This article reports on the second language (L2) perception of contrasts among British English monophthongs. This study has two aims: 1) to explore the discriminability of contrasts in L2 British English monophthongs; and 2) to test the perceptual assimilation model-L2 (PAM-L2) towards the ability to discriminate British English contrasts. The…

Automated alignment of transcriptions to audio files expedites the process of preparing data for acoustic analysis. Unfortunately, the benefits of auto-alignment have generally been available only to researchers studying majority languages, for which large corpora exist and for which acoustic models have been created by large-scale research…

A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker's knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties…

Explored the extent to which a model of the acoustic consequences of overlapping, sliding consonantal and vocalic gestures was used to account for stress-induced changes in F2 trajectories occurring in test words embedded in a carrier phrase. Three stress conditions were studied including contrastive stress on test words, contrastive stress on the…

Suggests that a sociopragmatic approach to the study of forms of address may shed new light on address behavior in general and on the use of forms of address in French and Dutch in particular. "Form of address" is used to encompass not only second-person singular pronouns, but also other devices that can be employed to make reference to…

This article investigates methodological problems involved in a discourse-centered exploration of societal ideologies, and in particular, in an ongoing research program studying publicly accessible discourse in a number of European countries related to interethnic conflicts, the construction of ethnic or national identities, and nation-building…

Sought evidence for or against the assumption that significant intercultural variation exists in the rhetorical preferences of national cultures through contrastive analysis of research articles in English (n=36) and Spanish (n=36) on business and economics written by native speakers of each language. (45 references) (Author/CK)

Clark's 1987 Principle of Contrast seems inconsistent with the synonymy exhibited by inflectional affixes in languages with inflection classes. But if inflection class membership identifies the inflection class of the lexemes to which it attaches, then inflection affixation complies with this principle. Grammatical implications are suggested. (76…

Strategies are developed for understanding how language variation limits communication. Methods of measuring communication are discussed, including an intelligibility measure used in the Solomon Islands. The analysis of data gathered using communication measurement is discussed. The result of the analysis is a determination of the number of…