People often experience difficulties when they first hear a novel accent. Prior research has shown that relatively fast natural accent accommodation can occur. However, there has been little investigation of the underlying perceptual mechanism that drives the learning. The current study examines whether phonemic boundary changes play a central…

There is limited research surrounding non-native speaker-teachers of world languages and the disruption known as the "native speaker fallacy" (Phillipson, 1992), which is the belief that only native speakers can be the most suitable teachers of a given language. This phenomenological study examined the lived experiences of tenured,…

This paper identifies various challenges that a 1.5 generation immigrant faced in a mainstream college composition class and reports on how he constructed his social presence and became a successful multilingual writer. The findings of this study would help higher education institutions more effectively serve the growing population of ESL students…

This article describes the development process of a project for heritage language speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese at a high-enrollment community college in the northeast United States. This pilot project, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, aimed to empower minority group students through active reinforcement of students'…

This article expands upon a plenary presentation I delivered at the 2017 Arizona CALL Conference at Arizona State University. I will discuss some current perspectives in second language acquisition (SLA) which have implications for heritage language acquisition (HLA) and provide some examples from longitudinal data collected among heritage…

This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on "Aktionsart" and Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as salient temporal…

Recent research has shown that speakers are sensitive to non-contrastive phonetic detail present in nonnative speech (e.g. Escudero et al. 2012; Wilson et al. 2014). Difficulties in interpreting and implementing unfamiliar phonetic variation can lead nonnative speakers to modify second language forms by vowel epenthesis and other changes. These…

Traditional flat-structured bigram and trigram models of phonotactics are useful because they capture a large number of facts about phonological processes. Additionally, these models predict that local interactions should be easier to learn than long-distance ones because long-distance dependencies are difficult to capture with these models.…

We have noticed a change in the use of prepositions in English. In our work with student essays, we increasingly encounter non-standard uses of prepositions, such as "concern on," "afraid from," and "enamored with." This trend is evident in both native and non-native American English speakers. We believe that the…

Reading in a second language (L2) is important for a variety of reasons. Reading authentic materials, in particular, allows L2 learners to engage with native speaker content, and ultimately the target culture. One body of authentic materials is that of literary texts, including those of more traditional prose fiction, poetry, and drama, but also…