Contemporary Standard Language Change

An acoustic analysis of contemporary vowels of the standard slovenian language

Slovenian language is among the richest Slavic languages in view of the number of dialects. More than 40 dialects in seven dialect groups can be found on a territory of about 21,000 km2 and population of 2 million. Given the richness of influencing factors on the Standard Slovenian language we decided to undertake an acoustic analysis of its contemporary vowel system. Results on vowel formant f...

REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING Contemporary Computer-Assisted Language Learning

Review by Ciara R. Wigham, Clermont Université Contemporary Computer-Assisted Language Learning, edited by Michael Thomas, Hayo Reinders, and Mark Warschauer, maps the parameters of contemporary computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and illustrates how a range of different areas, as well as research approaches, are shaping this field. The introductory chapter states four objectives fulfill...

Modeling non-standard language

A specific language as used by different speakers and in different situations has a number of more or less distant varieties. Extending the notion of non-standard language to varieties that do not fit an explicitly or implicitly assumed norm or pattern, we look for methods and tools that could be applied to such texts. The needs start from the theoretical side: categories usable for the analysi...

Language acquisition is language change.

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition contend that child language matches the input, with n...

Language Change and Language Contact