This dissertation investigates Voice Onset Time (VOT), which serves as an essential property for differentiating plosive consonants in L1 and L2 Mandarin Chinese. It surveys VOT variations and demonstrates that they are affected by several phonetic and phonological properties, e.g., lexical tone, place of articulation (POA), speech rate,…

In response to the recent sharp increase of L2 students in Reykjavik schools, allocation criteria for special L2 services were adopted that were based on length of residence and on whether children's home language was tonal or not tonal. This study set out to evaluate the appropriateness of these criteria, and to replicate previous findings of a…

In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…

This article extends Optimality Theoretic studies to the research on second language tone phonology. Specifically, this work analyses the acquisition of identical tone sequences in Mandarin Chinese by adult speakers of three non-tonal languages: English, Japanese and Korean. This study finds that the learners prefer not to use identical lexical…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

This book presents original, empirical data from quantitative and qualitative research studies in the field of language learning aptitude, ability, and individual differences. It does so from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition, psychology, neuroscience and sociolinguistics. All studies included in the book use a similar and uniform…

The current study examined how form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) as output enhancement facilitated second language (L2) perception of Mandarin tones at both the phonetic and phonological levels by 41 Cantonese learners of Mandarin. Two experimental groups, FFI only and FFI-CF, received a 90-min FFI treatment…

To master the subtleties of Chinese takes years, but most Americans can learn some basic spoken and written Chinese in a matter of weeks or months. A new phonic system, Pin Yin Romanizing System, tones, structure, and characters, and a comparison of Japanese and Chinese are discussed. (MLW)

This set of instructional materials for Shona, a Bantu language, consists of lessons designed to be used with audiotape recordings (not included here), lesson notes, written exercises, and vocabulary. The first "book" contains 24 language lessons on a variety of grammatical topics, with line drawing illustrations. The second book contains…

This Lao language textbook is the second draft of a book developed for teaching Lao to United States Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) and is designed to be used with a Lao language instructor familiar with competency based curricula. It is not designed for self-instruction, although after some hours of use, students may be familiar enough with the…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

This book is intended as a practical introduction to the study of the Gwari language. Therefore, the descriptive analysis of the grammar of Gwari is made without recourse to technical language. The book is divided into 5 sections, dealing with: (1) phonology; (2) the noun phrase; (3) the verb phrase; (4) the sentence; and (5) vocabulary, in the…

This guide is intended to familiarize Americans with the basic structure of Hmong sentences and with words or phrases that may be useful with Hmong refugees. Hmong is represented in the Romanized Popular Alphabet. Following a general discussion of pronunciation and tone in Hmong, the structure of basic, compound, and complex sentences is…

This Haida-English dictionary introduces the Alaskan Haida alphabet and gives Haida words with English translation and the English equivalent pronunciation. The first half of the dictionary is an introduction to the sound system and grammar of Haida. Short discussions of the following topics are included: vowels; consonants; semivowels; rounded…

A completely revised edition of "A Modern Grammar of Spoken Amharic," this book is presented as a practical text for the student of the language. The 43 chapters of the text present a descriptive analysis of the sound system and grammar. Except for verbal prefixes and suffixes and partially Semitic vocabulary, the structure of Amharic is…