The present project is a research-based and practice-tested online synchronous curriculum for English language learners with the Russian language mother tongue. The curriculum's theoretical component is grounded in Vygotsky's, Leont'ev', and Engestrom's "Cultural Historical Activity Theory" as well as in scholarly papers on the influence…

This article demonstrates the potential of sound iconicity for automatic text analysis. This study claims that--at least in poetic language--the ratio of plosive versus nasal sounds in a text predicts its emotional tone as it is perceived by readers; that is, poems that have a relatively high frequency of plosive sounds are more likely to express…

This dissertation is focused on analyzing phonological contact between Slavic and non-Slavic languages in southeastern and northeastern Europe, with the particular goal of describing how the social context of language contact interacts with linguistic factors to shape the outcome of contact-induced change. On the basis of case studies drawn from…

This study explores incremental processing in spoken word recognition in Russian 5- and 6-year-olds and adults using free-viewing eye-tracking. Participants viewed scenes containing pictures of four familiar objects and clicked on a target embedded in a spoken instruction. In the cohort condition, two object names shared identical three-phoneme…

Some languages, such as Finnish, use speech-sound duration as the primary cue for a phonological quantity distinction. For second-language (L2) learners, quantity is often difficult to master if speech-sound duration plays a less important role in the phonology of their native language (L1). By comparing the categorization performance of native…