Why do adults seem to struggle more than children in learning a second language, despite being better at a range of other cognitive skills? The source of L1-L2 differences in language learning is one of the most debated topics in the study of language. One hypothesis is that L1-L2 differences are primarily experience-based, with language learning…

While the present perfect is difficult for English Language Learners (ELLs) to master, this study seeks to provide evidence of its integral pragmatic function in the social task of initiating and developing relationships. Through analysis of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, the frequency of the present perfect, the pragmatic…

Interactional competence has been variously defined as turn-taking ability, paralinguistic features of communication such as eye contact, gesture, and gesticulation, and listener responses. In existing assessment systems such as the oral proficiency interview (OPI), interactional competence is only rarely explicitly factored into the holistic…

Purpose: This research explored mechanisms of vowel variation in African American English by comparing 2 geographically distant groups of African American and White American English speakers for participation in the African American Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift. Method: Thirty-two male (African American: n = 16, White American controls: n =…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Educational Resources (OER) are rapidly growing, but are not usually offered in multiple languages due to the lack of cost-effective solutions to translate the different objects comprising them and particularly videos. However, current state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine…

This paper investigates the effect of foreignization and Englishization on business naming practices in Turkey. The question that is addressed is in what new ways foreign elements and English lexical items influence the naming of store signs in the language. In previous work, it was argued that there are roughly three main ways in which…

Knowledge regarding social information is commonly believed to be derived from sources such as formal relationships and interviews and can be plotted as complex networks. We explored whether social networks can also be extracted through other means by using language statistics. In three computational studies we computed first-order and…

Multimodal studies posit that meaning is not only communicated through spoken and written words, but also through other modes such as images, gesture, gaze, proximity etc. The widespread availability of high-quality, miniaturised audio and video recording and storing technology has made multimodal data collection cheap and easy. However, the…

The article is devoted to the problem of implementation of hermeneutical approach to the text. The author who has worked with students of philological faculty for more than 25 years is concerned about the tendency of a pragmatic approach to the text of an artistic work which manifests in the fact that a modern student-reader refers to the work…

It's not uncommon for people to make reference to atmospheres, including in relationship with educational spaces. In this article, we investigate educational atmospheres by turning to Western and Chinese literature on the air and wind. We pursue this task in three phases. First, we examine the Western literature to see the possible strings of…

In this dissertation, I address two outstanding questions regarding how linguistic and extra-linguistic information are brought together in the interpretation of language situated within a discourse. The first part of this dissertation experimentally addresses how alternatives invoked by sentences containing the focus-sensitive operator 'only' are…

This article describes the development of a new questionnaire for assessing L2 learners' language attitudes. Drawing on theoretical work in the fields of social psychology and applied linguistics, the author reviewed the concept of (language) attitudes and contrasted them with the concept of (language) motivation. This thorough literature review,…

It is a well-known fact that advice-giving practices may differ from culture to culture. While some societies such as British culture refrain from giving advice, others such as Turkish may prefer to give advice perceiving it as an indication of solidarity. Thus, precautions for preventing this nature of advice is taken by language itself in a…

Following Swales' (1990) influential study on research article (RA) introductions, some attention has increasingly been paid to other rhetorical units of both expert and learners' writing, including titles. A key and effective discursive means through which titles are constructed and presented is the syntactic configuration. The present study,…

The need for transformation has led kingdom to envision and encode the Saudi Vision 2030 document; it is not merely an idealistic divination but a manuscript with an appropriate plan to accomplish its anticipated economic and social goals. In fact, planning is a critical factor in the document, which shapes it as a discourse of realization and…