Persuasiveness in oral communication in English can be expressed with various vocal phonetic cues that may not be readily accessible to English second language (L2) learners whose native language may employ a different set of cues. With a goal to increase L2 learners' perceived spoken confidence and persuasiveness, and obtain empirical evidence…

This article examines the use of prompt-based lexical collocations in opinion essays by Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students. Fifty second-year English majors at a Vietnamese university wrote 100 opinion essays on two topics as progress tests. The AntConc programme (Anthony, 2020) was employed to identify the frequencies of use…

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…

The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e.,…

In this work, based on an oral corpus of semi-directed interviews conducted in French with 40 L1 Chinese speakers learning French in France and in English with 29 L1 Chinese speakers learning English in the United States, I investigated the quotative system in non-native speech of English and French as it is used in the Chinese diaspora in Paris…

In 1924 Jabbar Baghcheban created a manual system that employed the phonetic characteristics of spoken Persian and Perso-Arabic orthography for use in the education of deaf students (Ibrahimi 2007). This article is a first exploration of variation and change in this system as it has evolved into the Iranian manual alphabet. Data on the…

Linguistic ideologies are informed by social stereotyping to maintain the "standard" variety which is often interpreted as morally superior to "nonstandard" varieties. Consequently, these ideologies racialize "nonstandard" varieties, leading to even more negative stereotypes. One outlet of such stereotypes can be…

In a variety of domains, adults who are given input that is only partially consistent do not discard the inconsistent portion (regularize) but rather maintain the probability of consistent and inconsistent portions in their behavior (probability match). This research investigates the possibility that adults probability match, at least in part,…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

The current study examined the extent to which native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Spontaneous speech samples elicited from 50 Japanese learners of English with various proficiency levels were first rated by 10 Canadian and 10…

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…

This study examined the effect of native language background on listeners' perception of native and non-native vowels spoken by native (Hong Kong Cantonese) and non-native (Mandarin and Australian English) speakers. They completed discrimination and an identification task with and without visual cues in clear and noisy conditions. Results…

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of…

This study examines the role of abstractness during the activation of a lexical representation. Abstractness and conflict are directly modeled in our approach by invoking lexical representations in terms of contrastive phonological features. In two priming experiments with English nouns differing only in vowel height of their stem vowels (e.g.,…

It has been widely shown that infants and adults are capable of using only prosodic information to discriminate between languages. However, it remains unclear which aspects of prosody, either rhythm or intonation, listeners attend to for language discrimination. Previous researchers have suggested that rhythm, the duration and timing of speech…