Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently? Boroditsky (2001) claimed they do, but the claim did not stand in three failed replications (Chen, 2007; January & Kako, 2007; Tse & Altarriba, 2008). Recently she and her colleagues reported data from a different task to support the claim (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2010). We repeated their study with English speakers in US,...

According to Ladefoged and Maddieson (1999), nasals are among the most common sounds in languages around the world. As the most common sounds, these three nasals are presumably among the easiest to produce and acquire. However, Mandarin speakers seem to have difficulty articulating English /n, ŋ/ codas. For example, Hansen’s (2001) study reveals that Mandarin speakers tend to produce English /ŋ...

Pause plays important roles for the intelligibility, naturalness and fluency of speech. This paper reported the effect of native (L1) Bengali speakers’ fluency of English on occurrence probability and duration of sentencemedial pauses with respect to three factors: phrase type, phrase length (l), distance (d). In this analysis, 40 nonnative (L2) English (L1 Bengali) speakers’ data was divided i...

Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese have difficulty producing native-like English stress contrasts. Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional, involving manipulation of fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality. Errors in any or all of these correlates could interfere with perception of the stress contrast, but it is unknown which correlates are most probl...

the purpose of this study was to examine cook’s (2003) ‘multiple competence’ by investigating backward pragmatic transfer (from l2 [english] to l1 [persian]) in refusals to invitations. it explored participants’ frequency and content of refusal strategies in l1 regarding the status (i.e., power and distance) of interlocutors and the proficiency level of efl learners. the participants were persi...

This study investigates how native prosodic systems as well as L2 learning experience shape non-native tone production in terms of tone movement, a primary cue to tone identity. In an imitation task, the six Cantonese tones were produced by four speaker groups: native Mandarin speakers (tonal), native English speakers (non-tonal), native English speakers with Mandarin learning experience (L2 to...

Does eye-witness memory differ depending on the language one speaks? We examined English and Spanish speakers' descriptions of intentional and accidental events, and their memory for the agents of these events. English and Spanish speakers described intentional events similarly, using mostly agentive language (e.g., "She broke the vase"). However, when it came to accidental events English speak...