Vowel harmony redux: Correct sounds,English loan words,and the sociocultural life of a phonological structure in Korean1

This paper examines an ideology of standard pronunciation and spelling of English loan words in South Korea through the lens of Korean vowel harmony. I focus specifically on the alternation between an older Japanese‐style ‘a’[a] and a newer Korean‐style ‘?’[?] for the mapping of mid‐vowels from English to Korean. The opposition between ‘a’ and ‘?’ also figures into the dichotomy of vowel classes between ‘yang’ or ‘light’ vowels and ‘yin’ or ‘dark’ vowels in Korean vowel harmony. This opposition is pervasive in Korean's rich stock of denotationally iconic words (e.g. onomatopoeia), where ablaut between vowel classes produces semantic and pragmatic contrasts. I suggest that this latter structure of phonological opposition has an influence on speakers’ perceptions of vowel difference and associated values in English loan words, despite an overarching ideology of standard pronunciation that is based on assumptions about phonetic fidelity. ? ??? ?? ???? ?? ?? ? ??? ? ?????? ????? ?? ??? ???? ????. ??, ?? ???? ‘?’[a]? ‘?’[?]? ??(mapping)?? ?? ??? ??. ??? ?? ????? ‘?’? ?? ?? ??? ? ?????? ???? ???? ??(正音)?? ?????? ??. ?? ‘?’? ????? ???, ??? ???? ??? ????? ?(音)?? ???? ??. ???, ‘?’/‘?’? ??? ??? ???? ?? ????? ????? ??; ?, ??? ????? ????? ??? ??. ??, ????? ???? ????? ??? ??? ??? ? ? ??. ????, ????? ????? ????? ??? ?? ???? ????? ??? ??? ???. [Korean]     

Environmental Influences on Infants’ Native Vowel Discrimination: The Case of Talker Number in Daily Life

Both quality and quantity of speech from the primary caregiver have been found to impact language development. A third aspect of the input has been largely ignored: the number of talkers who provide input. Some infants spend most of their waking time with only one person; others hear many different talkers. Even if the very same words are spoken the same number of times, the pronunciations can be more variable when several talkers pronounce them. Is language acquisition affected by the number of people who provide input? To shed light on the possible link between how many people provide input in daily life and infants’ native vowel discrimination, three age groups were tested: 4‐month‐olds (before attunement to native vowels), 6‐month‐olds (at the cusp of native vowel attunement) and 12‐month‐olds (well attuned to the native vowel system). No relationship was found between talker number and native vowel discrimination skills in 4‐ and 6‐month‐olds, who are overall able to discriminate the vowel contrast. At 12 months, we observe a small positive relationship, but further analyses reveal that the data are also compatible with the null hypothesis of no relationship. Implications in the context of infant language acquisition and cognitive development are discussed.     

Infants' First Words are not Phonetically Specified: Own Name Recognition in British English‐Learning 5‐Month‐Olds

By the end of their first year of life, infants’ representations of familiar words contain phonetic detail; yet little is known about the nature of these representations at the very beginning of word learning. Bouchon et al. ( 2015 ) showed that French‐learning 5‐month‐olds could detect a vowel change in their own name and not a consonant change, but also that infants reacted to the acoustic distance between vowels. Here, we tested British English‐learning 5‐month‐olds in a similar study to examine whether the acoustic/phonological characteristics of the native language shape the nature of the acoustic/phonetic cues that infants pay attention to. In the first experiment, British English‐learning infants failed to recognize their own name compared to a mispronunciation of initial consonant (e.g., Molly versus Nolly) or vowel (e.g., April versus Ipril). Yet in the second experiment, they did so when the contrasted name was phonetically dissimilar (e.g., Sophie versus Amber). Differences in phoneme category (stops versus continuants) between the correct consonant versus the incorrect one significantly predicted infants’ own name recognition in the first experiment. Altogether, these data suggest that infants might enter into a phonetic mode of processing through different paths depending on the acoustic characteristics of their native language.     

Identity,accent aim,and motivation in second language users: New Scottish Gaelic speakers’ use of phonetic variation

This paper examines the use of phonetic variation in word‐final rhotics among nineteen adult new speakers of Scottish Gaelic, i.e. speakers who did not acquire the language through intergenerational transmission. Our speakers learned Gaelic as adults and are now highly advanced users of the language. We consider variation in their rhotic productions compared to the productions of six older, traditional speakers. Previous approaches to variation in second language users have either focussed on how variable production will eventually result in native‐like ‘target’ forms (Type 1 study), or have investigated the extent to which second language users reproduce patterns of variation similar to ‘native speakers’ (Type 2 study). We additionally draw on sociocultural approaches to Second Language Acquisition and apply notions of accent aim, identity construction, and learning motivation in order to fully explore the data. In doing so, we advocate a ‘Type 3’ approach to variation in second language users.     

A Cross‐linguistic Examination of Toddlers’ Interpretation of Vowel Duration

Languages differ in their phonological use of vowel duration. For the child, learning how duration contributes to lexical contrast is complicated because segmental duration is implicated in many different linguistic distinctions. Using a language‐guided looking task, we measured English and Dutch 21‐month‐olds’ recognition of familiar words with normal or manipulated vowel durations. Dutch but not English learners were affected by duration changes, even though distributions of short and long vowels in both languages are similar, and English uses vowel duration as a cue to (for example) consonant coda voicing. Additionally, we found that word recognition in Dutch toddlers was affected by shortening but not lengthening of vowels, matching an asymmetry also found in Dutch adults. Considering the subtlety of the cross‐linguistic difference in the input, and the complexity of duration as a phonetic feature, our results suggest a strong capacity for phonetic analysis in children before their second birthday.     

Using english as a foreign language in international and multicultural consulting: Asset or hindrance?

When it comes to an encounter of people of mixed national and ethnical backgrounds, one of the major challenges is undoubtedly the linguistic diversity. Given the widely acknowledged status of English as the world language, English has also become the most widely used language when it comes to professional counselling in intercultural contexts. Due to the growing demand of counselling processes in English, a certain command of the English language has also become indispensible for consultants. It has to be noted, however, that it??s rarely English native speakers who prompt a ??multilingual?? group to speak English. In most working contexts it is speakers, for ??none of whom is the mother tongue?? (House 1999: 74), who agree to use English as common code of understanding, i.e. English as a lingua franca (ELF). Current researches strongly question the status of native English norms as the only point of reference for ??correct?? usage of English (cf. e.g. Seidlhofer et al. 2006). Based on empirical data, this contribution chooses an interdisciplinary approach at the interface between linguistics and other social sciences to examine some implications of the use of ELF in professional counselling processes with a strong focus on supervision. It is meant to show that consulting processes in English, among non-native speakers, can be carried out successfully despite clear linguistic deviations from native speaker norms.     

Socio‐phonetics and social change: Deracialisation of the GOOSE vowel in South African English1

This paper examines the degree of sociolinguistic change in the English of young middle‐class South Africans of different ethnic backgrounds in relation to new post‐apartheid opportunities and friendships. Once tightly controlled, social networks of young people of middle‐class background are now deracialising. The paper examines whether young people of the major ethnic groups, Black, Coloured and Indian, are simply adopting prestige White middle‐class norms, adapting them or resisting change. Forty‐eight speakers were analysed within a Labovian framework in relation to the goose vowel (long /u/or /uw/). Over 4000 tokens were analysed acoustically using PRAAT and compared via vowel normalisation procedures based on Watt and Fabricius (2003) . The results show that middle‐class speakers of the three ethnicities are fronting the vowel, but in different ways. Black speakers show the greatest accommodation to erstwhile White norms. Females show greater resistance among Coloureds and Indians, but overall it is the Black females of the study who approximate most closely to the norms of the White reference group of their gender.     

Expertise and aging: maintaining skills through the lifespan

As lifespan continues to increase in many developed countries, so too does the age at which we see extraordinary achievements from older adults. Examples from running, golf, and other domains continue to redefine what is possible as we age. Evidence suggests, however, that progression through adulthood is associated with a dramatic decline in all manner of physical and cognitive abilities, from physiological capacities (e.g., VO2 max) to cognitive and perceptual functions (e.g., IQ scores, reaction time). In the face of such precipitous decline in specific abilities, how do we account for maintenance of skilled performance and expertise amongst those supposedly well along the age-decline curve? Expert performers are seemingly able to sustain high levels of achievement in the face of an overall deterioration in general capacities. Moreover, experts maintain this performance in spite of reduced involvement in their field. There are three primary explanations for the ability of experts to maintain superior performance in spite of an overall decline in abilities: (a) preserved differentiation, (b) compensation, and (c) selective maintenance. Overall, research into the high achievements of older adults may reveal a great deal with respect to skill preservation and how to best counter age-related decline.     

Dynamic Assessment: Psychoeducational Assessment with Cultural Sensitivity

Dynamic assessment is a relatively new model of psychoeducational assessment. Administration typically follows a pretest-inteIVene-posttest format, with instruction embedded within the assessment procedure. Resulting information addresses issues of the responsiveness of learners to intelVention, the intensity and nature of input required to induce change, and the approach of the learner to problem-solving. The model primarily addresses issues of “how” learners learn and “how” learners are best instructed, rather than questions of classification or program eligibility. Dynamic assessment shows promise for providing instructionally relevant information for culturally diverse learners. This article describes the dynamic assessment model, examples of currently available procedures, and research specifically involving ,students from minority backgrounds.     

Levelling across the life‐span?: Tracing the face vowel in panel data from the North East of England

Apparent time analysis has revealed that the Tyneside face vowel is the site of two intersecting trends: levelling towards the supra‐northern monophthong as well as the gradual incursion of the southern standard closing diphthong. This article investigates the participation of individual speakers across their life‐span in these ongoing changes in the face vowel. We report on a small‐scale panel sample of six speakers who were recorded in 1971 and again, 42 years later, in 2013. The analysis probes the stability of individual speakers’ grammars, relying on longitudinal ethnographic analysis in the community as well as insights gleaned from sociolinguistic interviews about the speakers’ socio‐demographic trajectory and their presentations of self. The article contributes to the growing body of panel research that aims to determine the scope and the limits of linguistic malleability across speakers’ life histories.     

The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants: A multi-laboratory study

Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non-verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always have access to the same word-learning heuristics (e.g., mutual exclusivity). In a preregistered study, we tested the hypothesis that bilingual experience would lead to a more pronounced ability to follow another's gaze. We used a gaze-following paradigm developed by Senju and Csibra (Current Biology, 18, 2008, 668) to test a total of 93 6- to 9-month-old and 229 12- to 15-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants, in 11 laboratories located in 8 countries. Monolingual and bilingual infants showed similar gaze-following abilities, and both groups showed age-related improvements in speed, accuracy, frequency, and duration of fixations to congruent objects. Unexpectedly, bilinguals tended to make more frequent fixations to on-screen objects, whether or not they were cued by the actor. These results suggest that gaze sensitivity is a fundamental aspect of development that is robust to variation in language exposure.     

The Formation and Development of New Zealand English: Interaction of Gender-Related Variation and Linguistic Change

This research assesses the relative roles played by men and women in the development of New Zealand English. Real-time evidence on the development of NZ English over the past fifty years is provided by comparison of speakers recorded in 1948 and their present day descendants recorded recently. Elements of two vowel shifts are studied, and particular attention is paid to the vowel variables in words such as MOUTH, TRAP and DRESS. Results indicate that women lead in changes which are new and dynamic, but lag behind men in the use of variables representing older changes. While these results mirror patterns of gender-related variation observed in other contexts, explanations in terms of prestige which are often assumed to account for this pattern of variation are found to be inadequate in the New Zealand case. Rather, a hypothesis in terms of dialect contact, and specifically women's preferred discourse strategies in contact situations, is used to explain the process and progress of linguistic change in NZ English.     

The Therapeutic Pyramid: A Common Factors Synthesis of Techniques,Alliance, and Way of Being

Common factors in therapy such as the therapeutic alliance and client motivation have been found to account for more change than therapy models. But common factors have been critiqued as only lists of variables that provide little practical guidance. Some researchers have demonstrated that certain common elements (e.g., the therapeutic alliance) account for more variance than others (e.g., techniques), suggesting that some factors should be emphasized over others. Such findings suggest the need for alternatives to model‐based therapy, with one alternative being meta‐models, or “models of models,” that focus on how therapeutic factors interact with each other to produce change. The purpose of this article is to propose a meta‐model describing the relationship between two specific common factors—the therapeutic alliance and interventions. We also propose a new factor—a therapist's way of being—that we believe is foundational to effective therapy. The model is proposed in pyramid format, with techniques on top, the therapeutic alliance in the middle, and therapist way of being as the foundation. The hierarchical relationships between these three concepts are discussed, along with implications for training, research, and therapy.     

Manipulating honorifics in the construction of social identities in Japanese television drama1

This study examines culturally‐based ideologies concerning the use of Japanese honorifics in the construction of social identities through an analysis of dialogues in a Japanese television drama. The study assumes that the underlying or encoded meaning of Japanese honorific forms is social/psychological distance and considers ways in which speakers utilise differences in the encoded meanings of honorifics to construct a variety of social identities, including those that reflect membership within particular communities of practice. It also looks at how implicatures that arise through marked use of honorific forms are used to achieve specific interactional goals such as the expression of (im)politeness and the marking of change in the speaker's attitude toward the addressee/referent.     

Early Word Recognition in Sentence Context: French and English 24‐Month‐Olds' Sensitivity to Sentence‐Medial Mispronunciations and Assimilations

Recent work has shown that young children can use fine phonetic detail during the recognition of isolated and sentence‐final words from early in lexical development. The present study investigates 24‐month‐olds' word recognition in sentence‐medial position in two experiments using an Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm. In Experiment 1, French toddlers detect word‐final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., bu z [by z ] for bu s [by s ] “bus”), and they compensate for native voicing assimilations (e.g., bu z d evant toi [bu zd ?vɑ?twa] “bus in front of you”) in the middle of sentences. Similarly, English toddlers detect word‐final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., shee b for shee p ) in Experiment 2, but they do not compensate for illicit voicing assimilations (e.g., shee b th ere). Thus, French and English 24‐month‐olds can take into account fine phonetic detail even if words are presented in the middle of sentences, and French toddlers show language‐specific compensation abilities for pronunciation variation caused by native voicing assimilation.     

Retention or omission of the ne in advanced French interlanguage: The variable effect of extralinguistic factors

This article considers inter‐individual variation in omission rates of the preverbal particle ne in 991 negations produced in conversations between 73 native and non‐native speakers of French. It appears that both endogenous and exogenous extralinguistic factors are linked to omission rates of ne . Whereas age and gender were found to have little effect, the degree of extraversion of the speaker, the frequency of use of French and the native/non‐native status of the speakers were correlated with omission rates. Among the exogenous factors it appeared that the composition of the dyad was linked to omission rates: non‐native speakers interacting with native speakers omitted the ne more frequently than the non‐native speakers in conversation with other non‐native speakers. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Gentlemanly gender?Japanese men's use of clause‐final politeness in casual conversations1

Much of the Japanese language and gender literature discusses the differential use of polite language by women and men. The exchange of non‐reciprocal clause‐final speech levels is typically taken as a sign that interlocutors are of unequal social status. Cook (1998) has shown how Japanese speakers manipulate the use of clause‐final politeness in order to index particular stances in specific moments of ongoing verbal interaction. Using naturally occurring all‐male informal conversations, this paper examines the use of clause‐final politeness as marked by the presence or absence of the verb ending ∼masu[+politeness] by Japanese men in the Kansai (Western) region. The data provide a deeper understanding into how men exploit linguistic structures such as politeness, at the everyday local level, to create, maintain, and manage particular identities and/or stances.     

Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.     

Essay: The Role of Participatory Listening in Collaborative Discourse: Insights from Studies of Engineering Design Teams

In this article, we summarize evidence from observations of engineering teams for the importance of active listening in collaborative design problem solving. We focus on the way speakers use freehand sketching to convey complex design ideas, and how listeners support them whilst they do this. We argue that listeners temporarily redistribute the shared cognitive load of discourse production and comprehension within design teams: whilst speakers are engaged in sketch construction they are unable to take account of listener understanding, and listeners respond intuitively by anticipating and avoiding difficulties in this process. We conclude that this cooperativeness emerges naturally from the operation of effort conserving principles underlying collaborative social interaction, and show that by focusing on the contribution of the listener to the production of creative engineering discourse, this principle can be thrown into sharp relief.