Background: Although most prevalent in childhood, the acquisition of new words in oral vocabulary takes place right across the lifespan. Of the many factors that influence oral vocabulary learning, one extrinsic factor is the listening environment. The current study aimed to examine whether the presence of noise impacts oral vocabulary learning in…

The present study investigates to what extent first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) speakers use lexical futures, whether such forms provide evidence of development, and whether these forms are constrained differently from the present indicative (PI) according to linguistic predictors. It uses a combined approach through its…

Arabic emphasis refers to the production of consonants resulting from a primary constriction in the dental or alveolar region and a secondary constriction in the back of the vocal tract, recognized as 'Emphatic.' These have contrastive consonants produced in the dental or alveolar region, recognized as 'Plain.' The existing research on emphasis in…

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.e. duration of nasalization on…

The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

Experimental work has shown that spatial experiences influence spatiotemporal metaphor use. In these studies, participants are asked a question that yields different responses depending on the metaphor participants use. It has been claimed that English speakers are equally likely to respond with either variant in the absence of priming. Related…

Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, "sound symbolism," or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specificity of these…

English contains a considerable number of lexical combinations with various forms and labels, making it an interesting field of inquiry for researchers. The significance and popularity of support verb constructions (SVC) is that they are used largely by native speakers and include some of the most common words in English but seem to be problematic…

Sighted speakers of different languages vary systematically in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech. These differences influence how semantic elements are organized in gesture, but only when those gestures are produced with speech (co-speech gesture), not without speech (silent gesture). We ask whether the…

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…

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…

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…

We take a multidimensional perspective on the development of second language (L2) speaking ability and examine how changes in the underlying cognitive variables of linguistic knowledge and processing speed interact with complexity, fluency, and accuracy over the course of a 3-month Spanish study abroad session. Study abroad provides a unique…

Conceptual socialization refers to the process second/foreign language learners go through to transform their conceptual system so as "to fit the functional needs of the new language and culture" (Kecskes, 2002, p. 157). Therefore, the present study examined Turkish EFL learners' conceptual socialization by analyzing the similarities and…

This study aimed to advance research on first and second language future-time expression in Spanish and to demonstrate the strengths of combining functionalist, concept-oriented approaches (e.g., Andersen, 1984; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Shirai, 1995; von Stutterheim & Klein, 1987) with variationist approaches. The study targeted 140 participants…