The mora timing organization for producing contrastive geminate/single consonants and long/short vowels is a difficult task for non-native speakers of Japanese. This paper investigates characteristics of the segment durations involved in the production of contrastive phonemes by native Japanese speakers and Chinese-speaking subjects, when the speaking rate is changed. From the statistical regre...

Little research has been conducted to investigate highly advanced ESL learners’ written production of suggestions when addressing interlocutors of lower social power. The present study fills this gap by examining non-native speaking (NNS) composition instructors’ pragmatic choices of suggestions as compared to those made by their native speaking (NS) counterparts when providing written feedback...

Infant-directed speech, also sometimes described as “musilanguage”, has acoustic characteristics overlapping with those of infant-directed singing. In the present contribution we determine whether native-English-speaking adults and infants from native-English speaking households discriminate between infant-directed speech and song in a nonnative language and which acoustic features are typical ...

Although foreign language anxiety, considered as one of the most important negative factors affecting students' performance, has been receiving interest from researchers for decades, literature suggests only limited number studies which ground on dynamic approaches to explore elusive nature anxiety. Mainly focussing effects error correction, native/non-native teacher instruction and presence a ...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the study was to investigate the prevalence of voice disorders and associated risk factors among primary school teachers in Hong Kong. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was conducted based on a random sample of 20 primary schools in Hong Kong. A total of 714 full-time primary school teachers were invited to participate in the survey. Data were collected through a self-...

The present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. Most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native English speaking students’ (NNESs) pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native English speaking students (NESs) and compared learners ...

The development of English language learners (ELLs) was explored from kindergarten through eighth grade within a nationally representative sample of first-time kindergartners (N = 19,890). Growth curve analyses indicated that, compared to native English speakers, ELLs were rated by teachers more favorably on approaches to learning, self control, and externalizing behaviors in kindergarten and g...