Due to the globalized world, sixty percent of world's population is bilingual today. Such a population calls for the need to understand bilinguals from a holistic perspective since it is likely that we are surrounded by bilinguals and we are raising bilingual children. Therefore, this study investigates bilingualism from five different dimensions;…

While much research has examined second language (L2) phonetic acquisition, less research has examined first language (L1) attrition in terms of the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops. The current study examined L2 acquisition and L1 attrition in the VOT of word-initial voiceless stops among late English-Arabic and Arabic-English bilinguals…

The Sylheti Bangla, a variety of Bangla language is primarily spoken in the Sylhet District of Bangladesh, Barak Valley of Assam, Tripura, especially in North Tripura. The systematic perusal on English spoken by Sylheti Bangla speakers demonstrates that it carries a huge difference with English (RP) specially in respect to pronunciation, syllable…

As an international financial centre, Hong Kong is a metropolitan city that has given rise to multilingual characteristics in recent years. In addition to Cantonese and English, which serve mostly as first and second languages, Hong Kong residents have increasingly begun to develop a third or even a fourth language. The biliteracy and…

Addressing themes from the Douglas Fir Group's (2016) transdisciplinary framework, this paper bridges boundaries between cognitive and social disciplines by showing how social contextual factors can affect the psycholinguistic development of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in learner language. Sociolinguistic and sociocultural frameworks…

The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent bi-modal input improves the word segmentation ability of L2 learners of Japanese. Accurately identifying words in continuous speech is a fundamental process for comprehending the overall message, but studies show that second language (L2) learners often find this task difficult, even when…

This article reviews research findings involving visual input in speech processing in the form of facial cues and co-speech gestures for second-language (L2) learners, and provides pedagogical implications for the teaching of listening and speaking. It traces the foundations of auditory-visual speech research and explores the role of a speaker's…

Lexical stress assignment plays a central role in being understood in a second language. In fact, research has shown that it may be more important for the comprehensibility of second language learners' speech than, for example, grammatical correctness (Trofimovich & Isaacs, 2012). Nonetheless, its production poses challenges for second…

This study investigated bilingualism effects on the production of focus in 5- to 9-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual autistic children's L1 Cantonese, compared to their monolingual autistic peers as well as monolingual and bilingual typically developing children matched in nonverbal IQ, working memory, receptive vocabulary and maternal…

In many English language teaching contexts, listening activities resemble listening comprehension tests. Scholars have argued that this product-oriented approach is not particularly effective in helping learners improve their listening skills and have advocated for the inclusion of instruction that targets specific features of spoken language. The…

Twenty adult ESL students at a community college participated in a semester reading intervention. Participants received a modified extensive reading treatment, and some participants received an additional repeated reading direct instruction reading intervention. The author examined the impact of the reading interventions on ESL students' reading…

In this study, 118 native speakers of Japanese watched 48 separate video clips in which a teacher provided recasts on phonological or lexical errors to students in Portuguese, a language with which the participants were unfamiliar. In the video clips, six recast characteristics were manipulated: length, segmentation (segmented/whole), prosodic…

In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain "in situ" by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence…

This paper adopts an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze the social organization of the instruction-giving sequences that were accomplished by a teacher of Italian as a foreign language during the last phase of a writing task conducted in pairs. Specifically, the paper explores the linguistic, prosodic and embodied…

Stress is an integral part of conveying meaning in English at not only the level of the word but also the phrase and rhetoric where it is exploited in English in literature, humor, advertising, and more. Simultaneously, stress marks language variation in regional, generational, and ethnic dialects. Thus, stress bears a great functional load and…