Volume 24 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

In a forced-choice mouse-tracking paradigm, true and false statements (ranging from very true, to ambiguous, to very false) were tested in both affirmative and negated forms. Replicating prior research, mouse trajectories reveal subtle differences in a continuum of true to false statements. However, negation modifies this process, particularly for very true statements (i.e. Bread is not made from sand). The mouse trajectories were more curved with negated sentences, with end-points of the continuum of truth (very true and very false statements) having the greatest area under the curve. The proposed explanation is the pragmatic meaning of a negated statement such as “Gummie bears are not alive” is infelicitous, whereas a true statement “People live on Earth” is felicitous. This study reveals the online dynamics of processing these statements and possible confusion, particularly when very true statements contain a negation.

Bilingual partnerships (Piller & Pavlenko, 2004) and transnational families (Hirsch & Lee, 2018) are on the rise. With mothers spending more time with their children at home, even in dual career partnerships (Hochschild & Machung, 1989), the labor of family language policy (FLP) implementation often falls on them. While increasingly more new hires in academia are women (Finkelstein, Seal, & Schuster, 1998), only 31% of them are mothers (Perna, 2003). In this work, we examine the dominant discourses regarding bilingualism and FLP among academic mothers who find themselves at an intersection of multiple and often competing social positions. Data was collected from 46 academic mothers residing in linguistically-different host societies but all whom gather in an online community they have co-created. Data collection procedure included 22 open-ended questions exploring bilingualism and FLP orientations. Iterative and recursive content analysis was performed, yielding thematic patterns centering around language ideologies, practices, and bilinguality.

We examined the understanding of emotional speech by deaf children with cochlear implant (CI). Thirty deaf children with CI and 60 typically developing controls (matched on chronological age or hearing age) performed a computerized task featuring emotional prosody, either embedded in a discrepant context or without any context at all. Across the task conditions, the deaf participants with CI scored lower on the prosody-bases responses than their peers matched on chronological age or hearing age. Additionally, we analyzed the effect of age on determining correct prosody-based responses and we found that hearing age was a predictor of the accuracy of prosody-based responses. We discuss these findings with respect to delay in prosody and intermodal processing. Future research should aim to specify the nature of the cognitive processes that would be required to process prosody.

The present research explicates how job applicants employ language abstraction to present themselves as a good or bad candidate. According to the LIB theory (Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Semin, 1989), we tested the hypothesis that, with positive instruction (i.e., to be recruited), participants’ responses would be more abstract with positive items and more concrete with negative items. Conversely, we expected that participants’ responses would be more concrete with positive items and more abstract with negative ones when the instruction was negative (i.e., to not be recruited). Results of this experiment (N = 85 French participants) confirm our hypothesis and revealed a strong interaction effect between level of language abstraction and goal of self-presentation. Implications for linguistic bias effect and normative behavior in the interpersonal context of recruitment are discussed.

This study investigates whether L2 Mandarin learners can generalize experience with Mandarin tones to unfamiliar tones (i.e., Thai). Three language groups – L1 English/ L2 Mandarin learners (n=18), L1 Mandarin speakers (n=30), L1 monolingual English speakers (n=23) – were tested on the perception of unfamiliar Thai tones on ABX tasks. L2 Mandarin learners and L1 Mandarin speakers perceived Thai tones more accurately than L1 English non-learners. Mandarin learners L1 speakers showed priming on Mandarin tones on a lexical decision task with repetition priming, suggesting L2 tones had been encoded within lexical representations of L2 Mandarin words. However, results must be interpreted cautiously, with an absence of expected priming and presence of unexpected priming. In sum, learners can transfer L2 tone experience to unfamiliar tones, expanding the Feature Hypothesis (McAllister, Flege, & Piske, 2002) to include L2 influence as well. In addition, results indicate a potential disconnect between perception and encoding.

The present research aims at finding to what extent social-pragmatic cues that conflict with mutual exclusivity lead preschoolers to exclude a novel object as a referent for a novel word. Sixty early and late 3-year-old preschoolers randomly participated in one of the three conditions. In the first condition, preschoolers’ tendency to select an unfamiliar object for an unfamiliar word is investigated in the absence of social-pragmatic cues that contradict mutual exclusivity. The second condition is aimed to investigate if partial social-pragmatic cues, such as pointing towards a familiar object, interfere with mutual exclusivity. In the third condition, pointing towards a familiar object is accompanied by gazing alternately between the familiar object and preschoolers to investigate whether preschoolers abandon or still honor mutual exclusivity. The results indicate that in the absence of any social-pragmatic cues, preschoolers use a familiar object as a cue leading them to match a novel object with a novel word. Partial cues such as pointing towards familiar objects do not make any significant difference in preschoolers’ familiar/unfamiliar object selection for an unfamiliar word. If both of the social-pragmatic cues are available, preschoolers suspend mutual exclusivity in indirect word learning situations.

Motivation plays a critical role in L2 language learning and has proven to be a strong predictor of success in learning a foreign language (Biedroń & Pawlak, 2016). The Second Language Motivational Self System (L2MSS) is one of the most prominent theories developed by Dörnyei (2009), which has been studied in relation to different variables affecting language learning motivation. The aim of the present study is to examine the relationship between L2MSS components, international posture, and socioeconomic status among university students. The participants of this study were 134 non-English major university students. The results suggest that the ideal L2 self, and the L2 learning experience are related to international posture insert a comma after posture whereas the L2 learning experience is a stronger predictor of students’ motivated behavior. Future research should investigate the development of future selves in instructed language learning contexts conducive to enhancing and increasing motivation to learn English.

This study examines the relationship between mothers’ use of gestures and the lexical production of their children, measured in a joint book-reading task. Fifteen mother-child dyads participated, all monolingual native speakers of Mexican Spanish. Children were boys and girls with typical development, aged 48 months. Each reading session was videotaped and analyzed to calculate the gestural production of mothers and the lexical production of children. The results showed a significant positive correlation between the number of mothers’ gestures and the number of distinct words used by the children. Mothers’ gestural communication was related to the size of the vocabulary children produced in joint book-reading.