This is a longitudinal case study of two Farsi-speaking children learning English: ‘Bernard’ and ‘Melissa’, who were 7;4 and 8;4 at the start of data collection. The research deals with the initial state and further development in the child second language (L2) acquisition of syntax regarding the presence or absence of copula as a functional category, as well as the role and degree of L1 influe...

language is a system of verbal elements that makes communication of meaningspossible in the manners the users intend by employing certain linguistic deviceswhich are partly language-specific. once communicating cross-linguistically, thereis always a risk of negative transfer of techniques or processes from the firstlanguage (l1) to the foreign language (l2). the current study investigates the“e...

Language is a system of verbal elements that makes communication of meaningspossible in the manners the users intend by employing certain linguistic deviceswhich are partly language-specific. Once communicating cross-linguistically, thereis always a risk of negative transfer of techniques or processes from the firstlanguage (L1) to the foreign language (L2). The current study investigates the“e...

In this study we compare the consonantal production of L4 learners (level A1+B2) with the expected canonical pronunciation and the pronunciation of a German L1 control group. The L4 speakers’ source languages are Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) L1, Hong Kong English (HKE) L2 and Putonghua/Mandarin (P) L3. Due to major disparities across the typologically distant language pair Cantonese and German, an...

Simile and allusion are two rhetorical aspects that have been taken into consideration by the scholars of rhetoric since long time ago. Some of the Iranian poets have used the capacities of the Persian language and integrated these aspects to create a modern rhetoric which in this study is introduced as rhetorical simile. The objective of the present study is the investigation of this rhetoric ...

L1 transfer may be able to explain prosodic errors in an L2. For Japanese English prosody, several comparative studies have been conducted. Despite this, only oral reading texts have been used in previous studies and not much attention has been paid to the effect of differences in the L1 dialect, especially in the case of an “accentless” Japanese dialect. This preliminary study describes an inv...

The present study examines prosodic characteristics of Taiwan (TW) English in relation to native (L1) English and TW speakers’ mother tongue, Mandarin. The aim is to investigate 1) how TW second-language (L2) English is different from L1 English by integrated prosodic features 2) if any transfer effect from L2s’ mother tongue contributes to L2 accent and 3) What is the similarity/difference bet...

Mary Robinson was elected the first female President of Ireland in 1990, a position she held until she resigned in 1997 to take up the post of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which she held until 2002. The daughter of two physicians, she holds a Master of Arts from Trinity College Dublin, a law degree from King’s Inns, Dublin, and a Master of Law from Harvard Law School. In 1...

Relative prominence distribution, one of the major factors characterizing speech rhythm, is largely determined not only by the position of word accent/stress (word accent, henceforth) but also by the treatment of the acoustic correlates involved in word accent production (e.g., duration, F0, amplitude). Languages differ in both aspects, and those differences are expected to cause prosodic trans...

In the acquisition of a second language, numerous factors interact simultaneously, including the patterns of the first language (L1), the patterns of the target language (L2), universals of language acquisition, and the amount and type of exposure to the L2. English is learned as a second language in India, where the first languages of the English learners differ widely in the phonotactics of c...