This paper provides an introduction to Lakurumau, a previously undescribed and undocumented Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The first part of the paper is a guide to the Lakurumau documentation corpus, deposited in the ELAR archive. The participants and the content of the deposit, the technology used for recording, and the ethical protocols…

There remains considerable disagreement about which factors drive second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Age of onset (AO) appears to be a robust factor, lending support to theories of maturational constraints on L2 acquisition. The present study is an investigation of factors that influence grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2…

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…

In the past century, French has shifted from being the native language of many Louisianans to being an endangered dialect. Since the creation of the state agency CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) in the 1960's, efforts have been made to revitalize French in Louisiana, and since the 1980's, some parishes have offered…

Although many studies have suggested positive effects for speaking or output practice on L2 grammar development, the question of how speaking affects L2 grammar remains. This study specifically examines how output affects the explicit and implicit knowledge of Spanish indirect object pronouns (IOPs). It also investigates levels of L2 grammar…

Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) has for long been considered as a Null-subject language due to its variability in regards to subject expression (e.g. "Era bom porque eu diminuia de peso...era muito gordinha" "That was good because then I could lose some weight...(I) was a bit chubby." C33:179). Such variability has been…

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationships between working memory (WM) and three commonly used learning strategies or conditions in the nature of proficiency among adult L2 Russian learners. Based on the aptitude-learning condition interaction framework articulated by Robinson (2002b), the study identifies two types of…

Vocational Education and Training (VET) in high schools has had positive effects on the retention of Indigenous students, providing important pathways into further education and the workforce. However, low-level literacy (and numeracy) skills can make successful completion difficult, especially for students who speak Standard Australian English as…

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday…

In Japanese, self-qualification, or a qualifying segment of talk that reduces the force of the speaker's own utterances, is frequently introduced with contrastive markers, such as "demo," "kedo," and "ga." This study explores the relationship between the grammatical and pragmatic competence of Japanese L2 learners by examining their use of such…

In an examination of definition of oral proficiency, this study investigated the phenomenon of variation in questions posed by interviewers at key junctures in the interview process. It is argued that perceptions of oral proficiency are reflected in the extent of accommodation in interviewer questioning. (23 references) (Author/LB)

Normally hearing children (aged 4--10) and hearing-impaired children (aged 6--14) were tested on word awareness skills, such as the distinction between words and their referents, and their ability to provide explicit definitions of word. Older children performed significantly better than younger children, and normally hearing children performed…

Three levels of metacommunication knowledge and five factors that influence the understanding of speaker meaning in oral language were identified in pilot interviews with children and adolescents. (HOD)

Investigates the silent pauses in continuous speech in three genres: political speeches, political interviews, and casual interviews in order to see how the semantic-syntactic information of the message, the duration of silent pauses, and the acoustic environment of these pauses interact to produce the listener's perception of pauses. (Author/SED)

In 1984, a new corpus of spoken Quebecois French (Canada) was added to the existing data. In developing it, half of the native speakers participating in a 1971 study were re-interviewed, providing previously unavailable data on individual language development. The report describes in detail the sociolinguistic methodology used in developing the…