NS and NNS processing of idioms and nonidiom formulaic sequences: What can reaction times and think-alouds tell us?

Although researchers generally agree that native speakers (NSs) process formulaic sequences (FSs) holistically to some extent, findings about nonnative speakers (NNSs) are conflicting, potentially because not all FSs are psychologically equal or because in some studies NNSs may not have fully understood the FSs. We address these issues by investigating Chinese NSs and NNSs processing of idioms and matched nonidiom FSs in phrase acceptability judgment tasks with and without think-alouds (TAs). Reaction times show that NSs processed idioms faster than nonidioms regardless of length, but NNSs processed 3-character FSs faster than 4-character FSs regardless of type. TAs show NSs’ understanding of FSs has reached ceiling, but NNSs’ understanding was incomplete, with idioms being understood more poorly than nonidioms. Although we conclude that idioms and nonidioms have different mental statuses in NSs’ lexicons, it is inconclusive how they are represented by NNSs. TAs also show that NNSs employed various strategies to compensate for limited idiom knowledge, causing comparable processing speed for idioms and nonidioms. The findings highlight the importance of distinguishing subtypes of FSs and considering NNSs’ quality of understanding in discussions of the psychological reality of FSs.

Legal English Difficulties and Ways to Overcome

This article is devoted to the study of legal English and its main characteristics. Legal language is the language used by legal professionals in their professional activity. That fact that historically legal English developed separately from the plain English made it difficult for understanding by laypeople. People find the traditional legal writing in such documents as jury instructions, security disclosures, credit card agreements, apartment leases, cell phone contract, promissory note etc. Even native English speakers often complain that they cannot fully understand the documents written to give them information. The understanding of legal English has been a problem for centuries. It was the cause why the plain English movement arose in the 1970s. The purpose of the movement was to simplify the legal writing, make it simple and clear for average people. This problem arises not only for those people whose native language is English. Nonnative speakers also struggle with the complexity of English legal writing. Ukrainian legal professionals that engaged in the area of international, business or corporate law, have to draft documents in English. Sometimes that could be a real problem because unlike English and American legal schools, the majority of ours don't provide the separate course of English legal writing. The purpose of this article is to give practical advice to Ukrainian lawyers and interpreters, how, taking into account the peculiarities of legal English discourse, to draft documents in clear, simple and understandable way. Results of research. A lot of English and American scientists, lawyers as well as linguists, devoted their studies to the plain English movement. Analysis of their works shows that four major factors had influenced on the development of legal English: historical, sociological, political and jurisprudential. Owing to them legal English is full of words of foreign origin, archaisms, argots and terms of art. These factors also caused the frequent usage of formal words, common usage of common words with uncommon meaning, deliberate ambiguity in legal writing. The studies of legal writing by lawyers have focused basically on vocabulary. Linguists in their researchers have identified some other features: overly complex sentences, passives, nominalizations, multiple negations, archaisms and jargon, inappropriate document design. Described ways of simplifying legal English are quite easy to use. Taking into account tips mentioned in the article, legal professionals will be able to draft documents that will be clear and understandable for general public.

Native-like Performance of Pragmatic Features: Speech Acts in Spanish

This study had as its goal to investigate how nonnative speakers (NNSs) of Spanish were able to perform pragmatics which in various ways resembled that of native speakers (NSs). The study focused on three advanced NNSs of Spanish who had contributed data six years earlier to a corpus of NS and NNS speech acts of complimenting, apologizing and refusing. The purpose was to do a contrastive analysis comparing the pragmatic performance of NNSs and NSs in order to capture both similarities and areas where highly competent NNSs displayed knowledge gaps, however subtle. The subjects responded to a language background questionnaire regarding their learning of Spanish and also completed a learning style preference survey. They were then asked to revisit their earlier performance in pragmatics from the corpus data and to describe the strategies that they used to produce their highly-rated performance in Spanish pragmatics at that time. The findings revealed ways in which the three subjects differentially imitated NS behavior, and provided insights as to how they arrived at native-like behavior in their facial expressions, use of clicks, physical contact practices, colloquial language, and cursing. The subjects’ reported learning style preferences appeared to be generally consistent with the strategies that they reported using for dealing with the pragmatic features of interest, such as the way that they dealt with cursing.

A Study of the Vowel Context Effect on Initial Stops of Mandarin Produced by Native and Nonnative Speakers

This study, based on corpus materials, investigates the “voice onset time” (VOT) of Mandarin word-initial stops in isolated syllables according to the effect of vowel contexts produced by native and nonnative speakers. Here, 1250 monosyllables of word-initial plosives /p/, /t/, /k/, /p[Formula: see text]/, /t[Formula: see text]/, and /k[Formula: see text]/ were uttered in combination with the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ in four tone contexts except /ki/ and /k[Formula: see text]i/ that are phonetically illegal in Mandarin by 20 participants (10 native Chinese speakers and 10 Urdu learners of Chinese). Results show that for native Chinese speakers, the VOTs of aspirated stops followed by the high vowels /i/ and /u/ are significantly longer than those followed by the low vowel /a/, and unaspirated stops followed only by the high back vowel /u/ are significantly longer than those followed by the low vowel /a/. For native Urdu speakers, the mean VOTs of word-initial stops in Mandarin monosyllables have no significant effect for both aspirated and unaspirated ones in combination with different vowels. Understanding the results of this study will be of assistance to second language learning and teaching.

Do you hear my accent? How nonnative English speakers experience conflictual conversations in the workplace

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the experiences of nonnative speakers in conflictual situations with native speakers in the workplace. In three studies, the authors examine whether nonnative speakers experience stereotype threat in workplace conflict situations with native speakers, whether stereotype threat is associated with certain conflict managing behaviors (e.g. yielding and avoiding) and the relationship between stereotype threat, satisfaction with conflict outcomes and processes, and objective conflict outcomes. Design/methodology/approach Studies 1 and 2 use critical incident recall methodology to examine nonnative speakers’ conflict behaviors and satisfaction with conflict outcomes. In Study 3, data were collected from a face-to-face simulation with a random-assignment design. Findings Findings suggest that nonnative speakers indeed experience heightened stereotype threat when interacting with native speakers in conflict situations and the experience of stereotype threat leads to less satisfaction with conflict outcomes, perceptions of goal attainment, as well as worse objective conflict outcomes. Originality/value The current study is one of the first studies to document the effects of accent stereotype threat on conflict behaviors and outcomes. More broadly, it contributes to the conflict studies literature by offering new insight into the effects and implications of stereotype threat on workplace conflict behaviors and outcomes.

Peer Repair in a Second Language Class: A Conversation Analytic Study

Conversation analysis is a significant approach on research of the second language teaching and learning, among which repair has attracted more and more attention from scholars. This study investigates peer repair sequences between three nonnative speakers of English while they engaged in free talk in the second language classroom. 40 minutes of naturally occurring talk between nonnative speakers were collected and analyzed. The present study reports on the data shows two types of peer repair: first, self-initiated and other-corrected; second, other-initiated and other-corrected. The analysis of the peer repair sequences shows that the self-initiated and other-corrected repair sequences follow a pattern of asking for confirmation on the production of a language item and receiving a correction, while the other-initiated repair do not follow the rules of preference for self-correction described in conversation analysis.

German in childhood and Latin in adolescence: On the bidialectal nature of lexical access in English

The nature of word etymology, long a topic of interest in linguistics, has been considered to a much lesser extent in the word recognition literature. The present study created a database of overlapping words from the English Lexicon Project (ELP) and a database with the age of acquisition (AoA) norms which were categorized as either Germanic or Latin-based. Results revealed that Germanic words were learned earlier than Latin-based words. Germanic words also showed slower reaction times and higher accuracy relative to Latin-based words even when controlling for AoA, word frequency, and length. Additionally, analyses were conducted using a publicly available database that used the English Crowdsourcing Project (ECP) data with native and second language (L2) English speakers. The results with native speakers were similar to those collected with the ELP. However, nonnative speakers showed better accuracy and faster reaction times for Latin-based words compared to Germanic words. The findings support a bidialectal view of English in that Germanic words serve as the base of lexical processing during childhood, whereas Latin-based words fill in the lexical space across adolescence and into early adulthood. Furthermore, L2 speakers appear to acquire English via more advanced Latin-based vocabulary relative to native speakers. These results carry implications for theories of word recognition and the processing of lexical items in populations that come from linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Acquiring the core-peripheral distinction in split intransitivity

This study presents the results of an experimental investigation into the L2 acquisition of the core-peripheral distinction in the syntax of split intransitivity by L1 Mandarin EFL learners to verify whether or not their L2 acquisition is lexically constrained by the Split Intransitivity Hierarchy, which predicts that core verbs have primacy in both L1 and L2 acquisition over peripheral ones (Sorace, 2000, 2004, 2011). Two diagnostics of English split intransitivity, the prenominal past participles (PPPs) and the for hours constructions, were used to test native English speakers and Mandarin EFL learners’ gradient acceptability with respect to core-peripheral verb classes. The results of an acceptability judgment test show that both native speakers and nonnative speakers are sensitive to the core-peripheral distinction in the two diagnostics, and EFL learners exhibit a native-like sensitivity to core unaccusatives in PPPs but not in the for hours constructions. The results confirm that the core-peripheral distinction can be accounted for neither by L1 transfer nor L2 input, which suggests for the behavior is due to direct access to semantic universals in the L2 acquisition of split intransitivity syntax.