This study reports on a self-paced reading experiment in which native and non-native speakers of English read sentences designed to evaluate the predictions of usage-based and rule-based approaches to second language acquisition (SLA). Critical stimuli were four-word sequences embedded into sentences in which phrase frequency and grammaticality…

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…

This dissertation is a local, specific study on the Chamorro language policies of Guam. Scholars have noted since the beginning of the American occupation that the Indigenous Chamorro language of Guam is dying and is in danger of becoming extinct within the next generation. As the hub of American military presence in the Asia Pacific region, the…

Research on the age of learning effect on second language learners' foreign accents utilizes human judgments to determine speech production outcomes. Inferences drawn from analyses of these ratings are then used to inform theories. The present study focuses on rater differences in the age of learning effect research. Three groups of raters who…

Sixty English as a foreign language learners were divided into high-, intermediate-, and low-level groups based on their scores on pretests of target vocabulary and Vocabulary Levels Test scores. The participants read 10 Level 1 and 10 Level 2 graded readers over 37 weeks during two terms. Two sets of 100 target words were chosen from each set of…

The traditional morpheme order studies in second language acquisition have tried to demonstrate the existence of a fixed order of acquisition of English morphemes, regardless of the second language learner's background. Such orders have been taken as evidence of the preprogrammed nature of language acquisition. This article argues for a…

This article discusses the use of the Finnish change-of-state token "aa" that has previously not been identified. The central claim is that even though "aa" indicates a cognitive shift experienced by the speaker, it does not function as a receipt of new information. Instead, the token "aa" indicates that the speaker…

Corpus linguistics has transformed the landscape of empirical research on languages in recent decades. The proliferation of corpus technology has enabled researchers worldwide to conduct research in their own geographical locations with few hindrances. It has become increasingly commonplace for researchers to compile their own corpora for specific…

This study examines the effect of non-sentential context prosody pattern on lexical activation in Persian. For this purpose a questionnaire including target and non-target words is used. The target words are homographs with two possible stress patterns belonging to different syntactic categories. Participants are asked to read out the words aloud…

The last three decades have witnessed a notable growth in research on affect. Among the various affective variables, foreign language anxiety has been heavily studied. This interest in foreign language anxiety is consistent with increased attention to emotions in the neurosciences, cognitive psychology, and the social sciences. Instead of…

In this article the way bilinguals handle differing semantic categories in their two languages will be investigated. Drawing on bilingual data from multilingual speakers of Romansh as well as from speakers of (Swiss) German, the tensions that emerge from "conflicting habits" in the two languages are analyzed in the semantic domain of…

This special issue on language diversity and bilingual processing is based on papers presented at the "Exploratory Workshop on Speaking, Thinking and Gesturing in Two Languages," at the University of Reading, UK, in September 2012, sponsored by the European Science Foundation (IM/SCH/EW11-145). The workshop brought together a…

The past two decades have seen ample debate about processing instruction (PI) and its various components. In this article, we first describe what PI consists of and then address three questions: about the role of explicit information (EI) in PI, the difference between PI and teaching that incorporates production-based (PB) practice, and various…

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical markers of important lecture points and proposes a classification in terms of their interactive and textual orientation. The importance markers were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English corpus using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods. The classification is based on…

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb…