Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

This paper analyses the controversial discourses around the significance of the Arabic language in Eritrea. It challenges the arguments of the government and some scholars, who claim that the Arabic language is alien to Eritrean society. They argue that it was introduced as an official language under British rule and is only spoken by the Rashaida…

In applied linguistics and language education, an increased focus has been placed on plurality and hybridity to challenge monolingualism, the native speaker norm, and the modernist view of language and language use as unitary and bounded. The multi/plural turn parallels postcolonial theory in that they both support hybridity and fluidity while…

Many African countries exhibit complex patterns of language use because of linguistic pluralism. The situation is often compounded by the presence of at least one foreign language that is either the official or second language. The language situation in Botswana depicts this complex pattern. Out of the 26 languages spoken in the country, including…

Lemko identity in Poland is contested in a number of contexts, including social, linguistic and political domains, among others. The members of this minority have to learn to negotiate multiple identities, not only from an in-group perspective but also in interactions with the majority community in Poland. This paper examines how the Lemkos…

This dissertation explores Spanish nominal plural formation from a morphophonological perspective. The primary objective is to better understand heritage bilinguals' (HBs') phonological categorization of the morphological element of number in their heritage language. This is done by way of picture-naming elicitation tasks of consonant-final nouns…

The present study investigated how L2 students in L1-dominant upper-level undergraduate professional communication courses self-identify their needs in undertaking collaborative tasks such as writing professional documents and preparing for group presentations with L1 students. A survey was conducted on L2 students in these upper-level…

Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article discusses folk notions of globalization and examines perceptual and attitudinal responses offered by educationally underprivileged working-class female senior citizens, arguably the most neglected and marginalized social group in contemporary Korea. The present study stresses the importance of…

Home language (HL) effects on academic language literacy have been extensively discussed. However, previous research has mostly focused on Indo--European languages. This study extends the literature by using data (n = 17,600) collected in a diversified language area: Guangxi, China. We examined the effects of four HLs and four socioeconomic…

While recent literature advocates a translingual approach to pedagogy, the implications of such an approach for teacher identity development has been little explored. This article presents case studies of two English-dominant California teachers who learned Spanish: a Filipino-American teacher of Spanish, and an Anglo-American teacher of ESL. Both…

Little empirical research has examined the cause of language shift or the factors related to the heritage language (HL) development of language minority groups. This study investigates the factors that facilitate or inhibit the HL development of second-generation Korean Americans, with a focus on adolescent HL learners, who go through phases in…

This article explores attitudes and response to language selection in advertising targeting Italian bilinguals who belong to a defined speech community. The research builds upon (i) research on multilingual advertising by investigating its attitudinal correlates, and (ii) studies on advertising to bilinguals through the verification of the…

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large-scale picture-naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance…

Globalization as an increasingly influencing force has led English language to become the lingua franca of the world. However, the global spread of English is considered as linguistic and cultural imperialism of English speaking countries to exert their dominance, power, culture, ideology and language over the periphery countries. The devastating…

The current study looks at whether bilinguals varying in language dominance show a processing advantage for idiomatic over non-idiomatic phrases and to what extent this effect is modulated by idiom transparency (i.e., the degree to which the idiom's figurative meaning can be inferred from its literal analysis) and cross-language similarity (i.e.,…