The purpose of this qualitative, narrative inquiry was to explore and analyze the narrative stories of native English speaking adults who matriculated through a multicultural, dual language program from prekindergarten to 6th grade to understand the influence of the program on their lives, and the relationship between those experiences and their…

We examined the effects of classroom bilingual experience in children on an array of cognitive skills. Monolingual English-speaking children were compared with children who spoke English as the native language and who had been exposed to Spanish in the context of dual-immersion schooling for an average of 2 years. The groups were compared on a…

French immersion programs in Saskatchewan have traditionally served to further the goals of additive bilingualism between Canada's two official languages, French and English. Whereas these programs have historically consisted of predominantly Anglophone populations, recent trends in immigration have contributed to the increasingly diverse…

This study investigated whether measures of verbal working memory are less sensitive to children's socioeconomic background than traditional vocabulary measures. Participants were 120 school beginners, divided into high and low socioeconomic groups. The groups contained equal numbers of English first-language and second-language speakers. All were…

This study reports on a corpus analysis of samples of spoken discourse between a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, with the aim of exploring the statistically significant differences in the use of grammatical categories between the two groups of participants. The key word method extended to a part-of-speech level using the web-based…

English-speakers' learning of a French vowel contrast (/schwa/-/slashed o/) was examined under six different stimulus conditions in which contrastive and noncontrastive stimulus dimensions were varied orthogonally to each other. The distribution of contrastive cues was varied across training conditions to create single prototype, variable far…

We perform motion events in all aspects of our daily life, from walking home to jumping into a pool, from throwing a frisbee to pushing a shopping cart. The fact that languages may encode such motion events in different fashions has raised intriguing questions regarding the typological classifications of natural languages in relation to…

This dissertation concerns the acquisition of the interaction between lexicosemantic properties of verbs and syntax, focusing on symmetrical and asymmetrical verbs in different syntactic structures. Based on linguistic evidence, it is shown that two conceptual categories, Mutuality and Number, interact to give rise to four event-types: Single…

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to review readability formulae and offer a critique, based on a comparison of the grading of a variety of texts given by six well-known formulae. Methodology: A total of 64 texts in English were selected either by or for native English speaking children aged between six and 11 years. Each text was assessed…

In this experiment we evaluate phonetic training as a tool for language learning. Specifically, we take a group of native speakers (NS) of English (n = 24) currently enrolled in Arabic classes at American universities, and evaluate the effectiveness of a high variability phonetic training program (HVPT) to improve their perception of a difficult…

This article examines second language (L2) learner knowledge of English verb-argument constructions (VACs), for example, the "V 'against' n" construction. It investigates to what extent constructions underpin L2 learners' linguistic competence, how VAC mental representations in native speakers and learners differ, and…

The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2) acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains. The study included 118…

To examining the role of cultural differences in speed of lexical access, we employed two types of Posner (1967) name matching task: Arabic and English types. We have conducted an experiment on 30 native Arabic speakers from King Saud University. The results showed that the lexical access to physically identical letters is faster than lexical…

This study builds on research investigating the construct validity of elicited imitation (EI) as a measure of implicit second language (L2) grammatical knowledge. It differs from previous studies in that the EI task focuses on a single grammatical feature and time on task is strictly controlled. Seventy-three EFL learners and 20 native English…

The ability of Mandarin learners to express emotion in Mandarin has received little attention. This study examines how English L1 users express emotions in Mandarin and how this expression differs from that of Mandarin L1 users. Scenarios were adopted to elicit joy, anger, sadness, fear, and neutrality. Both groups articulated anger, joy, and fear…