As language technologies have become more sophisticated and prevalent, there have been increasing concerns about bias in natural language processing (NLP). Such work often focuses on the effects of bias instead of sources. In contrast, this paper discusses how normative language assumptions and ideologies influence a range of automated language…

Translanguaging is a new term in bilingual education; it supports a heteroglossic language ideology, which views bilingualism as valuable in its own right. Some translanguaging scholars have questioned the existence of discrete languages, further concluding that multilingualism does not exist. I argue that the political use of language names can…

Recent neurobiological studies revealed evidence for lexical representations that are not specified for the coronal place of articulation (PLACE; Friedrich, Eulitz, & Lahiri, 2006; Friedrich, Lahiri, & Eulitz, 2008). Here we tested when these types of underspecified representations influence neuronal speech recognition. In a unimodal…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target…

The collection of essays on language contact and language conflict includes: "Language Choices: Contact and Conflict?" (Martin Putz); "Language Ecology: Contact Without Conflict" (Peter Muhlhausler); "Towards a Dynamic View of Multilingualism" (Ulrike Jessner); "A Matter of Choice" (Florian Coulmas); The…