The development of the Berlin urban vernacular during the late Early Modern and Industrial Period has been described in the literature in two primary ways: The first describes it as the result of the wholesale adoption of an autochthonous Upper Saxon dialect by a small and mobile urban elite in Berlin, who in turn imparted this newly-acquired…

Richards (2006, 2010) suggests that wh-movement is prosodically driven. Based on the position of the Comp(lementizer) and the marking of prosodic phrase edges, he claims that if Comp is on one side and the language marks the opposite side of prosodic phrases, then the wh-phrase does not move since Comp and wh-phrase can create a prosodic wh-domain…

Given the prevalence of popular media in the lives of young children today, early childhood teacher education stands to benefit from fostering critical media literacy practices. Through the use of critical media literary practices, early childhood teacher educators can facilitate a process whereby preservice teachers learn how to critically…

This paper is an experimental investigation on the tonal structure and phonetic signaling of declarative questions by speakers of Manchego Peninsular Spanish, a dialect of Spanish for which little experimental research on intonation is currently available. Analysis 1 examines the scaling and timing properties of final rises produced by 16 speakers…

A crosslinguistic study is underway concerning children's protracted phonological development (i.e. speech sound disorders). The current article reports pilot Spanish data for this study from two 4-year-old boys with protracted phonological development. The purposes of the pilot study were to: (1) develop and evaluate a word list for elicitation…

Purpose: The authors examined the influence of demographic variables on nonmainstream American English (NMAE) use; the differences between NMAE speakers and mainstream American English (MAE) speakers on measures of metalinguistics, single-word reading, and a new measure of morphophonology; and the differences between the 2 groups in the…

Talker variability in speech influences language processing from infancy through adulthood and is inextricably embedded in the very cues that identify speech sounds. Yet little is known about developmental changes in the processing of talker information. On one account, children have not yet learned to separate speech sound variability from…

Both subjective impressions and previous research with monolingual listeners suggest that a foreign accent interferes with word recognition in infants, young children, and adults. However, because being exposed to multiple accents is likely to be an everyday occurrence in many societies, it is unexpected that such non-standard pronunciations would…

The influence of dialect on child speech assessment processes is important to consider in order to ensure accurate diagnosis and appropriate intervention (teaching or therapy) for bidialectal children. In Australia, there is limited research evidence documenting the influence of dialectal variations on identification of speech impairment among…

This essay explores Black male literacy practices as institutional critique at a large Midwestern land grant university. Through documenting a student's process of reinstatement at his university, I demonstrate how vernacular perspectives, language, and networking strategies are used for developing self-efficacy and critical literacies. Black…

This study reports upon the perceptions of a sample of Education Studies undergraduates of their employability within three jobs: teaching, accountancy and marketing/sales management. The concept of employability is framed around two themes analysed through a Bernsteinian conceptual analysis: transferable utility of an Education Studies degree for…

In Thailand, there has been much debate regarding what accents should be prioritized and adopted as models for learning and use in the context of English language education. However, it is not a debate in which the voices of English learners have sufficiently been heard. Several world Englishes scholars have maintained that being a denationalized…

This study explored the impact of short-term study abroad on the language attitudes of college-level learners of Arabic in the United States. It investigated students' destination preferences in various Arabic-speaking countries, their attitudes toward learning Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and regional dialects, and the factors that they perceived…

We argue that composition scholarship's defenses of language differences in student writing reinforce dominant ideology's spatial framework conceiving language difference as deviation from a norm of sameness. We argue instead for adopting a temporal-spatial framework defining difference as the norm of utterances, and defining languages,…

Most sociolinguistic studies rely on apparent time, cross-sectional methods to analyze language change. On the basis of apparent time data, sociolinguists have hypothesized that cultural processes of lifespan change create predictable cycles of linguistic behavior in which adolescents lead in the use of vernacular variants and advance sound change…