An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

The aim of this project was to identify factors contributing to cross-language semantic preview benefits. In Experiment 1, Russian-English bilinguals read English sentences with Russian words presented as parafoveal previews. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to present sentences. Critical previews were cognate translations of the…

Mobile technologies are increasingly finding their way into classroom practice. While these technologies can create opportunities that may facilitate learning, including the learning of a second or foreign language (L2), the full potential of these new media often remains underexploited. A case in point concerns tablet applications for language…

The present research applies the concepts of attention, awareness, and noticing to a previously unresolved strand of inquiry: accent marks in L2 (second language) French. Previous research found that learners who typed accented words had better recall of the accent marks than those who wrote the same words by hand. Sturm suggested that it may have…

Previous studies indicate that the discrimination of native phonetic contrasts in infants exposed to two languages from birth follows a different developmental time course from that observed in monolingual infants. We compared infant discrimination of dental (French) and alveolar (English) place variants of /d/ in three groups differing in…

Traces the history of glottal sounds in humans, and examines some of the functions of the glottal stop in modern languages, particularly French. (AM)

Research supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. (DD)

Discusses the status of nasal vowels in modern French and their evolution, as rule-governed derivations, from morphophonologically based rules to phonemic-phonetically based ones. (Author/AM)

Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, The American Philosophical Society, and The Fulbright Commission. (DD)

Criticizes Chomsky's theory of the syllabic feature as a major class feature in The Sound Pattern of English'' (New York, Harper and Row, 1968). (RS)

Describes a computer-based connectionist-type network model that correctly identified the gender of a set of French nouns, relying solely on information inherent in the nouns' structures, in the absence of explicit rules for evaluating nouns, through discovering criterial gender-specific features through examples of masculine and feminine nouns.…

Following Roman Jakobson, this article attempts to outline the affinity between linguistic change induced by language contact and conflict, and the poetic function of language. This phenomenon can be observed by studying the discourses of trilingual speakers in the Aosta Valley in Northern Italy. The problematic position of French is reflected and…

This article discusses sonorants and affricates in English, and contrasts them with the sonorants and affricates in French and German. (Text is in French.) (CLK)