This study employed a targeted phonetic instruction to explore the mechanisms that underpin second language (L2) phonetic acquisition. Broadly, two general approaches to phonetic acquisition have been previously proposed. A segmental approach suggests that learners acquire a series of individual, discrete phonemes (e.g., Flege, 1995), while a…

Many English-speaking children use plural nominal forms in spontaneous speech before the age of two, and display some understanding of plural inflection in production tasks. However, results from an intermodal preferential study suggested a lack of "comprehension" of nominal plural morphology at 24 months of age (Kouider, Halberda, Wood,…

The Aspect Hypothesis assumes that--in early interlanguages--the perfective past spreads from telic to atelic verbs because events occurring in the past are easier to be associated with predicates having an inherent endpoint in their lexico-conceptual representation. In this study it is questioned whether for initial L2ers knowing the general…

This research examines advertising discourse in Russian and English as acts of communicative exchange and interpersonal relationship between advertising discourse participants. The purpose was to identify and describe the way that viewers process information contained in television commercials and how they become consumers moving from getting…

Are the phonological representations of printed and spoken words isomorphic? This question is addressed by investigating the restrictions on onsets. Cross-linguistic research suggests that onsets of rising sonority are preferred to sonority plateaus, which, in turn, are preferred to sonority falls (e.g., bnif, bdif, lbif). Of interest is whether…

Discusses two experiments investigating non-antecedent suppression in American Sign Language (ASL). Findings indicate that spoken and signed languages use the same processing mechanisms in resolving co-reference relations. Results also indicate that within the probe recognition paradigm, the spatial indexing of ASL pronouns is similar to gender…

Forty bilingual Ss were tested in four experiments to see if decoding of linguistically mixed texts with one-word substitutions in the other language would take more time than decoding of unilingual material. The overall aim was to further explore the nature of the language switch mechanism as it functions in input. In the first experiment,…

Investigates the influence of linguistic structure on non-linguistic cognition by comparing Russian and English behavior on tasks involving the color blue. Russians, who differentiate this region into "dark blue" and "light blue," were expected to separate blues more often than English subjects for whom the colors belong to one lexical category.…

A study investigated the processes used by bilinguals for organizing vocabulary by presenting subjects with bilingual word recognition tasks in two modalities (aural and visual) and using a repetition paradigm. Subjects were asked to decide whether a word presented to them was a nonsense word or a real word. Two separate experiments are described.…

A study investigated whether adult learners of a second language would judge grammaticality differently in visual and aural judgment tasks. Four groups were tested: English first-language, French first-language, English second-language, and French second-language. Results indicate judgments were slower and less accurate in the aural condition,…