The role of basic emotions in SLA has been underestimated in both research and pedagogy. The present article examines 10 positive emotions ("joy," "gratitude," "serenity," "interest," "hope," "pride," "amusement," "inspiration," "awe," and "love")…

This article reports communicative interactions with a focus on the body as a dimension of the semiotic repertoire. The research context is a four-year, multi-site linguistic ethnography which investigates how people communicate in superdiverse cities in the UK. In the setting of a butcher's stall in a city market we consider three interactions at…

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…

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…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

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…