This study aims to explore and tackle different phenomena of syllable structure and syllabification patterns in Jordanian Arabic (JA). The study compares and contrasts the permissible syllable structures in different Jordanian dialects. It also presents a comprehensive analysis of how speakers of different Jordanian dialects tackle the consonantal…

The system of second person singular forms of address (2PS) in Medellín, Colombia is tripartite consisting of "tú, vos," and "usted," while also including the existence of a dual "usted." The current study compares usage of the intimate "usted" versus the distant "usted" with data from an oral…

Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative…

While synonymy has been extensively studied, few studies have examined the ditransitive construction of synonyms across English varieties. Informed by construction grammar viewing pattern-meaning combinations as constructions and using a 1.9-billion-word corpus of texts from 20 countries, this article analyzes four different ways of expressing…

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms "important" and "significant" concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American…

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like…

Many bidialectal children grow up speaking a variety (e.g., a regional dialect) that differs from the variety in which they subsequently acquire literacy. Previous computational simulations and artificial literacy learning experiments with adults have demonstrated lower accuracy in reading "contrastive" words for which dialect variants…

Human creativity and ingenuity partly depend on divergent thinking -- the ability to generate many varied, original, and elaborate responses. Prior research has found ample evidence of an effect of cognitive factors, including the organization of semantic networks and associative ability, on divergent thinking. Less is known, however, about how…

A list of 350 words that deviate in pronunciation from the standard English pronunciation of these words has been suggested in the present study. To highlight the deviant pronunciation of these words from the standard pronunciation, a wordlist based on observation has been suggested. Transcription of the words according to the British, American,…

Phonetic imitation is a ubiquitous process in speech production. Speakers have a strong tendency to imitate their interlocutors both in a native and a non-native language. It is especially important in acquiring non-native speech, because it allows forming new sound categories. In the current study we investigated whether and to what extent Polish…

Multi-word expressions are formulaic language universals with arbitrary and idiosyncratic collocations. Their usage and mastery are required of learners of a second language in achieving naturalness. However, despite the importance of multi-word expressions to mastering a second language, their syntactic architecture and colligational…

This study investigates the subject-verb (SV) concord of nouns with Latin plural endings in Philippine English. Despite the seemingly straightforward nature of SV agreement, it poses challenges for first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) English learners. Data from the GloWbe and NOW corpora were analyzed to identify the nouns' SV concord…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

In my research I examine the linguistic practices of Moroccans in Spain, many of whom speak Moroccan Arabic as well as Modern Standard Arabic, Tamazight, French, English and Spanish at varying levels of proficiency. As part of my research, I conducted a 10-month linguistic ethnography. I was able to rely on my native English and near-native…

Signs in sign languages have been mainly analyzed as composed of three formational elements: hand configuration, location, and movement. Researchers compare and contrast lexical differences and similarities among different signs and languages based on these formal elements. Such measurement requires extensive manual annotation of each feature…