Many authors note that the history of teaching Latin would be a fruitful topic for a comprehensive treatise. Although intense debates about the quality and necessity of teaching Latin date back as early as in the eighteenth century, Latin courses have persisted into the present and, notably, with few changes in content. The author supports the…

This paper compares the production and perception of the rise-fall contour of contrastive statements and the final rise-fall part of polar questions in Greek. The results show that these superficially similar rise-falls exhibit fine phonetic differences in the alignment of tonal targets with the segmental string, and that these differences can be…

It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or…

This study examined visual, auditory, and cross-modal temporal pattern processing at the nonlinguistic and sublexical linguistic levels, and the relationships between these abilities and decoding skill. The central question addressed whether dyslexic readers are impaired in their perception of timing, as assessed by sensitivity to rhythm.…

Recent studies have suggested that cultures vary in subtle ways in the talk about talk that children hear and learn to produce. Twenty-two three-year-old children and their families in respectively Oslo, Norway and Cambridge, Massachusetts were observed during mealtime with the aim of identifying talk-focused talk. The analysis distinguished talk…

A series of experiments shows that Spanish learners of English acquire the "ship-sheep" contrast in a way specific to their target dialect (Scottish or Southern British English) and that many learners exhibit a perceptual strategy found in neither Spanish nor English. To account for these facts as well as for the findings of earlier research on…

The goal of this research is to determine the relevant factors that aid in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian. Results confirm the findings of previous research, which say that aspect is not learned as a uniform category, but rather interrelates with the acquisition of Aktionsarten. This study focuses on the factors responsible…

Two construals of agency are evaluated as possible innate biases guiding case-marking in children. A BROAD construal treats agentive arguments of multi-participant and single-participant events as being similar. A NARROWER construal is restricted to agents of multi-participant events. In Hindi, ergative case-marking is associated with agentive…

The degree to which native and non-native readers interpret English sentences incrementally was investigated by examining plausibility effects on reanalysis processes. Experiment 1 required participants to read sentences word by word and to make on-line plausibility judgements. The results showed that natives and non-natives immediately computed…

"Is academic speech "more like" casual conversation or academic writing?" [Swales, J. (2001). "Metatalk in American academic talk. The cases of 'point' and 'thing'." "Journal of English Language," 29(1), p. 37]. Taking a corpus-based perspective to the analysis, this study compares the language of university classroom talk to academic prose and…

In the present work, we developed a database of nonlinguistic sounds that mirror prosodic characteristics typical of language and thus carry affective information, but do not convey linguistic information. In a dichotic-listening task, we used these novel stimuli as a means of disambiguating the relative contributions of linguistic and affective…

This monograph offers an overview of the background of and current language policy and planning matters related to the language situation in Northern Ireland with reference to the full range of linguistic diversity in the polity. Particular attention is paid to the Irish language, due to the size of the Irish-speaking community in the region and…

This paper makes a methodological contribution to the emerging field of learner corpus analysis [Granger, S., 1998. Learner English on Computer. Longman, London, 1998; Granger, S., 2002. Computer Learner corpora, Second Language Acquisition, and Foreign Language Teaching. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2002] and to Second Language Acquisition (SLA)…

This paper illustrates how corpus research can inform language teachers and textbook writers about contemporary usage. This study provides evidence from various corpora, including a collection of language practice books and textbooks, and electronic databases that contain contemporary language data on how English is actually used. The data found…

The Specialist Schools Initiative in England has urged schools to plan their teaching of foreign languages in relation to the linguistic needs and preferences of their local communities. The changing multilingual fabric of many parts of Britain make such a goal a potentially difficult and controversial process. This paper explores the views of a…