This study investigates the phonetic structures of Lushootseed obstruents from archival recordings dating to the 1950s, and seeks to address the following questions: (i) Which acoustic dimensions characterize the stop, affricate, and fricative contrast in Lushootseed? (ii) which acoustic dimensions characterize ejective types in Lushootseed? and (iii) which methods can be used to characterize acoustic properties of Lushootseed obstruents from old archival recordings? Several acoustic measures were used on two elder speakers. These measurements include: Voice Onset Timing (VOT); closure duration; burst intensity for stops; dynamic measures of intensity for affricates; voice onset quality measures for stops and affricates, which include f0 perturbation, jitter perturbation, and amplitude characteristics of the following vowel; and spectral measurements for affricates and fricatives, which includes the frequency of the main peak at the low- and mid-frequency ranges (FreqM) and DCT coefficients. The findings reveal that several of these acoustic measures characterize the stop, affricate, and fricative contrast in Lushootseed.

This study investigated the effects of audience design and goal bias in Chinese speakers’ message generation of source-goal motion events (e.g., A bird flies from the tree to the house), using picture description and memory tasks. The status of the source (e.g., the tree) or the goal (e.g., the house) was manipulated as known or unknown to the confederate addressees. The findings revealed that the participants were more likely to omit the sources when they were mutually known to the addressee than when they were not. However, participants showed similar accuracy in detecting source changes, regardless of whether the sources were known to the addressee. Moreover, they consistently mentioned goals and showed similar accuracy in detecting goal changes, regardless of whether the goals were known or unknown to the addressee. The results suggest that audience design influenced the speakers’ mention of sources, but not their memory of them. It did not affect either the mention or the memory of goals. Goal bias was not consistently observed across the two experiments, both linguistically and in memory. This suggests a fragile goal bias in Chinese. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that audience design and goal bias influence the message generation of motion events in Chinese speakers.

The English modals have been used as case studies in many domains of linguistic enquiry. Their diachronic development and patterns of synchronic variation in historical and contemporary corpora have been used to develop theories of linguistic representation, to further understanding of correlations between structure and use, and to investigate relationships between form and meaning. However, much of this research explores only the modals themselves: relatively little attention has been given to the study of modal collocations. In this article, we explore variation and change in collocational patterns of two modals (may and might) when they appear directly adjacent to the adverb well. Our analysis is corpus based, using quantitative data to explore macro-level trends in recent American English, and qualitative analysis to explore micro-level variation, particularly with regard to the development of concessive uses of may and might, and post-modal meanings more generally. We foreground the idea that modals show subtly different diachronic trends in specific collocations compared to perceived trends when looked at as an isolated class of auxiliary verbs.

This study uses electropalatography to examine linguopalatal contact differences between Japanese geminate and singleton consonants of various lingual places and manners of articulation. The analysis of over 8,000 tokens of these consonants produced by five Japanese speakers in three sets of stimuli (varying by the word lexical status, contrastive focus, and position within an utterance) showed significantly stronger constrictions for geminates of all places and manners, except for alveolopalatal fricatives. The geminate-singleton differences were the largest for alveolar and alveolopalatal nasals, while being the smallest for alveolopalatal affricates and velar stops. Durational differences between geminates and singletons were quite robust and tended to positively correlate with linguopalatal contact differences for most geminate and singleton consonants. No clear contact or durational differences were observed across the datasets, suggesting that the realization of the contrast is affected minimally by lexical status and position in the utterance. The findings for Japanese geminates are further discussed in the context of articulatory studies of similar contrasts in other languages.

The study of vowel quality has traditionally been based on single-point formant frequency measurements. There is considerable evidence now acknowledging spectral change as an essential part of the vowel system. Previous descriptions of Singapore English vowels have generally been impressionistic, with few offering detailed analysis of vowel quality and based on single-point formant frequency measurements at that. Collectively, they converge on the observations that the target monophthong pairs /i, ɪ/, /u, ʊ/, /ɔ, ɒ/, /ɑ, ʌ/, /æ, ɛ/ and /ɜ, ə/ are each realized as conflated single vowel sounds and the target diphthongs /ɛi/, /ɛə/ and /oʊ/ are monophthongized, with some overlap with the monophthongs listed above. This study analyzes the inherent spectral change of Singapore English vowels based on a dataset from the National Speech Corpus and examines possible contrast in duration between its tense-lax vowel pairs with the aim of providing an update on the description of its vowel system. Contrary to past conclusions, the present study finds no clear conflation of the monophthong pairs /i, ɪ/, /u, ʊ/, /ɔ, ɒ/, /ɑ, ʌ/ and /ɜ, ə/, or the reduction of /ɛə/. However, results do show the conflation of /æ/ and /ɛ/, and the monophthongization of /ɛi/ and /oʊ/.

Past research suggests that novel word learning is facilitated by multimodal contexts, which enrich semantic representations and strengthen memory traces. We explored whether environmental sounds (e.g., a creaking door) facilitate foreign language (FL) word learning. In all, 36 Spanish-speaking natives learned 60 written Spanish–FL word pairs, each accompanied by one of three sound conditions: a congruent sound matching the word pairs’ denotation, a meaningless tone or silence. Participants then completed a semantic priming and lexical decision task where reaction times and accuracy were collected. Performance was similar for congruent sound and tone conditions and, compared to silence, showed lower accuracy in the lexical decision task and a marginal benefit in the semantic task. These findings suggest that environmental sounds can influence learning, with varying effects depending on the task. Results are discussed in terms of current language learning models.

While literature on English modality has usually focused on traditional modal and semi-modal verbs, to our knowledge, no attention has ever been given to the emerging be having to (BHT) construction. Through corpus analysis conducted on GloWbE, ICE, BNC and CLMET, this article investigates the semantic differences between have to and BHT that make them distinct in the English constructicon. We demonstrate that BHT conveys meanings of contingency, reluctance and inchoativity, and propose that its recent emergence may stem from a specific functional gap within the English modal system. While have to appears to be gradually grammaticalizing with future-oriented functions, BHT seems to be renewing the original (and less grammaticalized) dynamic functions of have to. Finally, we explore the productivity of the construction across different English varieties and the reasons for its lower frequency in postcolonial varieties. The hypothesis of negative retentionism proposes that a feature that was absent in the lexifier language at the time of contact may indeed be found to be less frequently used in the contact variety at a later stage due to colonial lag.

People’s decisions may change when made in a foreign language (FL). Research testing this foreign language effect (FLE) has mostly used scenarios where uncertainty is expunged or reduced to a form of risk, whereas real-life decisions are usually characterized by uncertainty around outcome likelihood. In the current work, we aimed to investigate whether the FLE on decision-making extends to uncertain scenarios. Moreover, as it is still unclear what linguistic and psychological factors contribute to the FLE, we tested the effects of participants’ FL background, cognitive style and risk-taking attitude on decision processes under certain and uncertain conditions. Overall, we report null effects of language context (native versus foreign language) and problem condition (certain versus uncertain prospects) on participants’ choices. In addition, we found that both FL background and decision makers’ traits modulated participants’ choices in a FL, without emerging into the ‘classic’ FLE on decision-making. However, the direction of such effects was complex, and not always compatible with previous FLE theories. In light of these results, our study highlights the need to reconceptualize the FLE and its implications on decision-making.

While speakers are theorized to ideally not include unnecessary information (redundancy) in their utterances, in reality, they often do so. One potential reason is that linguistic redundancy facilitates language communication, especially when the addressee (interlocutor) is linguistically less competent (e.g., an artificial system). In three experiments, we examined whether linguistic redundancy may arise as a result of people’s tendency to use similar linguistic features as their interlocutor does during communication (i.e., linguistic alignment) and whether redundancy alignment (if any) differs with a human interlocutor versus a computer interlocutor. We also examined whether redundancy alignment is affected by the perceived competency of the interlocutor, participants’ abilities in theory of mind (ToM), and if redundancy alignment varied across time during the experiment. Participants carried out a picture matching and naming task with a human or computer interlocutor who either always or never included redundancies in their utterances. Redundancy alignment was found across all experiments, in that speakers produced more redundancies with a redundant interlocutor compared to a non-redundant one. This alignment was also modulated by the perceived competency of the interlocutor, the time course of the interaction, and ToM abilities, suggesting that redundancy usage is affected by both automatic and strategic mechanisms of linguistic alignment.

This research article examines the licensing of complementizer agreement with nominals (namely thematic subjects and objects) in the left periphery, focusing on data from Jordanian Arabic (JA). It demonstrates that obligatory complementizer agreement with A-bar elements is evident in JA grammar due to the effects of the Agree Identification Condition, which enforces an agreement inflection on the probe when the goal is not phonologically overt (e.g., a pro). This enforcement also applies when the probe agrees with a chain consisting of two silent links (e.g., when the complementizer agrees with a wh- or a focused element). This finding supports the proposal that the morphological realization of Agree dependencies is ruled by interface conditions, which are also proven to be responsible for the presence of an obligatorily overt complementizer when extraction of the embedded nominal takes place.

The integration of multiple linguistic modules – syntax, semantics and pragmatics – poses a persistent challenge for adult second language (L2) learners, as posited by the interface hypothesis (IH). This study examines how crosslinguistic influence impacts L2 learners’ acquisition and processing of Korean quotative constructions at the syntax–semantics–pragmatics interface. Using offline acceptability judgment and online self-paced reading tasks, we compared Japanese- and Chinese-speaking learners of Korean. The results revealed that Japanese-speaking learners outperformed Chinese-speaking learners in offline tasks, demonstrating native-like sensitivity to case-marking constraints, likely due to the structural similarities between Japanese and Korean. However, neither learner group exhibited sensitivity to case-marking violations during real-time processing, unlike native Korean speakers. These findings suggest a dissociation between explicit knowledge and online processing abilities, supporting the IH and emphasizing the persistent challenges of integrating multiple linguistic domains in L2 processing. This study underscores the role of crosslinguistic influence in facilitating explicit knowledge acquisition while revealing its limitations in fostering native-like automaticity in online processing.

In natural speech, phonetic cues that distinguish lexical items can be hyperarticulated when there is a minimal pair competitor, a process known as contrastive hyperarticulation. Building upon prior work, this article examines the cue-specific nature of contrastive hyperarticulation in Japanese, focussing on stop voice onset time (VOT) using a speech corpus. We confirmed that the existence of a voicing minimal pair competitor in the lexicon triggers hyperarticulation of VOT duration on the target segment (shorter for voiced stops and longer for voiceless stops), while other contrasts (singleton vs. geminate) did not. The results also suggest that contrastive hyperarticulation (a) is more compatible with casual speech than slow/clear speech, (b) is sensitive to position in a word (greater in word-initial position than in non-initial position) and (c) applies to a greater degree in Japanese than in English due to properties of stops. This provides further evidence that the phonetic specificity of contrastive hyperarticulation is cross-linguistically relevant.

Whether or not pre-planning extends beyond the initial noun in a noun phrase depends, in part, on the phrase’s dependency structure. Dependency structure disambiguates, in many contexts, the noun phrase’s reference. In the present experiment (N = 64), we demonstrate that advance planning is affected by the extent to which a dependency supports semantic disambiguation. Participants produced noun phrases in response to picture arrays. Syntax and lexemes were held constant, but semantic scope was manipulated by varying the contrastive functions of the first and the second noun. Evidence from eye-movement data revealed a stronger tendency for early planning in the extended scope condition. This is evidence that pre-planning requirements of structurally complex noun phrases are, in at least some contexts, determined by semantic functions.

The semiotic construction of corporate persons in law is key to the contemporary organization of global capitalism. The economic capacities enjoyed by corporations stem significantly from how the semiotics of corporate personhood work within domestic and international legal orders fundamentally designed for human persons. Signs (especially in documents—laws, incorporation papers, tax filings, etc.) construct corporations as legal persons—entities modeled on human persons yet differently bound to human embodiment. Corporations multiply themselves through the creation of legally independent corporate persons (“subsidiaries”), while unifying themselves through their control over these persons. Unlike human offspring, corporations’ corporate offspring are easily created, may take up residence in almost any jurisdiction, and always obey their parents. The paper will discuss the implications of these features of corporations with respect to tort liability, international trade, property, taxation, and private militaries.