This study seeks to uncover the theoretical bases for the production of the classical Arabic phonetic terms and their elements in the means of generating terms for both lexical semantics and conceptual semantics. The research problem is concerned with examining the roots of generating these phonetic terms and determining the categories of their…

Background: Arabic is recognised as diglossic; one manifestation of diglossia is the co-existence of two varieties of the language used in different social settings: standard (or literary) Arabic (StA) and spoken Arabic (SpA). The study investigated the impact of lexical-phonological distance in Arabic (identical, cognate, unique, which are…

This study evaluates attitudes toward nonnative Englishes among students, faculty, and staff at a STEM-focused U.S. university. The study utilizes the verbal-guise technique: Participants listened to and rated three summaries of the same short story as told by native speakers of U.S. English, Chinese, and Arabic. This adapted verbal-guise…

India is currently home to one of the world's largest English-speaking communities, in a context where the language is increasingly seen as a gateway to the world. Given the plurality of the country's social and linguistic landscape, however, a significant amount of the population does not speak or have access to the language. The impact of…

Indigenous children living in the more remote areas of Australia where Indigenous languages continue to be spoken often come to school with only minimal knowledge of English, but they may speak two or more local languages. Others come to school speaking either a creole, or Aboriginal English, non-standard varieties which may sound similar to…

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

The rise of English as a global lingua franca and the increasing use of it into the multilingual and multicultural contexts appear to be further indexing a number of new issues. These issues include from the discussion of its ownership -- that it is no longer only the language of native speakers of it, as statistically non-native speakers make up…

The ability to flexibly approach the pronunciation of unknown words, or set "for variability", has been shown to contribute to word recognition skills. However, this is the first study that has attempted to teach students strategies for increasing their set for variability. Beginning readers (N = 15) were instructed to correct oral…

Lexicographers, teachers and interpreters of New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) are challenged by the degree of lexical variation that exists in this young language. For instance, most numerals between one and twenty have two or more variants in common use (McKee, McKee, and Major 2008), a situation that contrasts with most established spoken…

This paper attempts to expound that China English boasting its own distinctive features on the levels of phonology, words, sentences and discourse has been playing an irreplaceable role in intercultural activities, though still in its infancy and in the process of developing and perfecting itself, and it now makes every effort to move towards…

This dissertation addresses the extent to which linguistic behavior can be described in terms of the projection of patterns from existing lexical items, through an investigation of Korean reduplication. Korean has a productive pattern of reduplication in which a consonant is inserted in a vowel-initial base, illustrated by forms such as "alok"--"t…

Adult second-language (L2) learners' perception of L2 phonetic segments is influenced by first-language phonological and phonetic properties. It was recently proposed that L2 vocabulary size in adult learners is related to changes in L2 perception (perceptual assimilation model), analogous to the emergence of first-language phonological function…

This study investigated the intelligibility of Chinese graduate students to their Indian, Chinese, Korean, and American peers. Specifically, the researcher sought to determine the teaching priorities for English for Academic Purposes in the US, where listeners have a wide variety of native languages. Research on Second Language Acquisition…

Until now, irregular sound change due to frequency has been considered as something sporadic, affecting only vocabulary, whereas, irregular sound change due to frequency, which concerns reductions in morphemes as well, especially inflectional ones, is the third essential factor of linguistic evolution, in addition to regular sound change. In any…

Sketches the history of the Scots language and the political and social history of Scotland, following with a description of the dialect, including its differences from standard English in phonology and vocabulary, and in the area of sociolinguistics. Some thoughts about the possible future of the dialect are added. (IFS/WGA)