English Norms Research Articles

EMOVAL : évaluation automatique de la valence et de l’activation émotionnelles des textes à l’aide d’une méta-norme de 5656 mots-racines

EMOVAL: automatic evaluation the emotional valence and arousal of texts using a 5656 root-words metanorm. EMOVAL is an emotional valence and arousal analysis model of texts. EMOVAL draws from linguistic tradition the hypothesis that every word has a denotative aspect (“meaning”) and a connotative aspect (“affective halo”). It uses a meta-analysis of seven French norms and one English norm with the objective to characterize the emotional valence of texts, paragraphs, or sentences in a pleasant or unpleasant way. The meta-analysis indicates that the seven French norms data are highly correlated in between (0.82 to 0.99), and highly correlated with the Affectiv Norm for English Words ( Bradley et Lang, 1999) (0.81 to 0.97). Arousal values taken from Affective Norm for English Words (ANEW) ( Bradley et Lang, 1999) and the Leleu (1987) norm are significately correlated (0.55). The metanorm has 5656 words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) characterized in valence (−1 to +1), and 3265 words characterized in arousal. These items are used by EMOVAL for valence judgments of texts. Two types of texts are proposed: the evaluation of the whole (702) or of extracts (110) of a corpus of sentences judged in a seven-point scale (−3 very unpleasant to +3 very pleasant) ( Bestgen et al., 2004), and of 12 texts positively valenced (happiness and good surprise) and negatively valenced (fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and bad surprise). These two types of tests confirm the psychological pertinence of EMOVAL. Limits regarding the arousal dimension are discussed. The metanorm presented in this article can be obtained from the authors.

Native-speaker and English as a lingua franca pronunciation norms: English majors’ views

Within the communicative approach to English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, the aims of instruction are primarily to enable learners to communicate; hence, functional and communicative intelligibility has become the goal of pronunciation training. On the other hand, contemporary approaches to EFL teaching leave sufficient room for accommodating the individual learner and contextual factors which largely influence the choice of the target pronunciation models. Moreover, in a globalized world, where English has become a contemporary lingua franca for intercultural communication, the pronunciation norms of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) appear to meet the needs and expectations of learners of English in international settings, coexisting with or replacing native-speaker pronunciation models as the target of instruction. The ELF approach and the Lingua Franca Core elaborated by Jenkins (2000, 2002) have aroused controversy among both researchers and EFL teachers. The paper presents the findings of a questionnaire study involving 234 Polish students, English majors, which aimed to determine their preferences and opinions concerning native-speaker and ELF norms as pronunciation instruction targets. The findings revealed a strong preference for native-like pronunciation models in the subjects’ own language development and a less strong preference for such models in pronunciation teaching at all levels of proficiency. Moreover, the results pointed to the significant role played by the intensity of pronunciation training and the level of awareness of native-speaker pronunciation models in shaping the subjects’ attitudes toward native-like and ELF pronunciation norms.

Convict Bastards, Common-Law Unions, and Shotgun Weddings

This article uses reconstituted family data from birth, death, and marriage registers to measure ex-nuptial fertility and premarital pregnancies in nineteenth-century Tasmania. It also examines the extent to which convict origins of European society on the island caused a departure from English norms of family formation behavior, during a period when men greatly outnumbered women. Illegitimacy was high during the convict period. From the mid-1850s, after the convict system collapsed, levels of ex-nupital births were relatively constant until the end of the century, as indicated both by the illegitimacy rate and by the proportion of marriages associated with prenuptial births. By the end of the nineteenth-century, rates of illegitimacy and prenuptial conceptions in Tasmania were well within the range of those of contemporary English-speaking populations.

Conceptualization of American English native speaker norms: a case study of an English language classroom in South Korea

This case study aims to reveal how conceptualization of native speakership was constructed and reinforced in a South Korean university classroom of English as a foreign language (EFL). In addition, it examines how this conceptualization positions native speakers, a non-native EFL teacher, and learners, and what learning opportunities were provided in this classroom. The participants of the study were one instructor and his students. The data include classroom observations, interviews with the teacher and students, and student surveys. The findings indicate that the students had been exposed to American English more frequently than any other English variety. Also, they wanted to learn American English in and outside of the classroom. Furthermore, this study shows that American English norms were revealed in the teacher’s beliefs and reinforced in his classroom through his instructional materials, classroom practices, and evaluation of the students. Thus, as a mediator between native speakers and learners, the teacher positioned native speakers as authoritative possessors of correct pronunciation and expressions for his students to imitate. Consequently, the students learned about pronunciation and informal expressions as modeled by American native speakers rather than learning to use the L2 communicatively as recommended by the institutional policy. This study has important implications for English language teaching in South Korea, specifically in terms of the concepts of native speakership, student learning, and teacher education.

Word recognition reflects dimension-based statistical learning.

Speech processing requires sensitivity to long-term regularities of the native language yet demands listeners to flexibly adapt to perturbations that arise from talker idiosyncrasies such as nonnative accent. The present experiments investigate whether listeners exhibit dimension-based statistical learning of correlations between acoustic dimensions defining perceptual space for a given speech segment. While engaged in a word recognition task guided by a perceptually unambiguous voice-onset time (VOT) acoustics to signal beer, pier, deer, or tear, listeners were exposed incidentally to an artificial "accent" deviating from English norms in its correlation of the pitch onset of the following vowel (F0) to VOT. Results across four experiments are indicative of rapid, dimension-based statistical learning; reliance on the F0 dimension in word recognition was rapidly down-weighted in response to the perturbation of the correlation between F0 and VOT dimensions. However, listeners did not simply mirror the short-term input statistics. Instead, response patterns were consistent with a lingering influence of sensitivity to the long-term regularities of English. This suggests that the very acoustic dimensions defining perceptual space are not fixed and, rather, are dynamically and rapidly adjusted to the idiosyncrasies of local experience, such as might arise from nonnative-accent, dialect, or dysarthria. The current findings extend demonstrations of "object-based" statistical learning across speech segments to include incidental, online statistical learning of regularities residing within a speech segment.

Hymnic Epic andThe Faerie Queene’s Original Printed Format: Canto-Canticles and Psalmic Arguments*

AbstractWhen Edmund Spenser (1552?–99) published hisFaerie Queenein 1590 and 1596, two pervasive structural features would have seemed surprising: the abbreviationCant.in sectional and running titles, used instead ofCanto;and a four-line stanza of common meter for each section's argument, instead of a more expansive and prestigious stanza. Study of the relevant early modern Italian and English norms of publication indicates that these were complementary and innovative means of merging heroic form with divine poetry and hymnic discourse, and recognized as such.Cant.readily suggestedcanticleand the Solomonic Canticles, and the poet himself calls one of his so-called cantos a “canticle” (4.5.46). In style and prosodic form, his arguments would have particularly evoked the nationally distinctive Elizabethan Protestant psalmody and hymnody, as well as popular ballads. By incorporating these two metamorphic devices intoThe Faerie Queene's framework, Spenser reconfigured the heroic poem to serve his different, English vision.

Shift in Controlled English Norms for Different Purposes and for Different Machine Translation Systems

This research identifies different controlled English (CE) norms to be followed in technical writing for a variety of purposes and for different machine translation (MT) systems. The results of the investigation show that CE norms for MT application are stricter than those for communicative reading. The primary inference here is that human beings can interpret the meanings of polysemous words, pronouns, prepositional phrases based on the context and easily detect the misspellings, but MT systems fail to do so. In addition, a comparison of CE norms for the application of two MT systems indicates that the corpus-based Google MT is less constrained than rule-based TransWhiz in the lexical area. This phenomenon is attributable to the selection of a highly probabilistic module as the semantic scoring preference for the suggested translation provided by Google MT, not word-for-word translation by TransWhiz. In contrast, Google MT is more constrained than TransWhiz in the syntactic area. The inference is that TransWhiz parses syntactic constructions and transfers the parsing result based on grammatical rules stored in the MT system, so it may modify the original word sequence to make the translation conform to linguistic patterns in the target language. Contrary to this, Google MT depends on fuzzy or exact matches statistically retrieved from the labeled corpus. If no matches can be found, syntactically inappropriate translations will be produced. Seen in this regard, CE norms are never fixed and have to be modified through the evolution of time and MT technology.

Accommodating (to) ELF in the international university

This article takes as its starting point the fact that the majority of universities in which English is the medium of instruction perceive themselves to be deeply international. Firstly, the article considers the implications of being ‘international’ for academic language policies and practices, but observes that despite the diverse international composition of university student (and to a lesser extent, staff) populations, university language policies and practices are still grounded in largely national (British and North American) English norms. The article goes on to explore the relevance of the findings of research into English as a(n academic) lingua franca for multilingual academic communities, as well as for international academic journals. Finally, it considers the implications of ELF research for native English academics, and argues that as ELF gains acceptance, particularly among younger multilingual speakers, and as multilingualism becomes the global academic norm, native English speakers, especially the monolingual majority, are at risk of becoming disadvantaged when communicating in international settings.

Ownership and maintenance of a language in transnational use: Should we leave our lingua franca alone?

English is a very special language in that it has many more non-native speakers than native speakers, and that it is used in far more settings where there are no native speakers present than in those between or including native speakers. Many of these settings are within contexts of higher education, due to increased transnational student mobility, university teacher mobility and offshore delivery of university education. In this paper it is argued that in discussing norms for international English, an ownership discourse and a maintenance (or cultivation) discourse should be distinguished. Some ideas from public goods theory are introduced that could be applied to an appreciation of international English. Finally, it is argued why even a language in international use needs cultivation.

British English norms for the spontaneous completion of three-letter word stems

Word stem completion tasks involve showing participants a number of words and then later asking them to complete word stems to make a full word. If the stem is completed with one of the studied words, it indicates memory. It is a test widely used to assess both implicit and explicit forms of memory. An important aspect of stimulus selection is that target words should not frequently be generated spontaneously from the word stem, to ensure that production of the word really represents memory. In this article, we present a database of spontaneous stem completion rates for 395 stems from a group of 80 British undergraduate psychology students. It includes information on other characteristics of the words (word frequency, concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, common part of speech, and number of letters) and, as such, can be used to select suitable words to include in a stem completion task. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

The Marriage of Mother and Father: Michif Influences as Expressions of Métis Intellectual Sovereignty in <em>Stories of the Road Allowance People</em>

The Marriage of Mother and FatherMichif Influences as Expressions of Métis Intellectual Sovereignty in Stories of the Road Allowance People Mareike Neuhaus (bio) In an article discussing the textualization of performance, J. Edward Chamberlin has noted with reference to the work of Renato Rosaldo and Julie Cruikshank that "we need to get back to that simple discipline of looking at (and listening to) texts, rather than always looking through or around or behind or underneath them" (86). I agree; as literary critics, we need to reexamine the question of language and language use in Indigenous literatures—for a number of reasons. Firstly, even if, as Lee Maracle (Stó:lō) has argued, language "is not the main" but "one means of expression of culture" ("Ramparts" 169; emphasis added), the way in which language is used creates meaning and implicates modes of being and thinking. Secondly, to echo what Margery Fee observed in the 1990s (31), ancestral languages and discourse conventions are far more central in Indigenous writing and storytelling than is generally assumed or acknowledged by Euroamerican academics. As Andrea Bear Nicholas (Maliseet) observes in "The Assault on Aboriginal Oral Traditions," the colonization of North America not only implied the theft of land and resources from Indigenous peoples but also involved breaking these peoples' connections to the land. Since these connections were ultimately expressed in and performed through the oral traditions, Bear Nichols writes, it is the latter that needed to be eradicated; hence the establishment of the residential and boarding school systems in Canada and the United States. There is thus, according to Bear Nicholas, a direct "correlation between the destruction of oral traditions and the colonial project [End Page 20] of dispossession" and consequently also between the destruction of the land and that of Indigenous languages (19). Indigenous mother tongues in North America have suffered immensely through colonialism; many of these languages have become extinct in the past five hundred years, and many others are threatened to become extinct in the very near future. Thus, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese have become the first languages for most Indigenous people living in North America today.1 When, in the face of this vast linguistic loss, Craig Womack (Creek/Cherokee) argues that English is "an Indian language," this observation makes sense when seen from the point of view of parole. For, as Womack rightly points out, English is used by many Indigenous people in large parts of Canada and the United States (404). In their use of this language, however, Indigenous people have "Indigenized" English more than it has altered Indigenous ways of expression. In fact, as I will argue here, Indigenous uses of the English language mark one of the means available to Indigenous storytellers and writers to preserve and celebrate their tribe's intellectual sovereignty, a prerequisite for other kinds of sovereignty. For this purpose, I will discuss the use of language in Maria Campbell's Stories of the Road Allowance People, which—to apply Pamela Sing's description of Michif to the Métis variant of English used in this collection—is all of the following: "non-normative, anti-institutional, perhaps anti-State, interrelational and relativizing" ("Intersections"). In Stories of the Road Allowance People, Maria Campbell marries Mother (symbolizing land and grammar) and Father (symbolizing story and lexicon) to weave a narrative that reflects not only the genesis of the Métis People and their language but also the importance of "membering" as a performance of Métis peoplehood. Campbell's motivation for translating the stories of her own Métis community in northern Saskatchewan into a Michif English code may not originally have been to create and claim intellectual sovereignty. Instead, she seems to have followed mainly her feelings, her sense of community, and her ear for her people's storytelling when working on this collection. And yet, every single reading of Stories of the Road Allowance People is ultimately a "performance" of stories that create meaning and function outside [End Page 21] the norms of standard English and Euroamerican thought, and may thus be regarded as an expression of intellectual sovereignty. I believe, therefore, that the manner in which the voices of the Road...

French categorization norms for 70 semantic categories and comparison with Van Overschelde et al.’s (2004) English norms

The present methodological note provides categorization norms for 70 semantic categories collected from 200 participants. The categories were mainly derived from a French translation of the Van Overschelde, Rawson, and Dunlosky (2004) inductor terms including a large set of semantic categories. Our study also extends recent French norms (Léger, Boumlak, & Tijus, 2008; Marchal & Nicolas, 2003) and tests their stability. These 70 categories constitute the widest French categorization norms to date and will be of use to studies in the fields of both linguistics and psycholinguistics. A cross-linguistic comparison, with both quantitative and qualitative results, is also performed, which should prove useful for bilingual and/or cross-linguistic studies. The norms collected for all 70 categories are available for download as supplemental materials from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Negotiating Europe's Lingua Franca

English has spread and is used around the world, often as a rational choice made by professional groups and bilingual speech communities. In Europe, it is used as a language of wider communication or a lingua franca. This study argues that although English can be the means of expression of local or national or European identities, and even though ‘Euro-English’ has some identifiable features, it is unlikely to develop into a distinct, stable, codifiable and teachable variety, wholly independent of native English norms.

On Comparing French and English Contract Law: Insights from Social Contract Theory

I here argue that the same thought structure that underlies French contract law (contractual interpretation and contractual mistake) also underlies French social contract theory (Rousseau), whereas a different thought structure underlies both English contract law and English social contract theory (Hobbes and Locke). More specifically, I claim that, on the French side, facts and norms tend to be neatly delineated from one another and clear prevalence is given to the norms, whereas, on the English side, facts and norms tend to be interwoven within a clear prevalence of the factual. The immediate purpose of this argument is to show that the differences revealed through a comparative analysis of French and English law in fact are part of a larger pattern of difference between French and English ways of thinking. Less immediately, but no less importantly, the piece is meant to provide an example of comparative law operating as a self-standing academic discipline.

Do English speakers address their Japanese colleagues by their first name, while talking in English in Japan?

This study examines how English speakers address, and are addressed by, their Japanese colleagues in Japan, and the deciding factors and motivation for the choice of address-forms in a given context. The local norms of English and Japanese are also examined through interviews with 15 British and 15 Japanese office workers in their home countries, to investigate the differences between the two norms that may cause English speakers and Japanese difficulty when showing familiarity in cross-cultural interaction. For the actual analysis of the interaction in English between English speakers and Japanese, I examined two English language teaching TV programmes, and interviewed seven English speakers and four Japanese speakers working in Japan. The main analysis focuses on how English speakers employ address-forms with their Japanese colleagues at work, in English in Japan. The analysis shows that speaking in English does not always mean following English norms, and that English speakers often accommodate the address-form of their Japanese colleagues to local norms, i.e. last name + san. This decision seems to be heavily influenced by not only the local context, but the Japanese speakers' English proficiency level. When Japanese colleagues are not ready to accept the use of their first name, then English speakers' adoption of the local norms seems to be an effective approach to establishing solidarity, which seems to be crucial in a cross-cultural business context.

Enacting English language ownership in the Outer Circle: a study of Singaporean Indians' orientations to English norms

ABSTRACT: Singapore is unique in that it has not only embraced English as one of its official languages, but has made the language of its colonizers the de facto working language of the nation and the sole medium of instruction in all its schools, while assigning its other three official languages, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, an L2 status in the school curriculum. With the use of English institutionalized in almost all domains of life, present‐ day Singaporeans grow up as ‘English‐knowing’ bilinguals, acquiring English in the process of its use and interaction in school, in the playground, in the workplace, and increasingly in the home as well, making them native speakers of their variety of English. This raises interesting questions with regard to the ownership and authority of Singaporean speakers, and as to their legitimacy as mother‐tongue speakers of the language. Drawing on Higgins' (2003) study on speakers' orientations towards English norms of Inner and Outer Circle countries, we examined Singaporean speakers' degree of ownership of their English norms along the dimensions of age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. In this paper we discuss some data from this ongoing study relating specifically to the language use of Singapore's Indian community, with a focus on how they positioned themselves in the process of articulating their orientations to English norms.

English language ownership among Singaporean Malays: going beyond the NS/NNS dichotomy

ABSTRACT: Singapore represents what Kachru calls an Outer Circle country. English is an official language, the de facto working language of the nation, and is the medium of instruction in all schools. Yet, with three dominant races and their affiliated languages, there is no single pattern of English language acquisition among Singaporeans. While some do indeed learn English as a second language, others acquire it in the process of its use and interaction, much like first language speakers in Inner Circle countries. Among other things, this makes these speakers native users of their variety of English. While much research has been done on the different varieties of English and their legitimacy, we explore speakers' orientations towards and degree of ownership of their English norms in one language community, Singaporean Malays, taking into account race, age, and socioeconomic class. The Malay community is interesting because, while most still use Malay as their predominant home language, English is making rapid inroads. By looking at English speakers across age and socioeconomic categories, we are able to capture a snapshot of their language ownership in transition, taking us beyond the NS/NNS dichotomy and nuancing the meanings of English in Singaporean society.

Translation norms for English and Spanish: The role of lexical variables, word class, and L2 proficiency in negotiating translation ambiguity

We present a set of translation norms for 670 English and 760 Spanish nouns, verbs and class ambiguous items that varied in their lexical properties in both languages, collected from 80 bilingual participants. Half of the words in each language received more than a single translation across participants. Cue word frequency and imageability were both negatively correlated with number of translations. Word class predicted number of translations: Nouns had fewer translations than did verbs, which had fewer translations than class-ambiguous items. The translation probability of specific responses was positively correlated with target word frequency and imageability, and with its form overlap with the cue word. Translation choice was modulated by L2 proficiency: Less proficient bilinguals tended to produce lower probability translations than more proficient bilinguals, but only in forward translation, from Ll to L2. These findings highlight the importance of translation ambiguity as a factor influencing bilingual representation and performance. The norms can also provide an important resource to assist researchers in the selection of experimental materials for studies of bilingual and monolingual language performance. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Language of administration and neuropsychological test performance in neurologically intact Hispanic American bilingual adults

This study compared the performance of Hispanic American bilingual adults on Spanish and English language versions of a neuropsychological test battery. Language achievement test scores were used to divide 36 bilingual, neurologically intact, Hispanic Americans from south Texas into Spanish-dominant, balanced, and English-dominant bilingual groups. They were administered the eight subtests of the Bateria Neuropsicologica and the Matrix Reasoning subtest of the WAIS-III in Spanish and English. Half the participants were tested in Spanish first. Balanced bilinguals showed no significant differences in test scores between Spanish and English language administrations. Spanish and/or English dominant bilinguals showed significant effects of language of administration on tests with higher language compared to visual perceptual weighting (Woodcock-Munoz Language Survey-Revised, Letter Fluency, Story Memory, and Stroop Color and Word Test). Scores on tests with higher visual-perceptual weighting (Matrix Reasoning, Figure Memory, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, and Spatial Span), were not significantly affected by language of administration, nor were scores on the Spanish/California Verbal Learning Test, and Digit Span. A problem was encountered in comparing false positive rates in each language, as Spanish norms fell below English norms, resulting in a much higher false positive rate in English across all bilingual groupings. Use of a comparison standard (picture vocabulary score) reduced false positive rates in both languages, but the higher false positive rate in English persisted.

The Influence of Aspects of Social Identity on the Development of L2 Phonology

Over time, second language (L2) speech production changes as the learner gains more experience with the language. Factors such as interaction with native speakers of the learner’s L2 are known to play an important role. It is less clear to what extent, if at all, aspects of social identity influence the development of the L2 (Hansen Edwards 2008:372– 373). This longitudinal study examines the development of the actor Jackie Chan’s L2 (English) phonology. His speech production in two time periods 9 years apart is contrasted: in 1998, before he gained success in the English-speaking world; and in 2007, after he had released multiple Hollywood blockbusters.To check that factors such as age of acquisition were not the only reason for a lack of alignment over time towards English native-speaker norms, another context was taken from 2007, namely, an interview with a French native speaker. In foreigner-directed speech, there exists a pressure to produce more standard variants (Zuengler 1991:234). If Chan uses fewer non-standard variants with a non-native English speaker than with a native English speaker, it would imply that there is some degree of intent in his usage of non-standard forms and that his development, or lack thereof, is not only due to uncontrollable factors of second language acquisition.Two variables are examined: his production of stops in word-final codas containing a single stop and in wordfinal consonant clusters containing a stop as the final consonant. Native speakers of English generally pronounce these stops, whereas native speakers of Chinese often simplify them by deleting or glottalising them (Setter et al. 2010:15, Hansen 2001:340).In 2007, Chan is found to use a greater rate of the standard non-simplified variant than previously; however, he also simplifies his pronunciation by deleting the stop in the codas more often than in 1998. He uses standard forms that align with English native speakers to a greater extent when talking to non-native speakers. After 9 years of working in Hollywood, he would have gained more experience with English due to his social network consisting of more English native speakers, resulting in the expected increased alignment with native-speaker norms. However, his English has developed so that the non-standard variant of deletion is also used to a greater extent; the usage of this variant emphasises Chan’s identity as a Chinese native speaker. This emphasis is possible because of his success in between the two time periods: not only does he no longer have to align as much as possible with English native speakers so as to appeal to the English-speaking market, his success as a specifically Chinese martial artist means that highlighting his identity as a Chinese native speaker has more linguistic capital. Thus, it seems that factors of an L2 learner’s social identity do indeed influence the acquisition and development of their L2.