The present paper investigates the occurrence of lexical transfer in L3 production in a diglossic context. The latter is characterised by a unique relationship between two varieties of language in one society and this makes it an interesting situation for the occurrence of crosslinguistic influence. Instances of semantic extensions were analysed…

Albeit the research into Arabic slang has been extensively explored, little empirical evidence addresses the use of Arabic slang in the educational context. This study therefore examines the use of Arabic slang among students in one Islamic higher education in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. It applies an interpretative case study design. The…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

This paper reports on a promising methodology for multilingualism studies that was trialled at the National Institute of Education (NIE) on the campus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2018. The methodology named the Aural-Oral Transect (AOT) is a systematic, easy-to-implement, unbiased way of collecting quantitative data on…

Research on linguistic variation suggests that usage patterns are deeply embedded in native and non-native speakers' knowledge of grammar. This study explores the transfer of these variable sociolinguistic patterns at the initial stages of third language acquisition. We elicited narratives in Portuguese from two mirror-image groups of sequential…

Descriptions of regional pragmatic variation in French are lacking to date the focus has been on a limited range of speech acts, including apologies, requests, compliments and responses to compliments. The present paper, a systematic analysis of invitation refusals across regional varieties of French, is designed to add to the research on…

This dissertation investigated the speech productions of the implosive -r consonant by U.S.-born Puerto Rican and Dominican Heritage Language Spanish speakers in New York. The following main research questions were addressed: 1) Do heritage language Caribbean Spanish speakers evidence the same variation with the /?/ consonant in the implosive…

Nominal and pronominal address forms, which play a central role in the construction of interpersonal relations (cf. Bargiela et al. 2002; Clyne et al. 2009), have been the focus of attention in different linguistics subfields for several decades now. Less attention, however, has been paid to these forms from a variational pragmatics (Schneider and…

A study was conducted to examine production variability in American Sign Language (ASL) in order to gain insight into the development of motor control in a language produced in another modality. Production variability was characterized through the spatiotemporal index (STI), which represents production stability in whole utterances and is a…

This exploratory study investigated the perceptions of Thai university students towards World Englishes (WEs). One hundred and ninety-eight students from three universities in Bangkok were administered a questionnaire inquiring about definitions of WEs, the Kachruvian concentric circles, the concepts of standard and ownership of English, Thai…

This study investigated the acquisition of an Egyptian phonological variant by student participants in a study abroad program at The American University in Cairo. Participants completed pre- and post-study abroad Simulated Oral Proficiency Interviews (SOPIs). The SOPI data showed a move toward an Egyptian realization of the phonological variable…

In 1922, Otto Jespersen hypothesized that women were more fluent (exhibited less hesitation in oral expression) than men because they had smaller and more central vocabularies, consisting of common words and combinations. Men's vocabularies were considered more extensive due to the inclusion of numerous novel, technical, and infrequently used…

This report is intended as a preliminary survey of the problems in the collection and sociological analysis of student slang. Dealing with the notion that every speaker handles a variety of registers and tends to choose among them in accordance with the particular social situation in which he finds himself, this study isolates some of the…

Explores the relationship between the theoretical study of institutionalized varieties of English (IVEs) and their application in teacher training programs. It is argued that, although there is a nascent awareness of IVEs, a monomodal paradigm based on native-speaker norms remains firmly entrenched among teachers and in most teacher-training…

A study investigated the speaking styles of black college students to determine whether selected stylistic features of speeches of students at a predominantly black university were different from those of black college students at a predominantly white university. Audiotapes were made of 25 students at the predominantly black university and 21…