The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

That a certain class of verb commonly known as 'statives' is undergoing change in terms of the way in which certain verbs of this type are being used in everyday speech is nothing new to the field of linguistics. Much has been written about it, and the author of this paper alone has been preoccupied with the subject for many years now. However,…

This study investigates acoustically one of long-term debated phonetic characteristics, the so-called Arabic voiced pharyngeal fricative /[voiced pharyngeal fricative]/. Most recent studies have found the Arabic pharyngeal to be approximant, while others have categorized it as a stop in careful speech, and still others have suggested it is a…

This dissertation examines whether and how psycholinguistic priming, and social knowledge are integrated in the identification of sociolinguistic variants. Using the English variable (ING), the alternation between -ing and -in' (e.g. thinking vs. thinkin') as a testing ground, this dissertation probes whether and how individuals utilize…

The paper presents the results of a complex study of ?onsonantal phonemes' syntagmatics, registered at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the word throughout the historical development of the English language. The analysis of frequencies of consonantal clusters' actualization allowed the author to characterize the regularities of their…

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on…

The purpose of the present study is to find out the extent to which the real spoken language is reflected in TV series in terms of vocabulary. In accordance with this purpose, a corpus, named as the British TV Series Corpus (BTSC) was compiled for the present study using two British TV series, Sherlock and Doctor Who, and this corpus was compared…

This paper looks into the dilemma of what counts as a grammatical 'learner error' in ELT on the basis of recent results from English variationist research and English as a lingua franca research. Examples from these studies show that features often perceived as 'errors' for EFL speakers also occur in ESL production--where they are called…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…

Intensifiers have been the focus of a number of studies over the past decade, with considerable interest in their meaning and variability. Several scholars have discussed the use of such forms, particularly in English (Ito and Tagliamonte 2003, Tagliamonte 2008) and Spanish (Brown and Cortés-Torres 2013; Kanwit et al. 2017), exploring their…

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.e. duration of nasalization on…

This paper traces the development of two roughly synonymous nominalizing suffixes during the Early Modern English period, the Romance "-ity" and the native "-ness." The aim is to assess whether these suffixes were favored in particular registers or followed similar paths of development, and to ascertain whether the ongoing…

This study is concerned with comparing the pronunciation in Southern Welsh, a Celtic language, and Cockney, an English dialect, regarding the place of articulation. The study uses a comparative method to shed light on the similarities and differences between the two accents. The data were collected from YouTube videos of speakers of Southern Welsh…

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…