While corpus linguistics has been applied towards many specific academic purposes, reports are few regarding its use to facilitate learning of legal English by non-native English speakers. Specialized corpora are required because legal English often differs significantly from ordinary usage, with words such as bar, motion, and hearing having…

This article reports on second language perception of non-native contrasts. The study specifically tests the perceptual assimilation model (PAM) by examining American learners' ability to discriminate Arabic contrasts. Twenty two native American speakers enrolled in a university level Arabic language program took part in a forced choice AXB…

This study presents findings on patterns of communication between internationally adopted children and their mothers in order to better understand the nature of these interactions and their influence on language learning. We examined maternal language use and joint attention behaviors of mothers and their children in 21 mother-child pairs: 10…

The growing set of studies on American regional dialects have to date focused heavily on vowels while few examine consonant features and none provide acoustic analysis of both vowel and consonant features. This dissertation uses real-time data on both vowels and consonants to show how Wisconsin English has changed over time. Together, the…

Purpose: A feedback perturbation paradigm was used to investigate whether prosodic cues are controlled independently or in an integrated fashion during sentence production. Method: Twenty-one healthy speakers of American English were asked to produce sentences with emphatic stress while receiving real-time auditory feedback of their productions.…

Despite growing interest in the rhetorical features of e-mail correspondence, this is the first study to examine the request strategies in e-mails written by native English-speaking professionals from a variety of industries in the United States. This study uses Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper's (1989) speech act framework to analyze the request…

This paper analyzes the activities, members, and effects of an inter-American expert network for the diffusion of psychometric knowledge, specifically of standardized aptitude testing for university admission in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. Within the framework of educational transfer studies, the role of international,…

Research exploring urban youths' value orientations toward the human-nature relationship was conducted with 59 students from a school in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA) and 51 students from a school in Guangzhou, Guangdong (China). Quantitative findings suggest that the majority of participants in both groups shared a similar value orientation,…

The results from a cross-national study comparing calculus performance of students at East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai and students at the University of Michigan before and after their first university calculus course are presented. Overall, ECNU significantly outperformed Michigan on both the pre- and post-tests, but the Michigan…

This research explores the impact of a year studying in Israel on Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) rabbinical students' emotional connection toward and knowledge about the State of Israel and the Jewish People. We want to better understand the students' beliefs, ideas, and behaviors that emerge from their experience…

This article draws attention to the role one's language plays in socialization and explains the misunderstandings and conflicts over integration of the Roma in the Czech Republic. Recognizing the role of home language leads to successful socialization. By not demanding that schools account for home language in the process of teaching, the Roma…

The empirical focus of this paper is a conversational turn-taking phenomenon in which conjunctions produced immediately after a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion are treated by co-participants as points of possible completion and transition relevance. The data for this study are audio-video recordings of 5 unscripted…

Purpose: The authors examined the influence of demographic variables on nonmainstream American English (NMAE) use; the differences between NMAE speakers and mainstream American English (MAE) speakers on measures of metalinguistics, single-word reading, and a new measure of morphophonology; and the differences between the 2 groups in the…

The number of international students in China is increasing rapidly, but their experiences in China remain largely unknown. This article reports an intensive longitudinal multiple case study that explores eight American students' intercultural experiences and the impacts of such experiences on individual identity during their study in a Chinese…

The most often repeated phrase in Lakota ceremonies and life is "Mitakuye Owas'in" Literally translated as "My relatives, you-all [are]" This is mostly glossed into English as "all my relations." This naturally raises the question of to whom this is said. The answer is: to all things. To humans and to other…