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…

Sankoff et al. (1997) indicated in their research on discourse markers (DMs) used by anglophones in Montreal that the mastery of DMs is a good indicator of the non-native speakers' integration into the linguistic community. As DMs, especially the informal ones, are not taught explicitly in language classes, their acquisition could only be…

Discourse markers, as words or phrases, play a significant role in promoting coherent segments of discourse. This paper investigates the use of discourse markers (DMs) in newspaper articles. By applying Fraser's framework, this study aims at investigating the functions and positions of DM "but" (English) and its equivalent…

In the United States, dominant language ideology validates the use of Standardized English as the only appropriate linguistic practice (Lippi-Green, 1994; Flores & Rosa, 2015). In educational settings, dominant language ideology entails the beliefs in language standardization and monolingualism (Farr & Song, 2011). The present case study…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a supplemental reading program that emphasizes phoneme awareness and phonics with small groups composed of both at-risk native English-speakers and at-risk English language learners (ELLs) whose first language is not Spanish. A multiple-baseline-across-participants design was utilized to investigate the…

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…

Children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy (CP) present with decreased vowel space area and reduced word intelligibility. Although a robust relationship exists between vowel space and word intelligibility, little is known about the intelligibility of vowels in this population. This exploratory study investigated the intelligibility of American…

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…

In response to the limitations of the nation-state as a conceptual frame for the study of linguistic landscapes (LL), this article argues for a transnational approach that accounts for the material reconfigurations and symbolic reimaginations of space in the context of global flows and migrations (Appadurai, 1996). This approach enables one to…

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.…

This study looks at a case study research on a language awareness workshop in a New York public school with a dual language (Spanish/English) program. A learner-centred lesson, taught in Spanish, focused on basic personal information exchanges for in-service teachers who taught only in English and who had some limited knowledge of Spanish. The…

This article compares data from service encounters conducted in person and over the telephone in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. During the in-person phase, the author and 8 fieldworkers entered businesses and initiated conversations with Latino service providers in Spanish, noting the language of response. The rate of non-reciprocal…