian and Chinese L2 speakers. We hypothesized that (i) L2 speakers would approximate the English vowels more closely as the phonological distance between

Quantifying risk: verbal probability expressions in Spanish and English.

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Cohn, Lawrence D; Vázquez, Miguel E Cortés; Alvarez, Adolfo

2009-01-01

To investigate how Spanish- and English-speaking adults interpret verbal probability expressions presented in Spanish and English (eg, posiblemente and possibly, respectively). Professional translators and university students from México and the United States read a series of likelihood statements in Spanish or English and then estimated the certainty implied by each statement. Several terms that are regarded as cognates in English and Spanish elicited significantly different likelihood ratings. Several language equivalencies were also identified. These findings provide the first reported evaluation of Spanish likelihood terms for use in risk communications directed towards monolingual and bilingual Spanish speakers.

Complimenting Functions by Native English Speakers and Iranian EFL Learners: A Divergence or Convergence

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Ali Akbar Ansarin

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL learners who were speaking Persian as their first language and 60 native English speakers. Through a written Discourse Completion Task comprised of eight different scenarios, compliments were analyzed with regard to topics (performance, personality, possession, and skill, functions (explicit, implicit, and opt-out, gender differences and the common positive adjectives used by two groups of native and nonnative participants. The findings suggested that native English speakers praised individuals more implicitly in comparison with Iranian EFL learners and native speakers provided opt-outs more frequently than Iranian EFL learners did. The analysis of data by Chi-square showed that gender and macro functions are independent of each other among Iranian EFL learners’ compliments while for native speakers, gender played a significant role in the distribution of appraisals. Iranian EFL learners’ complimenting patterns converge more towards those of native English speakers. Moreover, both groups favored explicit compliments. However, Iranian EFL learners were more inclined to provide explicit compliments. It can be concluded that there were more similarities rather than differences between Iranian EFL learners and native English speakers regarding compliment speech act. The results of this study can benefit researchers, teachers, material developers, and EFL learners.

Cognitive reserve in Parkinson's disease: the effects of welsh-english bilingualism on executive function.

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Hindle, John V; Martin-Forbes, Pamela A; Bastable, Alexandra J M; Pye, Kirstie L; Martyr, Anthony; Whitaker, Christopher J; Craik, Fergus I M; Bialystok, Ellen; Thomas, Enlli M; Mueller Gathercole, Virginia C; Clare, Linda

2015-01-01

Objective. Bilingualism has been shown to benefit executive function (EF) and delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease. This study aims at examining whether a bilingual advantage applies to EF in Parkinson's disease (PD). Method. In a cross-sectional outpatient cohort of monolingual English (n = 57) and bilingual Welsh/English (n = 46) speakers with PD we evaluated the effects of bilingualism compared with monolingualism on performance on EF tasks. In bilinguals we also assessed the effects of the degree of daily usage of each language and the degree of bilingualism. Results. Monolinguals showed an advantage in performance of language tests. There were no differences in performance of EF tests in monolinguals and bilinguals. Those who used Welsh less in daily life had better performance on one test of English vocabulary. The degree of bilingualism correlated with one test of nonverbal reasoning and one of working memory but with no other tests of EF. Discussion. The reasons why the expected benefit in EF in Welsh-English bilinguals with PD was not found require further study. Future studies in PD should include other language pairs, analysis of the effects of the degree of bilingualism, and longitudinal analysis of cognitive decline or dementia together with structural or functional neuroimaging.

Sentence comprehension in Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers

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Abuom, Tom O.; Shah, Emmah; Bastiaanse, Roelien

For this study, sentence comprehension was tested in Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers. The sentences were controlled for four factors: (1) order of the arguments (base vs. derived); (2) embedding (declarative vs. relative sentences); (3) overt use of the relative pronoun "who"; (4)

Cognitive Reserve in Parkinson’s Disease: The Effects of Welsh-English Bilingualism on Executive Function

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John V. Hindle

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Objective. Bilingualism has been shown to benefit executive function (EF and delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. This study aims at examining whether a bilingual advantage applies to EF in Parkinson’s disease (PD. Method. In a cross-sectional outpatient cohort of monolingual English (n=57 and bilingual Welsh/English (n=46 speakers with PD we evaluated the effects of bilingualism compared with monolingualism on performance on EF tasks. In bilinguals we also assessed the effects of the degree of daily usage of each language and the degree of bilingualism. Results. Monolinguals showed an advantage in performance of language tests. There were no differences in performance of EF tests in monolinguals and bilinguals. Those who used Welsh less in daily life had better performance on one test of English vocabulary. The degree of bilingualism correlated with one test of nonverbal reasoning and one of working memory but with no other tests of EF. Discussion. The reasons why the expected benefit in EF in Welsh-English bilinguals with PD was not found require further study. Future studies in PD should include other language pairs, analysis of the effects of the degree of bilingualism, and longitudinal analysis of cognitive decline or dementia together with structural or functional neuroimaging.

The Space-Time Topography of English Speakers

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Duman, Steve

2016-01-01

English speakers talk and think about Time in terms of physical space. The past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. In this way, we "map" space onto Time. This dissertation addresses the specificity of this physical space, or its topography. Inspired by languages like Yupno (Nunez, et al., 2012) and Bamileke-Dschang (Hyman,…

What Can Errors Tell Us about Differences between Monolingual and Bilingual Vocabulary Learning?

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Kaushanskaya, Margarita

2018-01-01

Error patterns in vocabulary learning data were used as a window into the mechanisms that underlie vocabulary learning performance in bilinguals vs. monolinguals. English--Spanish bilinguals (n = 18) and English-speaking monolinguals (n = 18) were taught novel vocabulary items in association with English translations. At testing, participants…

Brain Plasticity in Speech Training in Native English Speakers Learning Mandarin Tones

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Heinzen, Christina Carolyn

The current study employed behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures to investigate brain plasticity associated with second-language (L2) phonetic learning based on an adaptive computer training program. The program utilized the acoustic characteristics of Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) to train monolingual American English-speaking listeners to perceive Mandarin lexical tones. Behavioral identification and discrimination tasks were conducted using naturally recorded speech, carefully controlled synthetic speech, and non-speech control stimuli. The ERP experiments were conducted with selected synthetic speech stimuli in a passive listening oddball paradigm. Identical pre- and post- tests were administered on nine adult listeners, who completed two-to-three hours of perceptual training. The perceptual training sessions used pair-wise lexical tone identification, and progressed through seven levels of difficulty for each tone pair. The levels of difficulty included progression in speaker variability from one to four speakers and progression through four levels of acoustic exaggeration of duration, pitch range, and pitch contour. Behavioral results for the natural speech stimuli revealed significant training-induced improvement in identification of Tones 1, 3, and 4. Improvements in identification of Tone 4 generalized to novel stimuli as well. Additionally, comparison between discrimination of across-category and within-category stimulus pairs taken from a synthetic continuum revealed a training-induced shift toward more native-like categorical perception of the Mandarin lexical tones. Analysis of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) responses in the ERP data revealed increased amplitude and decreased latency for pre-attentive processing of across-category discrimination as a result of training. There were also laterality changes in the MMN responses to the non-speech control stimuli, which could reflect reallocation of brain resources in processing pitch patterns

Differences in the Association between Segment and Language: Early Bilinguals Pattern with Monolinguals and Are Less Accurate than Late Bilinguals

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Blanco, Cynthia P.; Bannard, Colin; Smiljanic, Rajka

2016-01-01

Early bilinguals often show as much sensitivity to L2-specific contrasts as monolingual speakers of the L2, but most work on cross-language speech perception has focused on isolated segments, and typically only on neighboring vowels or stop contrasts. In tasks that include sounds in context, listeners’ success is more variable, so segment discrimination in isolation may not adequately represent the phonetic detail in stored representations. The current study explores the relationship between language experience and sensitivity to segmental cues in context by comparing the categorization patterns of monolingual English listeners and early and late Spanish–English bilinguals. Participants categorized nonce words containing different classes of English- and Spanish-specific sounds as being more English-like or more Spanish-like; target segments included phonemic cues, cues for which there is no analogous sound in the other language, or phonetic cues, cues for which English and Spanish share the category but for which each language varies in its phonetic implementation. Listeners’ language categorization accuracy and reaction times were analyzed. Our results reveal a largely uniform categorization pattern across listener groups: Spanish cues were categorized more accurately than English cues, and phonemic cues were easier for listeners to categorize than phonetic cues. There were no differences in the sensitivity of monolinguals and early bilinguals to language-specific cues, suggesting that the early bilinguals’ exposure to Spanish did not fundamentally change their representations of English phonology. However, neither did the early bilinguals show more sensitivity than the monolinguals to Spanish sounds. The late bilinguals however, were significantly more accurate than either of the other groups. These findings indicate that listeners with varying exposure to English and Spanish are able to use language-specific cues in a nonce-word language categorization

The effects of L2 proficiency level on the processing of wh-questions among Dutch second language speakers of English

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Jackson, C.N.; Hell, J.G. van

2011-01-01

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study explores how Dutch-English L2 speakers parse English wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions. Results suggest that English native speakers and highly-proficient Dutch–English L2 speakers do not always exhibit measurable signs of on-line

Semantic and Conceptual Factors in Spanish-English Bilinguals' Processing of Lexical Categories in Their Two Languages

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Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller; Stadthagen-González, Hans; Pérez-Tattam, Rocío; Yava?, Feryal

2016-01-01

This study examines possible semantic interaction in fully fluent adult simultaneous and early second language (L2) bilinguals. Monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English (n = 144) were tested for their understanding of lexical categories that differed in their two languages. Simultaneous bilinguals came from homes in which Spanish…

Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT).

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Haman, Ewa; Łuniewska, Magdalena; Hansen, Pernille; Simonsen, Hanne Gram; Chiat, Shula; Bjekić, Jovana; Blažienė, Agnė; Chyl, Katarzyna; Dabašinskienė, Ineta; Engel de Abreu, Pascale; Gagarina, Natalia; Gavarró, Anna; Håkansson, Gisela; Harel, Efrat; Holm, Elisabeth; Kapalková, Svetlana; Kunnari, Sari; Levorato, Chiara; Lindgren, Josefin; Mieszkowska, Karolina; Montes Salarich, Laia; Potgieter, Anneke; Ribu, Ingeborg; Ringblom, Natalia; Rinker, Tanja; Roch, Maja; Slančová, Daniela; Southwood, Frenette; Tedeschi, Roberta; Tuncer, Aylin Müge; Ünal-Logacev, Özlem; Vuksanović, Jasmina; Armon-Lotem, Sharon

2017-01-01

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.

The Understanding of English Emotion Words by Chinese and Japanese Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca

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Mosekjær, Stine

In this thesis I investigate the understanding and use of the English emotion words guilty, ashamed, and proud by Japanese and Chinese speakers of English as a lingua franca. By exploring empirical data I examine (1) how Japanese and Chinese participants understand and use the three stimulus words......, (2) if their understanding and use differ from that of native English speakers, and (3) if so, what these differences are. In the thesis 65 participants are investigated. The participants consist of 20 native Japanese and 23 native Chinese. For comparison, a group of 22 British native English....... The framework, which is based on the theoretical notion of the word as an image-idea pair as suggested by the theory of linguistic supertypes, consists of three tests each addressing three different aspects of the understanding and use of the stimulus words: the Free Association test (FA test), the Context...

Infant sensitivity to speaker and language in learning a second label.

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Bhagwat, Jui; Casasola, Marianella

2014-02-01

Two experiments examined when monolingual, English-learning 19-month-old infants learn a second object label. Two experimenters sat together. One labeled a novel object with one novel label, whereas the other labeled the same object with a different label in either the same or a different language. Infants were tested on their comprehension of each label immediately following its presentation. Infants mapped the first label at above chance levels, but they did so with the second label only when requested by the speaker who provided it (Experiment 1) or when the second experimenter labeled the object in a different language (Experiment 2). These results show that 19-month-olds learn second object labels but do not readily generalize them across speakers of the same language. The results highlight how speaker and language spoken guide infants' acceptance of second labels, supporting sociopragmatic views of word learning. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Interface strategies in monolingual and end-state L2 Spanish grammars are not that different.

Science.gov (United States)

Parafita Couto, María C; Mueller Gathercole, Virginia C; Stadthagen-González, Hans

2014-01-01

This study explores syntactic, pragmatic, and lexical influences on adherence to SV and VS orders in native and fluent L2 speakers of Spanish. A judgment task examined 20 native monolingual and 20 longstanding L2 bilingual Spanish speakers' acceptance of SV and VS structures. Seventy-six distinct verbs were tested under a combination of syntactic and pragmatic constraints. Our findings challenge the hypothesis that internal interfaces are acquired more easily than external interfaces (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; White, 2006). Additional findings are that (a) bilinguals' judgments are less firm overall than monolinguals' (i.e., monolinguals are more likely to give extreme "yes" or "no" judgments) and (b) individual verbs do not necessarily behave as predicted under standard definitions of unaccusatives and unergatives. Correlations of the patterns found in the data with verb frequencies suggest that usage-based accounts of grammatical knowledge could help provide insight into speakers' knowledge of these constructs.

Compiling a Monolingual Dictionary for Native Speakers

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Patrick Hanks

2011-10-01

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ABSTRACT: This article gives a survey of the main issues confronting the compilers of monolingual dictionaries in the age of the Internet. Among others, it discusses the relationship between a lexical database and a monolingual dictionary, the role of corpus evidence, historical principles in lexicography vs. synchronic principles, the instability of word meaning, the need for full vocabulary coverage, principles of definition writing, the role of dictionaries in society, and the need for dictionaries to give guidance on matters of disputed word usage. It concludes with some questions about the future of dictionary publishing.

OPSOMMING: Die samestelling van 'n eentalige woordeboek vir moedertaalsprekers. Hierdie artikel gee 'n oorsig van die hoofkwessies waarmee die samestellers van eentalige woordeboeke in die eeu van die Internet te kampe het. Dit bespreek onder andere die verhouding tussen 'n leksikale databasis en 'n eentalige woordeboek, die rol van korpusgetuienis, historiese beginsels vs sinchroniese beginsels in die leksikografie, die onstabiliteit van woordbetekenis, die noodsaak van 'n volledige woordeskatdekking, beginsels van die skryf van definisies, die rol van woordeboeke in die maatskappy, en die noodsaak vir woordeboeke om leiding te gee oor sake van betwiste woordgebruik. Dit sluit af met 'n aantal vrae oor die toekoms van die publikasie van woordeboeke.

Sleutelwoorde: EENTALIGE WOORDEBOEKE, LEKSIKALE DATABASIS, WOORDEBOEKSTRUKTUUR, WOORDBETEKENIS, BETEKENISVERANDERING, GEBRUIK, GEBRUIKSAANTEKENINGE, HISTORIESE BEGINSELS VAN DIE LEKSIKOGRAFIE, SINCHRONIESE BEGINSELS VAN DIE LEKSIKOGRAFIE, REGISTER, SLANG, STANDAARDENGELS, WOORDESKATDEKKING, KONSEKWENSIE VAN VERSAMELINGS, FRASEOLOGIE, SINTAGMATIESE PATRONE, PROBLEME VAN KOMPOSISIONALITEIT, LINGUISTIESE PRESKRIPTIVISME, LEKSIKALE GETUIENIS

Revisiting the role of language in spatial cognition: Categorical perception of spatial relations in English and Korean speakers.

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Holmes, Kevin J; Moty, Kelsey; Regier, Terry

2017-12-01

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/nonsupport distinction. Here, using a paradigm previously found to elicit cross-language differences in color discrimination, we provide evidence for a difference in sensitivity to support/nonsupport between native English speakers and native Korean speakers who were late English learners and tested in a context that privileged Korean. Whereas the former group showed categorical perception (CP) when discriminating spatial scenes capturing the support/nonsupport distinction, the latter did not. An additional group of native Korean speakers-relatively early English learners tested in an English-salient context-patterned with the native English speakers in showing CP for support/nonsupport. These findings suggest that obligatory marking of support/nonsupport in one's native language can affect nonlinguistic sensitivity to this distinction, contra earlier findings, but that such sensitivity may also depend on aspects of language background and the immediate linguistic context.

Verb Errors of Bilingual and Monolingual Basic Writers

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Griswold, Olga

2017-01-01

This study analyzed the grammatical control of verbs exercised by 145 monolingual English and Generation 1.5 bilingual developmental writers in narrative essays using quantitative and qualitative methods. Generation 1.5 students made more errors than their monolingual peers in each category investigated, albeit in only 2 categories was the…

Monolingual accounting dictionaries for EFL text production

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Sandro

2006-01-01

Monolingual accounting dictionaries are important for producing financial reporting texts in English in an international setting, because of the lack of specialised bilingual dictionaries. As the intended user groups have different factual and linguistic competences, they require specific types...... text production. The monolingual accounting dictionary needs to include information about UK, US and international accounting terms, their grammatical properties, their potential for being combined with other words in collocations, phrases and sentences in order to meet user requirements. Data items...... of information. By identifying and analysing the users' factual and linguistic competences, user needs, use-situations and the stages involved in producing accounting texts in English as a foreign language, lexicographers will have a sound basis for designing the optimal English accounting dictionary for EFL...

Monolingual Accounting Dictionaries for EFL Text Production

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Sandro

2009-01-01

Monolingual accounting dictionaries are important for producing financial reporting texts in English in an international setting, because of the lack of specialised bilingual dictionaries. As the intended user groups have different factual and linguistic competences, they require specific types...... text production. The monolingual accounting dictionary needs to include information about UK, US and international accounting terms, their grammatical properties, their potential for being combined with other words in collocations, phrases and sentences in order to meet user requirements. Data items...... of information. By identifying and analysing the users' factual and linguistic competences, user needs, use-situations and the stages involved in producing accounting texts in English as a foreign language, lexicographers will have a sound basis for designing the optimal English accounting dictionary for EFL...

Development and Validation of Extract the Base: An English Derivational Morphology Test for Third through Fifth Grade Monolingual Students and Spanish-Speaking English Language Learners

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Goodwin, Amanda P.; Huggins, A. Corinne; Carlo, Maria; Malabonga, Valerie; Kenyon, Dorry; Louguit, Mohammed; August, Diane

2012-01-01

This study describes the development and validation of the Extract the Base test (ETB), which assesses derivational morphological awareness. Scores on this test were validated for 580 monolingual students and 373 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in third through fifth grade. As part of the validation of the internal structure,…

The Monolingual Cataloging Monolith: A Barrier to Library Access for Readers of Spanish.

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Jensen, Bruce

2003-01-01

Asserts that despite growing awareness of frontline public service concerns in accommodating Spanish speakers, little care is invested in the technical processing side of the library's responsibility to Spanish speakers. Examines the usefulness and accessibility of online public access catalogs for monolingual Spanish readers, focusing on records…

Bilingualism, executive control, and age at diagnosis among people with early-stage Alzheimer's disease in Wales.

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Clare, Linda; Whitaker, Christopher J; Craik, Fergus I M; Bialystok, Ellen; Martyr, Anthony; Martin-Forbes, Pamela A; Bastable, Alexandra J M; Pye, Kirstie L; Quinn, Catherine; Thomas, Enlli M; Gathercole, Virginia C Mueller; Hindle, John V

2016-09-01

The observation of a bilingual advantage in executive control tasks involving inhibition and management of response conflict suggests that being bilingual might contribute to increased cognitive reserve. In support of this, recent evidence indicates that bilinguals develop Alzheimer's disease (AD) later than monolinguals, and may retain an advantage in performance on executive control tasks. We compared age at the time of receiving an AD diagnosis in bilingual Welsh/English speakers (n = 37) and monolingual English speakers (n = 49), and assessed the performance of bilinguals (n = 24) and monolinguals (n = 49) on a range of executive control tasks. There was a non-significant difference in age at the time of diagnosis, with bilinguals being on average 3 years older than monolinguals, but bilinguals were also significantly more cognitively impaired at the time of diagnosis. There were no significant differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in performance on executive function tests, but bilinguals appeared to show relative strengths in the domain of inhibition and response conflict. Bilingual Welsh/English speakers with AD do not show a clear advantage in executive function over monolingual English speakers, but may retain some benefits in inhibition and management of response conflict. There may be a delay in onset of AD in Welsh/English bilinguals, but if so, it is smaller than that found in some other clinical populations. In this Welsh sample, bilinguals with AD came to the attention of services later than monolinguals, and reasons for this pattern could be explored further. © 2014 The British Psychological Society.

The Halo surrounding native English speaker teachers in Indonesia

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Angga Kramadibrata

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The Native Speaker Fallacy, a commonly held belief that Native English Speaker Teachers (NESTs are inherently better than Non-NESTs, has long been questioned by ELT researchers. However, this belief still stands strong in the general public. This research looks to understand how much a teacher’s nativeness affects a student’s attitude towards them, as well as the underlying reasons for their attitudes. Sixty seven respondents in two groups were asked to watch an animated teaching video, after which they completed a questionnaire that used Likert-scales to assess comprehensibility, clarity of explanation, engagement, and preference. The videos for both groups were identical apart from the narrator; one spoke in British English, while the other, Indian English. In addition, they were also visually identified as Caucasian and Asian, respectively. The video was controlled for speed of delivery. The quantitative data were then triangulated using qualitative data collected through open questions in the questionnaire as well as from a semi-structured interview conducted with 10 respondents. The data show that there is a significant implicit preference for NEST teachers in the video, as well as in respondent’s actual classes. However, when asked explicitly, respondents didn’t rank nativeness as a very important quality in English teachers. This discrepancy between implicit and explicit attitudes might be due to a subconscious cognitive bias, namely the Halo Effect, in which humans tend to make unjustified presumptions about a person based on known but irrelevant information.

More Limitations to Monolingualism: Bilinguals Outperform Monolinguals in Implicit Word Learning.

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Escudero, Paola; Mulak, Karen E; Fu, Charlene S L; Singh, Leher

2016-01-01

To succeed at cross-situational word learning, learners must infer word-object mappings by attending to the statistical co-occurrences of novel objects and labels across multiple encounters. While past studies have investigated this as a learning mechanism for infants and monolingual adults, bilinguals' cross-situational word learning abilities have yet to be tested. Here, we compared monolinguals' and bilinguals' performance on a cross-situational word learning paradigm that featured phonologically distinct word pairs (e.g., BON-DEET) and phonologically similar word pairs that varied by a single consonant or vowel segment (e.g., BON-TON, DEET-DIT, respectively). Both groups learned the novel word-referent mappings, providing evidence that cross-situational word learning is a learning strategy also available to bilingual adults. Furthermore, bilinguals were overall more accurate than monolinguals. This supports that bilingualism fosters a wide range of cognitive advantages that may benefit implicit word learning. Additionally, response patterns to the different trial types revealed a relative difficulty for vowel minimal pairs than consonant minimal pairs, replicating the pattern found in monolinguals by Escudero et al. (2016) in a different English accent. Specifically, all participants failed to learn vowel contrasts differentiated by vowel height. We discuss evidence for this bilingual advantage as a language-specific or general advantage.

The English Monolingual Dictionary: Its Use among Second Year Students of University Technology of Malaysia, International Campus, Kuala Lumpur

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Manan, Amerrudin Abd.; Al-Zubaidi, Khairi Obaid

2011-01-01

This research was conducted to seek information on English Monolingual Dictionary (EMD) use among 2nd year students of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Campus, Kuala Lumpur (UTMKL). Specifically, the researchers wish to discover, firstly, the students' habit and attitude in EMD use; secondly, to discover their knowledge with regard to…

The comparative analysis of English and Lithuanian transport terms and some methods of developing effective science writing strategies by non-native speakers of English

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V. Marina

2009-09-01

Full Text Available The paper addresses the problem of developing more effective strategies and skills of writing scientific and technical texts by non-native speakers of English. The causes of poor writing are identified and general guidelines for developing effective science writing strategies are outlined. The analysis of difficulties faced by non-native speakers of English in writing research papers is made by examining transport terms and international words which are based on different nomination principles in English and Lithuanian. Case study of various names given to a small vehicle used for passenger transportation in many countries is provided, illustrating the alternative ways of naming the same object of reality in different languages. The analysis is based on the theory of linguistic relativity. Differences in the use of similar international terms in English and Lithuanian, which often cause errors and misunderstanding, are also demonstrated. The recommendations helping non-native speakers of English to avoid errors and improve skills of writing scientific and technical texts are given.

The relation between working memory and language comprehension in signers and speakers.

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Emmorey, Karen; Giezen, Marcel R; Petrich, Jennifer A F; Spurgeon, Erin; O'Grady Farnady, Lucinda

2017-06-01

This study investigated the relation between linguistic and spatial working memory (WM) resources and language comprehension for signed compared to spoken language. Sign languages are both linguistic and visual-spatial, and therefore provide a unique window on modality-specific versus modality-independent contributions of WM resources to language processing. Deaf users of American Sign Language (ASL), hearing monolingual English speakers, and hearing ASL-English bilinguals completed several spatial and linguistic serial recall tasks. Additionally, their comprehension of spatial and non-spatial information in ASL and spoken English narratives was assessed. Results from the linguistic serial recall tasks revealed that the often reported advantage for speakers on linguistic short-term memory tasks does not extend to complex WM tasks with a serial recall component. For English, linguistic WM predicted retention of non-spatial information, and both linguistic and spatial WM predicted retention of spatial information. For ASL, spatial WM predicted retention of spatial (but not non-spatial) information, and linguistic WM did not predict retention of either spatial or non-spatial information. Overall, our findings argue against strong assumptions of independent domain-specific subsystems for the storage and processing of linguistic and spatial information and furthermore suggest a less important role for serial encoding in signed than spoken language comprehension. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Online English-English Learner Dictionaries Boost Word Learning

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Nurmukhamedov, Ulugbek

2012-01-01

Learners of English might be familiar with several online monolingual dictionaries that are not necessarily the best choices for the English as Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) context. Although these monolingual online dictionaries contain definitions, pronunciation guides, and other elements normally found in general-use dictionaries, they are…

An Evaluation of Native-speaker Judgements of Foreign-accented British and American English

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Doel, W.Z. van den

2006-01-01

This study is the first ever to employ a large-scale Internet survey to investigate priorities in English pronunciation training. Well over 500 native speakers from throughout the English-speaking world, including North America, the British Isles, Australia and New Zealand, were asked to detect and

Native Speaker Norms and China English: From the Perspective of Learners and Teachers in China

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He, Deyuan; Zhang, Qunying

2010-01-01

This article explores the question of whether the norms based on native speakers of English should be kept in English teaching in an era when English has become World Englishes. This is an issue that has been keenly debated in recent years, not least in the pages of "TESOL Quarterly." However, "China English" in such debates…

–ED ALLOMORPHS AND LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE OF MALAY SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH: A DESCRIPTIVE AND CORRELATIONAL STUDY

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Maskanah Mohammad Lotfie

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Malay is a language from the Austronesian family and unlike the Indo-European-originated English, it does not generally have inflectional temporal markers. Investigating this from a cross-linguistics - influence perspective, differences between the languages could mean difficulties for Malay speakers to acquire features of English. The objectives of this study are to investigate Malay speakers’ pronunciation of the English language –ed allomorphs – [d], [t] and [ɪd]/[əd] – and the relationship between the morphophonological forms and two types of linguistic knowledge, one of which is implicit while the other is explicit. Data were collated from fifty participants who are social science undergraduates and English majors who speak English as a second language. Four instruments were used to gauge the respondents’ verbal use of –ed allomorphs as well as their implicit and explicit knowledge of the allomorphs. Results indicate that the students’ verbal usage of the target items either lacks approximation to Standard English pronunciation or is largely dropped altogether. Results also suggest a moderate relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge of the allomorphs and their verbal production by Malay speakers of English. The finding illuminates acquisition problem of English language speakers whose mother tongue does not share similar inflectional markers. Pedagogical solutions can help learners of the English language to approximate Standard English and in the long run, enhance effective communication and increase chances of employability.

El Discurso de Pasado en el Espanol de Houston: Imperfectividad Y Perfectividad Verbal en una Situacion de Contacto (Past Tense in the Discourse of Spanish Speakers in Houston: Use of Preterite and Imperfect in a Language Contact Situation).

Science.gov (United States)

Mrak, N. Ariana

1998-01-01

Investigates whether, due to the language contact situation in Houston in a group of a Mexican-American speakers, the imperfect forms of subordinate language (Spanish) are going through a process of reduction in favor of the forms of the superordinate language (English) when compared to the speech of Spanish monolinguals. (Author/VWL)

Use of Monolingual and Bilingual Dictionaries among Students of English

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Monika Kavalir

2010-12-01

Full Text Available The study of dictionary use in 32 firstyear students of English at the University of Ljubljana in the academic year 2009/2010 shows that students use a variety of dictionaries with a slight preponderance of monolingual dictionaries over bilingual ones. The bilingual dictionaries listed do not include some of the most recent and most comprehensive dictionaries while some of the most frequently used resources are quite modest sized. The students are already predominantly users of electronic and online dictionaries with a lower frequency of printed resources – a trend which is only likely to accelerate with the advent of new bilingual online dictionaries. These results have practical relevance for teachers in all sectors, from primary and secondary schools to universities, as they point towards a need for additional training in the use of bilingual dictionaries. The transition from printed to electronic and online resources can also be expected to induce changes in EFL methodology at all levels.

Cognitive Development in Bilingual and Monolingual Lower-Class Children.

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Myers, Barbara; Goldstein, David

1979-01-01

The cognitive development of lower-class English-speaking monolingual and English-Spanish speaking bilingual children in kindergarten, third, and sixth grades was compared by means of standard verbal and nonverbal measures. The verbal ability of bilingual children was assessed in both English and Spanish. Their scores in both languages were low.…

Limits on Monolingualism? A comparison of monolingual and bilingual infants’ abilities to integrate lexical tone in novel word learning.

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Leher eSingh

2016-05-01

Full Text Available To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the present study investigated English-Mandarin bilingual infants’ abilities to negotiate phonological conflict introduced by learning both a tone and a non-tone language. In a novel word learning task, bilingual children were tested on their sensitivity to tone variation in English and Mandarin contexts. Their abilities to interpret tone variation in a language-dependent manner were compared to those of monolingual Mandarin learning infants. Results demonstrated that at 12 to 13 months, bilingual infants demonstrated the ability to bind tone to word meanings in Mandarin, but to disregard tone variation when learning new words in English. In contrast, monolingual learners of Mandarin did not show evidence of integrating tones into word meanings in Mandarin at the same age even though they were learning a tone language. However, a tone discrimination paradigm confirmed that monolingual Mandarin learning infants were able to tell these tones apart at 12 to 13 months under a different set of conditions. Later, at 17 to 18 months, monolingual Mandarin learners were able to bind tone variation to word meanings when learning new words. Our findings are discussed in terms of cognitive adaptations associated with bilingualism that may ease the negotiation of phonological conflict and facilitate precocious uptake of certain properties of each language.

Native Speakers as Teachers in Turkey: Non-Native Pre-Service English Teachers' Reactions to a Nation-Wide Project

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Coskun, Abdullah

2013-01-01

Although English is now a recognized international language and the concept of native speaker is becoming more doubtful every day, the empowerment of the native speakers of English as language teaching professionals is still continuing (McKay, 2002), especially in Asian countries like China and Japan. One of the latest examples showing the…

A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study of Apology Strategies Employed by Iranian EFL Learners and English Native Speakers

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Elham Abedi

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The development of speech-act theory has provided the hearers with a better understanding of what speakers intend to perform in the act of communication. One type of speech act is apologizing. When an action or utterance has resulted in an offense, the offender needs to apologize. In the present study, an attempt was made to compare the apology strategies employed by Iranian EFL learners and those of English native speakers in order to find out the possible differences and similarities. To this end, a discourse completion test (DCT was given to 100 male and female Iranian EFL learners and English native speakers. The respondents were supposed to complete the DCTs based on nine situations, which varied in terms of power between the interlocutors and level of imposition. This study employed Cohen and Olshtain's (1981 model to classify various types of apology strategies. The obtained results revealed some similarities along with some (statistically insignificant differences between EFL learners and American English speakers in terms of their use of apology strategies. Furthermore, it was found that the illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs, such as request for forgiveness and an offer of apology were the strategies mostly employed by the Iranian EFL learners while taking on responsibility such as explicit self-blame, and expression of self-deficiency were found to be the strategies mostly used by English native speakers. In terms of gender, the male and female respondents more or less used the same apology strategies in response to the situations. The findings of the present research can be used by language teachers as well as sociolinguists. Keywords: Speech act theory, Speech act of apology, Apology strategies, Iranian EFL learners, English Native speakers, Gender

Interface strategies in monolingual and end-state L2 Spanish grammars are not that different

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Maria Carmen eParafita Couto

2015-01-01

Full Text Available This study explores syntactic, pragmatic, and lexical influences on adherence to SV and VS orders in native and fluent L2 speakers of Spanish. A judgment task examined 20 native monolingual and 20 longstanding L2 bilingual Spanish speakers’ acceptance of SV and VS structures. Seventy-six distinct verbs were tested under a combination of syntactic and pragmatic constraints. Our findings challenge the hypothesis that internal interfaces are acquired more easily than external interfaces (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; White 2006. Additional findings are that (a bilinguals' judgments are less firm overall than monolinguals' (i.e., monolinguals are more likely to give extreme yes or no judgments and (b individual verbs do not necessarily behave as predicted under standard definitions of unaccusatives and unergatives. Correlations of the patterns found in the data with verb frequencies suggest that usage-based accounts of grammatical knowledge could help provide insight into speakers' knowledge of these constructs.

Native Speakers in Linguistic Imperialism

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Phillipson, Robert

2016-01-01

An investigation of Native English Speaking Teachers’ performance in schemes in six Asian contexts, commissioned by the British Council, and undertaken by three British academics, is subjected to critical evaluation. Key issues for exploration are the issue of a monolingual approach to English le...... the economic and geopolitical agenda behind this English teaching business, there is clear evidence of linguistic imperialism in the functions of this global professional service. These activities serve to strengthen Western interests.......An investigation of Native English Speaking Teachers’ performance in schemes in six Asian contexts, commissioned by the British Council, and undertaken by three British academics, is subjected to critical evaluation. Key issues for exploration are the issue of a monolingual approach to English...... learning and teaching, and the inappropriate qualifications of those sent to education systems when they are unfamiliar with the learners’ languages, cultures, and pedagogical traditions. Whether the schemes involved constitute linguistic imperialismis analysed. Whereas the need for multilingual competence...

Comparing Narrative Microstructure between Bilingual Balochi-Persian and Monolingual Persian Preschoolers

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Maryam Arabpour

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Background: To date, with rapid increase of bilingual children, more attention about different patterns of the bilingual children narratives is needed. The aim of this study was to compare microstructure level of narratives generated by typical developing kindergarten children who were bilingual in Persian and Balochi with monolingual Persian speakers. Method: Thirty Persian-speaking monolingual and thirteen available bilingual children (aged 48 months old participated in this study. Children’s story telling was audio-recorded and analyzed using the Persian-NAP (Narrative Assessment Protocol guidelines. Results: All of the NAP indicators include of group structure, phrase structure, modifiers, noun and verbs didn’t show significant difference between monolingual and bilingual children (0.06≤p≤0.5. Conclusion: We didn’t find different performance in the five NAP indicators between bilingual and monolingual children. It may be suggested that the different patterns of creating phrases and sentences in two languages don’t affect the grammatical use of them in second language.

Differential Language Functioning of Monolinguals and Bilinguals on Positive-Negative Emotional Expression

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Kheirzadeh, Shiela; Hajiabed, Mohammadreza

2016-01-01

The present interdisciplinary research investigates the differential emotional expression between Persian monolinguals and Persian-English bilinguals. In other words, the article was an attempt to answer the questions whether bilinguals and monolinguals differ in the expression of positive and negative emotions elicited through sad and happy…

Planning Abilities in Bilingual and Monolingual Children: Role of Verbal Mediation.

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Gangopadhyay, Ishanti; McDonald, Margarethe; Ellis Weismer, Susan; Kaushanskaya, Margarita

2018-01-01

We examined the role of verbal mediation in planning performance of English-Spanish-speaking bilingual children and monolingual English-speaking children, between the ages of 9 and 12 years. To measure planning, children were administered the Tower of London (ToL) task. In a dual-task paradigm, children completed ToL problems under three conditions: with no secondary task (baseline), with articulatory suppression, and with non-verbal motor suppression. Analyses revealed generally shorter planning times for bilinguals than monolinguals but both groups performed similarly on number of moves and execution times. Additionally, bilingual children were more efficient at planning throughout the duration of the task while monolingual children showed significant gains with more practice. Children's planning times under articulatory suppression were significantly shorter than under motor suppression as well as the baseline condition, and there was no difference in planning times between monolingual and bilingual children during articulatory suppression. These results demonstrate that bilingualism influences performance on a complex EF measure like planning, and that these effects are not related to verbal mediation.

Compliment Responses of Thai and Punjabi Speakers of English in Thailand

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Sachathep, Sukchai

2014-01-01

This variational pragmatics (VP) study investigates the similarities and differences of compliment responses (CR) between Thai and Punjabi speakers of English in Thailand, focusing on the strategies used in CR when the microsociolinguistic variables are integrated into the Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The participants were 20 Thai and 20…

The Acquisition of Clitic Pronouns in the Spanish Interlanguage of Peruvian Quechua Speakers.

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Klee, Carol A.

1989-01-01

Analysis of four adult Quechua speakers' acquisition of clitic pronouns in Spanish revealed that educational attainment and amount of contact with monolingual Spanish speakers were positively related to native-like norms of competence in the use of object pronouns in Spanish. (CB)

THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH SYLLABLE TIMING BY NATIVE SPANISH SPEAKERS LEARNERS OF ENGLISH. AN EMPIRICAL STUDY'

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Francisco Gutierrez Diez

2001-06-01

Full Text Available In this article we present part of the results of an empirical research on contrastive rhythm (English-Spanish. Of the several points dealt with in such a research (syllable compression, foot timing, syllable timing and isochrony of rhythmic units, we refer here to syllable duration in English and Spanish as well as the leaming of syllable duration by a group of advanced leamers of English whose first language is Spanish. Regarding the issue of syllable timing, a striking result is the equal duration of unstressed syllables in both languages, which challenges an opposite view underlying a teaching practice common among Spanish teachers of English to Spanish learners of that language. As for the interlanguage of the group of Spanish leamers of English, we comment on the presence of an interference error represented by a stressed/unstressed durational ratio mid way between the ratios for Spanish and English; we have also detected a developmental error related to the tempo employed by the leamers in their syllable timing, which is slower than the tempo produced by native speakers of English.

Monolingual accounting dictionaries for EFL text production

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Sandro Nielsen

2006-10-01

Full Text Available Monolingual accounting dictionaries are important for producing financial reporting texts in English in an international setting, because of the lack of specialised bilingual dictionaries. As the intended user groups have different factual and linguistic competences, they require specific types of information. By identifying and analysing the users' factual and linguistic competences, user needs, use-situations and the stages involved in producing accounting texts in English as a foreign language, lexicographers will have a sound basis for designing the optimal English accounting dictionary for EFL text production. The monolingual accounting dictionary needs to include information about UK, US and international accounting terms, their grammatical properties, their potential for being combined with other words in collocations, phrases and sentences in order to meet user requirements. Data items that deal with these aspects are necessary for the international user group as they produce subject-field specific and register-specific texts in a foreign language, and the data items are relevant for the various stages in text production: draft writing, copyediting, stylistic editing and proofreading.

The relationship between brain reaction and English reading tests for non-native English speakers.

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Cheng, Pei-Wen; Tian, Yu-Jie; Kuo, Ting-Hua; Sun, Koun-Tem

2016-07-01

This research analyzed the brain activity of non-native English speakers while engaged in English reading tests. The brain wave event-related potentials (ERPs) of participants were used to analyze the difference between making correct and incorrect choices on English reading test items. Three English reading tests of differing levels were designed and 20 participants, 10 males and 10 females whose ages ranged from 20 to 24, voluntarily participated in the experiment. Experimental results were analyzed by performing independent t-tests on the ERPs of participants for gender, difficulty level, and correct versus wrong options. Participants who chose incorrect options elicited a larger N600, verifying results found in the literature. Another interesting result was found: For incorrectly answered items, different areas of brain showing a significant difference in ERPs between the chosen and non-chosen options corresponded to gender differences; for males, this area was located in the right hemisphere whereas for females, it was located in the left. Experimental results imply that non-native English speaking males and females employ different areas of the brain to comprehend the meaning of difficult items. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

L2 Romanian Influence in the Acquisition of the English Passive by L1 Speakers of Hungarian

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Tankó Enikő

2015-03-01

Full Text Available The main question to be investigated is to what extent native speakers of Hungarian understand and acquire the English passive voice, as there is no generalized syntactic passive construction in Hungarian. As we will show, native speakers of Hungarian tend to use the predicative verbal adverbial construction when translating English passive sentences, as this construction is the closest syntactic equivalent of the English passive voice. Another question to be investigated is whether L2 Romanian works as a facilitating factor in the process of acquiring the L3 English passive voice. If all our subjects, Hungarian students living in Romania, were Hungarian-Romanian bilinguals, it would be obvious that knowledge of Romanian helps them in acquiring the English passive. However, as it will be shown, the bilingualism hypothesis is disconfirmed. Still, passive knowledge of Romanian influences to some extent the acquisition of the English passive voice.

Switches to English during French Service Encounters: Relationships with L2 French Speakers' Willingness to Communicate and Motivation

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McNaughton, Stephanie; McDonough, Kim

2015-01-01

This exploratory study investigated second language (L2) French speakers' service encounters in the multilingual setting of Montreal, specifically whether switches to English during French service encounters were related to L2 speakers' willingness to communicate or motivation. Over a two-week period, 17 French L2 speakers in Montreal submitted…

Bilinguals Have Different Hemispheric Lateralization in Visual Word Processing from Monolinguals

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Sze-Man Lam

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Previous bilingual studies showed reduced hemispheric asymmetry in visual tasks such as face perception in bilinguals compared with monolinguals, suggesting experience in reading one or two languages could be a modulating factor. Here we examined whether difference in hemispheric asymmetry in visual tasks can also be observed in bilinguals who have different language backgrounds. We compared the behavior of three language groups in a tachistoscopic English word sequential matching task: English monolinguals (or alphabetic monolinguals, A-Ms, bilinguals with an alphabetic-L1 and English-L2 (alphabetic-alphabetic bilinguals, AA-Bs, and bilinguals with Chinese-L1 and English-L2 (logographic-alphabetic bilinguals, LA-Bs. The results showed that AA-Bs had a stronger right visual field/ left hemispheric (LH advantage than A-Ms and LA-Bs, suggesting that different language learning experiences can influence how visual words are processed in the brain. In addition, we showed that this effect could be accounted for by a computational model that implements a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception (i.e., the Double Filtering by Frequency theory; Ivry & Robertson, 1998; the modeling data suggested that this difference may be due to both the difference in participants' vocabulary size and the difference in word-to-sound mapping between alphabetic and logographic languages.

Advanced Cantonese ESL Learners' Use of a Monolingual ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

monolingual dictionaries by Hong Kong advanced Cantonese ESL learners in the production of .... (COBUILD6), and one using Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 5th ...... A Contrastive Study of Pocket Electronic Diction- aries and ...

Teaching English to speakers of other languages an introduction

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Nunan, David

2015-01-01

David Nunan's dynamic learner-centered teaching style has informed and inspired countless TESOL educators around the world. In this fresh, straightforward introduction to teaching English to speakers of other languages he presents teaching techniques and procedures along with the underlying theory and principles. Complex theories and research studies are explained in a clear and comprehensible, yet non-trivial, manner without trivializing them. Practical examples of how to develop teaching materials and tasks from sound principles provide rich illustrations of theoretical constructs.

Physiological Indices of Bilingualism: Oral–Motor Coordination and Speech Rate in Bengali–English Speakers

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Chakraborty, Rahul; Goffman, Lisa; Smith, Anne

2009-01-01

Purpose To examine how age of immersion and proficiency in a 2nd language influence speech movement variability and speaking rate in both a 1st language and a 2nd language. Method A group of 21 Bengali–English bilingual speakers participated. Lip and jaw movements were recorded. For all 21 speakers, lip movement variability was assessed based on productions of Bengali (L1; 1st language) and English (L2; 2nd language) sentences. For analyses related to the influence of L2 proficiency on speech production processes, participants were sorted into low- (n = 7) and high-proficiency (n = 7) groups. Lip movement variability and speech rate were evaluated for both of these groups across L1 and L2 sentences. Results Surprisingly, adult bilingual speakers produced equally consistent speech movement patterns in their production of L1 and L2. When groups were sorted according to proficiency, highly proficient speakers were marginally more variable in their L1. In addition, there were some phoneme-specific effects, most markedly that segments not shared by both languages were treated differently in production. Consistent with previous studies, movement durations were longer for less proficient speakers in both L1 and L2. Interpretation In contrast to those of child learners, the speech motor systems of adult L2 speakers show a high degree of consistency. Such lack of variability presumably contributes to protracted difficulties with acquiring nativelike pronunciation in L2. The proficiency results suggest bidirectional interactions across L1 and L2, which is consistent with hypotheses regarding interference and the sharing of phonological space. A slower speech rate in less proficient speakers implies that there are increased task demands on speech production processes. PMID:18367680

The Role of Speaker Identification in Korean University Students' Attitudes towards Five Varieties of English

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Yook, Cheongmin; Lindemann, Stephanie

2013-01-01

This study investigates how the attitudes of 60 Korean university students towards five varieties of English are affected by the identification of the speaker's nationality and ethnicity. The study employed both a verbal guise technique and questions eliciting overt beliefs and preferences related to learning English. While the majority of the…

Constraints on Tone Sensitivity in Novel Word Learning by Monolingual and Bilingual Infants: Tone Properties Are More Influential than Tone Familiarity

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Burnham, Denis; Singh, Leher; Mattock, Karen; Woo, Pei J.; Kalashnikova, Marina

2018-01-01

This study compared tone sensitivity in monolingual and bilingual infants in a novel word learning task. Tone language learning infants (Experiment 1, Mandarin monolingual; Experiment 2, Mandarin-English bilingual) were tested with Mandarin (native) or Thai (non-native) lexical tone pairs which contrasted static vs. dynamic (high vs. rising) tones or dynamic vs. dynamic (rising vs. falling) tones. Non-tone language, English-learning infants (Experiment 3) were tested on English intonational contrasts or the Mandarin or Thai tone contrasts. Monolingual Mandarin language infants were able to bind tones to novel words for the Mandarin High-Rising contrast, but not for the Mandarin Rising-Falling contrast; and they were insensitive to both the High-Rising and the Rising-Falling tone contrasts in Thai. Bilingual English-Mandarin infants were similar to the Mandarin monolinguals in that they were sensitive to the Mandarin High-Rising contrast and not to the Mandarin Rising-Falling contrast. However, unlike the Mandarin monolinguals, they were also sensitive to the High Rising contrast in Thai. Monolingual English learning infants were insensitive to all three types of contrasts (Mandarin, Thai, English), although they did respond differentially to tone-bearing vs. intonation-marked words. Findings suggest that infants' sensitivity to tones in word learning contexts depends heavily on tone properties, and that this influence is, in some cases, stronger than effects of language familiarity. Moreover, bilingual infants demonstrated greater phonological flexibility in tone interpretation. PMID:29354077

Accent, Intelligibility, and the Role of the Listener: Perceptions of English-Accented German by Native German Speakers

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Hayes-Harb, Rachel; Watzinger-Tharp, Johanna

2012-01-01

We explore the relationship between accentedness and intelligibility, and investigate how listeners' beliefs about nonnative speech interact with their accentedness and intelligibility judgments. Native German speakers and native English learners of German produced German sentences, which were presented to 12 native German speakers in accentedness…

Effects of primary and secondary morphological family size in monolingual and bilingual word processing

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Mulder, K.; Dijkstra, A.F.J.; Schreuder, R.; Baayen, Harald

2014-01-01

This study investigated primary and secondary morphological family size effects in monolingual and bilingual processing, combining experimentation with computational modeling. Family size effects were investigated in an English lexical decision task for Dutch-English bilinguals and English

Predictors of Processing-Based Task Performance in Bilingual and Monolingual Children

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Buac, Milijana; Gross, Megan; Kaushanskaya, Margarita

2016-01-01

In the present study we examined performance of bilingual Spanish-English-speaking and monolingual English-speaking school-age children on a range of processing-based measures within the framework of Baddeley’s working memory model. The processing-based measures included measures of short-term memory, measures of working memory, and a novel word-learning task. Results revealed that monolinguals outperformed bilinguals on the short-term memory tasks but not the working memory and novel word-learning tasks. Further, children’s vocabulary skills and socioeconomic status (SES) were more predictive of processing-based task performance in the bilingual group than the monolingual group. Together, these findings indicate that processing-based tasks that engage verbal working memory rather than short-term memory may be better-suited for diagnostic purposes with bilingual children. However, even verbal working memory measures are sensitive to bilingual children’s language-specific knowledge and demographic characteristics, and therefore may have limited clinical utility. PMID:27179914

Trends of development of monolingualism and bilingualism in the educational policy of the United States

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Bakhov, Ivan

2017-01-01

The article analyzes the monolingualism policy opposed to the policy of bilingualism inthe language policy of the United States. The author considers the historical background,issues and implementation mechanisms of the monolingualism policy in the multiethnic state,the result of which is directed against cultural diversity and immigrant minority languages.The article defines sources of English monolingualism ideology, racial hostility of majoritytoward minority, ethnic conflict between the m...

An Annotated Bibliography on Second Language Acquisition

Science.gov (United States)

1994-06-01

In a study of third graders (Spanish- English), students were interviewed by a monolingual English- speaker and an English-dominant Hispanic...phonological measures with the monolingual interviewer. it was interpreted that there was greater accuracy with the Hispanic interviewer, and greater risk... dictionary containing all the difficult words plus distractors were provided, 3. a short lesson on how to inference was given, and 9 4. no cue was

Credibility of native and non-native speakers of English revisited: Do non-native listeners feel the same?

OpenAIRE

Hanzlíková, Dagmar; Skarnitzl, Radek

2017-01-01

This study reports on research stimulated by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) who showed that native listeners find statements delivered by foreign-accented speakers to be less true than those read by native speakers. Our objective was to replicate the study with non-native listeners to see whether this effect is also relevant in international communication contexts. The same set of statements from the original study was recorded by 6 native and 6 nonnative speakers of English. 121 non-native listen...

Recovery from First-Language Transfer: The Second Language Acquisition of English Double Objects by Korean Speakers

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Oh, Eunjeong

2010-01-01

Previous studies on second language (L2) acquisition of English dative alternation by Korean speakers (Oh and Zubizarreta, 2003, 2006a, 2006b) have shown that the acquisition of English benefactive double object (DO) (e.g. "John baked Mary a cake") lags behind that of its counterpart goal double object (e.g. "John sent Mary the letter"). This…

Advanced Cantonese ESL Learners' Use of a Monolingual ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This article reports on the results of a research study which investigated the use of monolingual dictionaries by Hong Kong advanced Cantonese ESL learners in the production of target language sentences. Thirty-one English majors participated in a sentence completion task and a sentence construction task with and ...

English Language Proficiency and Early School Attainment Among Children Learning English as an Additional Language.

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Whiteside, Katie E; Gooch, Debbie; Norbury, Courtenay F

2017-05-01

Children learning English as an additional language (EAL) often experience lower academic attainment than monolingual peers. In this study, teachers provided ratings of English language proficiency and social, emotional, and behavioral functioning for 782 children with EAL and 6,485 monolingual children in reception year (ages 4-5). Academic attainment was assessed in reception and Year 2 (ages 6-7). Relative to monolingual peers with comparable English language proficiency, children with EAL displayed fewer social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties in reception, were equally likely to meet curriculum targets in reception, and were more likely to meet targets in Year 2. Academic attainment and social, emotional, and behavioral functioning in children with EAL are associated with English language proficiency at school entry. © 2016 The Authors. Child Development published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development.

Quantitative and qualitative differences in the lexical knowledge of monolingual and bilingual children on the LITMUS-CLT task.

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Altman, Carmit; Goldstein, Tamara; Armon-Lotem, Sharon

2017-01-01

While bilingual children follow the same milestones of language acquisition as monolingual children do in learning the syntactic patterns of their second language (L2), their vocabulary size in L2 often lags behind compared to monolinguals. The present study explores the comprehension and production of nouns and verbs in Hebrew, by two groups of 5- to 6-year olds with typical language development: monolingual Hebrew speakers (N = 26), and Russian-Hebrew bilinguals (N = 27). Analyses not only show quantitative gaps between comprehension and production and between nouns and verbs, with a bilingual effect in both, but also a qualitative difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in their production errors: monolinguals' errors reveal knowledge of the language rules despite temporary access difficulties, while bilinguals' errors reflect gaps in their knowledge of Hebrew (L2). The nature of Hebrew as a Semitic language allows one to explore this qualitative difference in the semantic and morphological level.

Persian Native Speakers Reading Persian and English Texts: Their Strategic Behavior to Overcome Syntactic and Semantic Problems

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Alimorad, Zahra

2015-01-01

This study aimed to discover semantic and syntactic problems Persian native speakers might have while reading English and Persian texts and different strategies they use to overcome those problems. To this end, a convenient sample of 40 intermediate students studying English Literature at Shiraz University was selected. Twenty of them were asked…

Children’s Third-Party Understanding of Communicative Interactions in a Foreign Language

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Narges Afshordi

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Two studies explored young children’s understanding of the role of shared language in communication by investigating how monolingual English-speaking children interact with an English speaker, a Spanish speaker, and a bilingual experimenter who spoke both English and Spanish. When the bilingual experimenter spoke in Spanish or English to request objects, four-year-old children, but not three-year-olds, used her language choice to determine whom she addressed (e.g. requests in Spanish were directed to the Spanish speaker. Importantly, children used this cue – language choice – only in a communicative context. The findings suggest that by four years, monolingual children recognize that speaking the same language enables successful communication, even when that language is unfamiliar to them. Three-year-old children’s failure to make this distinction suggests that this capacity likely undergoes significant development in early childhood, although other capacities might also be at play.

Orthography-Induced Length Contrasts in the Second Language Phonological Systems of L2 Speakers of English: Evidence from Minimal Pairs.

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Bassetti, Bene; Sokolović-Perović, Mirjana; Mairano, Paolo; Cerni, Tania

2018-06-01

Research shows that the orthographic forms ("spellings") of second language (L2) words affect speech production in L2 speakers. This study investigated whether English orthographic forms lead L2 speakers to produce English homophonic word pairs as phonological minimal pairs. Targets were 33 orthographic minimal pairs, that is to say homophonic words that would be pronounced as phonological minimal pairs if orthography affects pronunciation. Word pairs contained the same target sound spelled with one letter or two, such as the /n/ in finish and Finnish (both /'fɪnɪʃ/ in Standard British English). To test for effects of length and type of L2 exposure, we compared Italian instructed learners of English, Italian-English late bilinguals with lengthy naturalistic exposure, and English natives. A reading-aloud task revealed that Italian speakers of English L2 produce two English homophonic words as a minimal pair distinguished by different consonant or vowel length, for instance producing the target /'fɪnɪʃ/ with a short [n] or a long [nː] to reflect the number of consonant letters in the spelling of the words finish and Finnish. Similar effects were found on the pronunciation of vowels, for instance in the orthographic pair scene-seen (both /siːn/). Naturalistic exposure did not reduce orthographic effects, as effects were found both in learners and in late bilinguals living in an English-speaking environment. It appears that the orthographic form of L2 words can result in the establishment of a phonological contrast that does not exist in the target language. Results have implications for models of L2 phonological development.

Mother-Tongue Diversity in the Foreign Language Classroom: Perspectives on the Experiences of Non-Native Speakers of English Studying Foreign Languages in an English-Medium University

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Bruen, Jennifer; Kelly, Niamh

2017-01-01

This paper considers the position of university language students whose mother tongue is other than the medium of instruction. Specifically, it investigates the attitudes and experiences of non-native English speakers studying either German or Japanese as foreign languages at an English-medium university. The findings indicate that the non-native…

Multilingualism in the English-Language Classroom: Pedagogical Considerations

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Cummins, Jim

2009-01-01

This article addresses the issue of whether TESOL should clearly articulate a set of pedagogical principles that challenge the assumption that English language teaching (ELT) should be conducted monolingually through English. This "monolingual principle" emphasizes instructional use of the target language (TL) to the exclusion of students' home…

Post-Monolingual Research Methodology: Multilingual Researchers Democratizing Theorizing and Doctoral Education

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Michael Singh

2017-02-01

dissemination of theoretical knowledge and the capabilities for theorizing. Often, from an English-only monolingual mindset, difference and divergence are seen as a recipe for deficits and dissonance. However, this paper challenges such mistaken beliefs by showing that multilingual HDRs can deepen and extend their capabilities for theorizing by using their own linguistic repertoires. Post-monolingual research methodology is to be of enormous benefit to multilingual researchers and scholars engaged in intellectual labor in predominantly English-only monolingual universities.

Tracking Multiple Statistics: Simultaneous Learning of Object Names and Categories in English and Mandarin Speakers.

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Chen, Chi-Hsin; Gershkoff-Stowe, Lisa; Wu, Chih-Yi; Cheung, Hintat; Yu, Chen

2017-08-01

Two experiments were conducted to examine adult learners' ability to extract multiple statistics in simultaneously presented visual and auditory input. Experiment 1 used a cross-situational learning paradigm to test whether English speakers were able to use co-occurrences to learn word-to-object mappings and concurrently form object categories based on the commonalities across training stimuli. Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment and further examined whether speakers of Mandarin, a language in which final syllables of object names are more predictive of category membership than English, were able to learn words and form object categories when trained with the same type of structures. The results indicate that both groups of learners successfully extracted multiple levels of co-occurrence and used them to learn words and object categories simultaneously. However, marked individual differences in performance were also found, suggesting possible interference and competition in processing the two concurrent streams of regularities. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Phonological Awareness and Vocabulary Performance of Monolingual and Bilingual Preschool Children with Hearing Loss

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Lund, Emily; Werfel, Krystal L.; Schuele, C. Melanie

2015-01-01

This pilot study compared the phonological awareness skills and vocabulary performance of English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children with and without hearing loss. Preschool children with varying degrees of hearing loss (n = 18) and preschool children without hearing loss (n = 19) completed measures of phonological awareness and…

Planning Abilities in Bilingual and Monolingual Children: Role of Verbal Mediation

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Gangopadhyay, Ishanti; McDonald, Margarethe; Ellis Weismer, Susan; Kaushanskaya, Margarita

2018-01-01

We examined the role of verbal mediation in planning performance of English–Spanish-speaking bilingual children and monolingual English-speaking children, between the ages of 9 and 12 years. To measure planning, children were administered the Tower of London (ToL) task. In a dual-task paradigm, children completed ToL problems under three conditions: with no secondary task (baseline), with articulatory suppression, and with non-verbal motor suppression. Analyses revealed generally shorter planning times for bilinguals than monolinguals but both groups performed similarly on number of moves and execution times. Additionally, bilingual children were more efficient at planning throughout the duration of the task while monolingual children showed significant gains with more practice. Children’s planning times under articulatory suppression were significantly shorter than under motor suppression as well as the baseline condition, and there was no difference in planning times between monolingual and bilingual children during articulatory suppression. These results demonstrate that bilingualism influences performance on a complex EF measure like planning, and that these effects are not related to verbal mediation. PMID:29593620

The timing and magnitude of Stroop interference and facilitation in monolinguals and bilinguals.

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Coderre, Emily L; VAN Heuven, Walter J B; Conklin, Kathy

2013-04-01

Executive control abilities and lexical access speed in Stroop performance were investigated in English monolinguals and two groups of bilinguals (English-Chinese and Chinese-English) in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Predictions were based on a bilingual cognitive advantage hypothesis, implicating cognitive control ability as the critical factor determining Stroop interference; and two bilingual lexical disadvantage hypotheses, focusing on lexical access speed. Importantly, each hypothesis predicts different response patterns in a Stroop task manipulating stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). There was evidence for a bilingual cognitive advantage, although this effect was sensitive to a number of variables including proficiency, language immersion, and script. In lexical access speed, no differences occurred between monolinguals and bilinguals in their native languages, but there was evidence for a delay in L2 processing speed relative to the L1. Overall, the data highlight the multitude of factors affecting executive control and lexical access speed in bilinguals.

Do We All Apologize the Same?--An Empirical Study on the Act of Apologizing by Spanish Speakers Learning English.

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Mir, Montserrat

1992-01-01

A study examined the production of English apology strategies by Spanish speakers learning English, by analyzing the remedial move in native and non-native social interactions. To restore harmony when an offensive act has been committed, remedial exchanges are performed according to the rules of speaking and the social norms of the speech…

Linguistic and Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism with Regional Minority Languages: A Study of Sardinian–Italian Adult Speakers

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Garraffa, Maria; Obregon, Mateo; Sorace, Antonella

2017-01-01

This study explores the effects of bilingualism in Sardinian as a regional minority language on the linguistic competence in Italian as the dominant language and on non-linguistic cognitive abilities. Sardinian/Italian adult speakers and monolingual Italian speakers living in the same geographical area of Sardinia were compared in two kinds of tasks: (a) verbal and non-verbal cognitive tasks targeting working memory and attentional control and (b) tasks of linguistic abilities in Italian focused on the comprehension of sentences differing in grammatical complexity. Although no difference was found between bilinguals and monolinguals in the cognitive control of attention, bilinguals performed better on working memory tasks. Bilinguals with lower formal education were found to be faster at comprehension of one type of complex sentence (center embedded object relative clauses). In contrast, bilinguals and monolinguals with higher education showed comparable slower processing of complex sentences. These results show that the effects of bilingualism are modulated by type of language experience and education background: positive effects of active bilingualism on the dominant language are visible in bilinguals with lower education, whereas the effects of higher literacy in Italian obliterate those of active bilingualism in bilinguals and monolinguals with higher education. PMID:29163288

A Comparative Study on the Use of Compliment Response Strategies by Persian and English Native Speakers

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Shabani, Mansour; Zeinali, Maryam

2015-01-01

The significance of pragmatic knowledge and politeness strategies has recently been emphasized in language learning and teaching. Most communication failures originate in the lack of pragmatic awareness which is evident among EFL learners while communicating with English native speakers. The present study aimed at investigating compliment response…

Attitudes of Jordanian University Students towards Using Online Chat Discourse with Native Speakers of English for Improving Their Language Proficiency

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Mahfouz, Safi M.; Ihmeideh, Fathi M.

2009-01-01

This study aims to investigate Jordanian university students' attitudes towards using video and text chat discourse with anonymous native speakers of English to improve their English proficiency. To achieve this aim, a questionnaire was designed. The study sample consisted of 320 university students enrolled in two Jordanian universities. Results…

The Use of a Monolingual Dictionary for Meaning Determination by Advanced Cantonese ESL Learners in Hong Kong

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Chan, Alice Y. W.

2012-01-01

This article reports on the results of a study which investigated advanced Cantonese English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' use of a monolingual dictionary for determining the meanings of familiar English words used in less familiar contexts. Thirty-two university English majors in Hong Kong participated in a dictionary consultation task,…

Cross-Cultural Transfer in Gesture Frequency in Chinese-English Bilinguals

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So, Wing Chee

2010-01-01

The purpose of this paper is to examine cross-cultural differences in gesture frequency and the extent to which exposure to two cultures would affect the gesture frequency of bilinguals when speaking in both languages. The Chinese-speaking monolinguals from China, English-speaking monolinguals from America, and Chinese-English bilinguals from…

Internal request modification by first and second language speakers ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This study focuses on the question of whether Luganda English speakers would negatively transfer into their English speech the use of syntactic and lexical down graders resulting in pragmatic failure. Data were collected from Luganda and Luganda English speakers by means of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) ...

Components and context: exploring sources of reading difficulties for language minority learners and native English speakers in urban schools.

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Kieffer, Michael J; Vukovic, Rose K

2012-01-01

Drawing on the cognitive and ecological domains within the componential model of reading, this longitudinal study explores heterogeneity in the sources of reading difficulties for language minority learners and native English speakers in urban schools. Students (N = 150) were followed from first through third grade and assessed annually on standardized English language and reading measures. Structural equation modeling was used to investigate the relative contributions of code-related and linguistic comprehension skills in first and second grade to third grade reading comprehension. Linguistic comprehension and the interaction between linguistic comprehension and code-related skills each explained substantial variation in reading comprehension. Among students with low reading comprehension, more than 80% demonstrated weaknesses in linguistic comprehension alone, whereas approximately 15% demonstrated weaknesses in both linguistic comprehension and code-related skills. Results were remarkably similar for the language minority learners and native English speakers, suggesting the importance of their shared socioeconomic backgrounds and schooling contexts.

Who can communicate with whom? Language experience affects infants' evaluation of others as monolingual or multilingual.

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Pitts, Casey E; Onishi, Kristine H; Vouloumanos, Athena

2015-01-01

Adults recognize that people can understand more than one language. However, it is unclear whether infants assume other people understand one or multiple languages. We examined whether monolingual and bilingual 20-month-olds expect an unfamiliar person to understand one or more than one language. Two speakers told a listener the location of a hidden object using either the same or two different languages. When different languages were spoken, monolinguals looked longer when the listener searched correctly, bilinguals did not; when the same language was spoken, both groups looked longer for incorrect searches. Infants rely on their prior language experience when evaluating the language abilities of a novel individual. Monolingual infants assume others can understand only one language, although not necessarily the infants' own; bilinguals do not. Infants' assumptions about which community of conventions people belong to may allow them to recognize effective communicative partners and thus opportunities to acquire language, knowledge, and culture. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Sensitivity to phonological context in L2 spelling: evidence from Russian ESL speakers

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dich, Nadya

2010-01-01

The study attempts to investigate factors underlying the development of spellers’ sensitivity to phonological context in English. Native English speakers and Russian speakers of English as a second language (ESL) were tested on their ability to use information about the coda to predict the spelling...... on the information about the coda when spelling vowels in nonwords. In both native and non-native speakers, context sensitivity was predicted by English word spelling; in Russian ESL speakers this relationship was mediated by English proficiency. L1 spelling proficiency did not facilitate L2 context sensitivity...

The Relationship between Receptive and Expressive Subskills of Academic L2 Proficiency in Nonnative Speakers of English: A Multigroup Approach

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Pae, Hye K.; Greenberg, Daphne

2014-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive language skills characterized by the performance of nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English in the academic context. Test scores of 585 adult NNSs were selected from Form 2 of the Pearson Test of English Academic's field-test database. A correlated…

Students' Understanding of Dictionary Entries: A Study with Respect to Four Learners' Dictionaries.

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Jana, Abhra; Amritavalli, Vijaya; Amritavalli, R.

2003-01-01

Investigates the effects of definitional information in the form of dictionary entries, on second language learners' vocabulary learning in an instructed setting. Indian students (Native Hindi speakers) of English received monolingual English dictionary entries of five previously unknown words from four different learner's dictionaries. Results…

Vowel reduction patterns of early Spanish- English bilinguals receiving continuous L1 and L2 input

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Byers Emily

2017-06-01

Full Text Available This study investigates the production of three morphophonetic variations of schwa in American English: the plural allomorph {-s} as in watches, the possessive allomorph {-s} as in Sasha’s, and word-finally as in Russia. The production of these three allomorphs were examined in Miami’s English monolingual and early Spanish-English bilingual populations. Our purpose was to determine how native-like early Spanish-English bilinguals′ spectral qualities and reduced vowel durations were compared to Miami English monolinguals during a reading task. Results indicate that early bilinguals′ reduced vowels followed the same overall pattern as monolinguals, but had different acoustic properties.

Faithful Imitator, Legitimate Speaker, Playful Creator and Dialogical Communicator: Shift in English Learners' Identity Prototypes

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Gao, Yihong

2014-01-01

This paper attempts to conceptualize identity prototypes regarding model L2 learners/users of English over the past 50 years, as embedded in research discourses. For a long time, the ideal learner was a "faithful imitator" whose L2 use and cultural conduct were strictly modeled on the native speaker (NS). With postcolonial changes around…

Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children.

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Carlson, Stephanie M; Meltzoff, Andrew N

2008-03-01

Advanced inhibitory control skills have been found in bilingual speakers as compared to monolingual controls (Bialystok, 1999). We examined whether this effect is generalized to an unstudied language group (Spanish-English bilingual) and multiple measures of executive function by administering a battery of tasks to 50 kindergarten children drawn from three language groups: native bilinguals, monolinguals (English), and English speakers enrolled in second-language immersion kindergarten. Despite having significantly lower verbal scores and parent education/income level, Spanish-English bilingual children's raw scores did not differ from their peers. After statistically controlling for these factors and age, native bilingual children performed significantly better on the executive function battery than both other groups. Importantly, the relative advantage was significant for tasks that appear to call for managing conflicting attentional demands (Conflict tasks); there was no advantage on impulse-control (Delay tasks). These results advance our understanding of both the generalizability and specificity of the compensatory effects of bilingual experience for children's cognitive development.

Recalling Arabic and English Prefixed and Suffixed Verbs among Arabic-English Bilingual Speakers: An Experimental Study in Relation to Working Memory

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Jiyar Othman

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The current study focuses on how prefixes and suffixes in Arabic and English impact one’s working memory capacity to recall verbs.  Further, it deals with whether or not Arabic-English bilingual speakers recall Arabic and English prefixed and suffixed verbs differently. To investigate this, the study was conducted in the form of two experiments on a group of 10 graduate students. The first experiment was on Arabic prefixed and suffixed verbs, whereas the second experiment was conducted similarly on English. The study concluded that suffixed Arabic verbs were recalled more than the prefixed ones, whereas in English the result was contrary where the participants could recall prefixed verbs more than the suffixed ones. This shows that L2 (Second Language does not differ from L1 (First Language in the effort exerted to recall words. Rather, the findings may suggest that it is easier to recall words in the second language, which might be due to the intensive instruction received in the second language. The study also discovered that several other factors played important roles in making the participants recall the items such as word-length effect, frequency and recency of the words.

Perspectives on the "Silent Period" for Emergent Bilinguals in England

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Bligh, Caroline; Drury, Rose

2015-01-01

This article draws together the research findings from two ethnographic studies as a means to problematize the "silent period" as experienced by young bilingual learners in two English speaking early-years settings in England. Most teachers and senior early-years practitioners in England are monolingual English speakers. The children…

Acoustic cues to perception of word stress by English, Mandarin, and Russian speakers.

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Chrabaszcz, Anna; Winn, Matthew; Lin, Candise Y; Idsardi, William J

2014-08-01

This study investigated how listeners' native language affects their weighting of acoustic cues (such as vowel quality, pitch, duration, and intensity) in the perception of contrastive word stress. Native speakers (N = 45) of typologically diverse languages (English, Russian, and Mandarin) performed a stress identification task on nonce disyllabic words with fully crossed combinations of each of the 4 cues in both syllables. The results revealed that although the vowel quality cue was the strongest cue for all groups of listeners, pitch was the second strongest cue for the English and the Mandarin listeners but was virtually disregarded by the Russian listeners. Duration and intensity cues were used by the Russian listeners to a significantly greater extent compared with the English and Mandarin participants. Compared with when cues were noncontrastive across syllables, cues were stronger when they were in the iambic contour than when they were in the trochaic contour. Although both English and Russian are stress languages and Mandarin is a tonal language, stress perception performance of the Mandarin listeners but not of the Russian listeners is more similar to that of the native English listeners, both in terms of weighting of the acoustic cues and the cues' relative strength in different word positions. The findings suggest that tuning of second-language prosodic perceptions is not entirely predictable by prosodic similarities across languages.

Articulation Skills in Spanish-Speaking Children.

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Linares, Thomas A.

The purpose of the research was to develop an articulation test for Spanish-speakers and to field-test the instrument in both a monolingual Spanish-speaking environment and a bilingual Spanish/English environment. Such a test is needed because there has been little available to enable the diagnostician, whose clientele includes Spanish-speakers,…

English Textbooks in Japan and Korea

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Yuasa, Katsura

2010-01-01

English education in Japan and Korea are similar in some respects. Although both countries are not completely but mostly monolingual societies, where citizens do not need English in their daily life, they have begun to realize the importance of English as a tool for international communication, and as a result their English education is becoming…

STUDENTS WRITING EMAILS TO FACULTY: AN EXAMINATION OF E-POLITENESS AMONG NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

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Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas

2007-02-01

Full Text Available This study combines interlanguage pragmatics and speech act research with computer-mediated communication and examines how native and non-native speakers of English formulate low- and high-imposition requests to faculty. While some research claims that email, due to absence of non-verbal cues, encourages informal language, other research has claimed the opposite. However, email technology also allows writers to plan and revise messages before sending them, thus affording the opportunity to edit not only for grammar and mechanics, but also for pragmatic clarity and politeness.The study examines email requests sent by native and non-native English speaking graduate students to faculty at a major American university over a period of several semesters and applies Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper’s (1989 speech act analysis framework – quantitatively to distinguish levels of directness, i.e. pragmatic clarity; and qualitatively to compare syntactic and lexical politeness devices, the request perspectives, and the specific linguistic request realization patterns preferred by native and non-native speakers. Results show that far more requests are realized through direct strategies as well as hints than conventionally indirect strategies typically found in comparative speech act studies. Politeness conventions in email, a text-only medium with little guidance in the academic institutional hierarchy, appear to be a work in progress, and native speakers demonstrate greater resources in creating e-polite messages to their professors than non-native speakers. A possible avenue for pedagogical intervention with regard to instruction in and acquisition of politeness routines in hierarchically upward email communication is presented.

Word Durations in Non-Native English

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Baker, Rachel E.; Baese-Berk, Melissa; Bonnasse-Gahot, Laurent; Kim, Midam; Van Engen, Kristin J.; Bradlow, Ann R.

2010-01-01

In this study, we compare the effects of English lexical features on word duration for native and non-native English speakers and for non-native speakers with different L1s and a range of L2 experience. We also examine whether non-native word durations lead to judgments of a stronger foreign accent. We measured word durations in English paragraphs read by 12 American English (AE), 20 Korean, and 20 Chinese speakers. We also had AE listeners rate the `accentedness' of these non-native speakers. AE speech had shorter durations, greater within-speaker word duration variance, greater reduction of function words, and less between-speaker variance than non-native speech. However, both AE and non-native speakers showed sensitivity to lexical predictability by reducing second mentions and high frequency words. Non-native speakers with more native-like word durations, greater within-speaker word duration variance, and greater function word reduction were perceived as less accented. Overall, these findings identify word duration as an important and complex feature of foreign-accented English. PMID:21516172

The Heart of the Matter: Methodological Challenges in Developing a Contemporary 257-269 Reading Programme for Monolingual Lexicography, from the Perspective of the Dictionary Unit for South African English

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Leela Pienaar

2011-10-01

Full Text Available

Abstract: This article argues the importance of the reading programme as the pivotal issue inthe lexicographic process. It is essentially a practical article which outlines strategies for developingand implementing a reading programme for monolingual lexicography. The arguments are informedby theory, together with an examination of the data-collection procedures followed by theDictionary Unit for South African English (DSAE and a survey of current practice in major Englishdictionary units around the world, namely the Oxford English Dictionary, the Canadian OxfordDictionary, the Australian National Dictionary Centre and the New Zealand Dictionary Centre.The reading programme for the DSAE is first defined and contextualized within its mission statement.The article then explores the challenges inherent in sampling contemporary written and spokenEnglish in the South African multilingual context. It is intended to inform the DSAE's intakepolicy, in terms of the following critical issues:

— the definition of South African English,

— the monitoring and selection of print, oral and electronic sources,

— the excerpting of citations and relevant bibliographic information, and

— the recruiting and training of readers.

These interlinked aspects of the reading programme have crucial implications for the quality andauthority of the monolingual dictionary on historical principles.

Keywords: READING PROGRAMME, MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARY, HISTORICAL PRINCIPLES, CONTEMPORARY, INTAKE, CITATIONS, STRATEGIES

Opsomming: Die kern van die saak: Metodologiese uitdagings by die ontwikkelingvan 'n eietydse leesprogram vir eentalige leksikografie, uit dieperspektief van die Dictionary Unit for South African English. Hierdie artikelbepleit die belangrikheid van die leesprogram as die kernsaak in die leksikografiese proses. Dit ishoofsaaklik 'n praktiese artikel wat stategieë vir die ontwikkeling en implementering van 'n

Development and Use of English Evaluative Expressions in Narratives of Chinese-English Bilinguals

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Chen, Liang; Yan, Ruixia

2011-01-01

This study compares the development and use of evaluative expressions in the English narratives elicited from 80 Chinese-English bilinguals and 80 American monolingual peers at four ages--five, eight, ten, and young adults--using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" (Mayer, 1969). Results revealed both similarities and differences…

Students Writing Emails to Faculty: An Examination of E-Politeness among Native and Non-Native Speakers of English

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Biesenbach-Lucas, Sigrun

2007-01-01

This study combines interlanguage pragmatics and speech act research with computer-mediated communication and examines how native and non-native speakers of English formulate low- and high-imposition requests to faculty. While some research claims that email, due to absence of non-verbal cues, encourages informal language, other research has…

(En)countering native-speakerism global perspectives

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Holliday, Adrian; Swan, Anne

2015-01-01

The book addresses the issue of native-speakerism, an ideology based on the assumption that 'native speakers' of English have a special claim to the language itself, through critical qualitative studies of the lived experiences of practising teachers and students in a range of scenarios.

Little Houses and Casas Pequenas: Message Formulation and Syntactic Form in Unscripted Speech with Speakers of English and Spanish

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Brown-Schmidt, Sarah; Konopka, Agnieszka E.

2008-01-01

During unscripted speech, speakers coordinate the formulation of pre-linguistic messages with the linguistic processes that implement those messages into speech. We examine the process of constructing a contextually appropriate message and interfacing that message with utterance planning in English ("the small butterfly") and Spanish ("la mariposa…

Some features of a typical house as perceived by native speakers of English and of Serbian

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Dilparić Branislava M.

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The paper reports findings from one of the two differently-designed surveys conducted among groups of both native speakers of English and native speakers of Serbian with a common general objective to obtain a picture of better candidates for a role of the whole (to be analyzed into its constituent elements in the contrastive study on the lexical field a house and its parts in English and Serbian. The specific objective of the survey presented here, however, was to build up the target picture with some of the features of the ideal example of the house category, such as the shape of the house, the key materials its principal structural elements (foundations, walls, a roof are made of, the number of residential units in the house and the type of the household that occupies it, the number of the house levels, the minimum of its interior spatial components and their functions, the types of systemic parts in the house, the status and position of the house relative to surround­ing buildings, etc. Also, taking into consideration that the demographic profiles of the survey participants reflected various cultural backgrounds (which significantly influence the formation of mental images of a typical sample of the category, the survey aimed to compare the similarities and differences between the 'English' and the 'Serbian' typical house, that is the features assigned to a typical house by most of the surveyed representa­tives of Anglo-American and by those of Serbian culture. Judging exclusively by the features observed and the results obtained, the study concludes that the 'English' and the 'Serbian' typical house look very similar in many aspect and that the two different cultures are not as distant as they may seem.

Analyzing cognitive and spelling skills in Spanish-speaking English-language learners and English-speaking Canadian learners Analizando procesos cognitivos y de escritura en niños hispano-parlantes que aprenden inglés como segunda lengua y niños canadienses de habla inglesa

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Isabel O’Shanahan

2010-05-01

Full Text Available The principal purpose of this study has been to analyze the cognitive processes and spelling skills in Spanish-speaking English-language learners. A sample of English-speaking Canadian learners and Spanish-speaking English-language learners was selected from different Canadian schools in the Vancouver District within British Columbia's province. We examined cognitive and spelling skills of English-speaking students and Spanish-speaking English language learners in the primary grades. We hypothesized that there would be a positive transfer from cognitive and linguistic processes from L1 to L2 spelling skills development, if no significant differences were observed among native English speakers and Spanish-language learners on these measures. There were no significant differences between the English –language learners and the native English speakers on measures of phonological awareness and spelling skills. However, English-speaking Canadian learners performed better than Spanish-speaking English-language learners on vocabulary and syntactic awareness. El objetivo principal de este estudio ha sido analizar los procesos cognitivos y de escritura de niños hispano-parlantes que aprenden el inglés como segunda lengua. Para ello se seleccionó a una muestra de niños canadienses de habla inglesa y otra de hispano-parlantes que reciben instrucción en inglés como segunda lengua en escuelas canadienses del distrito de Vancouver en la provincia canadiense de Columbia Británica (British Columbia. Se tomaron medidas de competencia lingu?ística (vocabulario y conciencia sintáctica, memoria de trabajo, conciencia fonológica y escritura de palabras y pseudopalabras en inglés para el grupo de monolingu?es, y las mismas medidas en los idiomas inglés y español para el grupo de hispano-parlantes. Nuestra predicción es que si existe un efecto de transferencia de L1 sobre L2 entonces existiría relación entre los procesos cognitivos y de escritura que

Multicultural issues in test interpretation.

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Langdon, Henriette W; Wiig, Elisabeth H

2009-11-01

Designing the ideal test or series of tests to assess individuals who speak languages other than English is difficult. This article first describes some of the roadblocks-one of which is the lack of identification criteria for language and learning disabilities in monolingual and bilingual populations in most countries of the non-English-speaking world. This lag exists, in part, because access to general education is often limited. The second section describes tests that have been developed in the United States, primarily for Spanish-speaking individuals because they now represent the largest first-language majority in the United States (80% of English-language learners [ELLs] speak Spanish at home). We discuss tests developed for monolingual and bilingual English-Spanish speakers in the United States and divide this coverage into two parts: The first addresses assessment of students' first language (L1) and second language (L2), usually English, with different versions of the same test; the second describes assessment of L1 and L2 using the same version of the test, administered in the two languages. Examples of tests that fit a priori-determined criteria are briefly discussed throughout the article. Suggestions how to develop tests for speakers of languages other than English are also provided. In conclusion, we maintain that there will never be a perfect test or set of tests to adequately assess the communication skills of a bilingual individual. This is not surprising because we have yet to develop an ideal test or set of tests that fits monolingual Anglo speakers perfectly. Tests are tools, and the speech-language pathologist needs to know how to use those tools most effectively and equitably. The goal of this article is to provide such guidance. Thieme Medical Publishers.

Components and Context: Exploring Sources of Reading Difficulties for Language Minority Learners and Native English Speakers in Urban Schools

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Kieffer, Michael J.; Vukovic, Rose K.

2012-01-01

Drawing on the cognitive and ecological domains within the componential model of reading, this longitudinal study explores heterogeneity in the sources of reading difficulties for language minority learners and native English speakers in urban schools. Students (N = 150) were followed from first through third grade and assessed annually on…

Behavioral Problems and Reading Difficulties among Language Minority and Monolingual Urban Elementary School Students

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Pierce, Margaret E.; Wechsler-Zimring, Adrianna; Noam, Gil; Wolf, Maryanne; Katzir, Tami

2013-01-01

This study examined the potentially compounding effect of language minority (LM) status on problem behaviors among urban second and third grade-level poor readers. Univariate analyses showed that a disproportionate percentage of both LM and English monolingual (L1) poor readers already displayed clinically significant levels of anxiety, social…

Vocal Fry Use in Adult Female Speakers Exposed to Two Languages.

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Gibson, Todd A; Summers, Connie; Walls, Sydney

2017-07-01

Several studies have identified the widespread use of vocal fry among American women. Popular explanations for this phenomenon appeal to sociolinguistic purposes that likely take significant time for second language users to learn. The objective of this study was to determine if mere exposure to this vocal register, as opposed to nuanced sociolinguistic motivations, might explain its widespread use. This study used multigroup within- and between-subjects design. Fifty-eight women from one of three language background groups (functionally monolingual in English, functionally monolingual in Spanish, and Spanish-English bilinguals) living in El Paso, Texas, repeated a list of nonwords conforming to the sound rules of English and another list of nonwords conforming to the sound rules of Spanish. Perceptual analysis identified each episode of vocal fry. There were no statistically significant differences between groups in their frequency of vocal fry use despite large differences in their amount of English-language exposure. All groups produced more vocal fry when repeating English than when repeating Spanish nonwords. Because the human perceptual system encodes for vocal qualities even after minimal language experience, the widespread use of vocal fry among female residents in the United States likely is owing to mere exposure to English rather than nuanced sociolinguistic motivations. Copyright © 2017 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Formality as a Feature of Postcolonial English in Kenya: a Contrastive Analysis Based on the International Corpus of English

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Natalia Budohoska

2011-08-01

Full Text Available In monolingual countries where English is the native language of the majority of population, it is used across all domains and registers, and by all members of society. In post-colonial, multilingual countries it comes to be used as a lingua franca in more restricted contexts. Because there is a significant difference between the role and use of English in a native and monolingual environment and a non-native, multilingual environment (Trudgill 1999 the following paper concentrates on differences in the formality level of English in postcolonial Kenya and Great Britain on the basis of parameters set up for this study. The data for this paper come from the International Corpus of English for East Africa and for Great Britain. The conclusions concerning the formality of English were drawn basing on a quantitative study employing the chi square test for evaluating significance of the features discussed and revealed a higher level of formality of English in the ICE-K. This study is an introduction to further qualitative research of characteristic morpho-syntactic features of English in Kenya.

Is the superior verbal memory span of Mandarin speakers due to faster rehearsal?

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Mattys, Sven L; Baddeley, Alan; Trenkic, Danijela

2018-04-01

It is well established that digit span in native Chinese speakers is atypically high. This is commonly attributed to a capacity for more rapid subvocal rehearsal for that group. We explored this hypothesis by testing a group of English-speaking native Mandarin speakers on digit span and word span in both Mandarin and English, together with a measure of speed of articulation for each. When compared to the performance of native English speakers, the Mandarin group proved to be superior on both digit and word spans while predictably having lower spans in English. This suggests that the Mandarin advantage is not limited to digits. Speed of rehearsal correlated with span performance across materials. However, this correlation was more pronounced for English speakers than for any of the Chinese measures. Further analysis suggested that speed of rehearsal did not provide an adequate account of differences between Mandarin and English spans or for the advantage of digits over words. Possible alternative explanations are discussed.

Item-Level Psychometrics and Predictors of Performance for Spanish/English Bilingual Speakers on "An Object and Action Naming Battery"

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Edmonds, Lisa A.; Donovan, Neila J.

2012-01-01

Purpose: There is a pressing need for psychometrically sound naming materials for Spanish/English bilingual adults. To address this need, in this study the authors examined the psychometric properties of An Object and Action Naming Battery (An O&A Battery; Druks & Masterson, 2000) in bilingual speakers. Method: Ninety-one Spanish/English…

Bilingualised or Monolingual Dictionaries? Preferences and Practices of Advanced ESL Learners in Hong Kong

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Chan, Alice Y. W.

2011-01-01

This article reports on the results of a questionnaire and interview survey on Cantonese ESL learners' preference for bilingualised dictionaries or monolingual dictionaries. The questionnaire survey was implemented with about 160 university English majors in Hong Kong and three focus group interviews were conducted with 14 of these participants.…

Are Cantonese-speakers really descriptivists? Revisiting cross-cultural semantics.

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Lam, Barry

2010-05-01

In an article in Cognition [Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). Semantics cross-cultural style. Cognition, 92, B1-B12] present data which purports to show that East Asian Cantonese-speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while Western English-speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al. take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to cultural background. Machery et al. conclude from their findings that the philosophical methodology of consulting intuitions about hypothetical cases is flawed vis a vis the goal of determining truths about some philosophical domains like philosophical semantics. In the following study, three new vignettes in English were given to Western native English-speakers, and Cantonese translations were given to native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese community in Southern California. For all three vignettes, questions were given to elicit intuitions about the referent of a proper name and the truth-value of an uttered sentence containing a proper name. The results from this study reveal that East Asian Cantonese-speakers do not differ from Western English-speakers in ways that support Machery et al.'s conclusions. This new data concerning the intuitions of Cantonese-speakers raises questions about whether cross-cultural variation in answers to questions on certain vignettes reveal genuine differences in intuitions, or whether such differences stem from non-intuitional differences, such as differences in linguistic competence. Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Main Concept Analysis: Validation and sensitivity in differentiating discourse produced by unimpaired English speakers from individuals with aphasia and dementia of Alzheimer type.

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Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Whiteside, Janet; Bargmann, Peggy

2016-10-01

Discourse from speakers with dementia and aphasia is associated with comparable but not identical deficits, necessitating appropriate methods to differentiate them. The current study aims to validate the Main Concept Analysis (MCA) to be used for eliciting and quantifying discourse among native typical English speakers and to establish its norm, and investigate the validity and sensitivity of the MCA to compare discourse produced by individuals with fluent aphasia, non-fluent aphasia, or dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT), and unimpaired elderly. Discourse elicited through a sequential picture description task was collected from 60 unimpaired participants to determine the MCA scoring criteria; 12 speakers with fluent aphasia, 12 with non-fluent aphasia, 13 with DAT, and 20 elderly participants from the healthy group were compared on the finalized MCA. Results of MANOVA revealed significant univariate omnibus effects of speaker group as an independent variable on each main concept index. MCA profiles differed significantly between all participant groups except dementia versus fluent aphasia. Correlations between the MCA performances and the Western Aphasia Battery and Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test were found to be statistically significant among the clinical groups. The MCA was appropriate to be used among native speakers of English. The results also provided further empirical evidence of discourse deficits in aphasia and dementia. Practitioners can use the MCA to evaluate discourse production systemically and objectively.

Language and spatial frames of reference in mind and brain.

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Gallistel, C R.

2002-08-01

Some language communities routinely use allocentric reference directions (e.g. 'uphill-downhill') where speakers of European languages would use egocentric references ('left-right'). Previous experiments have suggested that the different language groups use different reference frames in non-linguistic tasks involving the recreation of oriented arrays. However, a recent paper argues that manipulating test conditions produces similar effects in monolingual English speakers, and in animals.

Chinese Attitudes towards Varieties of English: A Pre-Olympic Examination

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Xu, Wei; Wang, Yu; Case, Rod E.

2010-01-01

This study reports on findings of an investigation into Chinese students' attitudes towards varieties of English before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. One hundred and eight college students in mainland China evaluated six English speeches by two American English speakers, two British English speakers, and two Chinese English speakers for social…

Speakers of different languages process the visual world differently.

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Chabal, Sarah; Marian, Viorica

2015-06-01

Language and vision are highly interactive. Here we show that people activate language when they perceive the visual world, and that this language information impacts how speakers of different languages focus their attention. For example, when searching for an item (e.g., clock) in the same visual display, English and Spanish speakers look at different objects. Whereas English speakers searching for the clock also look at a cloud, Spanish speakers searching for the clock also look at a gift, because the Spanish names for gift (regalo) and clock (reloj) overlap phonologically. These different looking patterns emerge despite an absence of direct language input, showing that linguistic information is automatically activated by visual scene processing. We conclude that the varying linguistic information available to speakers of different languages affects visual perception, leading to differences in how the visual world is processed. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Afrikaans, American and British models for South African English ...

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This article examines the treatment of racial labels in monolingual English dictionaries of South Africa. Considering past controversies regarding racist language in Afrikaans dictionaries and considering the changing role of English in democratic South Africa, we can expect that English dictionaries will be more carefully ...

Toward a Natural Speech Understanding System

Science.gov (United States)

1989-10-01

toward the monolingual English 25 msec value. Miyawaki et a]. (1975) investigated the /ra/ - /la/ continuum with English and Japanese speakers...Standard Dictionary In order to evaluate some of the claims of the learning theory of speech recognition, a computer model was developed. The NEXus...discrimination of synthetic vowels. Language and Speech, 1962, 5, 171-189. Funk and Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Funk and

English-Chinese Cross-Language IR Using Bilingual Dictionaries

Science.gov (United States)

2006-01-01

specialized dictionaries together contain about two million entries [6]. 4 Monolingual Experiment The Chinese documents and the Chinese translations of... monolingual performance. The main performance-limiting factor is the limited coverage of the dictionary used in query translation. Some of the key con...English-Chinese Cross-Language IR using Bilingual Dictionaries Aitao Chen , Hailing Jiang , and Fredric Gey School of Information Management

U.S. History and Modern World History Courses for English Speakers of Other Languages in Montgomery County Public Schools

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Zhao, Huafang; Wade, Julie

2014-01-01

The Office of Shared Accountability (OSA) in Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools (MCPS) examined academic performance of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students in U.S. History and Modern World History courses, as well as the course sequence in ESOL U.S. History and Modern World History. In MCPS, students who are not ESOL…

To Speak Like a TED Speaker--A Case Study of TED Motivated English Public Speaking Study in EFL Teaching

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Li, Yingxia; Gao, Ying; Zhang, Dongyu

2016-01-01

This paper intends to investigate the effectiveness of a new course pattern--TED-motivated English Public Speaking Course in EFL teaching in China. This class framework adopts TED videos as the learning materials to stimulate students to be a better speaker. Meanwhile, it aims to examine to what extent the five aspects of language skills are…

Predictors and Outcomes of Early vs. Later English Language Proficiency Among English Language Learners

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Halle, Tamara; Hair, Elizabeth; Wandner, Laura; McNamara, Michelle; Chien, Nina

2011-01-01

The development of English language learners (ELLs) was explored from kindergarten through eighth grade within a nationally representative sample of first-time kindergartners (N = 19,890). Growth curve analyses indicated that, compared to native English speakers, ELLs were rated by teachers more favorably on approaches to learning, self control, and externalizing behaviors in kindergarten and generally continued to grow in a positive direction on these social/behavioral outcomes at a steeper rate compared to their native English-speaking peers, holding other factors constant. Differences in reading and math achievement between ELLs and native English speakers varied based on the grade at which English proficiency is attained. Specifically, ELLs who were proficient in English by kindergarten entry kept pace with native English speakers in both reading and math initially and over time; ELLs who were proficient by first grade had modest gaps in reading and math achievement compared to native English speakers that closed narrowly or persisted over time; and ELLs who were not proficient by first grade had the largest initial gaps in reading and math achievement compared to native speakers but the gap narrowed over time in reading and grew over time in math. Among those whose home language is not English, acquiring English proficiency by kindergarten entry was associated with better cognitive and behavioral outcomes through eighth grade compared to taking longer to achieve proficiency. Multinomial regression analyses indicated that child, family, and school characteristics predict achieving English proficiency by kindergarten entry compared to achieving proficiency later. Results are discussed in terms of policies and practices that can support ELL children’s growth and development. PMID:22389551

Multilingual students' acquisition of English as their L3

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Samal Jalal, Rawand

with regard to English proficiency. The current study conducted in Denmark investigated multilingual students’ English proficiency compared to their monolingual peers’, and examined which learning strategies proficient L3 learners utilize. The sample was comprised of 9-graders who are monolinguals (N = 82......) and multilinguals with Turkish L1 (N = 134). The participants provided basic demographic information, and were tested in their general English proficiency. Out of the 70 multilinguals with Turkish L1, 12 participants were selected for further testing; i.e., the four participants who scored the lowest, four...... participants with intermediate scores, and the four who scored the highest, on a test of English proficiency. These participants were tested in their L1 (Turkish) and their L2 (Danish) in order to examine whether their proficiency in their L1 and L2 was associated with English proficiency. Furthermore, the 12...

Long-Term Experience with Chinese Language Shapes the Fusiform Asymmetry of English Reading

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Mei, Leilei; Xue, Gui; Lu, Zhong-Lin; Chen, Chuansheng; Wei, Miao; He, Qinghua; Dong, Qi

2015-01-01

Previous studies have suggested differential engagement of the bilateral fusiform gyrus in the processing of Chinese and English. The present study tested the possibility that long-term experience with Chinese language affects the fusiform laterality of English reading by comparing three samples: Chinese speakers, English speakers with Chinese experience, and English speakers without Chinese experience. We found that, when reading words in their respective native language, Chinese and English speakers without Chinese experience differed in functional laterality of the posterior fusiform region (right laterality for Chinese speakers, but left laterality for English speakers). More importantly, compared with English speakers without Chinese experience, English speakers with Chinese experience showed more recruitment of the right posterior fusiform cortex for English words and pseudowords, which is similar to how Chinese speakers processed Chinese. These results suggest that long-term experience with Chinese shapes the fusiform laterality of English reading and have important implications for our understanding of the cross-language influences in terms of neural organization and of the functions of different fusiform subregions in reading. PMID:25598049

Kokugo Dictionaries as Tools for Learners: Problems and Potential

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Tom GALLY

2012-10-01

Full Text Available For second-language learners, monolingual dictionaries can be useful tools because they often provide more detailed explanations of meanings and more extensive vocabulary coverage than bilingual dictionaries do. While learners of English have access to many monolingual dictionaries designed specifically to meet their needs, learners of Japanese must make do with Kokugo dictionaries, that is, monolingual dictionaries intended for native Japanese speakers. This paper, after briefly describing Kokugo dictionaries in general, analyzes a typical entry from such a dictionary to illustrate the advantages and challenges of the use of Kokugo dictionaries by learners of Japanese.

Teaching the Native English Speaker How to Teach English

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Odhuu, Kelli

2014-01-01

This article speaks to teachers who have been paired with native speakers (NSs) who have never taught before, and the feelings of frustration, discouragement, and nervousness on the teacher's behalf that can occur as a result. In order to effectively tackle this situation, teachers need to work together with the NSs. Teachers in this scenario…

The English Monolingual Dictionary: Its Use among Second Year Students of University Technology of Malaysia, International Campus, Kuala Lumpur

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Amerrudin Abd. Manan

2011-07-01

Full Text Available This research was conducted to seek information on English Monolingual Dictionary (EMD use among 2nd year students of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Campus, Kuala Lumpur (UTMKL. Specifically, the researchers wish to discover, firstly the students’ habit and attitude in EMD use; secondly, to discover their knowledge with regard to the language learning resources available in EMD; thirdly, to discover their skill in using EMD, and finally, to discover whether there were formal instructions in EMD use when they were studying in their former schools and tertiary education. One hundred and ninety-six students took part in the survey by answering a questionnaire. The results of the study reveal that the respondents were poor users of EMD. They rarely consulted the EMD; their knowledge of the language learning resources in the EMD was limited; most perceived their EMD skill as average, and there was no instruction in EMD when they were at tertiary education and previously when they were at school.

English as a lingua franca used at international meetings

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Barančicová Jana

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The paper deals with the use of English as a lingua franca. It concentrates on the environment of international meetings where English is used as a lingua franca. The aim of the research conducted through a survey of members of a NATO working group is to find out how native and non-native speakers feel about English used as a lingua franca during international meetings and how these two groups of speakers see each other in multinational interaction from the point of view of linguistics. The sections dealing with non-native speakers concentrate on the level of knowledge of English and on how native speakers cope with the English used during the meetings. The sections dealing with the views of English native speakers should establish the approach they take towards mistakes made by non-native speakers, whether native speakers should adjust the way they speak at international meetings and how they generally view the fact that their mother tongue is used all around the world.

Rhythmic patterning in Malaysian and Singapore English.

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Tan, Rachel Siew Kuang; Low, Ee-Ling

2014-06-01

Previous work on the rhythm of Malaysian English has been based on impressionistic observations. This paper utilizes acoustic analysis to measure the rhythmic patterns of Malaysian English. Recordings of the read speech and spontaneous speech of 10 Malaysian English speakers were analyzed and compared with recordings of an equivalent sample of Singaporean English speakers. Analysis was done using two rhythmic indexes, the PVI and VarcoV. It was found that although the rhythm of read speech of the Singaporean speakers was syllable-based as described by previous studies, the rhythm of the Malaysian speakers was even more syllable-based. Analysis of the syllables in specific utterances showed that Malaysian speakers did not reduce vowels as much as Singaporean speakers in cases of syllables in utterances. Results of the spontaneous speech confirmed the findings for the read speech; that is, the same rhythmic patterning was found which normally triggers vowel reductions.

L2 vs. L3 Initial State: A Comparative Study of the Acquisition of French DPs by Vietnamese Monolinguals and Cantonese-English Bilinguals

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Leung, Yan-Kit Ingrid

2005-01-01

This paper compares the initial state of second language acquisition (L2A) and third language acquisition (L3A) from the generative linguistics perspective. We examine the acquisition of the Determiner Phrase (DP) by two groups of beginning French learners: an L2 group (native speakers of Vietnamese who do not speak any English) and an L3 group…

Spoken English in the classroom - A Study of attitudes and experiences of spoken varieties of English in English teaching in Norway

OpenAIRE

Hopland, Amalie Alsaker

2016-01-01

To be able to express oneself orally is one of the five basic skills that is considered necessary for learning and development in school, work, and in society, and therefore deserves attention. The English language has developed from mainly being a language belonging to the native speakers to becoming a world language. Today, speakers of English use the language mainly to communicate internationally. With this development, the native speaker norm has been questioned by many academics. This is...

The effect on recognition memory of noise cancelling headphones in a noisy environment with native and nonnative speakers

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Brett R C Molesworth

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Noise has the potential to impair cognitive performance. For nonnative speakers, the effect of noise on performance is more severe than their native counterparts. What remains unknown is the effectiveness of countermeasures such as noise attenuating devices in such circumstances. Therefore, the main aim of the present research was to examine the effectiveness of active noise attenuating countermeasures in the presence of simulated aircraft noise for both native and nonnative English speakers. Thirty-two participants, half native English speakers and half native German speakers completed four recognition (cued recall tasks presented in English under four different audio conditions, all in the presence of simulated aircraft noise. The results of the research indicated that in simulated aircraft noise at 65 dB(A, performance of nonnative English speakers was poorer than for native English speakers. The beneficial effects of noise cancelling headphones in improving the signal to noise ratio led to an improved performance for nonnative speakers. These results have particular importance for organizations operating in a safety-critical environment such as aviation.

Vietnamese American Experiences of English Language Learning: Ethnic Acceptance and Prejudice

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Jeffrey LaBelle

2007-01-01

Full Text Available This article investigates the effects of ethnic acceptance and prejudice on English language learning among immigrant nonnative speakers. During 2004 and 2005, the author conducted participatory dialogues among six Vietnamese and Mexican adult immigrant English language learners. The researcher sought to answer five questions: (1 What are some nonnative English speakers’ experience regarding the way native speakers treat them? (2 How have nonnative English speakers’ experiences of ethnic acceptance or ethnic prejudice affected their learning of English? (3 What do nonnative English speakers think they need in order to lower their anxiety as they learn a new language? (4 What can native English speakers do to lower nonnative speakers’ anxiety? (5 What can nonnative English speakers do to lower their anxiety with native English speakers? Even though many of the adult immigrant participants experienced ethnic prejudice, they developed strategies to overcome anxiety, frustration, and fear. The dialogues generated themes of acceptance, prejudice, power, motivation, belonging, and perseverance, all factors essential to consider when developing English language learning programs for adult immigrants.

Comparing the Effect of Using Monolingual versus Bilingual Dictionary on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners' Vocabulary Learning

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Ahangari, Saeideh; Dogolsara, Shokoufeh Abbasi

2015-01-01

This study aimed to investigate the effect of using two types of dictionaries (monolingual and bilingual) on Iranian intermediate EFL learners' vocabulary learning. An OPT (Oxford placement test, 2001) was administered among 90 students 60 of whom were selected as the participants of this study. They were sophomore students studying English as a…

A Tale of Two Features: Perception of Cantonese Lexical Tone and English Lexical Stress in Cantonese-English Bilinguals

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Tong, Xiuli; Burnham, Denis

2015-01-01

This study investigated the similarities and differences in perception of Cantonese tones and English stress patterns by Cantonese-English bilingual children, adults, and English monolingual adults. All three groups were asked to discriminate pairs of syllables that minimally differed in either Cantonese tone or in English stress. Bilingual children’s performance on tone perception was comparable to their performance on stress perception. By contrast, bilingual adults’ performance on tone perception was lower than their performance on stress perception, and there was a similar pattern in English monolingual adults. Bilingual adults tended to perform better than English monolingual adults on both the tone and stress perception tests. A significant correlation between tone perception and stress perception performance was found in bilingual children but not in bilingual adults. All three groups showed lower accuracy in the high rising-low rising contrast than any of the other 14 Cantonese tone contrasts. The acoustic analyses revealed that average F0, F0 onset, and F0 major slope were the critical acoustic correlates of Cantonese tones, whereas multiple acoustic correlates were salient in English stress, including average F0, spectral balance, duration and intensity. We argue that participants’ difficulty in perceiving high rising-low rising contrasts originated from the contrasts’ similarities in F0 onset and average F0; indeed the difference between their major slopes was the only cue with which to distinguish them. Acoustic-perceptual correlation analyses showed that although the average F0 and F0 onset were associated with tone perception performance in all three groups, F0 major slope was only associated with tone perception in the bilingual adult group. These results support a dynamic interactive account of suprasegmental speech perception by emphasizing the positive prosodic transfer between Cantonese tone and English stress, and the role that level of

Total and Conceptual Vocabulary in Spanish–English Bilinguals From 22 to 30 Months: Implications for Assessment

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Core, Cynthia; Hoff, Erika; Rumiche, Rosario; Señor, Melissa

2015-01-01

Purpose Vocabulary assessment holds promise as a way to identify young bilingual children at risk for language delay. This study compares 2 measures of vocabulary in a group of young Spanish–English bilingual children to a single-language measure used with monolingual children. Method Total vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary were used to measure mean vocabulary size and growth in 47 Spanish–English bilingually developing children from 22 to 30 months of age based on results from the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI; Fenson et al., 1993) and the Inventario del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas (Jackson-Maldonado et al., 2003). Bilingual children’s scores of total vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary were compared with CDI scores for a control group of 56 monolingual children. Results The total vocabulary measure resulted in mean vocabulary scores and average rate of growth similar to monolingual growth, whereas conceptual vocabulary scores were significantly smaller and grew at a slower rate than total vocabulary scores. Total vocabulary identified the same proportion of bilingual children below the 25th percentile on monolingual norms as the CDI did for monolingual children. Conclusion These results support the use of total vocabulary as a means of assessing early language development in young bilingual Spanish–English speaking children. PMID:24023382

Mechanisms of Vowel Variation in African American English.

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Holt, Yolanda Feimster

2018-02-15

This research explored mechanisms of vowel variation in African American English by comparing 2 geographically distant groups of African American and White American English speakers for participation in the African American Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift. Thirty-two male (African American: n = 16, White American controls: n = 16) lifelong residents of cities in eastern and western North Carolina produced heed,hid,heyd,head,had,hod,hawed,whod,hood,hoed,hide,howed,hoyd, and heard 3 times each in random order. Formant frequency, duration, and acoustic analyses were completed for the vowels /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ɔ, u, ʊ, o, aɪ, aʊ, oɪ, ɝ/ produced in the listed words. African American English speakers show vowel variation. In the west, the African American English speakers are participating in the Southern Vowel Shift and hod fronting of the African American Shift. In the east, neither the African American English speakers nor their White peers are participating in the Southern Vowel Shift. The African American English speakers show limited participation in the African American Shift. The results provide evidence of regional and socio-ethnic variation in African American English in North Carolina.

THE INFLUENCE OF SYLLABIFICATION RULES IN L1 ON L2 WORD RECOGNITION.

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Choi, Wonil; Nam, Kichun; Lee, Yoonhyoung

2015-10-01

Experiments with Korean learners of English and English monolinguals were conducted to examine whether knowledge of syllabification in the native language (Korean) affects the recognition of printed words in the non-native language (English). Another purpose of this study was to test whether syllables are the processing unit in Korean visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, 26 native Korean speakers and 19 native English speakers participated. In Experiment 2, 40 native Korean speakers participated. In two experiments, syllable length was manipulated based on the Korean syllabification rule and the participants performed a lexical decision task. Analyses of variance were performed for the lexical decision latencies and error rates in two experiments. The results from Korean learners of English showed that two-syllable words based on the Korean syllabification rule were recognized faster as words than various types of three-syllable words, suggesting that Korean learners of English exploited their L1 phonological knowledge in recognizing English words. The results of the current study also support the idea that syllables are a processing unit of Korean visual word recognition.

Application of Native Speaker Models for Identifying Deviations in Rhetorical Moves in Non-Native Speaker Manuscripts

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Assef Khalili

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Introduction: Explicit teaching of generic conventions of a text genre, usually extracted from native-speaker (NS manuscripts, has long been emphasized in the teaching of Academic Writing inEnglish for Specific Purposes (henceforthESP classes, both in theory and practice. While consciousness-raising about rhetorical structure can be instrumental to non-native speakers(NNS, it has to be admitted that most works done in the field of ESP have tended to focus almost exclusively on native-speaker (NS productions, giving scant attention to non-native speaker (NNS manuscripts. That is, having outlined established norms for good writing on the basis of NS productions, few have been inclined to provide a descriptive account of NNS attempts at trying to produce a research article (RA in English. That is what we have tried to do in the present research. Methods: We randomly selected 20 RAs in dentistry and used two well-established models for results and discussion sections to try to describe the move structure of these articles and show the points of divergence from the established norms. Results: The results pointed to significant divergences that could seriously compromise the quality of an RA. Conclusion: It is believed that the insights gained on the deviations in NNS manuscripts could prove very useful in designing syllabi for ESP classes.

Language-Based Social Preferences among Children in South Africa

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Kinzler, Katherine D.; Shutts, Kristin; Spelke, Elizabeth S.

2012-01-01

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African…

Cognitive Representation of Colour in Bilinguals: The Case of Greek Blues

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Athanasopoulos, Panos

2009-01-01

A number of recent studies demonstrate that bilinguals with languages that differ in grammatical and lexical categories may shift their cognitive representation of those categories towards that of monolingual speakers of their second language. The current paper extended that investigation to the domain of colour in Greek-English bilinguals with…

Excitatory and inhibitory priming by attended and ignored non-recycled words with monolinguals and bilinguals.

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Neumann, Ewald; Nkrumah, Ivy K; Chen, Zhe

2018-03-03

Experiments examining identity priming from attended and ignored novel words (words that are used only once except when repetition is required due to experimental manipulation) in a lexical decision task are reported. Experiment 1 tested English monolinguals whereas Experiment 2 tested Twi (a native language of Ghana, Africa)-English bilinguals. Participants were presented with sequential pairs of stimuli composed of a prime followed by a probe, with each containing two items. The participants were required to name the target word in the prime display, and to make a lexical decision to the target item in the probe display. On attended repetition (AR) trials the probe target item was identical to the target word on the preceding attentional display. On ignored repetition (IR) trials the probe target item was the same as the distractor word in the preceding attentional display. The experiments produced facilitated (positive) priming in the AR trials and delayed (negative) priming in the IR trials. Significantly, the positive and negative priming effects also replicated across both monolingual and bilingual groups of participants, despite the fact that the bilinguals were responding to the task in their non-dominant language.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Monolingual, Bilingual, and "Bilingualised" Dictionaries in the Comprehension and Production of New Words.

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Laufer, Batia; Hadar, Linor

1997-01-01

Examines the differences in effectiveness of three types of dictionaries--monolingual, bilingual, and "bilingualised" in the comprehension and production of new words by learners of English as a foreign language. The study tested participants on the comprehension of target words and on their ability to use these words in their own sentences. (16…

Non-Native & Native English Teachers

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İrfan Tosuncuoglu

2017-12-01

Full Text Available In many countries the primary (mother tongue language is not English but there is a great demand for English language teachers all over the world. The demand in this field is try to be filled largely by non-native English speaking teachers who have learned English in the country or abroad, or from another non native English peaking teachers. In some countries, particularly those where English speaking is a a sign of status, the students prefer to learn English from a native English speaker. The perception is that a non-native English speaking teacher is a less authentic teacher than a native English speaker and their instruction is not satifactory in some ways. This paper will try to examine the literature to explore whether there is a difference in instructional effectiveness between NNESTs and native English teachers.

Are Cantonese-Speakers Really Descriptivists? Revisiting Cross-Cultural Semantics

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Lam, Barry

2010-01-01

In an article in "Cognition" [Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). "Semantics cross-cultural style." "Cognition, 92", B1-B12] present data which purports to show that East Asian Cantonese-speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while Western English-speakers tend to have…

Impact of Cyrillic on Native English Speakers' Phono-lexical Acquisition of Russian.

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Showalter, Catherine E

2018-03-01

We investigated the influence of grapheme familiarity and native language grapheme-phoneme correspondences during second language lexical learning. Native English speakers learned Russian-like words via auditory presentations containing only familiar first language phones, pictured meanings, and exposure to either Cyrillic orthographic forms (Orthography condition) or the sequence (No Orthography condition). Orthography participants saw three types of written forms: familiar-congruent (e.g., -[kom]), familiar-incongruent (e.g., -[rɑt]), and unfamiliar (e.g., -[fil]). At test, participants determined whether pictures and words matched according to what they saw during word learning. All participants performed near ceiling in all stimulus conditions, except for Orthography participants on words containing incongruent grapheme-phoneme correspondences. These results suggest that first language grapheme-phoneme correspondences can cause interference during second language phono-lexical acquisition. In addition, these results suggest that orthographic input effects are robust enough to interfere even when the input does not contain novel phones.

Performance on Auditory and Visual Tasks of Inhibition in English Monolingual and Spanish-English Bilingual Adults: Do Bilinguals Have a Cognitive Advantage?

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Desjardins, Jamie L.; Fernandez, Francisco

2018-01-01

Purpose: Bilingual individuals have been shown to be more proficient on visual tasks of inhibition compared with their monolingual counterparts. However, the bilingual advantage has not been evidenced in all studies, and very little is known regarding how bilingualism influences inhibitory control in the perception of auditory information. The…

Turkish- and English-speaking children display sensitivity to perceptual context in the referring expressions they produce in speech and gesture

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Demir, Özlem Ece; So, Wing-Chee; Özyürek, Asli; Goldin-Meadow, Susan

2012-01-01

Speakers choose a particular expression based on many factors, including availability of the referent in the perceptual context. We examined whether, when expressing referents, monolingual English- and Turkish-speaking children: (1) are sensitive to perceptual context, (2) express this sensitivity in language-specific ways, and (3) use co-speech gestures to specify referents that are underspecified. We also explored the mechanisms underlying children’s sensitivity to perceptual context. Children described short vignettes to an experimenter under two conditions: The characters in the vignettes were present in the perceptual context (perceptual context); the characters were absent (no perceptual context). Children routinely used nouns in the no perceptual context condition, but shifted to pronouns (English-speaking children) or omitted arguments (Turkish-speaking children) in the perceptual context condition. Turkish-speaking children used underspecified referents more frequently than English-speaking children in the perceptual context condition; however, they compensated for the difference by using gesture to specify the forms. Gesture thus gives children learning structurally different languages a way to achieve comparable levels of specification while at the same time adhering to the referential expressions dictated by their language. PMID:22904588

The Arts, the Common Core, and English Language Development in the Primary Grades

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Greenfader, Christa Mulker; Brouillette, Liane

2017-01-01

Background/Context: Throughout schooling, English learners (ELs) perform well below their monolingual English-speaking peers on literacy assessments, and Hispanics make up the majority of EL students in the United States. There is a strong consensus about the importance of early English oral language skills for ELs' literacy development, yet…

Predictive Validity and Accuracy of Oral Reading Fluency for English Learners

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Vanderwood, Michael L.; Tung, Catherine Y.; Checca, C. Jason

2014-01-01

The predictive validity and accuracy of an oral reading fluency (ORF) measure for a statewide assessment in English language arts was examined for second-grade native English speakers (NESs) and English learners (ELs) with varying levels of English proficiency. In addition to comparing ELs with native English speakers, the impact of English…

Monolingual Lexicography and Linguistic Variation in Shona

African Journals Online (AJOL)

R.B. Ruthven

when working on monolingual Shona dictionaries. ... ciplines often refer to the term variation. ... phers of monolingual dictionaries encounter in their work. 2. ..... used or the literal sense first and the rarely used or the metaphorical sense(s).

Iambic-Trochaic Law Effects among Native Speakers of Spanish and English

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Megan Crowhurst

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The Iambic-Trochaic Law (Bolton, 1894; Hayes, 1995; Woodrow, 1909 asserts that listeners associate greater intensity with group beginnings (a loud-first preference and greater duration with group endings (a long-last preference. Hayes (1987; 1995 posits a natural connection between the prominences referred to in the ITL and the locations of stressed syllables in feet. However, not all lengthening in final positions originates with stressed syllables, and greater duration may also be associated with stress in nonfinal (trochaic positions. The research described here challenged the notion that presumptive long-last effects necessarily reflect stress-related duration patterns, and investigated the general hypothesis that the robustness of long-last effects should vary depending on the strength of the association between final positions and increased duration, whatever its source. Two ITL studies were conducted in which native speakers of Spanish and of English grouped streams of rhythmically alternating syllables in which vowel intensity and/or duration levels were varied. These languages were chosen because while they are prosodically similar, increased duration on constituent-final syllables is both more common and more salient in English than Spanish. Outcomes revealed robust loud-first effects in both language groups. Long-last effects were significantly weaker in the Spanish group when vowel duration was varied singly. However, long-last effects were present and comparable in both language groups when intensity and duration were covaried. Intensity was a more robust predictor of responses than duration. A primary conclusion was that whether or not humans’ rhythmic grouping preferences have an innate component, duration-based grouping preferences, at least, and the magnitude of intensity-based effects are shaped by listeners’ backgrounds.

THE CHOICE OF ENGLISH MODAL FORMS IN E-MAILS DISCOURSE BY BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE SPEAKERS A ESCOLHA DAS FORMAS MODAIS EM INGLÊS PELOS FALANTES DE PORTUGUÊS DO BRASIL NOS DISCURSOS ELETRÔNICOS

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DEISE PRINA DUTRA

2000-01-01

Full Text Available This paper looks at how Brazilian Portuguese speakers express certain speechacts in electronic discourse while writing in English (giving suggestions/advice,asking for a favor, expressing necessity and expressing possibility, taking intoconsideration the modal choices these speakers make. The results show thatthe learners do not treat electronic discourse as a different discourse genrewhile English native speakers do. Learners of English as a foreign and secondlanguage need to become aware of the discourse genre differences.Este trabalho concentra-se em como os falantes de português do Brasilexpressam certos atos de fala em discurso eletrônico escrito em inglês (darsugestões/conselhos, pedir favor, expressar necessidade e expressarpossibilidade, levando em consideração as escolhas modais que esses falantesfazem. Os resultados mostram que os aprendizes não tratam o discurso eletrônicocomo um gênero discursivo diferente enquanto os falantes nativos de inglês ofazem. Os aprendizes de inglês como língua estrangeira e segunda línguaprecisam se tornar conscientes das diferenças dos gêneros discursivos.

Marking of verb tense in the English of preschool English-Mandarin bilingual children: evidence from language development profiles within subgroups on the Singapore English Action Picture Test.

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Brebner, Chris; McCormack, Paul; Liow, Susan Rickard

2016-01-01

The phonological and morphosyntactic structures of English and Mandarin contrast maximally and an increasing number of bilinguals speak these two languages. Speech and language therapists need to understand bilingual development for children speaking these languages in order reliably to assess and provide intervention for this population. To examine the marking of verb tense in the English of two groups of bilingual pre-schoolers learning these languages in a multilingual setting where the main educational language is English. The main research question addressed was: are there differences in the rate and pattern of acquisition of verb-tense marking for English-language 1 children compared with Mandarin-language 1 children? Spoken language samples in English from 481 English-Mandarin bilingual children were elicited using a 10-item action picture test and analysed for each child's use of verb tense markers: present progressive '-ing', regular past tense '-ed', third-person singular '-s', and irregular past tense and irregular past-participle forms. For 4-6 year olds the use of inflectional markers by the different language dominance groups was compared statistically using non-parametric tests. This study provides further evidence that bilingual language development is not the same as monolingual language development. The results show that there are very different rates and patterns of verb-tense marking in English for English-language 1 and Mandarin-language 1 children. Furthermore, they show that bilingual language development in English in Singapore is not the same as monolingual language development in English, and that there are differences in development depending on language dominance. Valid and reliable assessment of bilingual children's language skills needs to consider the characteristics of all languages spoken, obtaining accurate information on language use over time and accurately establishing language dominance is essential in order to make a

Cross-Linguistic Influence in French-English Bilingual Children's Possessive Constructions

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Nicoladis, Elena

2012-01-01

The purpose of this article was to test the predictions of a speech production model of cross-linguistic influence in French-English bilingual children. A speech production model predicts bidirectional influence (i.e., bilinguals' greater use of periphrastic constructions like the hat of the dog relative to monolinguals in English and reversed…

a sociophonetic study of young nigerian english speakers

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Oladipupo

between male and female speakers in boundary consonant deletion, (F(1, .... speech perception (Foulkes 2006, Clopper & Pisoni, 2005, Thomas 2002). ... in Nigeria, and had had the privilege of travelling to Europe and the Americas for the.

The Status of Native Speaker Intuitions in a Polylectal Grammar.

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Debose, Charles E.

A study of one speaker's intuitions about and performance in Black English is presented with relation to Saussure's "langue-parole" dichotomy. Native speakers of a language have intuitions about the static synchronic entities although the data of their speaking is variable and panchronic. These entities are in a diglossic relationship to each…

What Dictionary to Use? A Closer Look at the "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary," the "Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English" and the "Longman Lexicon of Contempory English."

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Shaw, A. M.

1983-01-01

Three dictionaries are compared for their usefulness to teachers of English as a foreign language, teachers in training, students, and other users of English as a foreign language. The issue of monolingual versus bilingual dictionary format is discussed, and a previous analysis of the two bilingual dictionaries is summarized. Pronunciation…

Home and Community Language Proficiency in Spanish-English Early Bilingual University Students.

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Schmidtke, Jens

2017-10-17

This study assessed home and community language proficiency in Spanish-English bilingual university students to investigate whether the vocabulary gap reported in studies of bilingual children persists into adulthood. Sixty-five early bilinguals (mean age = 21 years) were assessed in English and Spanish vocabulary and verbal reasoning ability using subtests of the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey-Revised (Schrank & Woodcock, 2009). Their English scores were compared to 74 monolinguals matched in age and level of education. Participants also completed a background questionnaire. Bilinguals scored below the monolingual control group on both subtests, and the difference was larger for vocabulary compared to verbal reasoning. However, bilinguals were close to the population mean for verbal reasoning. Spanish scores were on average lower than English scores, but participants differed widely in their degree of balance. Participants with an earlier age of acquisition of English and more current exposure to English tended to be more dominant in English. Vocabulary tests in the home or community language may underestimate bilingual university students' true verbal ability and should be interpreted with caution in high-stakes situations. Verbal reasoning ability may be more indicative of a bilingual's verbal ability.

Monolingual Lexicography and Linguistic Variation in Shona

African Journals Online (AJOL)

R.B. Ruthven

Abstract: This article focuses on the problems lexicographers of monolingual dictionaries face when dealing with a language characterised by differences associated with geographical variation. The article specifically seeks to explore problems with which Shona lexicographers are confronted when working on monolingual ...

Language Development in Preschool-Age Children Adopted from China.

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Roberts, Jenny A.; Pollock, Karen E.; Krakow, Rena; Price, Johanna; Fulmer, Kathleen C.; Wang, Paul P.

2005-01-01

This study examined the language development of 55 preschool-age children adopted from China who had resided in their permanent homes for approximately 2 years or longer. Slightly over 5% of the children scored below average on 2 or more measures from a battery of standardized speech-language tests normed on monolingual English speakers. However,…

Willing Learners yet Unwilling Speakers in ESL Classrooms

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Zuraidah Ali

2007-12-01

Full Text Available To some of us, speech production in ESL has become so natural and integral that we seem to take it for granted. We often do not even remember how we struggled through the initial process of mastering English. Unfortunately, to students who are still learning English, they seem to face myriad problems that make them appear unwilling or reluctant ESL speakers. This study will investigate this phenomenon which is very common in the ESL classroom. Setting its background on related research findings on this matter, a qualitative study was conducted among foreign students enrolled in the Intensive English Programme (IEP at Institute of Liberal Studies (IKAL, University Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN. The results will show and discuss an extent of truth behind this perplexing phenomenon: willing learners, yet unwilling speakers of ESL, in our effort to provide supportive learning cultures in second language acquisition (SLA to this group of students.

A fundamental residue pitch perception bias for tone language speakers

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Petitti, Elizabeth

A complex tone composed of only higher-order harmonics typically elicits a pitch percept equivalent to the tone's missing fundamental frequency (f0). When judging the direction of residue pitch change between two such tones, however, listeners may have completely opposite perceptual experiences depending on whether they are biased to perceive changes based on the overall spectrum or the missing f0 (harmonic spacing). Individual differences in residue pitch change judgments are reliable and have been associated with musical experience and functional neuroanatomy. Tone languages put greater pitch processing demands on their speakers than non-tone languages, and we investigated whether these lifelong differences in linguistic pitch processing affect listeners' bias for residue pitch. We asked native tone language speakers and native English speakers to perform a pitch judgment task for two tones with missing fundamental frequencies. Given tone pairs with ambiguous pitch changes, listeners were asked to judge the direction of pitch change, where the direction of their response indicated whether they attended to the overall spectrum (exhibiting a spectral bias) or the missing f0 (exhibiting a fundamental bias). We found that tone language speakers are significantly more likely to perceive pitch changes based on the missing f0 than English speakers. These results suggest that tone-language speakers' privileged experience with linguistic pitch fundamentally tunes their basic auditory processing.

Chinese College Students' Views on Native English and Non-Native English in EFL Classrooms

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Qian, Yang; Jingxia, Liu

2016-01-01

With the development of globalization, English is clearly spoken by many more non-native than native speakers, which raises the discussion of English varieties and the debate regarding the conformity to Standard English. Although a large number of studies have shown scholars' attitudes towards native English and non-native English, little research…

What is India speaking? Exploring the "Hinglish" invasion

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Parshad, Rana D.; Bhowmick, Suman; Chand, Vineeta; Kumari, Nitu; Sinha, Neha

2016-05-01

Language competition models help understand language shift dynamics, and have effectively captured how English has outcompeted various local languages, such as Scottish Gaelic in Scotland, and Mandarin in Singapore. India, with a 125 million English speakers boasts the second largest number of English speakers in the world, after the United States. The 1961-2001 Indian censuses report a sharp increase in Hindi/English Bilinguals, suggesting that English is on the rise in India. To the contrary, we claim supported by field evidence, that these statistics are inaccurate, ignoring an emerging class who do not have full bilingual competence and switch between Hindi and English, communicating via a code popularly known as "Hinglish". Since current language competition models occlude hybrid practices and detailed local ecological factors, they are inappropriate to capture the current language dynamics in India. Expanding predator-prey and sociolinguistic theories, we draw on local Indian ecological factors to develop a novel three-species model of interaction between Monolingual Hindi speakers, Hindi/English Bilinguals and Hinglish speakers, and explore the long time dynamics it predicts. The model also exhibits Turing instability, which is the first pattern formation result in language dynamics. These results challenge traditional assumptions of English encroachment in India. More broadly, the three-species model introduced here is a first step towards modeling the dynamics of hybrid language scenarios in other settings across the world.

Thanking Responders in Cameroon English

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Ouafeu, Yves Talla Sando

2009-01-01

An analysis of authentic or genuine interactions among Cameroon English speakers reveals that conversational routines in this variety of English differ a good deal from those obtained in other varieties of English, non-native varieties of English inclusive, and more specifically in native varieties of English. This paper looks at "thanking…

Item-level psychometrics and predictors of performance for Spanish/English bilingual speakers on an object and action naming battery.

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Edmonds, Lisa A; Donovan, Neila J

2012-04-01

There is a pressing need for psychometrically sound naming materials for Spanish/English bilingual adults. To address this need, in this study the authors examined the psychometric properties of An Object and Action Naming Battery (An O&A Battery; Druks & Masterson, 2000) in bilingual speakers. Ninety-one Spanish/English bilinguals named O&A Battery items in English and Spanish. Responses underwent a Rasch analysis. Using correlation and regression analyses, the authors evaluated the effect of psycholinguistic (e.g., imageability) and participant (e.g., proficiency ratings) variables on accuracy. Rasch analysis determined unidimensionality across English and Spanish nouns and verbs and robust item-level psychometric properties, evidence for content validity. Few items did not fit the model, there were no ceiling or floor effects after uninformative and misfit items were removed, and items reflected a range of difficulty. Reliability coefficients were high, and the number of statistically different ability levels provided indices of sensitivity. Regression analyses revealed significant correlations between psycholinguistic variables and accuracy, providing preliminary construct validity. The participant variables that contributed most to accuracy were proficiency ratings and time of language use. Results suggest adequate content and construct validity of O&A items retained in the analysis for Spanish/English bilingual adults and support future efforts to evaluate naming in older bilinguals and persons with bilingual aphasia.

Articulatory Movements during Vowels in Speakers with Dysarthria and Healthy Controls

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Yunusova, Yana; Weismer, Gary; Westbury, John R.; Lindstrom, Mary J.

2008-01-01

Purpose: This study compared movement characteristics of markers attached to the jaw, lower lip, tongue blade, and dorsum during production of selected English vowels by normal speakers and speakers with dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Parkinson disease (PD). The study asked the following questions: (a) Are movement…

Bilingual children's social preferences hinge on accent.

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DeJesus, Jasmine M; Hwang, Hyesung G; Dautel, Jocelyn B; Kinzler, Katherine D

2017-12-01

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 bilingual contexts in the United States demonstrate social preferences among the languages and accents that are present in their social environments. We compared children's preferences based on language (i.e., English vs. their other native language) and their preferences based on accent (i.e., English with a native accent vs. English with a non-native [yet familiar] accent). In Experiment 1, children attending a French immersion school demonstrated no preference between English and French speakers but preferred American-accented English to French-accented English. In Experiment 2, bilingual Korean American children demonstrated no preference between English and Korean speakers but preferred American-accented English to Korean-accented English. Across studies, bilingual children's preferences based on accent (i.e., American-accented English over French- or Korean-accented English) were not related to their own language dominance. These results suggest that children from diverse linguistic backgrounds demonstrate social preferences for native-accented speakers. Implications for understanding the potential relation between social reasoning and language acquisition are discussed. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Cognitive advantages and disadvantages in early and late bilinguals.

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Pelham, Sabra D; Abrams, Lise

2014-03-01

Previous research has documented advantages and disadvantages of early bilinguals, defined as learning a 2nd language by school age and using both languages since that time. Relative to monolinguals, early bilinguals manifest deficits in lexical access but benefits in executive function. We investigated whether becoming bilingual after childhood (late bilinguals) can produce the cognitive advantages and disadvantages typical of early bilinguals. Participants were 30 monolingual English speakers, 30 late English-Spanish bilinguals, and 30 early Spanish-English bilinguals who completed a picture naming task (lexical access) and an attentional network task (executive function). Late and early bilinguals manifested equivalent cognitive effects in both tasks, demonstrating lexical access deficits and executive function benefits. These findings provide support for the hypothesis that cognitive effects associated with bilingualism arise as the result of proficient, habitual use of 2 languages and not of developmental changes associated with becoming bilingual during childhood.

Home Language Will Not Take Care of Itself: Vocabulary Knowledge in Trilingual Children in the United Kingdom.

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Mieszkowska, Karolina; Łuniewska, Magdalena; Kołak, Joanna; Kacprzak, Agnieszka; Wodniecka, Zofia; Haman, Ewa

2017-01-01

Language input is crucial for language acquisition and especially for children's vocabulary size. Bilingual children receive reduced input in each of their languages, compared to monolinguals, and are reported to have smaller vocabularies, at least in one of their languages. Vocabulary acquisition in trilingual children has been largely understudied; only a few case studies have been published so far. Moreover, trilingual language acquisition in children has been rarely contrasted with language outcomes of bilingual and monolingual peers. We present a comparison of trilingual, bilingual, and monolingual children (total of 56 participants, aged 4;5-6;7, matched one-to-one for age, gender, and non-verbal IQ) in regard to their receptive and expressive vocabulary (measured by standardized tests), and relative frequency of input in each language (measured by parental report). The monolingual children were speakers of Polish or English, while the bilinguals and trilinguals were migrant children living in the United Kingdom, speaking English as a majority language and Polish as a home language. The trilinguals had another (third) language at home. For the majority language, English, no differences were found across the three groups, either in the receptive or productive vocabulary. The groups differed, however, in their performance in Polish, the home language. The trilinguals had lower receptive vocabulary than the monolinguals, and lower productive vocabulary compared to the monolinguals. The trilinguals showed similar lexical knowledge to the bilinguals. The bilinguals demonstrated lower scores than the monolinguals, but only in productive vocabulary. The data on reported language input show that input in English in bilingual and trilingual groups is similar, but the bilinguals outscore the trilinguals in relative frequency of Polish input. Overall, the results suggest that in the majority language, multilingual children may develop lexical skills similar to those of

Home Language Will Not Take Care of Itself: Vocabulary Knowledge in Trilingual Children in the United Kingdom

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karolina Mieszkowska

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Language input is crucial for language acquisition and especially for children’s vocabulary size. Bilingual children receive reduced input in each of their languages, compared to monolinguals, and are reported to have smaller vocabularies, at least in one of their languages. Vocabulary acquisition in trilingual children has been largely understudied; only a few case studies have been published so far. Moreover, trilingual language acquisition in children has been rarely contrasted with language outcomes of bilingual and monolingual peers. We present a comparison of trilingual, bilingual, and monolingual children (total of 56 participants, aged 4;5–6;7, matched one-to-one for age, gender, and non-verbal IQ in regard to their receptive and expressive vocabulary (measured by standardized tests, and relative frequency of input in each language (measured by parental report. The monolingual children were speakers of Polish or English, while the bilinguals and trilinguals were migrant children living in the United Kingdom, speaking English as a majority language and Polish as a home language. The trilinguals had another (third language at home. For the majority language, English, no differences were found across the three groups, either in the receptive or productive vocabulary. The groups differed, however, in their performance in Polish, the home language. The trilinguals had lower receptive vocabulary than the monolinguals, and lower productive vocabulary compared to the monolinguals. The trilinguals showed similar lexical knowledge to the bilinguals. The bilinguals demonstrated lower scores than the monolinguals, but only in productive vocabulary. The data on reported language input show that input in English in bilingual and trilingual groups is similar, but the bilinguals outscore the trilinguals in relative frequency of Polish input. Overall, the results suggest that in the majority language, multilingual children may develop lexical skills

Varieties of English.

Science.gov (United States)

Brook, G. L.

The English language is not a monolithic entity but an amalgam of many different varieties that can be associated respectively with groups of speakers, with individuals, and with the occasion. Among such varieties are slang, regional and class dialects, the language of children, and the language used by public speakers, journalists, lawyers,…

Variation among heritage speakers: Sequential vs. simultaneous bilinguals

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Teresa Lee

2013-08-01

Full Text Available This study examines the differences in the grammatical knowledge of two types of heritage speakers of Korean. Early simultaneous bilinguals are exposed to both English and the heritage language from birth, whereas early sequential bilinguals are exposed to the heritage language first and then to English upon schooling. A listening comprehension task involving relative clauses was conducted with 51 beginning-level Korean heritage speakers. The results showed that the early sequential bilinguals exhibited much more accurate knowledge than the early simultaneous bilinguals, who lacked rudimentary knowledge of Korean relative clauses. Drawing on the findings of adult and child Korean L1 data on the acquisition of relative clauses, the performance of each group is discussed with respect to attrition and incomplete acquisition of the heritage language.

Student perceptions of native and non-native speaker language instructors: A comparison of ESL and Spanish

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Laura Callahan

2006-12-01

Full Text Available The question of the native vs. non-native speaker status of second and foreign language instructors has been investigated chiefly from the perspective of the teacher. Anecdotal evidence suggests that students have strong opinions on the relative qualities of instruction by native and non-native speakers. Most research focuses on students of English as a foreign or second language. This paper reports on data gathered through a questionnaire administered to 55 university students: 31 students of Spanish as FL and 24 students of English as SL. Qualitative results show what strengths students believe each type of instructor has, and quantitative results confirm that any gap students may perceive between the abilities of native and non-native instructors is not so wide as one might expect based on popular notions of the issue. ESL students showed a stronger preference for native-speaker instructors overall, and were at variance with the SFL students' ratings of native-speaker instructors' performance on a number of aspects. There was a significant correlation in both groups between having a family member who is a native speaker of the target language and student preference for and self-identification with a native speaker as instructor. (English text

Longitudinal analysis of receptive vocabulary growth in young Spanish English-speaking children from migrant families.

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Jackson, Carla Wood; Schatschneider, Christopher; Leacox, Lindsey

2014-01-01

The authors of this study described developmental trajectories and predicted kindergarten performance of Spanish and English receptive vocabulary acquisition of young Latino/a English language learners (ELLs) from socioeconomically disadvantaged migrant families. In addition, the authors examined the extent to which gender and individual initial performance in Spanish predict receptive vocabulary performance and growth rate. The authors used hierarchical linear modeling of 64 children's receptive vocabulary performance to generate growth trajectories, predict performance at school entry, and examine potential predictors of rate of growth. The timing of testing varied across children. The ELLs (prekindergarten to 2nd grade) participated in 2-5 testing sessions, each 6-12 months apart. The ELLs' average predicted standard score on an English receptive vocabulary at kindergarten was nearly 2 SDs below the mean for monolingual peers. Significant growth in the ELLs' receptive vocabulary was observed between preschool and 2nd grade, indicating that the ELLs were slowly closing the receptive vocabulary gap, although their average score remained below the standard score mean for age-matched monolingual peers. The ELLs demonstrated a significant decrease in Spanish receptive vocabulary standard scores over time. Initial Spanish receptive vocabulary was a significant predictor of growth in English receptive vocabulary. High initial Spanish receptive vocabulary was associated with greater growth in English receptive vocabulary and decelerated growth in Spanish receptive vocabulary. Gender was not a significant predictor of growth in either English or Spanish receptive vocabulary. ELLs from low socioeconomic backgrounds may be expected to perform lower in English compared with their monolingual English peers in kindergarten. Performance in Spanish at school entry may be useful in identifying children who require more intensive instructional support for English vocabulary

Stuttering Characteristics of German-English Bilingual Speakers

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Schafer, Martina; Robb, Michael P.

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine stuttering behavior in German-English bilingual people who stutter (PWS), with particular reference to the frequency of stuttering on content and function words. Fifteen bilingual PWS were sampled who spoke German as the first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2). Conversational speech was…

Football versus football: effect of topic on /r/ realization in American and English sports fans.

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Love, Jessica; Walker, Abby

2013-12-01

Can the topic of a conversation, when heavily associated with a particular dialect region, influence how a speaker realizes a linguistic variable? We interviewed fans of English Premier League soccer at a pub in Columbus, Ohio. Nine speakers of British English and eleven speakers of American English were interviewed about their favorite American football and English soccer teams. We present evidence that the soccer fans in this speech community produce variants more consistent with Standard American English when talking about American football than English soccer. Specifically, speakers were overall more /r/-ful (F3 values were lower in rhotic environments) when talking about their favorite American football team. Numeric trends in the data also suggest that exposure to both American and British English, being a fan of both sports, and task may mediate these effects.

Learning for Life, a Structured and Motivational Process of Knowledge Construction in the Acquisition/Learning of English as a Foreign Language in Native Spanish Speakers

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Mino-Garces, Fernando

2009-01-01

As language learning theory has shifted from a highly guided to a more open learning process, this paper presents the teaching/learning philosophy called Learning for Life (L for L) as a great way to motivate native Spanish speaker students learning English as a foreign language, and to help them be the constructors of their own knowledge. The…

Multilingual Effects on EFL Learning: A Comparison of Foreign Language Anxiety Experienced by Monolingual and Bilingual Tertiary Students in the Lao PDR

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Phongsa, Manivone; Mohamed Ismail, Shaik Abdul Malik; Low, Hui Min

2018-01-01

Foreign language anxiety is common among adult learners, especially those who lack exposure to the language that they are learning. In this study, we compared the foreign language anxiety experienced by monolingual and bilingual tertiary students in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) who were learning English as a Foreign Language. The…

Which English? Whose English? An Investigation of "Non-Native" Teachers' Beliefs about Target Varieties

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Young, Tony Johnstone; Walsh, Steve

2010-01-01

This study explored the beliefs of "non-native English speaking" teachers about the usefulness and appropriacy of varieties such as English as an International Language (EIL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), compared with native speaker varieties. The study therefore addresses the current theoretical debate concerning "appropriate" target…

Cheater's Guide to Speaking English Like a Native

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De Mente, Boye

2007-01-01

Native English-speakers use a large number of proverbs and colloquial expressions in their daily conversations. These common sayings, which evolved over the centuries, are like "codes" that reveal the cultural values and attitudes of the speakers. To fully understand and communicate in English, it's necessary to be familiar with these expressions and know how and when to use them. The Cheater's Guide to Speaking English like a Native is a shortcut to achieving that goal.

Native language change during early stages of second language learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Bice, Kinsey; Kroll, Judith F

2015-11-11

Research on proficient bilinguals has demonstrated that both languages are always active, even when only one is required. The coactivation of the two languages creates both competition and convergence, facilitating the processing of cognate words, but slowing lexical access when there is a requirement to engage control mechanisms to select the target language. Critically, these consequences are evident in the native language (L1) as well as in the second language (L2). The present study questioned whether L1 changes can be detected at early stages of L2 learning and how they are modulated by L2 proficiency. Native English speakers learning Spanish performed an English (L1) lexical decision task that included cognates while event-related potentials were recorded. They also performed verbal fluency, working memory, and inhibitory control tasks. A group of matched monolinguals performed the same tasks in English only. The results revealed that intermediate learners demonstrate a reduced N400 for cognates compared with noncognates in English (L1), and an emerging effect is visually present in beginning learners as well; however, no behavioral cognate effect was present for either group. In addition, slower reaction times in English (L1) are related to a larger cognate N400 magnitude in English (L1) and Spanish (L2), and to better inhibitory control for learners but not for monolinguals. The results suggest that contrary to the claim that L2 affects L1 only when L2 speakers are highly proficient, L2 learning begins to impact L1 early in the development of the L2 skill.

Young Spanish-English Speaking Children's Reading Attitudes in Relation to Language Skills

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Wood, Carla L.; Gabas, Clariebelle M.

2017-01-01

Background: Reading attitudes are recognised as an influencing factor on the language and literacy achievement of school age monolingual English-speaking children. The relationship between reading attitudes and achievement in young Spanish-speaking English Learners (ELs) remains understudied. Purpose: The aim of the current study was to describe…

Words in Sheep’s Clothing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dušan Gabrovšek

2006-06-01

Full Text Available The paper focuses on various types of dictionary words, i.e. infrequent and rather uncommon words often listed in comprehensive monolingual English dictionaries but virtually nonexistent in actual usage. These are typically learned derivatives of Greek or Latin origin that are given as unlabeled synonyms of everyday vocabulary items. Their inclusion seems to stem from the application of two different bits of lexicographic philosophy: great respect for matters classical and the principle of comprehensiveness. Seen from this perspective, descriptive corpus-based lexicography is still too weak. While in large native-speaker-oriented dictionaries of English such entries do not seem to cause any harm, they can be positively dangerous in EFL/ESL environments, because using them can easily lead to strange or downright incomprehensible lexical items. Learners are advised to be careful and check the status of such “dubious” items also in English monolingual learners’ dictionaries, in which dictionary words are virtually nonexistent.

Hindsight of an English Language Learner.

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Dam, Phap

This keynote address by a native Vietnamese speaker who did not learn English until he was college-age, through the now obsolete "grammar-translation" method, recounts his difficulties in learning to converse orally in English. He stresses the need to teach conversational English to English Language Learners (ELLs) in addition to…

Lexical representation of novel L2 contrasts

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Hayes-Harb, Rachel; Masuda, Kyoko

2005-04-01

There is much interest among psychologists and linguists in the influence of the native language sound system on the acquisition of second languages (Best, 1995; Flege, 1995). Most studies of second language (L2) speech focus on how learners perceive and produce L2 sounds, but we know of only two that have considered how novel sound contrasts are encoded in learners' lexical representations of L2 words (Pallier et al., 2001; Ota et al., 2002). In this study we investigated how native speakers of English encode Japanese consonant quantity contrasts in their developing Japanese lexicons at different stages of acquisition (Japanese contrasts singleton versus geminate consonants but English does not). Monolingual English speakers, native English speakers learning Japanese for one year, and native speakers of Japanese were taught a set of Japanese nonwords containing singleton and geminate consonants. Subjects then performed memory tasks eliciting perception and production data to determine whether they encoded the Japanese consonant quantity contrast lexically. Overall accuracy in these tasks was a function of Japanese language experience, and acoustic analysis of the production data revealed non-native-like patterns of differentiation of singleton and geminate consonants among the L2 learners of Japanese. Implications for theories of L2 speech are discussed.

Development and preliminary evaluation of a pediatric Spanish-English speech perception task.

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Calandruccio, Lauren; Gomez, Bianca; Buss, Emily; Leibold, Lori J

2014-06-01

The purpose of this study was to develop a task to evaluate children's English and Spanish speech perception abilities in either noise or competing speech maskers. Eight bilingual Spanish-English and 8 age-matched monolingual English children (ages 4.9-16.4 years) were tested. A forced-choice, picture-pointing paradigm was selected for adaptively estimating masked speech reception thresholds. Speech stimuli were spoken by simultaneous bilingual Spanish-English talkers. The target stimuli were 30 disyllabic English and Spanish words, familiar to 5-year-olds and easily illustrated. Competing stimuli included either 2-talker English or 2-talker Spanish speech (corresponding to target language) and spectrally matched noise. For both groups of children, regardless of test language, performance was significantly worse for the 2-talker than for the noise masker condition. No difference in performance was found between bilingual and monolingual children. Bilingual children performed significantly better in English than in Spanish in competing speech. For all listening conditions, performance improved with increasing age. Results indicated that the stimuli and task were appropriate for speech recognition testing in both languages, providing a more conventional measure of speech-in-noise perception as well as a measure of complex listening. Further research is needed to determine performance for Spanish-dominant listeners and to evaluate the feasibility of implementation into routine clinical use.

The iPad as a Research Tool for the Understanding of English Plurals by English, Chinese, and Other L1 Speaking 3- and 4-Year-Olds.

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Xu Rattanasone, Nan; Davies, Benjamin; Schembri, Tamara; Andronos, Fabia; Demuth, Katherine

2016-01-01

Learning about what young children with limited spoken language know about the grammar of their language is extremely challenging. Researchers have traditionally used looking behavior as a measure of language processing and to infer what overt choices children might make. However, these methods are expensive to setup, require specialized training, are time intensive for data analysis and can have considerable dropout rates. For these reasons, we have developed a forced choice task delivered on an iPad based on our eye-tracking studies with English monolinguals (Davies et al., 2016, under review). Using the iPad we investigated 3- and 4-year-olds' understanding of the English plural in preschool centers. The primary aim of the study was to provide evidence for the usefulness of the iPad as a language research tool. We evaluated the usefulness of the iPad with second language (L2) learning children who have limited L2 language skills. Studies with school aged Chinese-speaking children show below native performance on English inflectional morphology despite 5-6 years of immersion (Jia, 2003; Jia and Fuse, 2007; Paradis et al., 2016). However, it is unclear whether this is specific only to children who speak Chinese as their first language (L1) or if younger preschoolers will also show similar challenges. We tested three groups of preschoolers with different L1s (English, Chinese, and other languages). L1 Chinese children's performance was below both English monolinguals and children speaking Other L1 languages, providing evidence that English inflections are specifically challenging for Chinese-speaking children. The results provide further evidence to support previous eye-tracking findings with monolinguals and studies with older bilinguals. The study provides evidence for the usefulness of iPads as research tool for studying language acquisition. Implications for future application of the iPad as a teaching and intervention tool, and limitations for the method, are

Perception of foreign-accented clear speech by younger and older English listeners

OpenAIRE

Li, Chi-Nin

2009-01-01

Naturally produced English clear speech has been shown to be more intelligible than English conversational speech. However, little is known about the extent of the clear speech effects in the production of nonnative English, and perception of foreign-accented English by younger and older listeners. The present study examined whether Cantonese speakers would employ the same strategies as those used by native English speakers in producing clear speech in their second language. Also, the clear s...

Teaching the Dutch how to pronounce English

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Frans Hermans; Peter Sloep

2015-01-01

The Dutch overestimate their English speaking skills. Their pronunciation is not always convincing and certain pronunciation mistakes are easily recognised as being typical for Dutch speakers of English. Although intelligibility cannot exist without adequate pronunciation, teaching English

Teaching the Dutch how to pronounce English

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hermans, Frans; Sloep, Peter

2018-01-01

The Dutch overestimate their English speaking skills. Their pronunciation is not always convincing, and certain pronunciation mistakes are easily recognised as being typical for Dutch speakers of English. Although intelligibility cannot exist without adequate pronunciation, teaching English

Reading, syntactic, orthographic, and working memory skills of bilingual Arabic-English speaking Canadian children.

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Abu-Rabia, Salim; Siegel, Linda S

2002-11-01

This study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 56 bilingual Arab-Canadian children age's 9-14. English was their main instructional language, and Arabic was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program in Toronto where they were taught to read and write Arabic. The children were administered word and pseudo-word reading, language, and working memory tests in English and Arabic. The majority of the children showed at least adequate proficiency in both languages. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudo-word reading working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The poor readers in Arabic had lower scores on all linguistic tasks, except the visual task. There were no significant differences between bilingual English Arabic children and monolingual English-speaking children on the reading, language, and memory tasks. However, bilingual English Arabic children who had reading problems in English had higher scores on English pseudo-word reading and spelling tasks than monolingual English-speaking children with reading disabilities, probably because of positive transfer from the regular nature of Arabic orthography. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of language reading skills in both languages--Arabic and English--despite the different nature of the two orthographies.

Learning speaker-specific characteristics with a deep neural architecture.

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Chen, Ke; Salman, Ahmad

2011-11-01

Speech signals convey various yet mixed information ranging from linguistic to speaker-specific information. However, most of acoustic representations characterize all different kinds of information as whole, which could hinder either a speech or a speaker recognition (SR) system from producing a better performance. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural architecture (DNA) especially for learning speaker-specific characteristics from mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, an acoustic representation commonly used in both speech recognition and SR, which results in a speaker-specific overcomplete representation. In order to learn intrinsic speaker-specific characteristics, we come up with an objective function consisting of contrastive losses in terms of speaker similarity/dissimilarity and data reconstruction losses used as regularization to normalize the interference of non-speaker-related information. Moreover, we employ a hybrid learning strategy for learning parameters of the deep neural networks: i.e., local yet greedy layerwise unsupervised pretraining for initialization and global supervised learning for the ultimate discriminative goal. With four Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) benchmarks and two non-English corpora, we demonstrate that our overcomplete representation is robust in characterizing various speakers, no matter whether their utterances have been used in training our DNA, and highly insensitive to text and languages spoken. Extensive comparative studies suggest that our approach yields favorite results in speaker verification and segmentation. Finally, we discuss several issues concerning our proposed approach.

Teacher of primary English

CERN Multimedia

2003-01-01

Part-time teacher of primary English needed for September 2003 to teach English National Curriculum (KS2) and NLS to mother tongue or good second language English-speakers aged 7-10. 4 hours contact time per week, team planning, marking and meetings. Candidates should be English mother tongue qualified teachers, confident, flexible classroom practitioners and team players. For further details and how to apply see http://enpferney.org/staff_vacancies.htm English National Programme, Lycée International, Ferney-Voltaire (http://enpferney.org/)

English Teaching Profile: Yemen Arab Republic.

Science.gov (United States)

British Council, London (England). English Language and Literature Div.

A description of the role and status of the English language in the Yemen Arab Republic begins with a general statement concerning the distribution of English speakers and the use of English language materials. Subsequent sections outline: (1) the use and status of English within the educational system at all levels, including teacher education;…

A cross-language study of perception of lexical stress in English.

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Vickie Y; Andruski, Jean E

2010-08-01

This study investigates the question of whether language background affects the perception of lexical stress in English. Thirty native English speakers and 30 native Chinese learners of English participated in a stressed-syllable identification task and a discrimination task involving three types of stimuli (real words/pseudowords/hums). The results show that both language groups were able to identify and discriminate stress patterns. Lexical and segmental information affected the English and Chinese speakers in varying degrees. English and Chinese speakers showed different response patterns to trochaic vs. iambic stress across the three types of stimuli. An acoustic analysis revealed that two language groups used different acoustic cues to process lexical stress. The findings suggest that the different degrees of lexical and segmental effects can be explained by language background, which in turn supports the hypothesis that language background affects the perception of lexical stress in English.

Pronunciation Assessment in the Context of World Englishes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dimova, Slobodanka

2017-01-01

The globalization of English has initiated a debate of acceptability of competing norms, be they endonormative or exonormative (Davies, 1999; Gill, 1999). In WE’s view, exonormative orientations towards the native-speaker may be discriminatory against non-native speakers (NNS) of English, so...... it recommends a pluralized and pluricentric notion of world Englishes (Kachru, 1992). ELF’s standpoint, conversely, rejects native speaker norms in favor of endonormative realizations of lingua franca varieties. These normative issues are exacerbated, both theoretically and practically, in the context...... the Expanding Circle users, for which “phonological intelligibility” is the most important criterion (Jenkins, 2006a). The chapter will continue with a discussion of criticism of the current practices in language testing and assessment that claim that the field has failed to adopt the WE perspective...

The Usage of Loanwords by Japanese Learners and Their Background : case of English Native Speakers (Dedicated to the Memory of Dr. SASAKI Yoshinori)

OpenAIRE

堀切, 友紀子

2010-01-01

In the field of Teaching Japanese as a Second Language, the study of Japanese loanwords has focused on their acquisition, and Japanese loanwords tend to be an obstacle for Japanese learners. However, actual situations about loanword usage by English native speakers need to be identical. The purpose of this research is to understand the process involved in the cognition, emotion and usage of loanwords by Japanese learners. An investigatory interview was conducted with 11 Japanese learners who ...

The Disfluent Speech of Bilingual Spanish–English Children: Considerations for Differential Diagnosis of Stuttering

Science.gov (United States)

Bedore, Lisa M.; Ramos, Daniel

2015-01-01

Purpose The primary purpose of this study was to describe the frequency and types of speech disfluencies that are produced by bilingual Spanish–English (SE) speaking children who do not stutter. The secondary purpose was to determine whether their disfluent speech is mediated by language dominance and/or language produced. Method Spanish and English narratives (a retell and a tell in each language) were elicited and analyzed relative to the frequency and types of speech disfluencies produced. These data were compared with the monolingual English-speaking guidelines for differential diagnosis of stuttering. Results The mean frequency of stuttering-like speech behaviors in the bilingual SE participants ranged from 3% to 22%, exceeding the monolingual English standard of 3 per 100 words. There was no significant frequency difference in stuttering-like or non-stuttering-like speech disfluency produced relative to the child's language dominance. There was a significant difference relative to the language the child was speaking; all children produced significantly more stuttering-like speech disfluencies in Spanish than in English. Conclusion Results demonstrate that the disfluent speech of bilingual SE children should be carefully considered relative to the complex nature of bilingualism. PMID:25215876

Restrictive Language Policy in Practice: English Learners in Arizona

Science.gov (United States)

Heineke, Amy J.

2016-01-01

As the most restrictive language policy context in the United States, Arizona's monolingual and prescriptive approach to teaching English learners continues to capture international attention. More than five school years after initial implementation, this study uses qualitative data from the individuals doing the policy work to provide a holistic…

Congenital Amusia in Speakers of a Tone Language: Association with Lexical Tone Agnosia

Science.gov (United States)

Nan, Yun; Sun, Yanan; Peretz, Isabelle

2010-01-01

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of musical pitch in speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French. We assessed whether this musical disorder exists among speakers of Mandarin Chinese who use pitch to alter the meaning of words. Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, we tested 117…

The Effect of a Simplified English Language Dictionary on a Reading Test. LEP Projects Report 1.

Science.gov (United States)

Albus, Deb; Bielinski, John; Thurlow, Martha; Liu, Kristin

This study was conducted to examine whether using a monolingual, simplified English dictionary as an accommodation on a reading test with limited-English-proficient (LEP) Hmong students improved test performance. Hmong students were chosen because they are often not literate in their first language. For these students, bilingual dictionaries are…

A System for Understanding and Selecting English-Language Articles for Advanced ESL Writers

Science.gov (United States)

Robinson, Heather M.

2010-01-01

The use of definite and indefinite articles in English is well known to be a major point of difficulty for many nonnative English speakers. These difficulties prevail even when the speakers are fluent in most other aspects of English grammar and style. This article investigates the pedagogical and linguistic reasons why article use is such a…

Agrammatic aphasia verb and argument patterns in Kiswahili-English spontaneous language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hillary K. Sang

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Background: The spontaneous and narrative language of Kiswahili agrammatic aphasic and non-brain-damaged speakers was analysed. The bilingual participants were also tested in English to enable comparisons of verb production in the two languages. The significance of this study was to characterise bilingual Kiswahili-English spontaneous agrammatic output. This was done by describing Kiswahili-English bilingual output data with a specific focus on the production of verbs. The description involves comparison of verb and argument production in Kiswahili and English. Methods and procedures: The participants recruited for this study were drawn from two groups of participants (six non-fluent aphasic/agrammatic speakers and six non-braindamaged. From each participant, a sample of spontaneous output was tape-recorded in English and Kiswahili based on the description and narration of the Flood rescue picture’ and the ‘Cookie theft picture’. The data elicited were compared for each subject and between the participants and relevant verb parameters have been analysed. The variables that were studied included mean length of utterance (MLU, inflectional errors, verb tokens and types, copulas and auxiliaries. Further, all verbs produced were classified as per their argument structure. Results: The results from English data supported previous findings on agrammatic output. The agrammatic participants produced utterances with shorter MLU and simpler sentence structure. However, Kiswahili data surprisingly showed reversed results, with agrammatic speakers producing longer utterances than non-brain-damaged (NBD controls. The results also revealed selective impairment in some agrammatic speakers who made inflectional errors. The verb argument structure showed contrasting results, with agrammatic speakers preferring transitive verbs whilst the NBD speakers used more intransitive verbs. Conclusions: The study attempts for the first time to characterise English

Annual Report for 1990: Laboratory Graduate Fellowship Program

Science.gov (United States)

1991-04-30

I41 t N- * r r -04 >, 0a r0N C *~~4;14 04 0... 1 A0 0 ) 0 OH U 0 E-4 0 31 monolingual English-speakers, both biological parents were willing to...signals from the same sensory modality. Reason proposed the concept of a "Neural Store" or neural memory in which the brain maintains a sort of dictionary

English Activation through Art: Tensions and Rewards

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Choi, Tat Heung

2017-01-01

This article describes a unit of work framed by a rationale for activating English language learning through arts-based practices that are suitable for preservice teachers who are nonnative speakers of English (seeking certification for teaching English as a second language). Because teachers of English are expected to use language arts to promote…

TEACHER OF ENGLISH NEEDED

CERN Multimedia

2002-01-01

Part-time teacher of primary English needed for September 2002 to teach English National Curriculum (KS2) and NLS to mother tongue or good second language English-speakers aged 7-10. 4 hours contact time per week, team planning, marking and meetings. Candidates should be English mother tongue qualified teachers, confident, flexible classroom practitioners and team players. For further details and how to apply: engnat@hotmail.com or 04 50 40 82 66. Apply as soon as possible, and in any case before 8 July. English National Programme, Lycée International, Ferney-Voltaire.

Formant compensation for auditory feedback with English vowels

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mitsuya, Takashi; MacDonald, Ewen N; Munhall, Kevin G

2015-01-01

Past studies have shown that speakers spontaneously adjust their speech acoustics in response to their auditory feedback perturbed in real time. In the case of formant perturbation, the majority of studies have examined speaker's compensatory production using the English vowel /ɛ/ as in the word...... "head." Consistent behavioral observations have been reported, and there is lively discussion as to how the production system integrates auditory versus somatosensory feedback to control vowel production. However, different vowels have different oral sensation and proprioceptive information due...... to differences in the degree of lingual contact or jaw openness. This may in turn influence the ways in which speakers compensate for auditory feedback. The aim of the current study was to examine speakers' compensatory behavior with six English monophthongs. Specifically, the current study tested to see...

The auditory attention status in Iranian bilingual and monolingual people

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nayiere Mansoori

2013-05-01

Full Text Available Background and Aim: Bilingualism, as one of the discussing issues of psychology and linguistics, can influence the speech processing. Of several tests for assessing auditory processing, dichotic digit test has been designed to study divided auditory attention. Our study was performed to compare the auditory attention between Iranian bilingual and monolingual young adults. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 60 students including 30 Turkish-Persian bilinguals and 30 Persian monolinguals aged between 18 to 30 years in both genders. Dichotic digit test was performed on young individuals with normal peripheral hearing and right hand preference. Results: No significant correlation was found between the results of dichotic digit test of monolinguals and bilinguals (p=0.195, and also between the results of right and left ears in monolingual (p=0.460 and bilingual (p=0.054 groups. The mean score of women was significantly more than men (p=0.031. Conclusion: There was no significant difference between bilinguals and monolinguals in divided auditory attention; and it seems that acquisition of second language in lower ages has no noticeable effect on this type of auditory attention.

Non-native educators in English language teaching

CERN Document Server

Braine, George

2013-01-01

The place of native and non-native speakers in the role of English teachers has probably been an issue ever since English was taught internationally. Although ESL and EFL literature is awash, in fact dependent upon, the scrutiny of non-native learners, interest in non-native academics and teachers is fairly new. Until recently, the voices of non-native speakers articulating their own concerns have been even rarer. This book is a response to this notable vacuum in the ELT literature, providing a forum for language educators from diverse geographical origins and language backgrounds. In addition to presenting autobiographical narratives, these authors argue sociopolitical issues and discuss implications for teacher education, all relating to the theme of non-native educators in ETL. All of the authors are non-native speakers of English. Some are long established professionals, whereas others are more recent initiates to the field. All but one received part of the higher education in North America, and all excep...

THE BASIC SPECIFICITY OF THE ABILITY OF VARIED ENGLISH LANGUAGE CURRICULUMS TO ENHANCE ENGLISH LEARNERS' CAPACITY TO DEVELOP NECESSARY SKILLS TO COMMUNICATE USING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

OpenAIRE

Michael Wayne Hendershot; Nutprapha K. Dennis; Suchada Chaiwiwattrakul; Ratirot Phiphitphakdee

2017-01-01

Inasmuch as the goal of teaching English to non-native English speakers should be focused on enhancing English learners’ ability to develop skills necessary for efficient and effective use of the English language in communication within their daily lives as well as within the context of educational, employment, governmental, and business related issues, the materials and resources used by the teacher to provide said English learners with enhanced ability to develop necessary skills for the us...

Mandarin-English Bilinguals Process Lexical Tones in Newly Learned Words in Accordance with the Language Context.

Science.gov (United States)

Quam, Carolyn; Creel, Sarah C

2017-01-01

Previous research has mainly considered the impact of tone-language experience on ability to discriminate linguistic pitch, but proficient bilingual listening requires differential processing of sound variation in each language context. Here, we ask whether Mandarin-English bilinguals, for whom pitch indicates word distinctions in one language but not the other, can process pitch differently in a Mandarin context vs. an English context. Across three eye-tracked word-learning experiments, results indicated that tone-intonation bilinguals process tone in accordance with the language context. In Experiment 1, 51 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 26 English speakers without tone experience were taught Mandarin-compatible novel words with tones. Mandarin-English bilinguals out-performed English speakers, and, for bilinguals, overall accuracy was correlated with Mandarin dominance. Experiment 2 taught 24 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 25 English speakers novel words with Mandarin-like tones, but English-like phonemes and phonotactics. The Mandarin-dominance advantages observed in Experiment 1 disappeared when words were English-like. Experiment 3 contrasted Mandarin-like vs. English-like words in a within-subjects design, providing even stronger evidence that bilinguals can process tone language-specifically. Bilinguals (N = 58), regardless of language dominance, attended more to tone than English speakers without Mandarin experience (N = 28), but only when words were Mandarin-like-not when they were English-like. Mandarin-English bilinguals thus tailor tone processing to the within-word language context.

Influence of Second Language Cherokee Immersion on Children's Development of Past Tense in Their First Language, English

Science.gov (United States)

Hirata-Edds, Tracy

2011-01-01

Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5-6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word…

The Development of English as a Second Language With and Without Specific Language Impairment: Clinical Implications.

Science.gov (United States)

Paradis, Johanne

2016-02-01

The purpose of this research forum article is to provide an overview of typical and atypical development of English as a second language (L2) and to present strategies for clinical assessment with English language learners (ELLs). A review of studies examining the lexical, morphological, narrative, and verbal memory abilities of ELLs is organized around 3 topics: timeframe and characteristics of typical English L2 development, comparison of the English L2 development of children with and without specific language impairment (SLI), and strategies for more effective assessment with ELLs. ELLs take longer than 3 years to converge on monolingual norms and approach monolingual norms asynchronously across linguistic subdomains. Individual variation is predicted by age, first language, language learning aptitude, length of exposure to English in school, maternal education, and richness of the English environment outside school. ELLs with SLI acquire English more slowly than ELLs with typical development; their morphological and nonword repetition abilities differentiate them the most. Use of strategies such as parent questionnaires on first language development and ELL norm referencing can result in accurate discrimination of ELLs with SLI. Variability in the language abilities of ELLs presents challenges for clinical practice. Increased knowledge of English language learning development with and without SLI together with evidence-based alternative assessment strategies can assist in overcoming these challenges.

Nobody seems to speak English here today: Enhancing assessment and training in aviation English

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dan Douglas

2014-07-01

Full Text Available In 2003 the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO strengthened the provisions that English be made available for international radiotelephony communication. ICAO also developed standards for English proficiency for international pilots and air traffic controllers. However, these standards are applied variably from country to country and in no country are native speakers of English tested for their ability to employ what has been termed "interactional competence" when using English for intercultural communication. Problems with this situation are reviewed and suggestions made for improving English assessment and training.

Swahili Learners' Views on the Need for a Monolingual Swahili ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

monolingual Swahili learners' dictionary specifically designed for them. The paper discusses the need for a monolingual Swahili pedagogical dictionary which helps the foreigner learn the language. A pedagogical dictionary is oriented towards encoding Swahili, hence it is logical that some Swahili grammatical aspects are ...

A Computer Text Analysis of Four Cohesion Devices in English Discourse by Native and Nonnative Writers.

Science.gov (United States)

Reid, Joy

1992-01-01

In a contrastive rhetoric study of nonnative English speakers, 768 essays written in English by native speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and English were examined using the Writer's Workbench program to determine whether distinctive, quantifiable differences in the use of 4 cohesion devices existed among the 4 language backgrounds. (Author/LB)

Case, Inflection, and Subject Licensing in Child Catalan and Spanish.

Science.gov (United States)

Grindstead, John

2000-01-01

Development of specified tense and number morphology in child Catalan and Spanish was found to correlate with the onset of overt subject use in one monolingual child Spanish speaker and four monolingual child Catalan speakers who were studied longitudinally. (Author/VWL)

Analysis of error type and frequency in apraxia of speech among Portuguese speakers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maysa Luchesi Cera

Full Text Available Abstract Most studies characterizing errors in the speech of patients with apraxia involve English language. Objectives: To analyze the types and frequency of errors produced by patients with apraxia of speech whose mother tongue was Brazilian Portuguese. Methods: 20 adults with apraxia of speech caused by stroke were assessed. The types of error committed by patients were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, and frequencies compared. Results: We observed the presence of substitution, omission, trial-and-error, repetition, self-correction, anticipation, addition, reiteration and metathesis, in descending order of frequency, respectively. Omission type errors were one of the most commonly occurring whereas addition errors were infrequent. These findings differed to those reported in English speaking patients, probably owing to differences in the methodologies used for classifying error types; the inclusion of speakers with apraxia secondary to aphasia; and the difference in the structure of Portuguese language to English in terms of syllable onset complexity and effect on motor control. Conclusions: The frequency of omission and addition errors observed differed to the frequency reported for speakers of English.

Analysis of error type and frequency in apraxia of speech among Portuguese speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Cera, Maysa Luchesi; Minett, Thaís Soares Cianciarullo; Ortiz, Karin Zazo

2010-01-01

Most studies characterizing errors in the speech of patients with apraxia involve English language. To analyze the types and frequency of errors produced by patients with apraxia of speech whose mother tongue was Brazilian Portuguese. 20 adults with apraxia of speech caused by stroke were assessed. The types of error committed by patients were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, and frequencies compared. We observed the presence of substitution, omission, trial-and-error, repetition, self-correction, anticipation, addition, reiteration and metathesis, in descending order of frequency, respectively. Omission type errors were one of the most commonly occurring whereas addition errors were infrequent. These findings differed to those reported in English speaking patients, probably owing to differences in the methodologies used for classifying error types; the inclusion of speakers with apraxia secondary to aphasia; and the difference in the structure of Portuguese language to English in terms of syllable onset complexity and effect on motor control. The frequency of omission and addition errors observed differed to the frequency reported for speakers of English.

A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Hartshorne, Joshua K; Tenenbaum, Joshua B; Pinker, Steven

2018-08-01

Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this ability declines have been obscure for both empirical reasons (underpowered studies) and conceptual reasons (measuring the ultimate attainment of learners who started at different ages cannot by itself reveal changes in underlying learning ability). We address both limitations with a dataset of unprecedented size (669,498 native and non-native English speakers) and a computational model that estimates the trajectory of underlying learning ability by disentangling current age, age at first exposure, and years of experience. This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily. This finding held not only for "difficult" syntactic phenomena but also for "easy" syntactic phenomena that are normally mastered early in acquisition. The results support the existence of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition, but the age of offset is much later than previously speculated. The size of the dataset also provides novel insight into several other outstanding questions in language acquisition. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Swedish or English? Migrants' Experiences of the Exchangeability of Language Resources

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Henry, Alastair

2016-01-01

Patterns of transmigration emerging as a consequence of globalization are creating new and complex markets for communicative resources in which languages and language varieties are differently valued. In a Swedish context, where lingua franca English can facilitate communication but where monolingual norms prevail and Swedish is positioned as the…

Navigating between a Monolingual Utopia and Translingual Realities: Experiences of American Learners of Yorùbá as an Additional Language

Science.gov (United States)

Mori, Junko; Sanuth, Kazeem Ké?hìndé

2018-01-01

Translingualism advocates for the appreciation of multilingual speakers' fluid, flexible, and creative deployment of semiotic resources without regard to the ideological constructs of named languages. While this scholarship has been developed primarily in the contexts of world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and bilingual education in…

Mandarin-English Bilinguals Process Lexical Tones in Newly Learned Words in Accordance with the Language Context

Science.gov (United States)

Quam, Carolyn; Creel, Sarah C.

2017-01-01

Previous research has mainly considered the impact of tone-language experience on ability to discriminate linguistic pitch, but proficient bilingual listening requires differential processing of sound variation in each language context. Here, we ask whether Mandarin-English bilinguals, for whom pitch indicates word distinctions in one language but not the other, can process pitch differently in a Mandarin context vs. an English context. Across three eye-tracked word-learning experiments, results indicated that tone-intonation bilinguals process tone in accordance with the language context. In Experiment 1, 51 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 26 English speakers without tone experience were taught Mandarin-compatible novel words with tones. Mandarin-English bilinguals out-performed English speakers, and, for bilinguals, overall accuracy was correlated with Mandarin dominance. Experiment 2 taught 24 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 25 English speakers novel words with Mandarin-like tones, but English-like phonemes and phonotactics. The Mandarin-dominance advantages observed in Experiment 1 disappeared when words were English-like. Experiment 3 contrasted Mandarin-like vs. English-like words in a within-subjects design, providing even stronger evidence that bilinguals can process tone language-specifically. Bilinguals (N = 58), regardless of language dominance, attended more to tone than English speakers without Mandarin experience (N = 28), but only when words were Mandarin-like—not when they were English-like. Mandarin-English bilinguals thus tailor tone processing to the within-word language context. PMID:28076400

Influences of Phonological Context on Tense Marking in Spanish–English Dual Language Learners

Science.gov (United States)

Barlow, Jessica A.; Potapova, Irina; Pruitt-Lord, Sonja

2017-01-01

Purpose The emergence of tense-morpheme marking during language acquisition is highly variable, which confounds the use of tense marking as a diagnostic indicator of language impairment in linguistically diverse populations. In this study, we seek to better understand tense-marking patterns in young bilingual children by comparing phonological influences on marking of 2 word-final tense morphemes. Method In spontaneous connected speech samples from 10 Spanish–English dual language learners aged 56–66 months (M = 61.7, SD = 3.4), we examined marking rates of past tense -ed and third person singular -s morphemes in different environments, using multiple measures of phonological context. Results Both morphemes were found to exhibit notably contrastive marking patterns in some contexts. Each was most sensitive to a different combination of phonological influences in the verb stem and the following word. Conclusions These findings extend existing evidence from monolingual speakers for the influence of word-final phonological context on morpheme production to a bilingual population. Further, novel findings not yet attested in previous research support an expanded consideration of phonological context in clinical decision making and future research related to word-final morphology. PMID:28750415

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS): The Speaking Test.

Science.gov (United States)

Ingram, D. E.

1991-01-01

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) assesses proficiency in English both generally and for special purposes of non-native English speakers studying, training, or learning English in English-speaking countries. The Speaking subtest of the IELTS measures a candidate's general proficiency in speaking in everyday situations via a…

Cultural Identity in Korean English

Science.gov (United States)

Chang, Bok-Myung

2010-01-01

This study aims to investigate the cultural identity of Korean English and to make the intercultural communications among non-native speakers successful. The purposes of this study can be summarized as follows: 1) to recognize the concept of English as an International Language (EIL), 2) to emphasize cross-cultural understanding in the globalized…

Pragmatic Instruction May Not Be Necessary among Heritage Speakers of Spanish: A Study on Requests

Science.gov (United States)

Barros García, María J.; Bachelor, Jeremy W.

2018-01-01

This paper studies the pragmatic competence of U.S. heritage speakers of Spanish in an attempt to determine (a) the degree of pragmatic transfer from English to Spanish experienced by heritage speakers when producing different types of requests in Spanish; and (b) how to best teach pragmatics to students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL).…

Supporting Young English Learners in the United States

Science.gov (United States)

Barrow, Lisa; Markman-Pithers, Lisa

2016-01-01

Simply put, children with poor English skills are less likely to succeed in school and beyond. What's the best way to teach English to young children who aren't native English speakers? In this article, Lisa Barrow and Lisa Markman-Pithers examine the state of English learner education in the United States and review the evidence behind different…

Tone Attrition in Mandarin Speakers of Varying English Proficiency

Science.gov (United States)

Creel, Sarah C.

2017-01-01

Purpose The purpose of this study was to determine whether the degree of dominance of Mandarin–English bilinguals' languages affects phonetic processing of tone content in their native language, Mandarin. Method We tested 72 Mandarin–English bilingual college students with a range of language-dominance profiles in the 2 languages and ages of acquisition of English. Participants viewed 2 photographs at a time while hearing a familiar Mandarin word referring to 1 photograph. The names of the 2 photographs diverged in tone, vowels, or both. Word recognition was evaluated using clicking accuracy, reaction times, and an online recognition measure (gaze) and was compared in the 3 conditions. Results Relative proficiency in English was correlated with reduced word recognition success in tone-disambiguated trials, but not in vowel-disambiguated trials, across all 3 dependent measures. This selective attrition for tone content emerged even though all bilinguals had learned Mandarin from birth. Lengthy experience with English thus weakened tone use. Conclusions This finding has implications for the question of the extent to which bilinguals' 2 phonetic systems interact. It suggests that bilinguals may not process pitch information language-specifically and that processing strategies from the dominant language may affect phonetic processing in the nondominant language—even when the latter was learned natively. PMID:28124064

An Action Research Study into the Role of Student Negotiation in Enhancing Perceived Student Engagement during English Speaking Classes at University Level in Turkey

Science.gov (United States)

Uztosun, Mehmet Sercan; Skinner, Nigel; Cadorath, Jill

2018-01-01

A major issue in English language teaching in Turkey and other monolingual countries is the teaching of spoken English. This article reports the initial and final stages of an action research study which used student negotiation to enhance student engagement in speaking classes. The research was conducted in the English Language Teaching…

Changing College Students’ Stereotypes of Standard English: The Pedagogical Process of an English Course

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

James H. Yang

2017-06-01

Full Text Available The use of English as a lingua franca for international communication has made the primacy of Standard English (SE become ideologically undesirable, not only because distinct varieties of English have evolved with their own standards, but also because nonnative speakers tremendously outnumber native speakers and their interaction has soared in intercultural exchange. Accordingly, a curriculum was devised to guide students to explore worldwide English variations in response to the paradigm shift from SE to a pluralistic model of English language teaching. This pedagogical research aims to examine how students transformed their stereotypes of SE into the understanding of world Englishes. This curriculum was implemented in English with 77 undergraduates enrolled in the ‘Language and Culture’ class at a national university in central Taiwan. With the focus on English spoken in New Zealand (NZ, they began with their impressions followed by their revisions. Then, they were guided to discover stories connecting themselves with the country. They proceeded to promote NZ tourism, understand local slang and accent, and take part in an optional semester-final volunteer teaching workshop. Their learning portfolios indicate that they modified their initial stereotypes, generalizations, misconceptions, and prejudices, becoming aware of the cultural diversity in NZ and linguistic differences between NZE and GAE. Overall, 86% of the students found the given instruction helpful for communication with New Zealanders, particularly so among high achievers and those who participated in the teaching service project.

English Language Learners' Nonword Repetition Performance: The Influence of Age, L2 Vocabulary Size, Length of L2 Exposure, and L1 Phonology.

Science.gov (United States)

Duncan, Tamara Sorenson; Paradis, Johanne

2016-02-01

This study examined individual differences in English language learners' (ELLs) nonword repetition (NWR) accuracy, focusing on the effects of age, English vocabulary size, length of exposure to English, and first-language (L1) phonology. Participants were 75 typically developing ELLs (mean age 5;8 [years;months]) whose exposure to English began on average at age 4;4. Children spoke either a Chinese language or South Asian language as an L1 and were given English standardized tests for NWR and receptive vocabulary. Although the majority of ELLs scored within or above the monolingual normal range (71%), 29% scored below. Mixed logistic regression modeling revealed that a larger English vocabulary, longer English exposure, South Asian L1, and older age all had significant and positive effects on ELLs' NWR accuracy. Error analyses revealed the following L1 effect: onset consonants were produced more accurately than codas overall, but this effect was stronger for the Chinese group whose L1s have a more limited coda inventory compared with English. ELLs' NWR performance is influenced by a number of factors. Consideration of these factors is important in deciding whether monolingual norm referencing is appropriate for ELL children.

Swahili learners' views on the need for a monolingual Swahili ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Swahili is a second language to many East and Central Africans, and a foreign language to its learners from Europe, America, Asia and other parts of Africa as well. Yet it lacks a monolingual Swahili learners' dictionary specifically designed for them. The paper discusses the need for a monolingual Swahili pedagogical ...

"Speaking English Naturally": The Language Ideologies of English as an Official Language at a Korean University

Science.gov (United States)

Choi, Jinsook

2016-01-01

This study explores language ideologies of English at a Korean university where English has been adopted as an official language. This study draws on ethnographic data in order to understand how speakers respond to and experience the institutional language policy. The findings show that language ideologies in this university represent the…

Thinking in English: A New Perspective on Teaching ESL

Science.gov (United States)

Muciaccia, John B.

2011-01-01

"Thinking in English" represents Dr. Muciaccia's unique method of teaching English to non-native English speakers. Unlike any other English as a Second Language (ESL) book, Muciaccia's book features the "cultural immersion" approach that he has developed and practiced to a fine degree. In addition to his methodology, Muciaccia includes words of…

A Protocol of Japanese-English Translation

OpenAIRE

三浦, 勲夫; MIURA, Isao

1999-01-01

Every year I translate Japanes enewspaper articles into English and publish them in book form containing 12 or more translations. In translating there are regular procedures I go through:1)initial translation done by me and 2) corrected translation done through discussion between a native English speaker and me.

Age of acquisition and allophony in Spanish-English bilinguals

Science.gov (United States)

Barlow, Jessica A.

2014-01-01

This study examines age of acquisition (AoA) in Spanish-English bilinguals’ phonetic and phonological knowledge of /l/ in English and Spanish. In English, the lateral approximant /l/ varies in darkness by context [based on the second formant (F2) and the difference between F2 and the first formant (F1)], but the Spanish /l/ does not. Further, English /l/ is overall darker than Spanish /l/. Thirty-eight college-aged adults participated: 11 Early Spanish-English bilinguals who learned English before the age of 5 years, 14 Late Spanish-English bilinguals who learned English after the age of 6 years, and 13 English monolinguals. Participants’ /l/ productions were acoustically analyzed by language and context. The results revealed a Spanish-to-English phonetic influence on /l/ productions for both Early and Late bilinguals, as well as an English-to-Spanish phonological influence on the patterning of /l/ for the Late Bilinguals. These findings are discussed in terms of the Speech Learning Model and the effect of AoA on the interaction between a bilingual speaker’s two languages. PMID:24795664

Unsupervised Word Mapping Using Structural Similarities in Monolingual Embeddings

OpenAIRE

Aldarmaki, Hanan; Mohan, Mahesh; Diab, Mona

2017-01-01

Most existing methods for automatic bilingual dictionary induction rely on prior alignments between the source and target languages, such as parallel corpora or seed dictionaries. For many language pairs, such supervised alignments are not readily available. We propose an unsupervised approach for learning a bilingual dictionary for a pair of languages given their independently-learned monolingual word embeddings. The proposed method exploits local and global structures in monolingual vector ...

Using Swahili and English to test explanations of agrammatism

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Abuom, Tom O.; Obler, Loraine K.; Bastiaanse, Roelien

2011-01-01

Background: This study is on time reference through verbs in two Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers. Recent studies in several languages have shown that time reference through verb inflection, and more specifically through tense, is impaired in agrammatic speakers. Consequently, several

A.P. Cowie. English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Phillip Louw

2011-10-01

Full Text Available In the mid 1990s the evolution of the English learner's dictionary reached a zenith with the appearance on the market of four advanced-level monolingual learners' dictionaries. Three of these were existing works, i.e. the Oxford Ad-vanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (henceforth ALD, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (henceforth LDOCE and the Collins CO-BUILD English Language Dictionary (henceforth COBUILD, which marked, to differing extents, significant departures from the lexicographical procedures followed by their predecessors. The last one, the Cambridge International Dic-tionary of English (henceforth CIDE, was a completely new dictionary. This highly productive burst of lexicographical energy was also the catalyst for an even more productive and sustained body of metalexicographical research and writing that dealt with the topic of learners' dictionaries.

Evaluating Online Bilingual Dictionaries: The Case of Popular Free English-Polish Dictionaries

Science.gov (United States)

Lew, Robert; Szarowska, Agnieszka

2017-01-01

Language learners today exhibit a strong preference for free online resources. One problem with such resources is that their quality can vary dramatically. Building on related work on monolingual resources for English, we propose an evaluation framework for online bilingual dictionaries, designed to assess lexicographic quality in four major…

Malaysian English: An Instrumental Analysis of Vowel Contrasts

Science.gov (United States)

Pillai, Stefanie; Don, Zuraidah Mohd.; Knowles, Gerald; Tang, Jennifer

2010-01-01

This paper makes an instrumental analysis of English vowel monophthongs produced by 47 female Malaysian speakers. The focus is on the distribution of Malaysian English vowels in the vowel space, and the extent to which there is phonetic contrast between traditionally paired vowels. The results indicate that, like neighbouring varieties of English,…

Oral-diadochokinesis rates across languages: English and Hebrew norms.

Science.gov (United States)

Icht, Michal; Ben-David, Boaz M

2014-01-01

Oro-facial and speech motor control disorders represent a variety of speech and language pathologies. Early identification of such problems is important and carries clinical implications. A common and simple tool for gauging the presence and severity of speech motor control impairments is oral-diadochokinesis (oral-DDK). Surprisingly, norms for adult performance are missing from the literature. The goals of this study were: (1) to establish a norm for oral-DDK rate for (young to middle-age) adult English speakers, by collecting data from the literature (five studies, N=141); (2) to investigate the possible effect of language (and culture) on oral-DDK performance, by analyzing studies conducted in other languages (five studies, N=140), alongside the English norm; and (3) to find a new norm for adult Hebrew speakers, by testing 115 speakers. We first offer an English norm with a mean of 6.2syllables/s (SD=.8), and a lower boundary of 5.4syllables/s that can be used to indicate possible abnormality. Next, we found significant differences between four tested languages (English, Portuguese, Farsi and Greek) in oral-DDK rates. Results suggest the need to set language and culture sensitive norms for the application of the oral-DDK task world-wide. Finally, we found the oral-DDK performance for adult Hebrew speakers to be 6.4syllables/s (SD=.8), not significantly different than the English norms. This implies possible phonological similarities between English and Hebrew. We further note that no gender effects were found in our study. We recommend using oral-DDK as an important tool in the speech language pathologist's arsenal. Yet, application of this task should be done carefully, comparing individual performance to a set norm within the specific language. Readers will be able to: (1) identify the Speech-Language Pathologist assessment process using the oral-DDK task, by comparing an individual performance to the present English norm, (2) describe the impact of language

Native language effects on spelling in English as a foreign language: a time-course study

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dich, Nadya; Pedersen, Bo

2013-01-01

The study explores first language (L1) influences on the mechanisms of spelling in English as a foreign language (EFL). We hypothesized that the transparency of L1 orthography influences (a) the amount of hesitation associated with spelling irregular English words, and (b) the size of units EFL...... spellers operate. Participants were adult speakers of three languages differing by the degree of transparency, Danish, Russian, and Italian (n = 60), and a group of English native speakers (n = 20). We analyzed keystroke logs from typed spellings of 30 English words. The amount of hesitation (number...... of corrections and number of long within-word pauses), was equal across all participants groups, thus disconfirming our first hypothesis. Inter-key intervals between onsets and rhymes were longer than within-rhyme intervals, but only in Danes and native English speakers, and not in Russians and Italians. We...

Mothers' attitudes toward adolescent confidential services: development and validation of scales for use in English- and Spanish-speaking populations.

Science.gov (United States)

Tebb, Kathleen P; Pollack, Lance M; Millstein, Shana; Otero-Sabogal, Regina; Wibbelsman, Charles J

2014-09-01

To explore parental beliefs and attitudes about confidential services for their teenagers; and to develop an instrument to assess these beliefs and attitudes that could be used among English and Spanish speakers. The long-term goal is to use this research to better understand and evaluate interventions to improve parental knowledge and attitudes toward their adolescent's access and utilization of comprehensive confidential health services. The instrument was developed using an extensive literature review and theoretical framework followed by qualitative data from focus groups and in-depth interviews. It was then pilot tested with a random sample of English- and Spanish-speaking parents and further revised. The final instrument was administered to a random sample of 1,000 mothers. The psychometric properties of the instrument were assessed for Spanish and English speakers. The instrument consisted of 12 scales. Most Cronbach alphas were >.70 for Spanish and English speakers. Fewer items for Spanish speakers "loaded" for the Responsibility and Communication scales. Parental Control of Health Information failed for Spanish speakers. The Parental Attitudes of Adolescent Confidential Health Services Questionnaire (PAACS-Q) contains 12 scales and is a valid and reliable instrument to assess parental knowledge and attitudes toward confidential health services for adolescents among English speakers and all but one scale was applicable for Spanish speakers. More research is needed to understand key constructs with Spanish speakers. Copyright © 2014 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Blue-Green Colour Categorisation in Mandarin-English Speakers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Emily Joanne Hird

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Observers are faster to detect a target among a set of distracters if the targets and distracters come from different colour categories. This cross-boundary advantage seems to be limited to the right visual field, which is consistent with the dominance of the left hemisphere for language processing. Here we study whether a similiar visual field advantage is found in Mandarin, a language which uses a logographic system. Forty late Mandarin-English bilinguals performed a blue-green colour categorisation task, in a blocked design, in their first language (L1: Mandarin or second language (L2: English. Eleven colour singletons ranging from blue to green were presented for 160ms, randomly in the left visual field (LVF or in the right visual field (RVF. We find that reaction times at the colour boundary were on average about 100 ms shorter in the LVF compared to the RVF, but only when the task was preformed in Mandarin as opposed to English. The apparent discrepancy with previous findings is conceivably due to the script nature of two languages: Mandarin logographic characters are analysed visuo-orthographically in the right fusiform gyrus [Guo and Burgund 2010, Brain Lang 115].

Fairness in Assessment of English Learners

Science.gov (United States)

Abedi, Jamal; Levine, Harold G.

2013-01-01

English language learners (ELLs) face a challenging academic future in learning a new language while simultaneously mastering content in the language they may be struggling to learn. Assessment plays an extremely important role in the academic careers of ELL students, perhaps more so than for native speakers of English. Major changes and…

The effect of language on functional capacity assessment in middle-aged and older US Latinos with schizophrenia.

Science.gov (United States)

Bengoetxea, Eneritz; Burton, Cynthia Z; Mausbach, Brent T; Patterson, Thomas L; Twamley, Elizabeth W

2014-08-15

The U.S. Latino population is steadily increasing, prompting a need for cross-cultural outcome measures in schizophrenia research. This study examined the contribution of language to functional assessment in middle-aged Latino patients with schizophrenia by comparing 29 monolingual Spanish-speakers, 29 Latino English-speakers, and 29 non-Latino English-speakers who were matched on relevant demographic variables and who completed cognitive and functional assessments in their native language. There were no statistically significant differences between groups on the four everyday functioning variables (UCSD Performance-Based Skills Assessment [UPSA], Social Skills Performance Assessment [SSPA], Medication Management Ability Assessment [MMAA], and the Global Assessment of Functioning [GAF]). The results support the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural acceptability of these functional assessment instruments. It appears that demographic variables other than language (e.g., age, education) better explain differences in functional assessment among ethnically diverse subpopulations. Considering the influence of these other factors in addition to language on functional assessments will help ensure that measures can be appropriately interpreted among the diverse residents of the United States. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.

The effect of language on functional capacity assessment in middle-aged and older US Latinos with schizophrenia

Science.gov (United States)

Bengoetxea, Eneritz; Burton, Cynthia Z.; Mausbach, Brent T.; Patterson, Thomas L.; Twamley, Elizabeth W.

2014-01-01

The U.S. Latino population is steadily increasing, prompting a need for cross-cultural outcome measures in schizophrenia research. This study examined the contribution of language to functional assessment in middle-aged Latino patients with schizophrenia by comparing 29 monolingual Spanish-speakers, 29 Latino English-speakers, and 29 non-Latino English-speakers who were matched on relevant demographic variables and who completed cognitive and functional assessments in their native language. There were no statistically significant differences between groups on the four everyday functioning variables (UCSD Performance-Based Skills Assessment [UPSA], Social Skills Performance Assessment [SSPA], Medication Management Ability Assessment [MMAA], and the Global Assessment of Functioning [GAF]). The results support the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural acceptability of these functional assessment instruments. It appears that demographic variables other than language (e.g., age, education) better explain differences in functional assessment among ethnically diverse subpopulations. Considering the influence of these other factors in addition to language on functional assessments will help ensure that measures can be appropriately interpreted among the diverse residents of the United States. PMID:24751379

Age of dementia diagnosis in community dwelling bilingual and monolingual Hispanic Americans.

Science.gov (United States)

Lawton, Deborah M; Gasquoine, Philip G; Weimer, Amy A

2015-05-01

Bilingualism has been reported to delay the age of retrospective report of first symptom in dementia. This study determined if the age of clinically diagnosed Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia occurred later for bilingual than monolingual, immigrant and U.S. born, Hispanic Americans. It involved a secondary analysis of the subset of 81 bi/monolingual dementia cases identified at yearly follow-up (1998 through 2008) using neuropsychological test results and objective diagnostic criteria from the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging that involved a random sampling of community dwelling Hispanic Americans (N = 1789). Age of dementia diagnosis was analyzed in a 2 × 2 (bi/monolingualism × immigrant/U.S. born) ANOVA that space revealed both main effects and the interaction were non-significant. Mean age of dementia diagnosis was descriptively (but not significantly) higher in the monolingual (M = 81.10 years) than the bilingual (M = 79.31) group. Overall, bilingual dementia cases were significantly better educated than monolinguals, but U.S. born bilinguals and monolinguals did not differ significantly in education. Delays in dementia symptomatology pertaining to bilingualism are less likely to be found in studies: (a) that use age of clinical diagnosis vs. retrospective report of first dementia symptom as the dependent variable; and (b) involve clinical cases derived from community samples rather than referrals to specialist memory clinics. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

South Korean University Students' Perceptions of Different English Varieties and Their Contribution to the Learning of English as a Foreign Language

Science.gov (United States)

Ahn, So-Yeon; Kang, Hyun-Sook

2017-01-01

This study explored South Korean university students' perceptions of different English varieties and their speakers, student attitudes towards the learning of English and its varieties, and the role of these attitudinal variables in the learning of English as a foreign language. One-hundred-one students who were enrolled in four sections of a…

Cross-cultural differences in adult Theory of Mind abilities: A comparison of native-English speakers and native-Chinese speakers on the Self/Other Differentiation task.

Science.gov (United States)

Bradford, Elisabeth Ef; Jentzsch, Ines; Gomez, Juan-Carlos; Chen, Yulu; Zhang, Da; Su, Yanjie

2018-02-01

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to compute and attribute mental states to ourselves and other people. It is currently unclear whether ToM abilities are universal or whether they can be culturally influenced. To address this question, this research explored potential differences in engagement of ToM processes between two different cultures, Western (individualist) and Chinese (collectivist), using a sample of healthy adults. Participants completed a computerised false-belief task, in which they attributed beliefs to either themselves or another person, in a matched design, allowing direct comparison between "Self"- and "Other"-oriented conditions. Results revealed that both native-English speakers and native-Chinese individuals responded significantly faster to self-oriented than other-oriented questions. Results also showed that when a trial required a "perspective-shift," participants from both cultures were slower to shift from Self-to-Other than from Other-to-Self. Results indicate that despite differences in collectivism scores, culture does not influence task performance, with similar results found for both Western and non-Western participants, suggesting core and potentially universal similarities in the ToM mechanism across these two cultures.

Predicting English Word Reading Skills for Spanish-Speaking Students in First Grade.

Science.gov (United States)

Páez, Mariela; Rinaldi, Claudia

2006-10-01

This article describes the word reading skills in English and Spanish for a sample of 244 Spanish-speaking, English-learning (hence, bilingual) students in first grade and presents a predictive model for English word reading skills. The children in the study were assessed at the end of kindergarten and first grade, respectively. Data were gathered with 3 subtests of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery and a researcher-developed phonological awareness task. Results showed that, on average, children's English word reading skills were similar to monolingual norms whereas their Spanish word reading skills averaged 1 SD below the mean. English vocabulary, English phonological awareness, and Spanish word reading skills in kindergarten were found to be significant predictors of English word reading skills in first grade. Educational implications for screening language and reading skills and promising areas for targeted instruction for this population are discussed.

The English Primary Auxiliary Verbs: A Linguistic Theoretical Exercise

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Nekky Umera

Abstract. Obviously, the fact remains that English Language is a sensitive Language ... Even though the English auxiliary verbs are of two kinds: Primary and Modal auxiliary ..... Therefore we are of the opinion that most speakers lack adequate.

Planning for a Global Lingua Franca: Challenges for Feminist Language Planning in English(es) around the World

Science.gov (United States)

Pauwels, Anne

2011-01-01

In this paper I outline the challenges for feminist language planning in the context of a global lingua franca--English. Drawing upon the views of speakers of "World Englishes" I discuss their reactions as well as reported practices in relation to gender-inclusive language use. This reveals the complexities of managing the tension between the…

L1 Korean and L1 Mandarin L2 English Learners' Acquisition of the Count/Mass Distinction in English

Science.gov (United States)

Choi, Sea Hee; Ionin, Tania; Zhu, Yeqiu

2018-01-01

This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the English count/mass distinction by speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. It is hypothesized that L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners are influenced by atomicity in the use of the count/mass morphosyntax in English. This…

Treaty-Port English in Nineteenth-Century Shanghai: Speakers, Voices, and Images

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jia Si

2013-03-01

Full Text Available This article examines the introduction of English to the treaty port of Shanghai and the speech communities that developed there as a result. English became a sociocultural phenomenon rather than an academic subject when it entered Shanghai in the 1840s, gradually generating various social activities of local Chinese people who lived in the treaty port. Ordinary people picked up a rudimentary knowledge of English along trading streets and through glossary references, and went to private schools to improve their linguistic skills. They used English to communicate with foreigners and as a means to explore a foreign presence dominated by Western material culture. Although those who learned English gained small-scale social mobility in the late nineteenth century, the images of English-speaking Chinese were repeatedly criticized by the literati and official scholars. This paper explores Westerners’ travel accounts, as well as various sources written by the new elite Chinese, including official records and vernacular poems, to demonstrate how English language acquisition brought changes to local people’s daily lives. I argue that treaty-port English in nineteenth-century Shanghai was not only a linguistic medium but, more importantly, a cultural agent of urban transformation. It gradually molded a new linguistic landscape, which at the same time contributed to the shaping of modern Shanghai culture.

Comprehension of Competing Argument Marking Systems in Two Australian Mixed Languages

Science.gov (United States)

O'Shannessy, Carmel; Meakins, Felicity

2012-01-01

Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners when compared to monolingual learners. For speakers of Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol there is no monolingual group for comparison, yet crosslinguistic influence can be seen in how the speakers resolve competition between case-marking and word order systems in each…

White Native English Speakers Needed: The Rhetorical Construction of Privilege in Online Teacher Recruitment Spaces

Science.gov (United States)

Ruecker, Todd; Ives, Lindsey

2015-01-01

Over the past few decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of native speakerism in the field of TESOL. Several recent studies have exposed instances of native speakerism in TESOL recruitment discourses published through a variety of media, but none have focused specifically on professional websites advertising programs in…

English Grammar for Students of French.

Science.gov (United States)

Morton, Jacqueline

This grammar is a self-study manual intended to aid native speakers of English who are beginning the study of French. It is designed to supplement the French textbook, not to replace it. The common grammatical terms that are necessary for learning to speak and write French are explained in English and illustrated by examples in both French and…

Perceptions of The Seriousness of Mispronunciations of English Speech Sounds

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Moedjito Moedjito

2006-01-01

Full Text Available The present study attempts to investigate Indonesian EFL teachers’ and native English speakers’ perceptions of mispronunciations of English sounds by Indonesian EFL learners. For this purpose, a paper-form questionnaire consisting of 32 target mispronunciations was distributed to Indonesian secondary school teachers of English and also to native English speakers. An analysis of the respondents’ perceptions has discovered that 14 out of the 32 target mispronunciations are pedagogically significant in pronunciation instruction. A further analysis of the reasons for these major mispronunciations has reconfirmed the prevalence of interference of learners’ native language in their English pronunciation as a major cause of mispronunciations. It has also revealed Indonesian EFL teachers’ tendency to overestimate the seriousness of their learners’ pronunciations. Based on these findings, the study makes suggestions for better English pronunciation teaching in Indonesia or other EFL countries.

Temporal Analysis of English and Spanish Narratives.

Science.gov (United States)

de Johnson, Teresa H.; O'Connell, Daniel C.

In order to ascertain the effect of different demands on cognitive processes as reflected in speech rate, pause and hesitation phenomena, 90 young men, 45 native speakers of English (U.S.A.) and 45 native speakers of Spanish (Mexico), were asked to retell a story presented in one of three ways: (1) film plus narration; (2) film only; (3) narration…

The Wildcat Corpus of Native- and Foreign-Accented English: Communicative Efficiency across Conversational Dyads with Varying Language Alignment Profiles

Science.gov (United States)

Van Engen, Kristin J.; Baese-Berk, Melissa; Baker, Rachel E.; Choi, Arim; Kim, Midam; Bradlow, Ann R.

2010-01-01

This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English, a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English. The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of…

Exploring How Institutional Structures and Practices Influence English Learners' Opportunity to Learn Social Studies

Science.gov (United States)

Heafner, Tina L.; Plaisance, Michelle

2016-01-01

Background/Context: Current research addresses the marginalization of social studies and trends in teaching English learners (ELs) in monolingual schools; however, few studies have examined the way in which support services provided to ELs impact their exposure to social studies instruction. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:…

Language shift, bilingualism and the future of Britain's Celtic languages.

Science.gov (United States)

Kandler, Anne; Unger, Roman; Steele, James

2010-12-12

'Language shift' is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied examples for which good census data exist for the most recent 100-120 years in many areas where Celtic languages were once the prevailing vernaculars. We model the dynamics of language shift as a competition process in which the numbers of speakers of each language (both monolingual and bilingual) vary as a function both of internal recruitment (as the net outcome of birth, death, immigration and emigration rates of native speakers), and of gains and losses owing to language shift. We examine two models: a basic model in which bilingualism is simply the transitional state for households moving between alternative monolingual states, and a diglossia model in which there is an additional demand for the endangered language as the preferred medium of communication in some restricted sociolinguistic domain, superimposed on the basic shift dynamics. Fitting our models to census data, we successfully reproduce the demographic trajectories of both languages over the past century. We estimate the rates of recruitment of new Scottish Gaelic speakers that would be required each year (for instance, through school education) to counteract the 'natural wastage' as households with one or more Gaelic speakers fail to transmit the language to the next generation informally, for different rates of loss during informal intergenerational transmission.

Language shift, bilingualism and the future of Britain's Celtic languages

Science.gov (United States)

Kandler, Anne; Unger, Roman; Steele, James

2010-01-01

‘Language shift’ is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied examples for which good census data exist for the most recent 100–120 years in many areas where Celtic languages were once the prevailing vernaculars. We model the dynamics of language shift as a competition process in which the numbers of speakers of each language (both monolingual and bilingual) vary as a function both of internal recruitment (as the net outcome of birth, death, immigration and emigration rates of native speakers), and of gains and losses owing to language shift. We examine two models: a basic model in which bilingualism is simply the transitional state for households moving between alternative monolingual states, and a diglossia model in which there is an additional demand for the endangered language as the preferred medium of communication in some restricted sociolinguistic domain, superimposed on the basic shift dynamics. Fitting our models to census data, we successfully reproduce the demographic trajectories of both languages over the past century. We estimate the rates of recruitment of new Scottish Gaelic speakers that would be required each year (for instance, through school education) to counteract the ‘natural wastage’ as households with one or more Gaelic speakers fail to transmit the language to the next generation informally, for different rates of loss during informal intergenerational transmission. PMID:21041210

Behavioral and Electrophysiological Differences in Executive Control between Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Science.gov (United States)

Barac, Raluca; Moreno, Sylvain; Bialystok, Ellen

2016-01-01

This study examined executive control in sixty-two 5-year-old children who were monolingual or bilingual using behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) measures. All children performed equivalently on simple response inhibition (gift delay), but bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on interference suppression and complex response…

NATIVE VS NON-NATIVE ENGLISH TEACHERS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Masrizal Masrizal

2013-02-01

Full Text Available Although the majority of English language teachers worldwide are non-native English speakers (NNS, no research was conducted on these teachers until recently. A pioneer research by Peter Medgyes in 1994 took quite a long time until the other researchers found their interests in this issue. There is a widespread stereotype that a native speaker (NS is by nature the best person to teach his/her foreign language. In regard to this assumption, we then see a very limited room and opportunities for a non native teacher to teach language that is not his/hers. The aim of this article is to analyze the differences among these teachers in order to prove that non-native teachers have equal advantages that should be taken into account. The writer expects that the result of this short article could be a valuable input to the area of teaching English as a foreign language in Indonesia.

Rate of multilingual phonological acquisition: Evidence from a cross-sectional study of English-Mandarin-Malay.

Science.gov (United States)

Lim, Hui W; Wells, Bill; Howard, Sara

2015-01-01

Early child multilingual acquisition is under-explored. Using a cross-sectional study approach, the present research investigates the rate of multilingual phonological acquisition of English-Mandarin-Malay by 64 ethnic Chinese children aged 2;06-4;05 in Malaysia--a multiracial-multilingual country of Asia. The aims of the study are to provide clinical norms for speech development in the multilingual children and to compare multilingual acquisition with monolingual and bilingual acquisition. An innovative multilingual phonological test which adopts well-defined scoring criteria drawing upon local accents of English, Mandarin and Malay is proposed and described in this article. This procedure has been neglected in the few existing Chinese bilingual phonological acquisition studies resulting in peculiar findings. The multilingual children show comparable phonological acquisition milestones to that of monolingual and bilingual peers acquiring the same languages. The implications of the present results are discussed. The present findings contribute to the development of models and theories of child multilingual acquisition.

Language and EFL Teacher Preparation in Non-English-Speaking Environments.

Science.gov (United States)

Peretz, Arna S.

Linguistic and paralinguistic problems faced by non-native-English speakers training to be teachers of English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) in non-English-speaking environments are discussed. Relevant theories of second language learning and acquisition are reviewed, and the affective factors and sociocultural variables that appear to…

Spanish Speakers Apologizing in English: A Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Cordella, Marisa

1991-01-01

The speech act of apologizing in English between Chileans and Australians is examined in terms of the frequency, distribution, and function of apology-strategies. It is argued that positive politeness strategies are more frequently used in Spanish than English, and the sex of the apologizer and recipient must be considered. (41 references)…

Planning and Articulation in Incremental Word Production: Syllable-Frequency Effects in English

Science.gov (United States)

Cholin, Joana; Dell, Gary S.; Levelt, Willem J. M.

2011-01-01

We investigated the role of syllables during speech planning in English by measuring syllable-frequency effects. So far, syllable-frequency effects in English have not been reported. English has poorly defined syllable boundaries, and thus the syllable might not function as a prominent unit in English speech production. Speakers produced either…

The role of the phonological loop in English word learning: a comparison of Chinese ESL learners and native speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Hamada, Megumi; Koda, Keiko

2011-04-01

Although the role of the phonological loop in word-retention is well documented, research in Chinese character retention suggests the involvement of non-phonological encoding. This study investigated whether the extent to which the phonological loop contributes to learning and remembering visually introduced words varies between college-level Chinese ESL learners (N = 20) and native speakers of English (N = 20). The groups performed a paired associative learning task under two conditions (control versus articulatory suppression) with two word types (regularly spelled versus irregularly spelled words) differing in degree of phonological accessibility. The results demonstrated that both groups' recall declined when the phonological loop was made less available (with irregularly spelled words and in the articulatory suppression condition), but the decline was greater for the native group. These results suggest that word learning entails phonological encoding uniformly across learners, but the contribution of phonology varies among learners with diverse linguistic backgrounds.

"Necesita una vacuna": what Spanish-speakers want in text-message immunization reminders.

Science.gov (United States)

Ahlers-Schmidt, Carolyn R; Chesser, Amy; Brannon, Jennifer; Lopez, Venessa; Shah-Haque, Sapna; Williams, Katherine; Hart, Traci

2013-08-01

Appointment reminders help parents deal with complex immunization schedules. Preferred content of text-message reminders has been identified for English-speakers. Spanish-speaking parents of children under three years old were recruited to develop Spanish text-message immunization reminders. Structured interviews included questions about demographic characteristics, use of technology, and willingness to receive text reminders. Each participant was assigned to one user-centered design (UCD) test: card sort, needs analysis or comprehension testing. Respondents (N=54) were female (70%) and averaged 27 years of age (SD=7). A card sort of 20 immunization-related statements resulted in identification of seven pieces of critical information, which were compiled into eight example texts. These texts were ranked in the needs assessment and the top two were assessed for comprehension. All participants were able to understand the content and describe intention to act. Utilizing UCD testing, Spanish-speakers identified short, specific text content that differed from preferred content of English-speaking parents.

Vowel change across three age groups of speakers in three regional varieties of American English

Science.gov (United States)

Jacewicz, Ewa; Fox, Robert A.; Salmons, Joseph

2011-01-01

This acoustic study examines sound (vowel) change in apparent time across three successive generations of 123 adult female speakers ranging in age from 20 to 65 years old, representing three regional varieties of American English, typical of western North Carolina, central Ohio and southeastern Wisconsin. A set of acoustic measures characterized the dynamic nature of formant trajectories, the amount of spectral change over the course of vowel duration and the position of the spectral centroid. The study found a set of systematic changes to /I, ε, æ/ including positional changes in the acoustic space (mostly lowering of the vowels) and significant variation in formant dynamics (increased monophthongization). This common sound change is evident in both emphatic (articulated clearly) and nonemphatic (casual) productions and occurs regardless of dialect-specific vowel dispersions in the vowel space. The cross-generational and cross-dialectal patterns of variation found here support an earlier report by Jacewicz, Fox, and Salmons (2011) which found this recent development in these three dialect regions in isolated citation-form words. While confirming the new North American Shift in different styles of production, the study underscores the importance of addressing the stress-related variation in vowel production in a careful and valid assessment of sound change. PMID:22125350

Vowel change across three age groups of speakers in three regional varieties of American English.

Science.gov (United States)

Jacewicz, Ewa; Fox, Robert A; Salmons, Joseph

2011-10-01

This acoustic study examines sound (vowel) change in apparent time across three successive generations of 123 adult female speakers ranging in age from 20 to 65 years old, representing three regional varieties of American English, typical of western North Carolina, central Ohio and southeastern Wisconsin. A set of acoustic measures characterized the dynamic nature of formant trajectories, the amount of spectral change over the course of vowel duration and the position of the spectral centroid. The study found a set of systematic changes to /I, ε, æ/ including positional changes in the acoustic space (mostly lowering of the vowels) and significant variation in formant dynamics (increased monophthongization). This common sound change is evident in both emphatic (articulated clearly) and nonemphatic (casual) productions and occurs regardless of dialect-specific vowel dispersions in the vowel space. The cross-generational and cross-dialectal patterns of variation found here support an earlier report by Jacewicz, Fox, and Salmons (2011) which found this recent development in these three dialect regions in isolated citation-form words. While confirming the new North American Shift in different styles of production, the study underscores the importance of addressing the stress-related variation in vowel production in a careful and valid assessment of sound change.

Turn exchange rhythm in English dialogues

Science.gov (United States)

Fon, Janice

2005-09-01

This study looked at the relationship between rhythm and exchange type in British English, a stress-timed language, and Singaporean English, a syllable-timed language, using a spontaneous speech corpus. Exchange intervals (EIs), or the time difference between the end of one speaker and the beginning of another, were measured and exchanges of different types were labeled. Results showed that, in a dialogue, EIs were generally limited to a narrow range. However, within this range, EIs had at least four functions. First, EIs were reflective of the cognitive load and functioned as a way to differentiate various exchange types. Those requiring more cognitive resources, such as question-and-answer pairs, generally needed longer EIs than those not as cognitively loaded, such as backchanneling pairs. Second, EIs were indicative of linguistic rhythm. Singaporean English tended to have shorter EIs than British English. Third, EIs were reflective of politeness. The degree of politeness correlated negatively with EI. Shorter EIs showed a higher degree of respect. Finally, EIs were also indicative of the level of insecurity of a speaker, which was best reflected by gender differences. Females in general had longer EIs than males.

A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fabricius, Anne; Watt, Dominic; Johnson, Daniel Ezra

2009-01-01

from RP and Aberdeen English (northeast Scotland). We conclude that, for the data examined here, the S-centroid W&F procedures performs at least as well as the two most recognized speaker-intrinsic, vowel-extrinsic, formant-intrinsic normalization methods, Lobanov's (1971) z-score procedure and Nearey......This paper evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S-centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios...

The Invisible Revolving Door: The Issue of Teacher Attrition in English Language Development Classrooms in Arizona

Science.gov (United States)

Heineke, Amy J.

2018-01-01

The most restrictive language policy context in the United States, Arizona's monolingual and prescriptive approach to teaching English learners continues to capture national and international attention. Five school years removed from the initial implementation, this study aimed to understand the complexities of Arizona language policy in…

Use of Black English and Racial Discrimination in Urban Housing Markets.

Science.gov (United States)

Massey, Douglas S.; Lundy, Garvey

2001-01-01

Compared male and female speakers of white middle class English, black accented English, and black English vernacular in their telephone contacts with rental agents who were advertising apartments for rent in Philadelphia. Results found clear, dramatic evidence of telephone-based racial discrimination. Callers perceived as lower class black…

Improving English Speaking Fluency: The Role of Six Factors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gholamhossein Shahini

2017-12-01

Full Text Available This qualitative study, using an open interview, set out to investigate the roles six factors, including age, university education, teachers of English Language institutes, teaching English, dictionary, and note-taking, played in improving English speaking fluency of seventeen fluent Iranian EFL speakers. The participants were chosen purposefully based on the speaking scale of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL. The findings indicated that early age had a great impact on the participants’ speaking fluency. They mentioned that they could not pick up fluency if they had started learning English at older ages. Moreover, university education had no effect on enhancing their fluency. They stated that not having enough opportunities to speak English in classrooms, being exposed to wrong amounts of input from their classmates or even from some university instructors, having no access to English native speakers in English Language Departments, professors’ talking in native language out of classes, in their offices or even sometimes in classes all led to their losing motivation after entering the university. In contrast, teachers in English language institutes had a supportive role in increasing the participants’ English learning. Although two participants quit teaching English since it had a negative influence on their speaking, it had a positive impact on improving speaking ability of the rest. And finally, fruitful strategies were suggested on how to use dictionaries and note-takings.

SEMANTIC DERIVATION OF BORROWINGS

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Shigapova, F.F.

2017-09-01

Full Text Available The author carried out the contrastive analysis of the word спикер borrowed into Russian from English and the English word speaker. The findings of the analysis include confirm (1 different derivational abilities and functions of the borrowed word and the native word; (2 distinctive features in the definitions, i.e. semantic structures, registered in monolingual non-abridged dictionaries; (3 heterogeneous parameters of frequencies recorded in the National Corpus of the Russian language and the British National Corpus; (4 absence of bilingual equivalent collocations with words спикер and speaker. The collocations with words studied revealed new lexical and connotative senses in the meaning of the word. Relevance of the study conducted is justified by the new facts revealed about the semantic adaptation of the borrowed word in the system of the Russian language and its paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections in the system of the recipient language.

A Usage-Based Approach to Preposition Placement in English as a Second Language

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Jach, Daniel

2018-01-01

This study examined the acquisition of preposition placement in English as a second language from a usage-based perspective. German and Chinese learners of English and English native speakers rated the acceptability of English oblique "wh" relative clauses in a magnitude estimation task. Results indicated that acceptability depended on…

Adding More Fuel to the Fire: An Eye-Tracking Study of Idiom Processing by Native and Non-Native Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Siyanova-Chanturia, Anna; Conklin, Kathy; Schmitt, Norbert

2011-01-01

Using eye-tracking, we investigate on-line processing of idioms in a biasing story context by native and non-native speakers of English. The stimuli are idioms used figuratively ("at the end of the day"--"eventually"), literally ("at the end of the day"--"in the evening"), and novel phrases ("at the end of the war"). Native speaker results…

Translational equivalents and composition of the entries in bilingual English-Serbian dictionaries

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Zečević Snežana M.

2013-01-01

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is the analysis of translational eqivalents as well as of the composition of the entries in bilingual English-Serbian dictionaries. It is initially assumed that there are different microstructure and macrostructure of the dictionaries of different volume and purpose, likewise the correspondence of translational equivalents of their entries. The analysis conducted for the requirements of this paper included six randomly chosen lexemes of the English language taken from three bilingual dictionaries that were contrasted with their equivalent lexemes presented in the monolingual English dictionary which was later used for checking. The results of the analysis presented less meaning of the lexemes in Colloquial and Universal English-Serbian Dictionary while the utmost variety of semantic dimensions was noted in Encyclopedic English-Serbian Dictionary which by its quality and organization presents an inexhaustible source of information necessary for translating texts from English to Serbian language.

Development and Use of a Corpus Tailored for Legal English Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Skier, Jason; Vibulphol, Jutarat

2016-01-01

While corpus linguistics has been applied towards many specific academic purposes, reports are few regarding its use to facilitate learning of legal English by non-native English speakers. Specialized corpora are required because legal English often differs significantly from ordinary usage, with words such as bar, motion, and hearing having…

The English of Gustavia, St. Barthélemy

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Decker, Ken; Williams, Jeffrey P.; Schneider, Edgar W.; Trudgill, Peter; Schreier, Daniel

2015-01-01

Introduction There is a variety of English spoken in the port city of Gustavia on the French island of St. Barthélemy in the Leeward Islands in the northeastern corner of the Caribbean. It has the smallest population of speakers of English in the Caribbean and is probably the most endangered

Making the Transition from Non-Native Speaker to Near-Native Speaker Teachers of English: Facing Globalization Challenges in Teaching English

Science.gov (United States)

Bin Mohamed Ali, Haja Mohideen

2009-01-01

Many job advertisements seeking teachers of English to work in Japan, China, South Korea and Thailand, for instance, specify that they are looking for native speaking teachers from USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand. They do not seem to be interested even in trained non-native speaking teachers from their own countries. This situation also exists…

Non-English Majors' Listening Teaching Based on Lexical Chunks Theory and Schema Theory

Science.gov (United States)

He, Xiaoyu

2016-01-01

English listening is seen as a vital means of linguistic input for Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, which lays a solid foundation for English learning and communication with English speakers. Besides, with increasing of scores of the listening part in the newly-reformed CET-4 and CET-6 (CET refers to college English test in…

Evaluation of speech errors in Putonghua speakers with cleft palate: a critical review of methodology issues.

Science.gov (United States)

Jiang, Chenghui; Whitehill, Tara L

2014-04-01

Speech errors associated with cleft palate are well established for English and several other Indo-European languages. Few articles describing the speech of Putonghua (standard Mandarin Chinese) speakers with cleft palate have been published in English language journals. Although methodological guidelines have been published for the perceptual speech evaluation of individuals with cleft palate, there has been no critical review of methodological issues in studies of Putonghua speakers with cleft palate. A literature search was conducted to identify relevant studies published over the past 30 years in Chinese language journals. Only studies incorporating perceptual analysis of speech were included. Thirty-seven articles which met inclusion criteria were analyzed and coded on a number of methodological variables. Reliability was established by having all variables recoded for all studies. This critical review identified many methodological issues. These design flaws make it difficult to draw reliable conclusions about characteristic speech errors in this group of speakers. Specific recommendations are made to improve the reliability and validity of future studies, as well to facilitate cross-center comparisons.

Psychometric Properties of the Working Memory Rating Scale for Spanish-Speaking English Language Learners

Science.gov (United States)

Guzman-Orth, Danielle; Grimm, Ryan; Gerber, Michael; Orosco, Michael; Swanson, H. Lee; Lussier, Cathy

2015-01-01

The Working Memory Rating Scale (WMRS) was designed as a behavioral rating tool to assist teachers in identifying students at risk of working memory difficulties. The instrument was originally normed on 417 monolingual English-speaking children from the United Kingdom. The purpose of this study was to test the reliability and validity of the WMRS…

The Sound of Voice: Voice-Based Categorization of Speakers' Sexual Orientation within and across Languages.

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Simone Sulpizio

Full Text Available Empirical research had initially shown that English listeners are able to identify the speakers' sexual orientation based on voice cues alone. However, the accuracy of this voice-based categorization, as well as its generalizability to other languages (language-dependency and to non-native speakers (language-specificity, has been questioned recently. Consequently, we address these open issues in 5 experiments: First, we tested whether Italian and German listeners are able to correctly identify sexual orientation of same-language male speakers. Then, participants of both nationalities listened to voice samples and rated the sexual orientation of both Italian and German male speakers. We found that listeners were unable to identify the speakers' sexual orientation correctly. However, speakers were consistently categorized as either heterosexual or gay on the basis of how they sounded. Moreover, a similar pattern of results emerged when listeners judged the sexual orientation of speakers of their own and of the foreign language. Overall, this research suggests that voice-based categorization of sexual orientation reflects the listeners' expectations of how gay voices sound rather than being an accurate detector of the speakers' actual sexual identity. Results are discussed with regard to accuracy, acoustic features of voices, language dependency and language specificity.

Speaker segmentation and clustering

OpenAIRE

Kotti, M; Moschou, V; Kotropoulos, C

2008-01-01

07.08.13 KB. Ok to add the accepted version to Spiral, Elsevier says ok whlile mandate not enforced. This survey focuses on two challenging speech processing topics, namely: speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. Speaker segmentation aims at finding speaker change points in an audio stream, whereas speaker clustering aims at grouping speech segments based on speaker characteristics. Model-based, metric-based, and hybrid speaker segmentation algorithms are reviewed. Concerning speaker...

Linguistic Intervention Techniques for At-Risk English Language Learners

Science.gov (United States)

Schneider, Elke; Evers, Tsila

2009-01-01

In U.S. public schools, the population of nonnative speakers of English who are at risk for failing language requirements is growing. This article presents multisensory structured language (MSL) teaching strategies to remediate these students' difficulties in reading, writing, and speaking English. These strategies are underscored by recent…

Speaker Recognition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mølgaard, Lasse Lohilahti; Jørgensen, Kasper Winther

2005-01-01

Speaker recognition is basically divided into speaker identification and speaker verification. Verification is the task of automatically determining if a person really is the person he or she claims to be. This technology can be used as a biometric feature for verifying the identity of a person...

The impact of language co-activation on L1 and L2 speech fluency.

Science.gov (United States)

Bergmann, Christopher; Sprenger, Simone A; Schmid, Monika S

2015-10-01

Fluent speech depends on the availability of well-established linguistic knowledge and routines for speech planning and articulation. A lack of speech fluency in late second-language (L2) learners may point to a deficiency of these representations, due to incomplete acquisition. Experiments on bilingual language processing have shown, however, that there are strong reasons to believe that multilingual speakers experience co-activation of the languages they speak. We have studied to what degree language co-activation affects fluency in the speech of bilinguals, comparing a monolingual German control group with two bilingual groups: 1) first-language (L1) attriters, who have fully acquired German before emigrating to an L2 English environment, and 2) immersed L2 learners of German (L1: English). We have analysed the temporal fluency and the incidence of disfluency markers (pauses, repetitions and self-corrections) in spontaneous film retellings. Our findings show that learners to speak more slowly than controls and attriters. Also, on each count, the speech of at least one of the bilingual groups contains more disfluency markers than the retellings of the control group. Generally speaking, both bilingual groups-learners and attriters-are equally (dis)fluent and significantly more disfluent than the monolingual speakers. Given that the L1 attriters are unaffected by incomplete acquisition, we interpret these findings as evidence for language competition during speech production. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier B.V.

A general auditory bias for handling speaker variability in speech? Evidence in humans and songbirds

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Buddhamas eKriengwatana

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Different speakers produce the same speech sound differently, yet listeners are still able to reliably identify the speech sound. How listeners can adjust their perception to compensate for speaker differences in speech, and whether these compensatory processes are unique only to humans, is still not fully understood. In this study we compare the ability of humans and zebra finches to categorize vowels despite speaker variation in speech in order to test the hypothesis that accommodating speaker and gender differences in isolated vowels can be achieved without prior experience with speaker-related variability. Using a behavioural Go/No-go task and identical stimuli, we compared Australian English adults’ (naïve to Dutch and zebra finches’ (naïve to human speech ability to categorize /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels of an novel Dutch speaker after learning to discriminate those vowels from only one other speaker. Experiment 1 and 2 presented vowels of two speakers interspersed or blocked, respectively. Results demonstrate that categorization of vowels is possible without prior exposure to speaker-related variability in speech for zebra finches, and in non-native vowel categories for humans. Therefore, this study is the first to provide evidence for what might be a species-shared auditory bias that may supersede speaker-related information during vowel categorization. It additionally provides behavioural evidence contradicting a prior hypothesis that accommodation of speaker differences is achieved via the use of formant ratios. Therefore, investigations of alternative accounts of vowel normalization that incorporate the possibility of an auditory bias for disregarding inter-speaker variability are warranted.

Punjabis Learning English: Word Order. TEAL Occasional Papers, Vol. l, 1977.

Science.gov (United States)

Seesahai, Maureen

When teaching English as a second language to speakers of Punjabi, it is useful for the teacher to have some knowledge of the students' native language. This paper analyzes the differences in word order between English and Punjabi. The five basic sentence patterns in English are contrasted with the equivalent sentence patterns in Punjabi.…

English as an Academic Lingua Franca: The ELFA Project

Science.gov (United States)

Mauranen, Anna; Hynninen, Niina; Ranta, Elina

2010-01-01

English is unquestionably the world language of academia--yet its most notable characteristic, being predominantly used by non-native speakers, has not seriously been taken on board in ESP descriptive studies. The project English as an academic lingua franca (ELFA) based at the University of Helsinki investigates academic discourses, branching out…

Cognitive Factors in the Choice of Syntactic Form by Aphasic and Normal Speakers of English and Japanese: The Speaker's Impulse.

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Menn, Lise; And Others

This study examined the role of empathy in the choice of syntactic form and the degree of independence of pragmatic and syntactic abilities in a range of aphasic patients. Study 1 involved 9 English-speaking and 9 Japanese-speaking aphasic subjects with 10 English-speaking and 4 Japanese normal controls. Study 2 involved 14 English- and 6…

The Role of Home and School Factors in Predicting English Vocabulary among Bilingual Kindergarten Children in Singapore

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Dixon, L. Quentin

2011-01-01

Research in monolingual populations indicate that vocabulary knowledge is essential to reading achievement, but how vocabulary develops in bilingual children has been understudied. The current study investigated the role of home and school factors in predicting English vocabulary among 284 bilingual kindergartners (168 Chinese, 65 Malay, 51…

Improving the Effectiveness of Speaker Verification Domain Adaptation With Inadequate In-Domain Data

Science.gov (United States)

2017-08-20

M speakers. We seek a probabilistic solution to domain adap- tation, and so we encode knowledge of the out-of-domain data in prior distributions...the VB solution from (16)-(21) becomes: µ =αȳ + (1− α)µout, (24) Σa =α ( 1 NT NT∑ n=1 〈ynyTn 〉 − ȳȳT ) + (1− α) Σouta (25) + α (1− α) ( ȳ − µout...non- English languages and from unseen channels. An inadequate in-domain set was provided, which consisted of 2272 samples from 1164 speakers, and

Self-Disclosure in Initial Interactions amongst Speakers of American and Australian English

Science.gov (United States)

Haugh, Michael; Carbaugh, Donal

2015-01-01

Getting acquainted with others is one of the most basic interpersonal communication events. Yet there has only been a limited number of studies that have examined variation in the interactional practices through which unacquainted persons become acquainted and establish relationships across speakers of the same language. The current study focuses…

A Study of the Use of the Weak Forms of English Grammatical Words ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

More often than not, when grammatical words such as determiners, pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs and prepositions occur in Standard English sentences, they are produced in their weak forms. The concern of this study is whether educated Yoruba English speakers appropriately use the weak forms of English ...

Robust Speech Processing & Recognition: Speaker ID, Language ID, Speech Recognition/Keyword Spotting, Diarization/Co-Channel/Environmental Characterization, Speaker State Assessment

Science.gov (United States)

2015-10-01

Dallas Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science EC32 P.O. Box 830688 Richardson, Texas 75083-0688 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT...87 4.3 Whisper Based Processing for ASR ………………………………………….…. 92 5.0 Task 5: SPEAKER STATE ASSESSMENT/ ENVIROMENTAL SNIFFING (SSA/ENVS...Dec. 7-10, 2014 [3] S. Amuda, H. Boril, A. Sangwan, J.H.L. Hansen, T.S. Ibiyemi, “ Engineering analysis and recognition of Nigerian English: An

Education, bilingualism, and cognitive trajectories: Sacramento Area Latino Aging Study (SALSA).

Science.gov (United States)

Mungas, Dan; Early, Dawnté R; Glymour, M Maria; Zeki Al Hazzouri, Adina; Haan, Mary N

2018-01-01

This study examined the influence of education, country where education occurred, and monolingual-bilingual (English/Spanish) language usage on late life cognitive trajectories in the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA), an epidemiological study of health and cognition in Hispanics, mostly of Mexican origin, age 60 and over (N = 1,499). SALSA followed a large cohort of older Latinos for up to 7 assessment waves from 1998 to 2007. Global cognition was assessed by using the Modified Mini Mental State Examination, and the Spanish English Verbal Learning Test was used to measure episodic memory. Education, country of origin, and language usage patterns were collected at the baseline assessment and used as predictors of longitudinal trajectories of cognition. Parallel process mixed effects models were used to examine effects of education and language variables on baseline cognition and rate of cognitive decline. Mixed effects longitudinal models showed that education had strong effects on baseline global cognition and verbal memory but was not related to decline over up to 9 years of longitudinal follow-up. Differences in education effects between subgroups educated in Mexico and in the United States were minor. Monolingual-bilingual language usage was not related to cognitive decline, and bilinguals did not significantly differ from monolingual English speakers on baseline cognitive scores. Hypotheses that higher education and bilingualism protect against late life cognitive decline were not supported and education effects on late-life cognitive trajectories did not substantially differ across U.S.- and Mexico-educated groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Cross-linguistic vowel variation in trilingual speakers of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German.

Science.gov (United States)

Peters, Jörg; Heeringa, Wilbert J; Schoormann, Heike E

2017-08-01

The present study compares the acoustic realization of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German vowels by trilingual speakers in the Saterland. The Saterland is a rural municipality in northwestern Germany. It offers the unique opportunity to study trilingualism with languages that differ both by their vowel inventories and by external factors, such as their social status and the autonomy of their speech communities. The objective of the study was to examine whether the trilingual speakers differ in their acoustic realizations of vowel categories shared by the three languages and whether those differences can be interpreted as effects of either the differences in the vowel systems or of external factors. Monophthongs produced in a /hVt/ frame revealed that High German vowels show the most divergent realizations in terms of vowel duration and formant frequencies, whereas Saterland Frisian and Low German vowels show small differences. These findings suggest that vowels of different languages are likely to share the same phonological space when the speech communities largely overlap, as is the case with Saterland Frisian and Low German, but may resist convergence if at least one language is shared with a larger, monolingual speech community, as is the case with High German.

Comprehending Implied Meaning in English as a Foreign Language

Science.gov (United States)

Taguchi, Naoko

2005-01-01

This study investigated whether second language (L2) proficiency affects pragmatic comprehension, namely the ability to comprehend implied meaning in spoken dialogues, in terms of accuracy and speed of comprehension. Participants included 46 native English speakers at a U.S. university and 160 Japanese students of English in a college in Japan who…

Total and Conceptual Vocabulary in Spanish-English Bilinguals from 22 to 30 Months: Implications for Assessment

Science.gov (United States)

Core, Cynthia; Hoff, Erika; Rumiche, Rosario; Senor, Melissa

2013-01-01

Purpose: Vocabulary assessment holds promise as a way to identify young bilingual children at risk for language delay. This study compares 2 measures of vocabulary in a group of young Spanish-English bilingual children to a single-language measure used with monolingual children. Method: Total vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary were used to…

Why Not Non-Native Varieties of English as Listening Comprehension Test Input?

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Abeywickrama, Priyanvada

2013-01-01

The existence of different varieties of English in target language use (TLU) domains calls into question the usefulness of listening comprehension tests whose input is limited only to a native speaker variety. This study investigated the impact of non-native varieties or accented English speech on test takers from three different English use…

Rigor or Restriction: Examining Close Reading with High School English Language Learners

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Thomason, Betty; Brown, Clara Lee; Ward, Natalia

2017-01-01

English language learners (ELLs) are the fastest growing student subgroup in the United States, and public schools have the challenging task of teaching ELLs both English language and academic content. In spite of the attention given to improving outcomes for ELLs, the achievement gap between ELLs and native English speakers persists, especially…

Phonetic Encoding of Coda Voicing Contrast under Different Focus Conditions in L1 vs. L2 English.

Science.gov (United States)

Choi, Jiyoun; Kim, Sahayng; Cho, Taehong

2016-01-01

This study investigated how coda voicing contrast in English would be phonetically encoded in the temporal vs. spectral dimension of the preceding vowel (in vowel duration vs. F1/F2) by Korean L2 speakers of English, and how their L2 phonetic encoding pattern would be compared to that of native English speakers. Crucially, these questions were explored by taking into account the phonetics-prosody interface, testing effects of prominence by comparing target segments in three focus conditions (phonological focus, lexical focus, and no focus). Results showed that Korean speakers utilized the temporal dimension (vowel duration) to encode coda voicing contrast, but failed to use the spectral dimension (F1/F2), reflecting their native language experience-i.e., with a more sparsely populated vowel space in Korean, they are less sensitive to small changes in the spectral dimension, and hence fine-grained spectral cues in English are not readily accessible. Results also showed that along the temporal dimension, both the L1 and L2 speakers hyperarticulated coda voicing contrast under prominence (when phonologically or lexically focused), but hypoarticulated it in the non-prominent condition. This indicates that low-level phonetic realization and high-order information structure interact in a communicatively efficient way, regardless of the speakers' native language background. The Korean speakers, however, used the temporal phonetic space differently from the way the native speakers did, especially showing less reduction in the no focus condition. This was also attributable to their native language experience-i.e., the Korean speakers' use of temporal dimension is constrained in a way that is not detrimental to the preservation of coda voicing contrast, given that they failed to add additional cues along the spectral dimension. The results imply that the L2 phonetic system can be more fully illuminated through an investigation of the phonetics-prosody interface in connection

New laryngeal allophony in Manchester English

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hejná, Michaela; Scanlon, Jane

2015-01-01

The study focuses on the relationship between pre-aspiration and glottalisation in Manchester English. Analyses of five speakers aged 20-22 years indicate there is a prosodically conditioned complementary distribution: pre-aspiration is found word-medially ("batter"), while glottalisation occurs...

THE MOTHER TONGUE IN MONOLINGUAL AND MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kyuchukov, H.

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The study presents a small research project on Russian monolingual children in Moscow, and Turkish bilingual children living in Berlin, Germany. The children were examined with using the Test of Early Language Development (3rd ed., and despite the limitations of the study, the findings point up interesting tendencies. In the comprehension section of the test, the Russian monolinguals did much better than the Turkish bilinguals; however, in the section testing production, both groups of children had the same results. All children had difficulties in acquisition of abstract terms, certain prepositions, complex sentences and retelling or creating a story narrative from pictures. Bilingualism is not an obstacle for mother tongue development, but it seems there are universal factors which influence the process of language acquisition.

The Thaayorre think of Time Like They Talk of Space.

Science.gov (United States)

Gaby, Alice

2012-01-01

Around the world, it is common to both talk and think about time in terms of space. But does our conceptualization of time simply reflect the space/time metaphors of the language we speak? Evidence from the Australian language Kuuk Thaayorre suggests not. Kuuk Thaayorre speakers do not employ active spatial metaphors in describing time. But this is not to say that spatial language is irrelevant to temporal construals: non-linguistic representations of time are shown here to covary with the linguistic system of describing space. This article contrasts two populations of ethnic Thaayorre from Pormpuraaw - one comprising Kuuk Thaayorre/English bilinguals and the other English-monolinguals - in order to distinguish the effects of language from environmental and other factors. Despite their common physical, social, and cultural context, the two groups differ in their representations of time in ways that are congruent with the language of space in Kuuk Thaayorre and English, respectively. Kuuk Thaayorre/English bilinguals represent time along an absolute east-to-west axis, in alignment with the high frequency of absolute frame of reference terms in Kuuk Thaayorre spatial description. The English-monolinguals, in contrast, represent time from left-to-right, aligning with the dominant relative frame of reference in English spatial description. This occurs in the absence of any east-to-west metaphors in Kuuk Thaayorre, or left-to-right metaphors in English. Thus the way these two groups think about time appears to reflect the language of space and not the language of time.

Teaching Mathematical Problem Solving to Students with Limited English Proficiency.

Science.gov (United States)

Kaplan, Rochelle G.; Patino, Rodrigo A.

Many mainstreamed students with limited English proficiency continue to face the difficulty of learning English as a second language (ESL) while studying mathematics and other content areas framed in the language of native speakers. The difficulty these students often encounter in mathematics classes and their poor performance on subsequent…

The Corpus of English as Lingua Franca in Academic Settings.

Science.gov (United States)

Mauranen, Anna

2003-01-01

Describes a project to make a corpus of English spoken as a lingua franca in university settings in Finland. This corpus is one of the first to address the need for corpora that show the target for English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners whose goal is not to speak with native speakers but to interact in communities where English is a lingua franca.…

ACOUSTIC MEASUREMENT ON VOWEL PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE BY INDONESIAN EFL LEARNERS

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Rudha Widagsa

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Indonesian is the most widely spoken language in Indonesia. More than 200 million people speak the language as a first language. However, acoustic study on Indonesian learners of English (ILE production remains untouched. The purpose of this measurement is to examine the influence of first language (L1 on English vowels production as a second language (L2. Based on perceptual magnet hypothesis (PMH, ILE were predicted to produce close sounds to L1 English where the vowels are similar to Indonesian vowels. Acoustic analysis was conducted to measure the formant frequencies. This study involved five males of Indonesian speakers aged between 20-25 years old. The data of British English native speakers were taken from previous study by Hawkins & Midgley (2005. The result illustrates that the first formant frequencies (F1 which correlates to the vowel hight of Indonesian Learners of English were significantly different from the corresponding frequencies of British English vowels. Surprisingly, the significant differences in second formant (F2 of ILE were only in the production of /ɑ, ɒ, ɔ/ in which /ɑ/=p 0.002, /ɒ/ =p 0,001, /ɔ/ =p 0,03. The vowel space area of ILE was slightly less spacious than the native speakers. This study is expected to shed light in English language teaching particularly as a foreign language.

The Typical Different Features of Grammar of the British English (BrE and American English (AmE

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I Wayan Dirgeyasa

2016-08-01

Full Text Available There are a number of varieties of English all over the world such as American, British, Australian, Indian, Singaporean, Philippine English, etc. However, there are only two varieties of English which are most widely and dominantly taught, learned, and used both spoken and printed around the world namely British English (BrE and American English (AmE. In real sense, the two are often confusing for the non-native learners because they have some differences and uniqueness in some aspects such as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Therefore, it is really important for students, teachers and speakers as well to be aware of the major differences between the two. This paper is trying to review some striking unique and different features of grammar of British English (BrE and American English (AmE.

Speaker and Accent Variation Are Handled Differently: Evidence in Native and Non-Native Listeners

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Kriengwatana, Buddhamas; Terry, Josephine; Chládková, Kateřina; Escudero, Paola

2016-01-01

Listeners are able to cope with between-speaker variability in speech that stems from anatomical sources (i.e. individual and sex differences in vocal tract size) and sociolinguistic sources (i.e. accents). We hypothesized that listeners adapt to these two types of variation differently because prior work indicates that adapting to speaker/sex variability may occur pre-lexically while adapting to accent variability may require learning from attention to explicit cues (i.e. feedback). In Experiment 1, we tested our hypothesis by training native Dutch listeners and Australian-English (AusE) listeners without any experience with Dutch or Flemish to discriminate between the Dutch vowels /I/ and /ε/ from a single speaker. We then tested their ability to classify /I/ and /ε/ vowels of a novel Dutch speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change only), or vowels of a novel Flemish speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change plus accent change). We found that both Dutch and AusE listeners could successfully categorize vowels if the change involved a speaker/sex change, but not if the change involved an accent change. When AusE listeners were given feedback on their categorization responses to the novel speaker in Experiment 2, they were able to successfully categorize vowels involving an accent change. These results suggest that adapting to accents may be a two-step process, whereby the first step involves adapting to speaker differences at a pre-lexical level, and the second step involves adapting to accent differences at a contextual level, where listeners have access to word meaning or are given feedback that allows them to appropriately adjust their perceptual category boundaries. PMID:27309889

The Use of English in the Chinese Language Classroom: Perspectives from American College Students

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Henrietta Yang

2010-08-01

Full Text Available For a long time, whether learners' first language (L1 should be used in the foreign language classroom has been a controversial issue in the foreign language education field. The focus has been mostly on the use of L1 in the English language classroom (e.g.,Atkinson, 1987; Brooks-Lewis, 2009; Kieu, 2010; Krashen, 1981; Miles, 2004; Nazary, 2008; Prodromou, 2002; Schweers, 1999; Tang,2002. The debate centers on two diverse pedagogical approaches: the monolingual approach and the bilingual approach. The supporters of the monolingual approach contend that only the target language that learners are acquiring (i.e. English in most of the study should be allowed in the classroom, and Krashen (1981, 1985 was a pivotal supporter of this approach. However, other researchers and language teachers argue that the monolingual approach is not practical, particularly in lower-level classes (e.g., Atkinson, 1987; BrooksLewis, 2009; Schweers, 1999; Tang, 2002. They believe that using L1 in the classroom can be very effective when explaining difficult grammar points and linguistic elements that are language specific. The supporters of the bilingual approach do not deny the advantages of maximizing target language exposure and practice. However, they suggest that when learners' L1 is applied strategically, it can actually be a very important learning tool (e.g., Atkinson, 1987; Brooks-Lewis,2009; Schweers, 1999. Furthermore, both Schweers (1999 and Miles (2004 point out that the use of L1 provides students a more relaxed atmosphere and makes them less anxious and more confident in the classroom.

User-Centred Design for Chinese-Oriented Spoken English Learning System

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Yu, Ping; Pan, Yingxin; Li, Chen; Zhang, Zengxiu; Shi, Qin; Chu, Wenpei; Liu, Mingzhuo; Zhu, Zhiting

2016-01-01

Oral production is an important part in English learning. Lack of a language environment with efficient instruction and feedback is a big issue for non-native speakers' English spoken skill improvement. A computer-assisted language learning system can provide many potential benefits to language learners. It allows adequate instructions and instant…

Speaker Authentication

CERN Document Server

Li, Qi (Peter)

2012-01-01

This book focuses on use of voice as a biometric measure for personal authentication. In particular, "Speaker Recognition" covers two approaches in speaker authentication: speaker verification (SV) and verbal information verification (VIV). The SV approach attempts to verify a speaker’s identity based on his/her voice characteristics while the VIV approach validates a speaker’s identity through verification of the content of his/her utterance(s). SV and VIV can be combined for new applications. This is still a new research topic with significant potential applications. The book provides with a broad overview of the recent advances in speaker authentication while giving enough attention to advanced and useful algorithms and techniques. It also provides a step by step introduction to the current state of the speaker authentication technology, from the fundamental concepts to advanced algorithms. We will also present major design methodologies and share our experience in developing real and successful speake...

The Role of Accessibility of Semantic Word Knowledge in Monolingual and Bilingual Fifth-Grade Reading

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Cremer, M.; Schoonen, R.

2013-01-01

The influences of word decoding, availability, and accessibility of semantic word knowledge on reading comprehension were investigated for monolingual "("n = 65) and bilingual children ("n" = 70). Despite equal decoding abilities, monolingual children outperformed bilingual children with regard to reading comprehension and…

Introducing Diversity of English into ELT: Student Teachers' Responses

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Suzuki, Ayako

2011-01-01

The growing use of English by its L2 speakers for their international communication has started to suggest a need for many changes in ELT, particularly in traditional EFL countries. One of the changes discussed among some sociolinguists is the introduction of different varieties of English from the two traditionally highly regarded varieties, i.e.…

The effect of tertiary study at an English medium university on the ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The effect of tertiary study at an English medium university on the written English of speakers of Black South African English. J Parkinson. Abstract. No Abstract. Full Text: EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT · DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT · http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tvl.v37i2.53847.

The Role of Statistical Learning and Working Memory in L2 Speakers' Pattern Learning

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McDonough, Kim; Trofimovich, Pavel

2016-01-01

This study investigated whether second language (L2) speakers' morphosyntactic pattern learning was predicted by their statistical learning and working memory abilities. Across three experiments, Thai English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students (N = 140) were exposed to either the transitive construction in Esperanto (e.g., "tauro…

Inclusion Strategies for Multi-word Units in Monolingual Dictionaries

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Phillip Louw

2011-10-01

Full Text Available

Abstract: This article focuses on inclusion strategies for different types of multi-word units, beit as part of the macrostructure or embedded as treatment units in the microstructure of a specificdictionary. The types of multi-word units discussed range from multi-word lexical items to collocationsand multi-word compound lexical items. The general principles set out in this article areapplied specifically to monolingual school dictionaries that target learners of English in the juniorsecondary phase.In order to discuss inclusion strategies adequately it is, however, necessary to make a cursorydistinction between idioms and collocations, on the one hand, and between collocations and multiwordcompound lexical items, on the other. It is shown that current monolingual dictionaries oftenfail to distinguish between these types and therefore apply potentially confusing inclusion strategies.In the discussion of inclusion strategies for multi-word lexical items that follows, it is shownthat, whereas loan groups and group prepositions require lemmatisation as full multilexical lemmas,the strategy for idioms is not as simple. The problems with a full lemmatisation of idioms arepointed out and an alternative system, whereby idioms are consistently included as sublemmaswith full microstructural treatment, is proposed.Next it is shown that collocations do not have lexical item status and can therefore not betreated in the same way as multi-word lexical items. However, provision must be made that somecollocations may need additional microstructural treatment addressed to them.Lastly, inclusion strategies for multi-word compound lexical items, which frequently occur inEnglish, are discussed. The practice of sublemmatising so-called "transparent" compound lexicalitems and giving them no or little microstructural treatment, is shown to be inappropriate forschool dictionaries.Hopefully the guidelines provided in this article can be of some help in clearing up

Monolingual Dictionary Use in an EFL Context

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Ali, Holi Ibrahim Holi

2012-01-01

Caledonian College of Engineering, Oman, has been encouraging its students to use monolingual dictionaries rather than bilingual or bilingualized ones in classroom and during the exams. This policy with has been received with mixed feelings and attitudes. Therefore, this study strives to explore teachers' and students' attitudes about the use of…

Translanguaging in Higher Education: Beyond Monolingual Ideologies

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Mazak, Catherine M., Ed.; Carroll, Kevin S., Ed.

2016-01-01

This book examines translanguaging in higher education and provides clear examples of what translanguaging looks like in practice in particular contexts around the world. While higher education has historically been seen as a monolingual space, the case studies from the international contexts included in this collection show us that institutions…

Local Pragmatic Norms in Students' English: An Identity to Unleash

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Nneka Umera-Okeke

English has grown into a global language shared by people in diverse ... Then it revealed the local pragmatic norms of various kinds, which students ... regardless of what any other individual or community may think or feel about the ... those of how non-native speakers of English speak, act, and behave with reference to.

THE EFFECT OF FORMAL SCHEMA ON COLLEGE ENGLISH LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN EFL

OpenAIRE

Shi Liyan; Wang Duqin; Chu Chunyan

2014-01-01

Abstract: Listening comprehension used to be thought of as a passive skill, and listeners were called as“tape-recorder” (Anderson & Lynch,1988). But in fact it is an active process, in which what the listener wants to get is an adequate understanding of what the speaker said and what the speaker meant. To achieve this purpose, English listeners should utilize contextual clues, background knowledge and depend on many learning strategies. Active listeners will understand what the speakers said ...

Topic Continuity in Informal Conversations between Native and Non-Native Speakers of English

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Morris-Adams, Muna

2013-01-01

Topic management by non-native speakers (NNSs) during informal conversations has received comparatively little attention from researchers, and receives surprisingly little attention in second language learning and teaching. This article reports on one of the topic management strategies employed by international students during informal, social…

Encoding, rehearsal, and recall in signers and speakers: shared network but differential engagement.

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Bavelier, D; Newman, A J; Mukherjee, M; Hauser, P; Kemeny, S; Braun, A; Boutla, M

2008-10-01

Short-term memory (STM), or the ability to hold verbal information in mind for a few seconds, is known to rely on the integrity of a frontoparietal network of areas. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to ask whether a similar network is engaged when verbal information is conveyed through a visuospatial language, American Sign Language, rather than speech. Deaf native signers and hearing native English speakers performed a verbal recall task, where they had to first encode a list of letters in memory, maintain it for a few seconds, and finally recall it in the order presented. The frontoparietal network described to mediate STM in speakers was also observed in signers, with its recruitment appearing independent of the modality of the language. This finding supports the view that signed and spoken STM rely on similar mechanisms. However, deaf signers and hearing speakers differentially engaged key structures of the frontoparietal network as the stages of STM unfold. In particular, deaf signers relied to a greater extent than hearing speakers on passive memory storage areas during encoding and maintenance, but on executive process areas during recall. This work opens new avenues for understanding similarities and differences in STM performance in signers and speakers.

Accentedness and intelligibility: Mandarin-accented English for Korean and American listeners

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hardman, Jocelyn

.S. who were certified to teach at the university level, and the key words were highly familiar to native speakers of English, those words which matched exactly were scored as accurate, while those which did not were marked as inaccurate. In addition, the listeners rated their familiarity with known key...... words on an increasing 5-point Likert scale, while unknown words were entered as ‘0.’. A series of mixed effects models with logistic regression analyzed the effect of speaker segmental production accuracy and listener word familiarity on intelligibility. Individual speaker and listener variation......, as well as key word variation, were crossed as random effects. For the Koreans, Mandarin-accented English was significantly less intelligible than for the Americans and the differences in the segments that most frequently caused problems for each L1 listener group lend evidence to the strong role played...

Teach English, Teach about the Environment: A Resource for Teachers of Adult English for Speakers of Other Languages

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The EPA has developed the Teach English, Teach about the Environment curriculum to help you teach English to adult students while introducing basic concepts about the environment and individual environmental responsibility.

Aspects of the Negation Systems of English and Urhobo: A ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The contrastive analysis of aspects of the negation systems of English and Urhobo was ... Data for the study were collected from texts written in English by native and ... from books and articles written in Urhobo by native speakers of the language. ... as focus marking in some sentences, but without the negative marker “not”.

Perceptions of the Pediatric Hospice Experience among English- and Spanish-Speaking Families.

Science.gov (United States)

Thienprayoon, Rachel; Marks, Emily; Funes, Maria; Martinez-Puente, Louizza Maria; Winick, Naomi; Lee, Simon Craddock

2016-01-01

Many children who die are eligible for hospice enrollment but little is known about parental perceptions of the hospice experience, the benefits, and disappointments. The objective of this study was to explore parental perspectives of the hospice experience in children with cancer, and to explore how race/ethnicity impacts this experience. We held 20 semistructured interviews with 34 caregivers of children who died of cancer and used hospice. Interviews were conducted in the caregivers' primary language: 12 in English and 8 in Spanish. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using accepted qualitative methods. Both English and Spanish speakers described the importance of honest, direct communication by medical providers, and anxieties surrounding the expectation of the moment of death. Five English-speaking families returned to the hospital because of unsatisfactory symptom management and the need for additional supportive services. Alternatively, Spanish speakers commonly stressed the importance of being at home and did not focus on symptom management. Both groups invoked themes of caregiver appraisal, but English-speaking caregivers more commonly discussed themes of financial hardship and fear of insurance loss, while Spanish-speakers focused on difficulties of bedside caregiving and geographic separation from family. The intense grief associated with the loss of a child creates shared experiences, but Spanish- and English-speaking parents describe their hospice experiences in different ways. Additional studies in pediatric hospice care are warranted to improve the care we provide to children at the end of life.

Sonority constraints on onset-rime cohesion: evidence from native and bilingual Filipino readers of English.

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Alonzo, Angelo; Taft, Marcus

2002-01-01

Research in English suggests that syllables can be analyzed in terms of two subunits-the onset (defined as the initial consonant or consonant cluster) and the rime (the unit formed by the vowel and following consonant/s). This study investigated whether nonnative readers of English, which in the case of the present study were native Filipino speakers, also make use of onset-rime units, particularly when some features of their native language (namely infixation and reduplication) appear to foster no awareness of such units. In two lexical decision experiments, monosyllabic English words were presented, divided in between their first and second consonants (e.g., B LIND), at their onset-rime boundary (e.g., BL IND), or at their antibody boundary (e.g., BLI ND). Results indicated that the processes of infixation and reduplication did not affect the English word processing of native Filipino speakers. Rather, results for both native Filipino and native English speakers suggest that onsets composed of an "s + consonant" sequence (e.g., STAMP) are less cohesive than onsets comprised of a stop-liquid sequence (e.g., BLIND). It was concluded that not only may sonority constraints underlie onset cohesiveness, but that such phonetic properties may also be involved in visual word recognition. Copyright 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).

Questioning English Standards: Learner Attitudes and L2 Choices in Norway

Science.gov (United States)

Rindal, Ulrikke

2014-01-01

This study investigates attitudes towards varieties of English among Norwegian adolescent learners and assesses the role of social evaluation for second language (L2) pronunciation choices by combining a verbal guise test with speaker commentary and reports of language choices. The results suggest that while American English is the most accessible…

Ubiquitous English Learning System with Dynamic Personalized Guidance of Learning Portfolio

Science.gov (United States)

Wu, Ting-Ting; Sung, Tien-Wen; Huang, Yueh-Min; Yang, Chu-Sing; Yang, Jin-Tan

2011-01-01

Situated learning has been recognized as an effective approach in enhancing learning impressions and experiences for students. Can we take advantage of situated learning in helping students who are not English native speakers to read English articles more effective? Can the effectiveness of situated learning be further promoted by individual…

Kindergarten Teachers' Perceptions of Barriers English Language Learners Face in Mathematics

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Franklin, Martha A.

2013-01-01

There is a disparity of mathematics achievement between native English speakers and English language learners (ELL). This study sought to understand the barriers ELL kindergarten students faced in being successful in mathematics. The purpose of this qualitative, instrumental case study was to explore kindergarten teachers' perceptions…

Japanese University Students' Willingness to Communicate in English: The Serendipitous Effect of Oral Presentations

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Matsuoka, Rieko; Matsumoto, Kahoko; Poole, Gregory; Matsuoka, Misato

2014-01-01

This study examines the ways in which college students in Japan overcame sensitivity to external evaluation and increased their willingness to communicate in English. It is not uncommon for university students in Japan, who are otherwise proficient speakers of English and motivated to learn, fail to exhibit English competency in real communication…

Chinese English in as lingua franca in global business setting: A case study of ongoing emails of a foreign company in China

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Wang Wenpu

2016-01-01

Full Text Available With the process of globalization, English has been increasingly become the lingua franca for people speaking different languages to communicate with each other, among whom the number of non-native speakers of English far outnumbers those native speakers in traditional sense. Against this background, the principle of taking the rules of native English speakers as the norms is undergoing challenges. The non-native speakers are claiming the ownership and rights of norm-providing to the English language (Crystal, 2003. In business setting, this is especially true (Charles, 2007. This paper intends to explore the use of Chinese English as lingua franca in business setting. Taking a foreign enterprise based in China as the case, this paper investigates over 400 ongoing business e-mails written in English by its Chinese employees, including the management and other staff. Four most salient patterns of Chinese English structures are identified, i.e., punctuations, absence of inflectional markers in number and tense, serial verb construction, and zero articles, which are then analyzed cultural, linguistic and social-linguistic perspectives. The effectiveness of such language patterns are proved according to the principle of “understandability” proposed by Kachru and Nelson (2006 from both intra-cultural and inter-cultural aspects. Based on the afore-said analysis, this paper concludes that Chinese English, during the process of language contact, has become a legitimate English variation, and has been providing new norms for the other countries to follow. It is suggested that business English users in China need to use their Chinese English with a confident stance, while business partners from other countries need to get familiar with this English variation in order for them to communicate effectively with their Chinese partners.

"I Am Never Afraid of Being Recognized as an NNES": One Teacher's Journey in Claiming and Embracing Her Nonnative-Speaker Identity

Science.gov (United States)

Park, Gloria

2012-01-01

With an increase in the number of learners and speakers of English as an additional language entering the English language teaching field, especially in Outer and Expanding Circle countries and some migrating into the Inner Circle countries (e.g., Jenkins, 2009), there is an urgent need to prepare, and understand the experiences of, English…

Influences on preschool children's oral health-related quality of life as reported by English and Spanish-speaking parents and caregivers.

Science.gov (United States)

Born, Catherine D; Divaris, Kimon; Zeldin, Leslie P; Rozier, R Gary

2016-09-01

This study examined young, preschool children's oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) among a community-based cohort of English and Spanish-speaking parent-child dyads in North Carolina, and sought to quantify the association of parent/caregiver characteristics, including spoken language, with OHRQoL impacts. Data from structured interviews with 1,111 parents of children aged 6-23 months enrolled in the Zero-Out Early Childhood Caries study in 2010-2012 were used. OHRQoL was measured using the overall score (range: 0-52) of the Early Childhood Oral Health Impact Scale (ECOHIS). We examined associations with parents' sociodemographic characteristics, spoken language, self-reported oral and general health, oral health knowledge, children's dental attendance, and dental care needs. Analyses included descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate methods based upon zero-inflated negative binomial regression. To determine differences between English and Spanish speakers, language-stratified model estimates were contrasted using homogeneity χ 2 tests. The mean overall ECOHIS score was 3.9 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 3.6-4.2]; 4.7 among English-speakers and 1.5 among Spanish speakers. In multivariate analyses, caregivers' education showed a positive association with OHRQoL impacts among Spanish speakers [prevalence ratio (PR) = 1.12 (95% CI = 1.03-1.22), for every added year of schooling], whereas caregivers' fair/poor oral health showed a positive association among English speakers (PR = 1.20; 95% CI = 1.02-1.41). The overall severity of ECOHIS impacts was low among this population-based sample of young, preschool children, and substantially lower among Spanish versus English speakers. Further studies are warranted to identify sources of these differences in - actual or reported - OHRQoL impacts. © 2016 American Association of Public Health Dentistry.

Influence of Current Input-Output and Age of First Exposure on Phonological Acquisition in Early Bilingual Spanish-English-Speaking Kindergarteners

Science.gov (United States)

Ruiz-Felter, Roxanna; Cooperson, Solaman J.; Bedore, Lisa M.; Peña, Elizabeth D.

2016-01-01

Background: Although some investigations of phonological development have found that segmental accuracy is comparable in monolingual children and their bilingual peers, there is evidence that language use affects segmental accuracy in both languages. Aims: To investigate the influence of age of first exposure to English and the amount of current…

"Nobody Told Me They Didn't Speak English!": Teacher Language Views and Student Linguistic Repertoires in Hutterite Colony Schools in Canada

Science.gov (United States)

Sterzuk, Andrea; Nelson, Cynthia A.

2016-01-01

This article presents a qualitative study of five monolingual teachers' understandings of the linguistic repertoires of their multilingual students. These teachers deliver the Saskatchewan provincial curricula in English to Hutterite colony students who are users of three languages: (a) spoken Hutterisch as a home and community language, (b)…

Composition Medium Comparability in a Direct Writing Assessment of Non-Native English Speakers

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Edward W. Wolfe

2004-01-01

Full Text Available The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL contains a direct writing assessment, and examinees are given the option of composing their responses at a computer terminal using a keyboard or composing their responses in handwriting. This study sought to determine whether performance on a direct writing assessment is comparable for examinees when given the choice to compose essays in handwriting versus word processing. We examined this relationship controlling for English language proficiency and several demographic characteristics of examinees using linear models. We found a weak two-way interaction between composition medium and English language proficiency with examinees with weaker English language scores performing better on handwritten essays while examinees with better English language scores performing comparably on the two testing media. We also observed predictable differences associated with geographic region, native language, gender, and age.

[Monolingualism, an overlooked multilingual?

Science.gov (United States)

Vincent, E

There has been some emphasis on the practice of multi­lingualism. It is seen as encouraging children creativity, lin­guis­­tic sensitivity and openness. In this article, we seek to find out if the different qualities demonstrated in multilingualism can also be developed in a monolingualism context. Despite the fact that it is a single language system - where grammar, accents, the rhythm of the sentence remain unchanged - it will be interesting to draw some parallels with multilingualism. This will lead us to study the processes of oral and written language acquisition in children. The associations with stuttering will also be mentioned.

Chinese L1 children's English L2 verb morphology over time: individual variation in long-term outcomes.

Science.gov (United States)

Paradis, Johanne; Tulpar, Yasemin; Arppe, Antti

2016-05-01

This study examined accuracy in production and grammaticality judgements of verb morphology by eighteen Chinese-speaking children learning English as a second language (L2) followed longitudinally from four to six years of exposure to English, and who began to learn English at age 4;2. Children's growth in accuracy with verb morphology reached a plateau by six years, where 11/18 children did not display native-speaker levels of accuracy for one or more morphemes. Variation in children's accuracy with verb morphology was predicted by their English vocabulary size and verbal short-term memories primarily, and quality and quantity of English input at home secondarily. This study shows that even very young L2 learners might not all catch up to native speakers in this time frame and that non-age factors play a role in determining individual variation in child L2 learners' long-term outcomes with English morphology.

Who Will Be Bilingual? A Critical Discourse Analysis of a Spanish-English Bilingual Pair

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Nuñez, Idalia; Palmer, Deborah

2017-01-01

This article presents a basic interpretive qualitative study that examined how two students, a dominant Spanish speaker (Joel) and a dominant English speaker (Carter) used languages during their microinteractions in pair work in a dual language kindergarten classroom. The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between language…

Do Nonnative Language Speakers "Chew the Fat" and "Spill the Beans" with Different Brain Hemispheres? Investigating Idiom Decomposability with the Divided Visual Field Paradigm

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Cieslicka, Anna B.

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study was to explore possible cerebral asymmetries in the processing of decomposable and nondecomposable idioms by fluent nonnative speakers of English. In the study, native language (Polish) and foreign language (English) decomposable and nondecomposable idioms were embedded in ambiguous (neutral) and unambiguous (biasing…

The Non-Native English Speaker Teachers in TESOL Movement

Science.gov (United States)

Kamhi-Stein, Lía D.

2016-01-01

It has been almost 20 years since what is known as the non-native English-speaking (NNES) professionals' movement--designed to increase the status of NNES professionals--started within the US-based TESOL International Association. However, still missing from the literature is an understanding of what a movement is, and why non-native English…

Increased Access to Professional Interpreters in the Hospital Improves Informed Consent for Patients with Limited English Proficiency.

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Lee, Jonathan S; Pérez-Stable, Eliseo J; Gregorich, Steven E; Crawford, Michael H; Green, Adrienne; Livaudais-Toman, Jennifer; Karliner, Leah S

2017-08-01

Language barriers disrupt communication and impede informed consent for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) undergoing healthcare procedures. Effective interventions for this disparity remain unclear. Assess the impact of a bedside interpreter phone system intervention on informed consent for patients with LEP and compare outcomes to those of English speakers. Prospective, pre-post intervention implementation study using propensity analysis. Hospitalized patients undergoing invasive procedures on the cardiovascular, general surgery or orthopedic surgery floors. Installation of dual-handset interpreter phones at every bedside enabling 24-h immediate access to professional interpreters. Primary predictor: pre- vs. post-implementation group; secondary predictor: post-implementation patients with LEP vs. English speakers. Primary outcomes: three central informed consent elements, patient-reported understanding of the (1) reasons for and (2) risks of the procedure and (3) having had all questions answered. We considered consent adequately informed when all three elements were met. We enrolled 152 Chinese- and Spanish-speaking patients with LEP (84 pre- and 68 post-implementation) and 86 English speakers. Post-implementation (vs. pre-implementation) patients with LEP were more likely to meet criteria for adequately informed consent (54% vs. 29%, p = 0.001) and, after propensity score adjustment, had significantly higher odds of adequately informed consent (AOR 2.56; 95% CI, 1.15-5.72) as well as of each consent element individually. However, compared to post-implementation English speakers, post-implementation patients with LEP had significantly lower adjusted odds of adequately informed consent (AOR, 0.38; 95% CI, 0.16-0.91). A bedside interpreter phone system intervention to increase rapid access to professional interpreters was associated with improvements in patient-reported informed consent and should be considered by hospitals seeking to improve

Unvorgreifliche Gedanken, betreffend die Ausuebung und Verbesserung des Uebersetzungsunterrichts Englisch-Deutsch. (Modest Thoughts on the Use and Improvement of Training in Translation -- English to German).

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Haber, Bernd K.

1978-01-01

Surveys current practice in teaching translation and finds it faulty. An almost mathematical model of translation strategy is suggested for upper-level students of English who can use a monolingual dictionary. Two sample texts for testing the model are appended. (IFS/WGA)

English word frequency and recognition in bilinguals: Inter-corpus comparison and error analysis.

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Shi, Lu-Feng

2015-01-01

This study is the second of a two-part investigation on lexical effects on bilinguals' performance on a clinical English word recognition test. Focus is on word-frequency effects using counts provided by four corpora. Frequency of occurrence was obtained for 200 NU-6 words from the Hoosier mental lexicon (HML) and three contemporary corpora, American National Corpora, Hyperspace analogue to language (HAL), and SUBTLEX(US). Correlation analysis was performed between word frequency and error rate. Ten monolinguals and 30 bilinguals participated. Bilinguals were further grouped according to their age of English acquisition and length of schooling/working in English. Word frequency significantly affected word recognition in bilinguals who acquired English late and had limited schooling/working in English. When making errors, bilinguals tended to replace the target word with a word of a higher frequency. Overall, the newer corpora outperformed the HML in predicting error rate. Frequency counts provided by contemporary corpora predict bilinguals' recognition of English monosyllabic words. Word frequency also helps explain top replacement words for misrecognized targets. Word-frequency effects are especially prominent for bilinguals foreign born and educated.

English as a Foreign Language Spelling: Comparisons between Good and Poor Spellers

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Russak, Susie; Kahn-Horwitz, Janina

2015-01-01

This study examined English as a foreign language (EFL) spelling development amongst 233 fifth-grade, eighth-grade and 10th-grade Hebrew first-language speakers to examine effects of English orthographic exposure on spelling. Good and poor speller differences were examined regarding the acquisition of novel phonemes (/ae/, /?/ and /?/) and…

Supporting Oral Narrative Development of Kindergarten English Language Learners Using Multimedia Stories

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Yang, Sha

2016-01-01

Narrative ability comes before literacy for bilingual students and helps narrow down the gap in text-level literacy between English language learners (ELLs) and native English speakers. Kindergarten ELLs are the best age group to receive intervention to improve their oral narrative skills. Multimedia stories have potential to assist kindergarten…

On English Speakers' Ability to Communicate Emotion in Mandarin

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Jian, Hua-Li

2015-01-01

The ability of Mandarin learners to express emotion in Mandarin has received little attention. This study examines how English L1 users express emotions in Mandarin and how this expression differs from that of Mandarin L1 users. Scenarios were adopted to elicit joy, anger, sadness, fear, and neutrality. Both groups articulated anger, joy, and fear…

Native and Non-native English Teachers' Perceptions of their Professional Identity: Convergent or Divergent?

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Zia Tajeddin

2016-10-01

Full Text Available There is still a preference for native speaker teachers in the language teaching profession, which is supposed to influence the self-perceptions of native and nonnative teachers. However, the status of English as a globalized language is changing the legitimacy of native/nonnative teacher dichotomy. This study sought to investigate native and nonnative English-speaking teachers’ perceptions about native and nonnative teachers’ status and the advantages and disadvantages of being a native or nonnative teacher. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. A total of 200 native and nonnative teachers of English from the UK and the US, i.e. the inner circle, and Turkey and Iran, the expanding circle, participated in this study. A significant majority of nonnative teachers believed that native speaker teachers have better speaking proficiency, better pronunciation, and greater self-confidence. The findings also showed nonnative teachers’ lack of self-confidence and awareness of their role and status compared with native-speaker teachers, which could be the result of existing inequities between native and nonnative English-speaking teachers in ELT. The findings also revealed that native teachers disagreed more strongly with the concept of native teachers’ superiority over nonnative teachers. Native teachers argued that nonnative teachers have a good understanding of teaching methodology whereas native teachers are more competent in correct language. It can be concluded that teacher education programs in the expanding-circle countries should include materials for teachers to raise their awareness of their own professional status and role and to remove their misconception about native speaker fallacy.

Working Memory Effects on L1 and L2 Processing of Ambiguous Relative Clauses by Korean L2 Learners of English

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Kim, Ji Hyon; Christianson, Kiel

2017-01-01

In this study, we report the results of two self-paced reading experiments that investigated working memory capacity effects on the processing of globally ambiguous relative clauses by advanced Korean second language (L2) learners of English. Consistent with previous monolingual literature on the processing of temporary ambiguity, we found that…

Attitude and Self-Efficacy Change: English Language Learning in Virtual Worlds

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Zheng, Dongping; Young, Michael F.; Brewer, Robert A.; Wagner, Manuela

2009-01-01

This study explored affective factors in learning English as a foreign language in a 3D game-like virtual world, Quest Atlantis (QA). Through the use of communication tools (e.g., chat, bulletin board, telegrams, and email), 3D avatars, and 2D webpage navigation tools in virtual space, nonnative English speakers (NNES) co-solved online…

Translation, adaptation and validation of two versions of the Chronic Liver Disease Questionnaire in Malaysian patients for speakers of both English and Malay languages: a cross-sectional study.