American English Speakers Research Articles

Positioning updates as relevant

Telling about your day is a documented component of close relationships. In examining nearly 31 hours of video-recorded English-speaking American and Canadian families with young children primarily between the ages of three and six, this paper analyses how children solve the problem of producing relevant updates about the goings on of their day. Findings indicate that child-initiated updates are ‘touched off ’ by prior talk or something in the immediate environment. I find that child-initiated updates occur in three sequential environments: (1) when they are prompted by a specific word/ phrase, (2) when they are prompted by an object in the locally immediate environment, and (3) when they are prompted by the local ongoing activity. Importantly, these updates are retrospectively activated in that they are responsive to what just occurred before, but also initiate a new sequence. The updating practices described here provide further evidence of the interactional sophistication of young children in that they show how children can exploit the ongoing environment to deliver updates about their own lives.

The use of humor in Spanish and English compliment responses: A cross-cultural analysis

AbstractCompliments and compliment responses (CRs) are face threatening acts which may jeopardize the interlocutor’s positive and negative face. Compliment responses are especially challenging because of the need to balance accepting the compliment with saving face for not sounding arrogant. The use of humor in responding to a compliment can serve as a mitigating factor to respond to a compliment gracefully but with amusement to balance out the loss of face. The present study seeks to analyze humorous CRs in Spanish and English in order to establish cross-cultural comparisons. The results suggest some distinct cultural tendencies. American English speakers prefer self-denigrating humor whereas Peninsular Spanish use teasing and ironic upgrades. Spanish speakers also rely on a wider variety of linguistic resources to add humor to their CRs. Both language groups use humor as a tool to save face. Teasing among Peninsular Spanish is used to strengthen familiarity and closeness ties between interlocutors, a trait often associated with the positive politeness nature of Spanish culture. Self-denigrating humor in English CRs is described as ambiguous from a politeness perspective because it can preserve negative face by directing the humor to the speaker or it may be interpreted as an imposition to reiterate the compliment.

Topic Maintenance and Topic Transition in a Couple’s Dinnertime Conversation

This paper investigates the patterns of topic maintenance and topic transition used to create conversation and their accompanying structural features speakers employ to signal these two conversational phenomena. The data are a 21-minute dyadic dinnertime conversation between a boyfriend and girlfriend; they are both native speakers of American English, in their late twenties. The two significant findings of the study are as follows. First, the data reveal that the speakers used three major techniques, namely minimal responses, substitutions, and deletions, to maintain the same topic of the conversation (Goffman, 1983; Radford & Tarplee, 2000; Abu Akel, 2002; Sukrutrit, 2010; Jeon, 2012). Second, in the analysis of topic transition, the data show that the speakers resorted to different types of topic transitions (i.e., collaborative, unilateral, linked, minimally linked, and sudden) to end an ongoing topic and start a new one (West & Garcia, 1988; Ainsworth-Vaughn, 1992; Okamoto & Smith-Lovin, 2001; Sukrutrit, 2010; Jeon, 2012).

Favorite Words as a Window onto the Aesthetic Function of Language

This article characterizes the aesthetic properties of English words. One thousand adult speakers of American English reported their favorite words and justified their selections. Each word was coded for phonological characteristics, valence, and frequency of occurrence and compared with words from a corpus of everyday English from Reader’s Digest. The participants’ stated reasons for their selections were categorized as utilitarian (meaning, use) or aesthetic (form). Compared to the word types in the Reader’s Digest corpus, the favorite words were longer and lower in frequency of occurrence. They were less likely to include a sonorant consonant but more likely to include a repeated consonant. Consonant clusters were sparser among the favorite words. The majority of people justified their favorite words on utilitarian grounds, suggesting some difficulty considering form apart from meaning. The best predictors of aesthetic justifications were lower valence, lower frequency, longer length, higher sonority, and a higher density of lax vowels. People value words for the work they do—the meanings they convey. Nevertheless, people can appreciate words as objects, and when they do, novelty and musicality are privileged. This study informs our understanding of the aesthetic function of language and situates that function into a broader consideration of aesthetic appreciation.

The Age of Aidans: Cognitive Underpinnings of a New Trend in English Boys’ Names

Several sources have recently reported a trend in North American English boys’ names. According to this trend, a disproportionate number of boys’ names contain a final syllabic nasal. This paper presents two studies that investigate this observation systematically. A corpus linguistic study of the most popular names in Ontario and the USA revealed that around 40% of English boys’ names fit this pattern, which has been called “the Age of Aidans”. The second study was a lexical decision task. It was modeled after previous research on sound symbolism (phonosemantics). This experiment demonstrated that speakers preferred pseudo-names for boys that fit the “Age of Aidans”pattern. Taken together, the two studies suggest that final syllabic nasals can be compared to phonesthemes. Current North American speakers of English may perceive disyllabic names ending in syllabic nasals as “good” boys’ names.

Use of English Futures, Will vs. Be Going to: A Corpus-Based Comparison Study

The present study investigates usage of English futures, will and be going to, by Korean EFL learners and American native English speakers. The examined usage data are extracted from the native speaker corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and two learner corpora, the Kyungpook National University (KNU) Student English Learner Corpus-Written (KSELC-W) and the KNU English Learner Corpus (KELC), and compared to determine interlanguage developmental patterns and usage similarities or differences between native speakers and nonnative speakers. In support of existing literature, the findings from the current study reveal that the American native English speakers of COCA significantly overuse both will and be going to in the spoken register compared to the combined written registers. Furthermore, the findings also indicate that although the writing samples of the learner corpora were written during formal EFL education settings, will and be going to usage by the Korean EFL learners closely resemble the usage data of the combined written-all registers of COCA. Finally, semantic analyses show that the advanced learners of KSELC-W use be going to quite correctly with the semantic senses in the present form. In contrast to the learners in Coates (1983), they use be going to to deliver the sense of epistemicity rather than the root intention senses.

What’s Beyond the Language of Apology? A Case Study

This study investigates the realization of the speech act of apology. It seeks to analyze the linguistic patterns used to represent apology from a pragmalinguistic point of view. It aims at presenting an actual insight on the impact of gender and social practices on performing different apology strategies through providing empirical evidence on the impact of the mother tongue on acquiring apology competence by EFL learners. The study made use of the written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) including 20 scenarios administrated to three groups of respondents of both genders: 100 native speakers of Jordanian Arabic, 100 Jordanian EFL learners, and 50 native speakers of American English. The findings revealed that gender has influenced the use of different apology strategies between the males and females of each group. It was also indicated that the sociocultural practices have played a big role in the socio-linguistic realization of apology. This impact was more pronounced throughout the different preference to the use of apology strategies among the three groups. In addition, it was found that there are interlingual hypotheses concerning the foreign language pragmatics prompting the EFL learners to deviate from the native language and English norms of apology. Thus, it was concluded that the mother tongue influence is not the sole source of pragmatic deviations from the second language norms; this influence cannot be described as negative transfer but a creative process done by EFL Learners to master English.

Linguistic Influence on Russian and American Ethnobiological Categorization

In the Russian language, nouns are classified by gender and animacy, whereas in English, nouns are not. Using triad-sorts of names for biological and non-biological taxa, a comparison of results provided by native speakers of both languages reveals that cognitive categorizations of animate and inanimate nomenclatural forms differ significantly between speakers of Russian and American English. Speakers of American English appear to categorize names for living nouns more by phenotype than do Russians, who in turn appear to classify nouns more frequently on the basis of linguistic features such as gender. These results are believed to be pertinent to the elicitation and construction of folk ethnobiology taxonomies.

Nonword Repetition Across Two Dialects of English: Effects of Specific Language Impairment and Nonmainstream Form Density.

Purpose Nonword repetition (NWR) has been proposed as a culturally and linguistically fair measure of children's language abilities that is useful for the identification of specific language impairment (SLI). However, Moyle, Heilmann, and Finneran (2014) suggested that the density of a child's nonmainstream forms also influences NWR in ways that could complicate its use. Using speakers of either African American English (AAE) or Southern White English (SWE), we asked if NWR performance differed in children with SLI and same dialect-speaking typically developing (TD) children and if nonmainstream form density impacted their scores. Method The participants were 106 kindergartners (AAE: SLI n = 35; TD n = 35; SWE: SLI n = 18; TD n = 18; groups matched for age and IQ) who performed the NWR task of Dollaghan and Campbell (1998) . Nonmainstream form density measures were gathered from listener judgments of conversational samples. Results NWR performance differed between those with and without SLI, but the difference was smaller in AAE than in SWE, especially at the longest syllable length. Nonmainstream form density was found to further explain NWR performance beyond the children's SLI status for AAE speakers; density and SLI status were confounded for the SWE speakers, making it harder to disentangle the effects of each in that dialect. Conclusions Results indicate the NWR may differ in diagnostic utility between speakers of different dialects. Results also support Moyle et al.'s (2014) finding that density affects NWR. Thus, NWR is more sensitive to dialectal differences than originally assumed.

A Corpus of Regional American Language from YouTube

Recent years have seen an increase in the number of corpora of regional language variation for English, allowing new types of aggregate analysis to be conducted. While the creation of a corpus from written language material is relatively straightforward, transcribing speech is time-consuming, and thus there are no large corpora of transcribed American speech with broad geographic coverage. This paper describes the creation of a new corpus of regional American English from the automatically generated captions of videos from YouTube channels with a local American focus – mainly channels of regional and local government entities or civic organizations. The corpus, which consists of transcripts of over 29,267 hours of spoken language, will enable the analysis of regional patterns of lexical, morphosyntactic, and other types of variation in spoken American English. Exploratory analysis and mapping of the corpus data indicates regional variation in spoken language is evident.

Phonetic Convergence, Language Talent, Personality and Attention

Studies into phonetic adaptation rarely consider individual differences (IDs) on a cognitive and personality level between speakers as a direct source of adaptation variation. In order to investigate the degree to which the individual phonetic talent and further psycho-cognitive IDs of speakers affects phonetic convergence in a second language setting, 20 German native speakers were involved in two dialog tasks with two native speakers of English, a male speaker of American English and a female speaker of Standard Southern British English. The dialogs were quasi-spontaneous task-oriented interactions elicited with the Diapix picture-matching game. The English L2 learners were divided into a phonetically talented and less talented group based on their test results and evaluation in a preceding extensive language talent test battery. The acoustic analyses using amplitude envelopes revealed that talented speakers converged significantly more towards their English native speaking partners in the Diapix study. An additional analysis relates their degree of convergence to a range of personality and cognitive measures. The factors openness, neuroticism, Behavior Inhibition score and the switch costs in a Simon Test were significantly impacting the degree of phonetic convergence in the dialog study.

КОГНИТИВНАЯ СТРУКТУРА СКАЗОЧНОЙ АЛЛЮЗИИ С КОМПОНЕНТОМ «ЗОЛУШКА» (CINDERELLA): СРАВНИТЕЛЬНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ НА ОСНОВЕ КОРПУСНОГО ПОДХОДА

The article provides a comparative analysis of a fairy-tale allusion functioning in the speech of native speakers of Russian and American English. The study focuses on identifying nationally specific components of the cognitive structure of the allusion with the component Золушка/Cinderella and on describing the peculiarities of the linguistic worldview, which influence the coding and decoding of an image. The analysed frames and sub-frames constituting the structure of this allusion manifested cardinally different associative relations actualized during its usage and, consequently, different motivation for using the allusion based on this comparison.

Do gestures retain mental associations with their iconic origins, even after they become emblematic? An analysis of the middle-finger gesture among American English speakers.

What concepts and words do communicative gestures activate in the minds of people who view them? It’s widely believed that many gestures grow from iconic origins—they look like what they mean—but also that at some point they may become emblematic—conventionalized as culturally agreed-upon symbols. How long do links between physical movements of the body and the things in the world they denote persist in the minds of gesture-users? A pair of experiments asks this question for the Middle-Finger, a cross-culturally recognized obscene gesture. The prevailing view is that the gesture originates in a phallic symbol. Yet it is now predominantly used as an emblematic gesture displaying contempt (among other things). It is currently unknown whether the iconic origins of gestures persist through the emblematic stage in the minds of gesture users. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that viewing the Middle-Finger primes thoughts about penises or the word penis. The results showed that the Middle-Finger induced no priming of penis compared with control, unlike another obscene penis-representing gesture (Finger-Bang), which did. This suggests that the Middle-Finger no longer activates thoughts of penises in the minds of contemporary American English speakers. Emblematic gestures with iconic origins may undergo historical change not just in the functions they serve but also in the effects they have on the minds of people who use them.

Lexicon and Scenarios of Touch Perception: Towards Developing a Research Thesaurus

The paper shows the important advance in sensory neuroscience achieved with a recent discovery of C-tactile system integrating mechanosensitive C fibers that innervate the hairy skin and representing the neurobiological substrate for the affective and rewarding properties of touch. It has drawn scientists' attention to social touch research and has increased the demand for developing psychometric instruments of touch perception assessment calling for developing an elaborated and cross-culturally validated touch lexicon. The paper focuses on creating a Russian touch lexicon and assessing the relevance of different sensory and emotional characteristics (a list of 270 adjectives and participles) to active ('I touch', 80 participants) and passive ('I am being touched', 75 participants) scenarios of touch perception by native speakers of the Russian language. A comparison to previously reported data for the sample of American English speakers has revealed a general similarity of Russian and English touch lexicons. Active touch perception scenario was characterized by the dominance of haptic characteristics (features relevant to sensory properties of objects), while in passive touch perception scenario a prominent increase was observed for the perceived relevance of touch recipient's sensory experience characteristics including words related to pain, tickle, chafing, and itch. The results suggest that the choice of particular words used in task descriptions and in semantic differential scales should be made relevant to the particular touch perception scenarios, rather than relying on a limited generic touch lexicon.

Pennsylvania Germans, An Interpretive Encyclopedia, by Simon J. Bronner and Joshua R. Brown, editors.

<i>Pennsylvania Germans, An Interpretive Encyclopedia</i>, by Simon J. Bronner and Joshua R. Brown, editors.

ПОДКАСТЫ ИНТЕРНЕТ-РЕСУРСА ALL EARS ENGLISH В ОБУЧЕНИИ ИНТЕРАКТИВНОЙ СТОРОНЕ УСТНОГО ОБЩЕНИЯ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ СТУДЕНТОВ УРОВНЯ B2-C1

In the article, requirements for interaction skills for advanced (B2-C1) students learning English are presented. It is shown that podcasts have significant linguo-didactic potential for teaching the interactive aspect of oral foreign-language communication to B2-C1 students by the example of the podcasts of the Internet resource All Ears English that can serve as a source of information on linguistic and extralinguistic features of interaction in the modern American culture and is an authentic standard of the American English speakers’ speech behaviour. The structure and thematic groups of All Ears English podcasts are defined on the basis of speech strategies and means of communication.

Dialects "haven’t got to" be the same: modal microvariation in English

This paper concerns itself with dialectal differences between British Eng-lish (BrE) and American English (AmE) regarding modal have-got and its scope with respect to sentential negation. Modal haven’t got is perfectly acceptable in BrE, meaning ‘not obligated to’ in the standard variety. In AmE, modal have-got is somewhat degraded when the have has unambiguously raised, and especially so when it is negated, as shown in a preliminary acceptability judgement survey of American English speakers. An analysis in terms of polarity sensitivity is inadequate, and Iatridou &amp; Zeijlstra’s (2013) syntax for modals is overly restrictive in the face of scopally ambiguous have not (got) to in non-standard varieties of BrE. We propose an analysis in terms of the locus of modality: whereas have and got are separate in BrE, in AmE have-got is a scopally indivisible whole. Finally, we evaluate how well this analysis extends to an additional dialectal difference in verb phrase ellipsis (LeSourd 1976), where the have of have-got survives ellipsis in BrE but not AmE.

ESL learners’ intra-speaker variability in producing American English tense and lax vowels

Abstract Nonnative (L2) English learners are often assumed to exhibit greater speech production variability than native (L1) speakers; however, support for this assumption is primarily limited to secondary observations rather than having been the specific focus of empirical investigations. The present study examined intra-speaker variability associated with L2 English learners’ tense and lax vowel productions to determine whether they showed comparable or greater intra-speaker variability than native English speakers. First and second formants of three tense/lax vowel pairs were measured, and Coefficient of Variation was calculated for 10 native speakers of American English and 30 nonnative speakers. The L2 speakers’ vowel formants were found to be native-like approximately half of the time. Whether their formants were native-like or not, however, they seldom showed greater intra-speaker variability than the L1 speakers.

Relations between language skills and problem behaviour in preschool children

ABSTRACT The purpose of the study was to explore whether gender or ethnicity moderated the links between language skills and teacher ratings of problem behaviour and between language and social skills in 386 English-speaking Hispanic and European American preschool children from low-income families. The Preschool Language Scale-4 was administered individually to each child participant. Teachers completed the Child Behavior Checklist/11/2–5 and the Social Skills Rating System for each participant. Results indicated that gender or ethnicity did not moderate the relationships between language skills and problem behaviours. However, the association between language skills and social skills was influenced by gender or ethnicity.

Transfer in speech motor learning: The role of voicing

Previous studies have demonstrated that American English speakers can improve their production of phonotactically illegal onset clusters (e.g., DBEEGO) after structured practice. However, the nature of what is learned remains incompletely understood. We use a transfer paradigm to address this question by examining performance on trained and untrained novel consonant sequences. In particular, we investigated whether the differences between voiced and voiceless stop-stop clusters (e.g., /gd/ vs. /kt/) influences transfer of learning, hypothesizing that the voiced clusters involve more complex motor control. Forty native speakers of American English practiced nonwords beginning with either voiced (/gd/, /db/, /gb/) or voiceless (/kt/, /kp/, /tp/) stop-stop onset clusters. All participants were tested on both types of clusters at baseline (prior to practice) and in two retention sessions (20 minutes (R1) and 2 days (R2) after practice). Blinded coders rated cluster accuracy based on presence of a vowel in the acoustics. Preliminary results (n = 10) indicate a trend of bi-directional transfer, with participants in both practice conditions exhibiting improved accuracy for both trained and untrained clusters. Previous studies have demonstrated that American English speakers can improve their production of phonotactically illegal onset clusters (e.g., DBEEGO) after structured practice. However, the nature of what is learned remains incompletely understood. We use a transfer paradigm to address this question by examining performance on trained and untrained novel consonant sequences. In particular, we investigated whether the differences between voiced and voiceless stop-stop clusters (e.g., /gd/ vs. /kt/) influences transfer of learning, hypothesizing that the voiced clusters involve more complex motor control. Forty native speakers of American English practiced nonwords beginning with either voiced (/gd/, /db/, /gb/) or voiceless (/kt/, /kp/, /tp/) stop-stop onset clusters. All participants were tested on both types of clusters at baseline (prior to practice) and in two retention sessions (20 minutes (R1) and 2 days (R2) after practice). Blinded coders rated cluster accuracy based on presence of a vowel in the...