The origins of the bilingual advantage in various cognitive tasks are largely unknown. We tested the hypothesis that bilinguals' early capacities to track their native languages separately and learn about the properties of each may be at the origin of such differences. Spanish-Catalan bilingual and Spanish or Catalan monolingual infants watched silent video recordings of French-English bilingua...

Can listeners entrain to speech rhythms? Monolingual speakers of English and French and balanced English-French bilinguals tapped along with the beat they perceived in sentences spoken in a stress-timed language, English, and a syllable-timed language, French. All groups of participants tapped more regularly to English than to French utterances. Tapping performance was also influenced by the pa...

Despite being one of the most popular tasks in lexical semantics, word similarity has often been limited to the English language. Other languages, even those that are widely spoken such as Spanish, do not have a reliable word similarity evaluation framework. We put forward robust methodologies for the extension of existing English datasets to other languages, both at monolingual and cross-lingu...

Following Swales’s (1981) works on genre analysis, studies on different sections of Research Articles (RAs) in various languages and fields abound; however, only scant attention has been directed toward abstracts written in Persian, and in the field of literature. Moreover, claims made by Lores (2004) regarding the correspondence of two types of abstracts with different models, and by Martin (2...

We investigated if and how the use of one or multiple languages (bilingualism hereafter) affects the perception of intervocalic singleton/geminate consonants in Italian and Japanese. Two groups of non-native listeners (monolingual speakers of Australian English and bilingual speakers of Cantonese/English or Vietnamese/English) were examined. Two groups of native listeners (Italian and Japanese)...

this study aimed to examine cross-cultural differences in performing refusal of requests between persian native speakers (pnss) and english native speakers (enss) in terms of the frequency of the semantic formulas. also examined in this study was whether persian efl learners would transfer their l1 refusal patterns into the l2, and if there would be a relation between their proficiency level an...

This study examines the rhythmic properties of highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals. Ten Spanish-English bilinguals who live in the United States read aloud sentences in Spanish (their L1) and English (their L2), and ten Spanish and ten English monolingual control speakers read aloud sentences in their respective native languages. We performed an acoustic analysis of vocalic and consona...

Condolence is part of Austin’s expressive speech act and is related to Searle’s behabitives illocutionary act. Although a theoretically sound issue in pragmatics, condolence speech act has not been investigated as much as other speech acts in discourse-related studies. This paper aims at investigating interjections and intensifiers while performing condolence speech act among Persian and Englis...