This dissertation investigates how distributional information in the speech stream can assist infants in the initial stages of acquisition of their native language phonology. An exploratory statistical analysis derives this information from the adult speech data in the corpus of conversations between adults and young children in Russian. Because…

This comparative study, conducted in multicultural London, investigates the occurrence in interviews with a researcher and in constructed same-sex peer conversations of five linguistic features characteristic of London English in the speech of two groups of British-born adolescents: ethnic Bangladeshis and ethnic Chinese of Cantonese heritage. The…

The conceptual structure account of semantic memory (CSA; L. K. Tyler & H. E. Moss, 2001) claims that feature correlation (the degree to which features co-occur) and feature distinctiveness (the number of concepts in which a feature occurs) interact with domains of knowledge (e.g., living vs. nonliving) such that the distinctive features of…

Three experiments addressed the hypothesis that production factors constrain phonotactic learning in adult English speakers, and that this constraint gives rise to a markedness effect on learning. In Experiment 1, an acoustic measure was used to assess consonant-consonant coarticulation in naturally produced nonwords, which were then used as…

Many scholars have proposed concepts relevant to spatial reference. Herskovits (1982) proposed that the topological concepts support, contiguity and containment are basic in English, while Levinson et al.'s (2003) examination of nine unrelated languages revealed that the concept attachment is primary. Neither of these proposals is confirmed in…

Previous studies indicate that the discrimination of native phonetic contrasts in infants exposed to two languages from birth follows a different developmental time course from that observed in monolingual infants. We compared infant discrimination of dental (French) and alveolar (English) place variants of /d/ in three groups differing in…

This study investigated the effects of synchronous and asynchronous CMC (computer-mediated communication)on the development of linguistic features of learners' speech in Japanese. Using learners from fourth-semester Japanese classes, the following research questions were examined: (a) Does CMC have positive effects on the development of oral…

From the 1960s to the 1990s in the United States, a distinctive feature was observed in variations in the number of Bachelor's degree recipients by field of study. The number in each field demonstrated certain cyclical patterns. Similarly, the U.S. economy experienced fluctuations during a comparable period. Given this 40-year trend, this study…

Six Mandarin affricates (i.e., zh[ts], ch[ts[superscript h]], z[ts], c[ts[superscript h]], j[tc], q[tc[superscript h]), which are not universally present in other languages, have been extensively challenging for learners of Mandarin Chinese. In the current study, perception of these affricates was investigated via an experiment in which native…

This study investigated the effects of high front (HF) vowels and low back (LB) vowels on inter-listener and intra-listener reliability in rating hypernasality. Audio recorded samples of two sentences, one containing only high front vowels and one containing only low back vowels, were judged by two expert listeners. Speakers were 25 children; 20…

Initial studies on the acquisition of two Spanish copulas, "ser" and "estar", emerged from a research agenda exploring whether second language (L2) development was driven by universal mechanisms manifested in stages rather than an accumulation of entities (Rutherford, 1987). Concerning the Spanish copulas, the stages of acquisition through which…

In order to test the hypothesis that closeness to the listener's native language is a determining factor when identifying stuttering in an unfamiliar language, three panels of different linguistic background were asked to make judgements of stuttering in a sample of Dutch speakers. It was found that a panel speaking Dutch and a panel speaking…

Even before it became a common place to assume that "the Eskimo have a hundred words for snow" the languages of hunting and gathering people have played an important role in debates about linguistic relativity concerning geographical ontologies. Evidence from languages of hunter-gatherers has been used in radical relativist challenges to…

This article overviews the status, ecology, use, and the teaching/learning of English in the southern Indian state of Kerala. It does so along two overlapping dimensions. A socio-demographic dimension situates the ecology of English in Kerala in the general Indian context, and relates it to the ethno-linguistic identity of Kerala. A second applied…

The findings reported in this paper are the result of an experiment to determine the empirical validity of such semantic concepts as analytic, synthetic, and contradictory. Twenty-eight university students were presented with 156 sentences to assign to one of four semantic categories: (1) synthetic ("The dog is a poodle"), (2) analytic…