Research in computer mediated communication and sociolinguistics, have increasingly highlighted the concept of establishing an "online identity" through specific language use. However, while emojis or common netspeak abbreviations are often the focus of research concerned with cyber language, no studies have considered the function…

Purpose: This study investigated how listeners' native language affects their weighting of acoustic cues (such as vowel quality, pitch, duration, and intensity) in the perception of contrastive word stress. Method: Native speakers (N = 45) of typologically diverse languages (English, Russian, and Mandarin) performed a stress identification…

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic…

Educators and researchers increasingly recognise the impact of language policies on bilingual education. The present study examined the similarities and differences in how the teachers and principals in two different contexts, a Mandarin-English bilingual programme in a Canadian kindergarten and elementary school and a Russian-Hebrew bilingual…

Young children typically do not use order-of-mention to resolve ambiguous pronouns, but may do so if given additional cues, such as gestures. Additionally, this ability to utilize gestures may be enhanced in bilingual children, who may be more sensitive to such cues due to their unique language experience. We asked monolingual and bilingual…

Confronted with many challenges to improving the quality of U.S. public K-12 education, many policymakers have viewed the study of a second language as a useful but nonessential ingredient of a world-class education system. However, others point out that dual-language education can be a powerful intervention for closing the achievement gap for…

When power tests include a time limit, it is important to assess the possibility of "speededness" for examinees. Research on differential speededness in the past has included looking at gender and ethnic subgroups in the United States on paper and pencil tests. The needs of a global audience necessitated, and the availability of computer…

Proposes six related cognitive statuses relevant for explicating the use of referring expressions in natural language discourse. A study of the distribution of referring expressions in naturally occurring discourse in English, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Spanish is offered as support for the proposal. (Contains 91 references.) (Author)

Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, 24 leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. Contributions and authors include the following: "Sound-Symbolic Processes" (Leanne Hinton, Johanna…

A collection of 32 conference papers is presented as reflecting the state of the art in contrastive linguistics studies of English and other languages. The reports cover the following topics: 5 English contrastive projects (Romanian-English, Yugoslav-Serbo-Croatian English, English-Hungarian, and Finnish-English analysis, and a project from the…