Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two d...

Address behavior is governed by politeness phenomenon which is culturally bound. This paper attempts to draw a cross-cultural comparison between Chinese and English address forms and, going beneath the surface, explore the cultural differences in value systems and their underlying philosophical sources. The study will help people develop a fuller understanding of the meanings of the address ter...

Various researchers (i.e., Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand,1995; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) have suggested that the cultural variables of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism correspond to Fiske’s (1991, 1992) relational models of collectivism, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. In this study, we tested this claim in a cross-cultural comparison betw...

The present study sought to investigate the evidence for cross-linguistic transfer in a partial English immersion and non-immersion educational setting. To this end, a total of 145 first, third and fifth graders in a partial English immersion program and 95 students from the same grade levels in a non-immersion program were chosen. Six different English and Persian tests were administered: the ...

Three studies investigated whether apologies and/or thanks in a favor asking email message increase normality of the message, positive attitude about the message, sender credibility and willingness to give the favor in the U.S. and Korea. Participants as the Sender in study 1 (N = 521) and as the Receiver in study 2 (N = 386) completed one of four versions of a questionnaire regarding a prototy...

This paper presents a systematic comparison of various measures of f0 range in female speakers of English and German. F0 range was analyzed along two dimensions, level (i.e., overall f0 height) and span (extent of f0 modulation within a given speech sample). These were examined using two types of measures, one based on "long-term distributional" (LTD) methods, and the other based on specific la...

Most studies of linguistic codeswitching (CS) focus on what language items can be switched and how such are intrasententially configurated at the surface sentence level. This study investigates CS a rather abstract level by adopting Bilingual Lemma Activation (BLA) Model (Wei, 2020). model claims that lemmas (i.e., entries in mental lexicon about lexemes) language-specific, language-specific co...

Description, classification, diversity and universality of languages are the key terms of linguistic typology, which first aims at answering the following question: what do languages have in common and in what ways do they differ?1 In other words, typology is concerned with finding properties that are shared by languages (invariants in Lazard terms), and has to do with cross-linguistic comparis...