This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) started a new approach to viewing metaphors in languages. Traditionally, metaphor is considered as one of the rhetorical devices. Conceptual metaphor, however, is an approach for us to understand abstract notions in terms of relatively concrete concepts. The HEART metaphor in Chinese…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare word-initial and word-final consonant cluster productions in young children who speak African American English (AAE) and compare their productions to what we know about cluster productions in children who speak Mainstream American English (MAE), in order to minimize misdiagnosis of speech sound…

The aim of this presentation is to measure to what extent long vowels are confused with diphthongs by Turkish English majors. A diphthong is made of two components. By definition and sound structure, diphthongs are a combination of two separate vowel sounds that, when uttered, the first vowel glides onto the second vowel forming a single syllable,…

Research has long claimed that rubrics provide the objective, fair, and equitable means by which to assess student writing. Recent moves in writing programs and composition classrooms have acknowledged the ways that writing assessment perpetuates linguistic violence, and shifts towards anti-racist assessment practices have ushered in grading…

Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the differences between the age of acquisition (AoA) and sentence length of sentences of the speech recognition (SR) tests for adults and children in Dutch, American English, and Canadian French. Method: The AoA and sentence length of the sentences of four SR tests for adults and children were…

Despite English teachers' acknowledgement of the plurality of English and the emergence of different varieties of the language, the actual manifestations of this plurality and the associated principles do not seem to be equally embraced in their classroom approach. Against this background, this study investigated Iranian English teachers'…

Due to the large number of near-synonyms present in the English language, English learners frequently struggle to use near-synonyms in different contexts, as these words, despite similar meanings, are not always interchangeable. This study examines the distribution and collocation of three synonyms, "important," "significant,"…

In Dialogic syntax (cf. Du Bois 2014; Tantucci et al. 2018), naturalistic interaction is inherently grounded in resonance, viz. the catalytic activation of affinities across turns (Du Bois and Giora 2014). Resonance occurs dynamically when interlocutors creatively coconstruct utterances that are formally and phonetically similar to the utterance…

Background: Developmental dysarthria is a motor speech impairment commonly characterized by varying levels of reduced speech intelligibility. The relationship between intelligibility deficits and acoustic vowel space among these individuals has long been noted in the literature, with evidence of vowel centralization (e.g., in English and…

Background: Bilingual speech production studies have highlighted that level of proficiency influences the acoustic-phonetic representation of phonemes in both languages (MacKay, Flege, Piske, & Schirru 2001; Zarate-Sandez, 2015). The results for bilingual speech production reveals that proficient/early bilinguals produce distinct acoustic…

The popularity of using textbooks in second language programs in universities around the world continues to grow. Textbooks support teachers in their teaching by providing accessible materials and clear instruction. In addition, learners are guided by familiar lesson frameworks (e.g., beginning, middle, end) to guide their independent study…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to investigate vowel detection and identification in noise and provide baseline data regarding how vowel perception changed with signal-to-noise ratios. Psychometric functions of vowel detection and identification for 12 American English isolated vowels in long-term speech-shaped noise were examined for young…

For English language learners, mastering the use of near-synonyms can be challenging. Despite the semantic similarities of English synonyms, they are not interchangeable in all contexts. The objectives of this corpus-based study are to examine differences between the near-synonymous adjectives "blank," "empty" and…