Linguistic encoding of spatial events has long provided a forum for examining how languages encode space, how children learn their native encodings, and whether cross-linguistic differences affect non-linguistic representations of space. One prominent case concerns motion events in which objects are moved into tight or loose-fit relationships of…

To have a better understanding of the sociolinguistic surroundings of Japanese Brazilians as return migrants in Japan, this study investigates language use in their communities from a perspective of linguistic landscape (LL), paying particular attention to their ethnic identity as to how they are viewed by the host society, including language…

In sociolinguistic contexts where standardized languages coexist with regional dialects, the study of differential item functioning is a valuable tool for examining certain linguistic uses or varieties as threats to score validity. From an ecological perspective, this paper describes three stages in the study of differential item functioning…

In this autoethnography, María Cioè-Peña recounts her experiences of Black erasure in bilingual education in US schools, where the focus is on language and an imagined mixed-race collective, centering culture to circumvent race and treating language as connective yet racially neutral. But languages and how language users are perceived are not…

Pidgins, narrowly defined, are auxiliary languages reserved for communication with linguistic outgroups. Although implicitly recognized as a class of languages by many linguists, there has been little systematic typological investigation of pidgins. This dissertation presents the first large-scale typological study of morphology and functional…

Tiered vocabulary is a pervasive concept in academic scholarship, education policy, and schools. It involves placing individual words into hierarchically arranged tiers, based on their apparent simplicity, sophistication, utility, and complexity, with these categorisations used to determine which words carry value in the classroom. In this article…

This study is the first to explore microdevelopment in sociolinguistic evaluative judgments of standard German and Austro-Bavarian dialect by adult second language learners of German by using dense time serial measurements. Intensive longitudinal data (10 observations per participant) were collected from four learners at approximately weekly…

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the perception of unstressed vowel reduction (UVR)--also known as vowel devoicing--in Central Mexican Spanish. UVR is a variable, gradient process in which vowels undergo a constellation of phonetic weakening processes including shortening, devoicing, and apparent deletion (Gordon 1998). While it is…

There is a long-standing gap in literacy achievement between African American and European American students (e.g., NAEP, 2019, 2022). A large body of research has examined different factors that continue to reinforce performance differences across students. One variable that has been a long-term interest to sociolinguists and applied scientists…

Word Analysis is an approach to teach second language (L2) students about cultural perspectives which are understood collectively as the ideas, values, beliefs, and experiences many native speakers have regarding cultural domains within their own cultures. Word Analysis is anchored on the relationships between language and communication, and…

Perception of second language (L2) speakers and their speech is known to be influenced both by phonetic and by sociolinguistic factors. The existing body of scholarly research on L2 speech perception, however, is overwhelmingly focused on Indo-European languages, raising doubts about the generalizability of existing sociolinguistic, phonetic,…

Sociolinguistic variation (SLV) entails that language is affected by social context (i.e. register, pragmatics). Interest in the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a second language (L2-SLV), as a key component of communicative competence, has grown exponentially over the past thirty years (Geeslin & Long, 2014). Researchers have…

'Translanguaging' has become the most popular term in discussions about how to use learners' languages as resources for target language teaching/learning, but it has also become ambiguous because it is being developed in proposals adopting different perspectives on multilingualism. The first aim of this article is to offer an overview of the two…

The Welsh Government's Welsh language strategy, Cymraeg: A million Welsh speakers [Welsh Government. 2017a. "Cymraeg 2050: A Million Welsh Speakers." Cardiff: Welsh Government], aims to increase the numbers of Welsh speakers to one million by 2050. The creation of new Welsh speakers and immersion education form an integral part of the…

Research on the acoustic characteristics of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) in North American English indicates that it is generally higher-pitched than Adult Directed Speech (ADS) and has unique prosodic characteristics, which is commonly found across many spoken languages. However, very little research has addressed another important aspect of…