Upon encountering unfamiliar words or observing local practices in study abroad contexts, second language learners may discuss aspects of the target and culture with their peers – 'non-native' friends from same cultural background 'natives' culture. Such mediations are instrumental elaborating understandings, but naturally conditioned by participants’ intercultural stances, including appreciati...

Research suggests that the size of the second language (L2) vowel inventory relative to the native (L1) inventory may affect the discrimination and acquisition of L2 vowels. Models of non-native and L2 vowel perception stipulate that naïve listeners' non-native and L2 perceptual patterns may be predicted by the relationship in vowel inventory size between the L1 and the L2. Specifically, having...

PURPOSE To use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at two field strengths to assess healthy adults' regional myocardial noncontrast (native) T1 relaxation time distribution, and global myocardial native T1 between sexes and across age groups. MATERIALS AND METHODS In all, 84 healthy volunteers underwent MRI at 1.5T and 3.0T. T1 maps were acquired in three left ventricular short axis slices using...

When organisms are faced with new or changing environments, a central challenge is the coordination of adaptive shifts in many different phenotypic traits. Relationships among traits may facilitate or constrain evolutionary responses to selection, depending on whether the direction of selection is aligned or opposed to the pattern of trait correlations. Attempts to predict evolutionary potentia...

Adults have difficulty discriminating non-native speech contrasts, yet young infants discriminate both native and nonnative contrasts. Language-specific influences appear by 9-10 months for consonants and phonotactic sequences, and by 6 months for vowels. Early experience is still influential in adulthood, when fluent early bilinguals still show L1 rather than L2 effects on consonant discrimina...

Human-mediated dispersal interplays with natural processes and complicates understanding of the biogeographical history of species. This is exemplified by two invasive tunicates, Ciona robusta (formerly Ciona intestinalis type A) and C. intestinalis (formerly Ciona intestinalis type B), globally distributed and sympatric in Europe. By gathering new mitochondrial sequences that were merged with ...

Recent poststructuralist theories of identity posit identities as being discursively constructed in interactions with society, institutions, and individuals. This study used a Linguistic Ethnographic framework to investigate the discursive identity construction of two English teachers, one ‘non-native’ English speaker, and one ‘native’ English speaker, teaching English in a tertiary institution...