Various explanations have been put forth for the asymmetrical acquisition of tense and aspect morphology across categories of lexical aspect. This experiment tested the adequacy of a subset of such accounts by examining English native speakers' (n = 40) use of progressive and past tense morphology within activity and accomplishment verb frames…

Adults implicitly judge people from certain social backgrounds as more "American" than others. This study tests the development of children's reasoning about nationality and social categories. Children across cultures (White and Korean American children in the United States, Korean children in South Korea) judged the nationality of…

Purpose: Our aim is to explore the complex interplay of prosody (tone of speech) and semantics (verbal content) in the perception of discrete emotions in speech. Method: We implement a novel tool, the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech. Eighty native English speakers were presented with spoken sentences made of different combinations of 5…

This study investigates the degree to which native-English-speaking learners of Spanish can generate expectations for information likely to occur in upcoming portions of an unfolding linguistic signal. We examine Spanish clitic left dislocation, a long-distance dependency between a topicalized object and an agreeing clitic, whose felicity depends…

Back translation--the 're-translation' of a translated questionnaire back into the original language and the subsequent comparison of the original version and the back translation--is a controversial assessment method for questionnaire translations. Recently, cross-cultural survey methodologists have followed the call for more empirical research…

This study investigated the pragmatic comprehension and production of the speech act of refusals in English by a group of Spanish-English bilinguals (SEB) in comparison with native English speakers (NES), taking into account variables such as length of residency in the L2 environment, type of refusals and level of politeness. Other variables…

This study compares the performance of native speakers and adult second language (L2) learners on tasks tapping proficiency in grammar, vocabulary, and collocations. In addition, data were collected on several predictors of individual differences in linguistic attainment, including some related to language experience (print exposure, education,…

Readers are expected to construct balanced mental representations of socioscientific issues discussed across controversial documents. However, readers tend to be biased toward documents that present belief-consistent perspectives and tend to refute documents that argue against their stance (text-belief consistency effect). Published studies on…

Bilingualism has been associated with a range of cognitive and language-related advantages, including the recognition that words can have different labels across languages. However, most previous research has failed to consider heterogeneity in the linguistic environments of children categorized as monolingual. Our study assessed the influence of…

Tens of thousands native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) are employed, in many cases for only being able to speak the language, to teach English in public and private schools in China, and many concentrated in early childhood bilingual programs. However, these schools face the lingering problem of not addressing the cultural and professional…

Languages generally use musical pitch variation of the voice as part of their sound systems (Maddieson, 2011)--pitch variations that can be somewhat reminiscent of music. Music ability and/or training may influence language processing (e.g., Bidelman et al., 2011; Delogue et al., 2010). In particular, studies have concluded that there may be a…

Much of what we know about the development of listeners' word segmentation strategies originates from the artificial language-learning literature. However, many artificial speech streams designed to study word segmentation lack a salient cue found in all natural languages: utterance boundaries. In this study, participants listened to a…

The act of refusal takes place in everyday lives, but it has been discussed to be a difficult speech act for nonnative speakers. This study seeks to investigate Korean EFL learners' refusals in extended discourse along with their pragmatic perceptions. Sixteen college students were engaged in oral role-plays with two native English speakers and…

This study examined whether social bias manipulation can influence how naïve multiage listeners evaluate second language (L2) speech. Sixty native English-speaking listeners (Montreal residents) rated audio recordings of 40 Quebec French speakers of L2 English for five dimensions of oral performance (accentedness, comprehensibility, segmental…

The developmental process of reading acquisition is frequently conceptualized as a self-organizing mental network consisting of lexico-semantic, phonological and orthographical components. The developmental nature of this network varies across languages and is known to impact second-language learners of typologically different languages. Yet, it…