37,261,953 papers found

BACKGROUND: The English language has been recognised as an international language, enabling the globalisation of education and work opportunities. An institute in Taiwan has committed to strengthening English teaching by implementing a student-centred teaching and learning activity using role play. In addition, the inv…

An analysis of the language backgrounds of 237 persons in a psychology department subject pool is presented. Specific findings indicate that (a) only about two-thirds of the subjects were native speakers of English, (b) native English speakers can be divided into several different groups on the basis of bilingual backg…

This research explores perceptions of linguistic variation in English in Washington state (WA). Respondents marked on a map of WA the places where they believe people's English sounds "different" and provided a label for that type of English. The analysis of the results used digital tools to create composite maps consi…

L1-Spanish learners of English have been reported to distinguish English /i/ and /I? on the basis of duration cues, whereas L1-English listeners primarily use spectral cues. Morrison (2008a) hypothesized that duration-based perception is a secondary developmental stage that emerges from an initial stage of multidimensi…

It was hypothesized that native English adults would be more skillful in producing word-final English /p/ and /b/ than native English children who, in turn, would be more skillful in doing so than adult native speakers of a language (Mandarin Chinese) that does not possess word-final stops. A video tracking system was…

Four- and five-hear-old black and white children of black English and standard American English backgrounds, respectively were administered a standard articulation test. A contrastive analysis revealed phonological differences in consonantal development between the two dialectal groups. However, contrasts were reflecte…

UNLABELLED: We explored classification accuracy of English and Spanish versions of an experimental semantic language measure with functional monolingual-bilingual children with and without language impairment. A total of 441 children participated, including 78 balanced bilinguals (15 with language impairment, 63 with t…

Thresholds of formant discrimination of speech and non-speech sounds were compared for native listeners of English and Chinese. English listeners showed significantly better thresholds than Chinese listeners, not only for English vowels, but also for Chinese vowels. Thresholds for vowel-spectrum-shaped noise were compa…

BACKGROUND: There are no published data on typical phonological development for Singaporean children. There is therefore the risk that children's speech in Singapore may be misdiagnosed or that clinicians may set goals erroneously. AIMS: This paper reports a preliminary study on the English phonology of typically deve…

PURPOSE: This study investigated predominantly Spanish-speaking, predominantly English-speaking, and Spanish-English bilingual children's performance on a battery of semantic tasks. METHOD: Six semantic tasks (associations, characteristic properties, categorization, functions, linguistic concepts, and similarities and…

We examined the voice onset times (VOTs) of monolingual and bilingual speakers of English and French to address the question whether cross language phonetic influences occur particularly in simultaneous bilinguals (that is, speakers who learned both languages from birth). Speakers produced sentences in which there were…

PURPOSE: This exploratory study investigates the development of oral narrative retell proficiency among Spanish-English emergent bilingual children longitudinally from kindergarten to second grade in Spanish and English as they learned literacy in the 2 languages concurrently. METHOD: Oral narrative retell assessments…

To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d-th/ contrast. Findings show that the ability to discriminate…

This article analyzes the interfering effect of the second language (L2) on the first language (L1) in native Spanish speakers living in the United States. We examined 3 linguistic aspects: (a) syntactic comprehension, (b) verbal memory, and (c) calculation abilities. We carried out 2 different studies. In the 1st stud…

This study examined whether late-learning English-German L2 learners and late-learning German-English L2 learners use prosodic cues to disambiguate temporarily ambiguous L1 and L2 sentences during speech production. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that English-German L2 learners and German-English L2 learners used a pitch…

L1-Spanish L2-English listeners' perception of a Canadian-English /bIt//bId/-/bit/-/bid/ continuum was investigated. Results were largely consistent with the developmental stages for L1-Spanish listeners' acquisition of English /i/ and /I/ hypothesized by Escudero (2000): Stage 0, inability to distinguish. Stage 1, dur…

There is little consensus among different early childhood education stakeholders in Hong Kong on whether it is beneficial or detrimental for children to receive an English bilingual education before the age of 6. This longitudinal study investigated the issue of potential 'detrimental effects of learning English' on Ho…

Native speakers of Spanish with different amounts of experience with English classified stop-consonant voicing (/b/ versus /p/) across different speech accents: English-accented Spanish, native Spanish, and native English. While listeners with little experience with English classified target voicing with an English- or…

Can listeners entrain to speech rhythms? Monolingual speakers of English and French and balanced English-French bilinguals tapped along with the beat they perceived in sentences spoken in a stress-timed language, English, and a syllable-timed language, French. All groups of participants tapped more regularly to English…

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the contribution of word familiarity to Spanish/English bilingual listeners' recognition of English and Spanish words. DESIGN: The study employed a counterbalanced design. Three lists of monosyllabic English and bisyllabic Spanish words (50 words per list per language) were presented in…