2024 January - 33 articles
Little attention is paid to prosody in second language (L2) instruction, but computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) offers learners solutions to improve the perception and production of L2 suprasegmentals. In this study, we extend with acous...
Encountering idioms (hit the sack = “go to bed”) in a second language (L2) often results in a literal-first understanding (“literally hit a sack”). The figurative meaning is retrieved later, subject to idiom familiarity and L2...
Background: This quasi-experimental comparative group study examined vocabulary knowledge and its associations with other language skills in Greek-speaking children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder and mild language impairment (HF-ASDLI...
This article analyzes four interpretations of the adverb siempre ‘always’ that do not belong to general Spanish. The continuative and the progressive-comparative interpretations are argued to be calques of Italian, often attested in Riopl...
In this article, we investigate how grammatical competence is manifested in young students’ written texts and how this contributes to the students’ overall writing competence. We pose the following two research questions: (i) Which gramma...
Assessment of prosody is not usually included in the evaluation of oral expression skills of L2 Spanish learners. Some of the factors that probably explain this fact are the lack of adequate materials, correctness models and tools to carry out this a...
This paper discusses the challenges posed in creating a Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) environment for multiple languages. By selecting one language from each of three different language families, we show that a single environment ma...
Studies on school-aged children have been infrequent in research on Spanish as a heritage language. The present study explored how dual-language immersion education, patterns of heritage language use, proficiency, and age shape child Spanish heritage...
This paper aims to define the featural composition of the complementizers that introduce subjunctive complements in Istro-Romanian, and to identify the internal organization of the subjunctive clause in terms of subject positions, verb movement, clit...
Yucatec Spanish displays a type of sentence that appears to mix elements of an active impersonal and a passive. For example, “te castigaron por mi tío” may be interpreted as “you were punished by my uncle”, where a by-p...
This study presents evidence of second language (L2) influence on first language (L1) perception of alveolar stops. Sixty-one L1 Japanese late learners of L2 English (onset ~12 years old) in Japan (N = 31) and in the US (N = 30) participated. We exam...
Utterances containing verbal irony display prosodic particularities that distinguish them from non-ironic speech. While some prosodic features of irony have been identified in Spanish, previous studies have not accounted for different subtypes, nor h...
In this paper, two syntactic configurations are considered that involve V-to-C movement in present-day German: Verb Second in run-of-the-mill declarative clauses and Verb Second in non-assertive embedded contexts. Along the lines of the cartographic...
This paper aims to provide a clearer understanding of the structure known in the literature as the innovative use of estar, illustrated in sentences like Luego salgo/voy a visitar usuarios que están muy morosos [Medellín, Colombia;...
This article reviews some of the principal patterns of morphosyntactic variation within Daco-Romanian and across Daco-Romance in support of a distinction between low vs high V-movement grammars variously distributed in accordance with diatopic variat...
The study investigates psycholinguistic mechanisms of sentence parsing and ambiguity resolution by balanced Tatar–Russian bilinguals who learnt English as their additional language. We check the parser’s sensitivity to the selectional pro...
Possession has been scarcely studied in the variety of Spanish in contact with Mapudungun and in Chilean Spanish. In this contribution, we analyze the nominal possessive constructions found in a corpus of interviews with speakers from five communitie...
In this paper, I analyze, from a compositional perspective, the relevant features to construct the interpretation of immediate succession between a subordinate event and the event that takes place in the main sentence. Among all the components involv...
This paper examines data from Spanish middle-passive sentences whose grammatical subject contains a body-part noun, externally possessed by means of a dative possessor. I advocate for an analysis whereby the possessor originates inside the theme DP a...
Collocations are one of the most studied types of word combinations. Their intricate nature, based on varying degrees of restriction, begs the question as to how modifications in their typical form influence the way they are processed by native speak...
This study investigates the contemporary grammaticalized uses of perdón (‘sorry’) in two varieties of Spanish, namely Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, the investigation is based on a taxonomy of offenses, organized...
This explorative study examines intonation contours in neutral and non-neutral statements of Paraguayan Spanish, a variety shaped by extensive contact with Guarani, a co-official language of Paraguay. Paraguayan Spanish displays both lexical and synt...
Existential sentences in Spanish are sensitive to the definiteness or quantification restriction or effect, which prevents personal pronouns, proper nouns, and definite constituents from occupying the pivot position. Contact varieties between Spanish...
Digital forensic investigations are becoming increasingly crucial in criminal investigations and civil litigations, especially in cases of corporate espionage and intellectual property theft as more communication occurs online via e-mail and social m...
Cognitive science has demonstrated that multilinguals (including children) show a cognitive advantage over monolinguals. Linguistics has provided evidence that multilinguals (including children) are able to successfully separate their lexicons and gr...
Decades-long research on islands has led to the conclusion that island constraints are candidates for language universals. A recent surge in research on islandhood in African languages has revealed some would-be island configurations that are transpa...
Although extensive research has been carried out on opaque formulaic language where the meaning is not the sum of the individual words (i.e., idioms and many collocations), it is still not clear how cross-language congruency and frequency of exposure...
This paper explores the diachrony of the Portuguese contrastive connective ao passo que (‘whereas’). First, we describe its syntactic and semantic properties in present-day European Portuguese. With this contemporary analysis in mind, we...
The development of English language written communication skills across many contexts has been hindered by factors such as examination-oriented cultures, anxiety associated with both oral and written communication, limited opportunities for engaging...
This study explores the relationship between linguistic behaviors of Americans of Southwest Asian or North African descent (SWANA Americans) and their ethnic rootedness, religion, and locality. SWANA Americans are an understudied community in the fie...
In this paper, I explore the properties and the uses of the past participles in the Arbëresh variety of S. Nicola dell’Alto, an Albanian dialect still spoken in Southern Italy, which has been in contact with Italo-Romance varieties for mor...
This article presents RuPro, a new corpus resource of prosodically annotated speech by Russian heritage speakers in the U.S. and monolingually raised Russian speakers. The corpus contains data elicited in formal and informal communicative situations,...
We investigate the acquisition of adverb placement in Spanish among school-age child heritage speakers of Spanish born and raised in the US by Mexican parents. We examine frequency and manner adverbs with negative and positive polarity and the potent...
