Despite the progress in information technology, artificial intelligence as well as all kinds of machine translation software, we found that to dynamically capture the essence and the spirit of the cultural item, one needs to resort to the human mind rather than to the machine that only decodes words away from their shades of meaning. The objective…

Second language (L2) speakers often experience difficulties in learning words with L2-specific phonemes due to the unfaithful lexical encoding predicted by the fuzzy lexical representations hypothesis. Currently, there is limited understanding of how allophonic variation in the first language (L1) influences L2 phonological and lexical encoding.…

During spoken word processing, native (L1) listeners use allophonic variation to predictively rule out word competitors and speed up word recognition. There is some evidence that second language (L2) learners develop an awareness of allophonic distributions in their L2, but whether they use their knowledge to facilitate word recognition online,…

This dissertation investigates how parametric variation of linguistic properties leads to similarities and differences in language processing across the levels of words, grammatical features, and sentences. For a truly generalizable theory of psycholinguistics, the languages surveyed should not be constrained to English (Garnham, 1994; Norcliffe…

Subtitling is one of the most commonly employed types of audiovisual translation, for being cheaper and easier to be compared with other types, and also being adopted as the process of rendering aural, visual, and written modes into one single mode of communication, The current study is a translation analysis of the first fifty minutes of the…

This study expands on previous research into filler-gap dependency processing in second language (L2) English, by means of a replication of Canales's (2012) self-paced reading study. Canales, among others, found that advanced L2-English speakers exhibited the same processing behavior that Stowe (1986) found for native English processing: On…

Translation, from a cultural perspective, is the exchange and communication between two distinct cultures, posing a challenge to the translator to possess not only fluency but also a deep understanding of the history and culture of both languages. This study examined the comprehension abilities for translation strategies of native Chinese English…

Listeners use more than just acoustic information when processing speech. Social information, such as a speaker's race/ethnicity, can also affect listeners' understanding of the speech signal. In some cases, these social primes can facilitate perception, while in others they may inhibit perception. Indeed, a picture of an East Asian face has been…

This project explores how the variation in language experiences and attitudes that Mexican American Spanish heritage speaker bilinguals in the United States have affects their speech perception in both their languages. Heritage language bilinguals speak as a first language a minority language that they have cultural ties to (e.g., Spanish in the…

Despite much research on how multilingual learners view the linguistic properties of language, how they perceive languages as cultural capital has been far less investigated. Drawing on the theories of social cognition, this study explores how multiple foreign language learners' impressions, as a lens to observe their multilingual awareness, are…

Graded readers are a great asset to learners acquiring the vocabulary of another language. Homonyms, on the other hand, are a recognized source of trouble for students with that same goal. Publishers of graded readers control the presentation of old and new words, but does this control extend to homonyms? Are only the word forms controlled for--in…

In this paper, the researcher aims at investigating and revisiting the impact of Krashen's input hypothesis on L2 output. Based on Krashen's theories, the researcher proposes the homogeneity hypothesis as an extension to the input hypothesis. Homogeneity hypothesis states that the linguistic input given to L2 learners should be not only…

A new trend in the creation of multimodal products has been to include various ethnicities and languages to be more representative of current societies. The presence of more than one language can be problematic and challenging for translators, and consequently, various scholars have attempted to propose possible strategies for rendering such…

This research study investigates the effectiveness of a pedagogical model (an interventional framework) of contextualised instruction through Reverso Context, a comprehensive language and translation tool, in developing the translation skills of senior EFL student teachers. The study employs a quasi-experimental one-group pre-post design, with a…

This dissertation examines the linguistic behavior of code-switching in three groups of highly proficient Cantonese-English bilinguals. Code-switching refers to alternating between two or more languages within the same sentence or between two sentences. While traditional research on bilingualism often compares bilingual speakers against…