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…

This study investigates how fluent second-language (L2) learners of English produce and perceive the /ae/-/?/ vowel contrast of Southwestern American English. Two learner groups are examined: (1) early, proficient English speakers who were raised by Spanish-speaking families but who became dominant in English during childhood and, as adults, lack…

The American edition of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" has significant changes from the original British version, and every word of a Harry Potter book in translation derives from a translator's decision-making process. Focusing students on British-to-American cultural translation problems in the Harry Potter series encourages…

This study examined intelligibility of twelve American English vowels produced by English, Chinese, and Korean native speakers in quiet and speech-shaped noise in which vowels were presented at six sensation levels from 0 dB to 10 dB. The slopes of vowel intelligibility functions and the processing time for listeners to identify vowels were…

This study investigates the cross-cultural realization of request patterns. The goal of the study is to compare the realization of requests produced by adult American English speaking learners of Russian (NNS) to that of native speakers of Russian and native speakers of English to identify the similarities and differences between native and…

Perceptual simulations are unconscious and automatic, whereas perceptual imagery is conscious and deliberate, but it is unclear how easily one can transfer perceptual information from unconscious to conscious awareness. We investigated whether it is possible to be aware of what one is mentally representing; that is, whether it is possible to…

Language policy is a mechanism determining the uses of language generally; here it examines the role of the English language in the emerging USA. Inspired by Spanish riches deriving from the "New World" during the sixteenth century, the first English people to settle permanently in North America hoped for similar riches. In North…

This study aims to find out the extent to which students attending the English Language Teaching Programme (ELT) at Ondokuz Mayis University are aware of the major spelling, vocabulary, and pronunciation differences between American and British English which constitute the most commonly used varieties of English. To this end, 42 randomly selected…

This study adopts the revised interpersonal model of metadiscourse to discover whether and to what extent Chinese authors employ a varying amount of Interactional Metadiscourse (IM) in the past decade in English abstracts of economics Research Articles (RAs). The data was drawn from a prestigious economics journal in China to compose a corpus of…

The time frame for infants' acquisition of language constancy was probed, using the phonetic variation in a rarely heard accent (South African English) or a frequently heard accent (American English). A total of 156 Australian infants were tested. Six-month-olds looked longer to Australian English than less commonly heard South African accent, but…

The development of corpus linguistics has laid theoretical foundation and provided technical support for breaking the bottleneck in traditional vocabulary instruction in China. Corpora allow access to authentic data and show frequency patterns of words and grammar construction. Such patterns can be used to improve language materials or to directly…

This thesis argues that rhythmic well-formedness preferences contribute to conditioning morphosyntactic choices, providing evidence from patterns in language use that constraints on phonological constructs are at work in the assessment of competing morphosyntactic variants. The results of the thesis call into question a fundamental empirical…

The present article reports on the findings of a cross-sectional acoustic study of the production of the Spanish /e/-/ei/ contrast, as in "pena-peina" and "reno-reino," by native-English intermediate and advanced learners of Spanish. The acoustic parameter that distinguishes Spanish /e/ from /ei/ is formant change--/e/ is a…

This study investigates the perception of Jordanian EFL learners' (JEFL) pragmatic transfer of refusal strategies in terms of contextual and cultural factors. Data were collected using a discourse completion test (DCT) and a scaled-response questionnaire (SRQ) to elicit perception data from the participants. Data from the SRQ were analyzed based…

This study aimed at investigating the problems that translators faced when subtitling cultural expressions from English into Arabic. To achieve this goal, the researchers selected a convenient sample comprising 40 graduate and 40 undergraduate students who were enrolled in the English language programs during the academic year 2012/2013 in…