Welsh-English Research Articles

Welsh–English bilingual adolescents’ performance on verbal analogy and verbal classification tasks: the role of language exposure and use on vocabulary knowledge

ABSTRACT Numerous studies suggest that bilinguals demonstrate smaller vocabularies than monolinguals, and that bilinguals’ breadth of vocabulary knowledge – both expressive and receptive – is linked to input frequencies in each language [e.g. Hoff, E., S. Welsh, S. Place, and K. Ribot. 2014. “Properties of Dual Language Input That Shape Bilingual Development and Properties of Environments That Shape Dual Language Input.” In Input and Experience in Bilingual Development, edited by T. Grüter, and J. Paradis, Vol. 13, 119–140. Amserdam: John Benjamins]. However, relatively little is known about the quality of bilinguals’ knowledge of the words they do know (e.g. their understanding of how words relate to each other semantically) and how input frequencies influence that knowledge. Using the Cognitive Abilities Tasks – 4 (CAT-4), this study explored the potential links between three types of input sources – home language exposure, self-reported rates of language use in general, and language use with friends – and bilinguals’ performance on two types of vocabulary tests in both Welsh and English: verbal analogy and verbal categorisation. Results revealed similar performance across-the-board in relation to their knowledge of English vocabulary, regardless of their exposure to and use of Welsh and/or English in general and with friends, but their knowledge of the links between words in Welsh was related to home language exposure and rates of language use. The implications and application of these results in practice are discussed.

In their own words: amplifying critical literacy and social justice pedagogy through spoken word poetry

ABSTRACT Drawn from an ethnographic study of spoken word poetry in Australia, this article offers case studies of two youth poets and follows their journeys with spoken word over three years as they performed in community-based slams, engaged with the New South Wales English Extension 2 curriculum, and served as mentor poets in culturally and linguistically diverse schools. Situated in western Sydney, this article considers how spoken word poetry can be integrated into the secondary English curriculum in order to enhance critical literacy and promote social justice pedagogy. As the first study that explores the intersection of spoken word poetry with high-stakes assessment, it offers insight into how social justice shapes young people’s creative practices that interrogate and celebrate their intersectional identities.

“The Only Cure for an Increasingly Sick System”: The Jewish Labour Bund and Social Democratic Politics in Canada

David Lewis was not religious. In fact, many Canadians were probably fooled by his name and slight Welsh accent into believing he was from good Protestant stock, but his was a secular Judaism, grounded in the social democratic Jewish Labour Bund. This paper argues that, although generally overlooked in the literature, “the single most important person” in the CCF/NDP deeply engrained Bundist values and principles—working-class unity, the centrality of labour unions to political struggle and electoral efforts to agitate for justice and equality for Jews (and all workers), and international solidarity—into the social democratic left in Canada.

‘Pine Decline or pine declines?’ Analysis and Interpretation of Bog-Pines from Wem Moss, Shropshire, UK

A dendrochronological investigation was undertaken on subfossil Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) stumps following their discovery during conservation management at Wem Moss, a small (28 ha) former raised mire in Shropshire, UK. Two ring-width chronologies were constructed from 14 of the 17 trees sampled spanning 198 and 208 years, respectively. Whilst dendrochronological dating was not possible, radiocarbon assays provided an estimated age for this mire-rooting woodland of between 3015 and 2505 years cal. BCE, coinciding with the age traditionally associated with the widespread mortality of pine trees throughout much of the UK and Ireland, often referred to as the Pine Decline (ca. 4000 radiocarbon years BP). Placed in a wider geographical context, the Wem Moss pines are located within the lowland Meres and Mosses region, where previous studies on subfossil pine have demonstrated protracted declines in mire-rooting trees. These have included tree mortality significantly post-dating the Pine Decline, especially at larger peatland sites that exceed 5 km2. Such macrofossil evidence for the presence of Scots pine into the late Holocene is supported by continuous Pinus pollen representation at peatland sites in the Welsh Marches (English–Welsh border), suggesting the possible survival of native Scots pine trees in this area up to the present day. The investigation of Wem Moss bog pines and their wider geographical context highlights the incomplete and patchy nature of palaeo-vegetational records and also the need for future genetic research on living Scots pine in possible refugial areas in Britain and Ireland.

Fundamental frequency range in the bilingual repertoire of traditional and new Welsh speakers

Aims: This research aims to examine cross-linguistic interaction and intra-linguistic variation in the Welsh and English of bilingual speakers in two areas of north Wales. Specifically, I present an analysis of fundamental frequency range (FFR) and examine both cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic differences in speech production between bilinguals from Welsh-speaking and English-speaking homes. Design: Data were collected from Welsh–English bilinguals aged 16–18 in the areas surrounding the Welsh-dominant town of Caernarfon (Gwynedd) and the English-dominant town of Mold (Flintshire). The sample was equally stratified by speaker gender and home language. Data: The data were elicited from a reading passage task and were analysed acoustically. Measures of level and span were taken. Data were analysed using conditional inference trees and random forests. Findings: The results of the analysis of FFR in Caernarfon and Mold revealed no significant differences between English and Welsh. In Mold, gender was the only significant predictor of FFR across all measures. In Caernarfon, home-language differences in level were found in female speakers’ data only, and gender differences in span were found in the speech of those from English-speaking homes. Originality: The study contributes to previous studies of traditional and new speakers in minority-language contexts by examining both languages in the speakers’ repertoires. Specifically, it is the first study to examine the regional and home-language variation in FFR of bilingual speakers. Implications: The results highlight (1) the importance of community-specific patterns in minority-language contexts and (2) the way in which linguistic background might interact with other social factors in situations of long-term language contact. The results imply that a more holistic approach to examinations of variation in such contexts will be fruitful.

“The Band of Brothers”: The Mobilization of English Welsh Dual Identities in Second World War Britain

AbstractIn the run-up to the Second World War, the War Office agreed to organize territorial units that recruited specifically on the grounds of English Welsh dual identities. These formations, which comprised the 99th London Welsh Heavy Anti-Aircraft regiment and the 46th Liverpool Welsh Royal Tank Regiment, began recruiting in 1939 from English cities with significant Welsh populations. This article explores the mobilization and performance of English Welsh identities during the Second World War and reflects upon why, at a time of global conflict, some English men opted to enlist on the basis of Welsh antecedents. Relatively little attention has been paid to the plurality of British identity in wartime or to how the existence of what historian Thomas Hajkowski has called “hybrid ‘dual identities’” within the constituent countries of the United Kingdom informed the functioning of Britishness during the Second World War. Making use of previously unpublished and original life-writing sources, this article illuminates the significance of dual identifications across two nations at once—in this case, Wales and England—within the multinational state of Britain at war. Overall, by examining the intersectionality between subjective wartime constructions of kin, home, and nation(s), it points to how a sense of dual identifications could feed into recruitment patterns and potentially bolster combat motivation and morale. By highlighting the interconnectedness between constituent nations of Britain, and the complexities of identity formation within Britishness, this article adds to the literature that complicates the notion of fixed singular national identities and underscores the importance of dual identifications within and across the borders of the constituent nations in advancing our understanding of twentieth-century Britain.

English–Welsh Cross-Lingual Embeddings

Cross-lingual embeddings are vector space representations where word translations tend to be co-located. These representations enable learning transfer across languages, thus bridging the gap between data-rich languages such as English and others. In this paper, we present and evaluate a suite of cross-lingual embeddings for the English–Welsh language pair. To train the bilingual embeddings, a Welsh corpus of approximately 145 M words was combined with an English Wikipedia corpus. We used a bilingual dictionary to frame the problem of learning bilingual mappings as a supervised machine learning task, where a word vector space is first learned independently on a monolingual corpus, after which a linear alignment strategy is applied to map the monolingual embeddings to a common bilingual vector space. Two approaches were used to learn monolingual embeddings, including word2vec and fastText. Three cross-language alignment strategies were explored, including cosine similarity, inverted softmax and cross-domain similarity local scaling (CSLS). We evaluated different combinations of these approaches using two tasks, bilingual dictionary induction, and cross-lingual sentiment analysis. The best results were achieved using monolingual fastText embeddings and the CSLS metric. We also demonstrated that by including a few automatically translated training documents, the performance of a cross-lingual text classifier for Welsh can increase by approximately 20 percent points.

Menna Gallie’s Strike for a Kingdom (1959) Redefining Genre and Gender

Posing as no more than a whodunnit, Menna Gallie’s first novel introduced a new and distinctive voice into post-war anglophone Welsh writing. It was witty, comic, affectionate, often irreverent and distinctively Welsh – she claimed that she wrote with a Welsh accent. But a lightness of touch mediated through a traditionally unchallenging genre can conceal a deadly seriousness of purpose. This essay suggests that <i>Strike for a Kingdom </i>is a remarkable text inviting just such a bi-focal reading. As a seemingly artless whodunnit it provides the required transgressive act leading to a return to the established order expected by a predominantly bourgeois readership. As a politically charged narrative the novel’s value lies not in its generic formulations but in its coded representation of how colonising Anglocentric power systems, especially structural patriarchy, class hierarchy and accompanying gender differentiation, represented principally through a police inspector, run counter to indigenous forms of passive, collective masculinity in the western mining valleys.

Professor David Brynmor Thomas

Professor David Brynmor Thomas

Electrophysiological Differentiation of the Effects of Stress and Accent on Lexical Integration in Highly Fluent Bilinguals

Individuals who acquire a second language (L2) after infancy often retain features of their native language (L1) accent. Cross-language priming studies have shown negative effects of L1 accent on L2 comprehension, but the role of specific speech features, such as lexical stress, is mostly unknown. Here, we investigate whether lexical stress and accent differently modulate semantic processing and cross-language lexical activation in Welsh–English bilinguals, given that English and Welsh differ substantially in terms of stress realisation. In an L2 cross-modal priming paradigm, we manipulated the stress pattern and accent of spoken primes, whilst participants made semantic relatedness judgments on visual word targets. Event-related brain potentials revealed a main effect of stress on target integration, such that stimuli with stress patterns compatible with either the L1 or L2 required less processing effort than stimuli with stress incompatible with both Welsh and English. An independent cross-language phonological overlap manipulation revealed an interaction between accent and L1 access. Interestingly, although it increased processing effort, incorrect stress did not significantly modulate semantic priming effects or covert access to L1 phonological representations. Our results are consistent with the concept of language-specific stress templates, and suggest that accent and lexical stress affect speech comprehension mechanisms differentially.

The Effects of Home Language and Bilingualism on the Realization of Lexical Stress in Welsh and Welsh English.

This study investigates effects of long-term language contact and individual linguistic experience on the realization of lexical stress correlates in Welsh and Welsh English. To this end, a production study was carried out in which participants were asked to read out Welsh and English disyllabic words with stress on the penultimate syllable, placed within carrier phrases. Recordings were made of the productions of Welsh and English target words, by two groups of Welsh-English bilinguals differing in home language, as well as the productions of English target words by Welsh English monolinguals and speakers of Southern Standard British English (SSBE). Acoustic measures were taken of fundamental frequency (f0) and intensity ratios of stressed and unstressed vowels, duration of stressed and unstressed vowels, and duration of the post-stress consonant. The results of acoustic comparisons of Welsh English with SSBE and Welsh revealed that SSBE differs from the other groups in all measures of lexical stress. Welsh and Welsh English, however, show considerable phonetic overlap, albeit with language-specific differences in two of the five measures (unstressed vowel duration, intensity ratio). These findings suggest cross-language convergence in the realization of lexical stress in Welsh and Welsh English disyllabic words with penultimate stress. Individual linguistic experience, in turn, did not play a major role in the realization of lexical stress in these words. Bilinguals did not differ from monolinguals when speaking English, and home language also had no effect on any measure. This suggests that other factors must be responsible for the observed patterns. We discuss the possibility that the varieties of Welsh and Welsh English spoken in this community function as a sign of regional or peer group identity, rather than as markers of linguistic experience.

Can you tell by their English if they can speak Welsh? Accent perception in a language contact situation

Aims: The purpose of this research was to gain a better understanding of accent perception in language contact situations in which monolingual speakers of a contact variety and bilinguals live in the same community. Design: We investigated the English accents of monolinguals and bilinguals from the same area in South-West Wales, and listeners’ perceptions thereof, in three inter-related studies. Data: In Study 1, an accent perception experiment, participants from four different listener groups were asked to differentiate English monolinguals and Welsh–English bilinguals on the basis of short English speech samples. In Study 2, the same participants’ views about differences between the accentual features of monolinguals and bilinguals were examined in individual structured interviews. Finally, in Study 3, the speech samples from the accent perception experiment were analysed phonetically based on the accentual features mentioned in Study 2. Findings: Study 1 revealed that monolinguals and bilinguals can be identified above chance based on their English accent, but performance was unexceptional. Identification was better with greater accent familiarity, but unrelated to the listener’s ability to speak Welsh. Study 2 revealed the specific segmental and suprasegmental features that the listeners considered indicative of monolingual and bilingual speakers’ English accents, while Study 3 showed that only some of the listeners’ views are consistent with the production data from Study 1. Originality: This paper is the first to examine whether monolinguals and bilinguals from a bilingual area with historical language contact can be identified on the basis of their majority language accent, and on what grounds these identifications are made. Implications: This research shows that settings in which minority-language features originate from both historical language contact and individual bilingualism yield subtle accentual differences in the majority language between monolinguals and bilinguals to which even listeners from the same accent background may not be responsive.

The development of English tense and agreement morphology in Welsh–English bilingual children with and without specific language impairment

AbstractThis study investigated whether third person singular –sand past tense accuracy and error types can reveal distinct developmental patterns of agreement and tense acquisition in younger and older Welsh (L1) sequential bilingual (L2) English children with typical development (L2-TLD) and in younger children with language impairment (L2-SLI_Y). A group of older (L2-TLD_O; mean age = 93.72 months) and younger (L2-TLD_Y; mean age = 67 months) Welsh–English (TLD) bilingual children and a group of young (mean age = 63 months) children with SLI (L2-SLI_Y) age matched to the L2-TLD_Y group were administered the screening component of the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. Results indicated that the three groups differed in their production of third person singular –sand regular past tense but not in accuracy on irregular past tense verbs, when vocabulary skills were considered. The L2-SLI_Y children produced similar error types to the L2-TLD_Y children, who differed from their L2-TLD_O peers in this respect. L2 children’s vocabulary size, nonverbal intelligence, and item-level factors, such as frequency and morphophonology, differentially contributed to their performance across the various morphemes. We discuss these results within current accounts of language development and impairment.

Long-term outcomes for bilinguals in minority language contexts: Welsh–English teenagers’ performance on measures of grammatical gender and plural morphology in Welsh

AbstractThis study explored the long-term effects of limited input on bilingual teenagers’ acquisition of complex morphology in Welsh. Study 1 assessed 168 12–13 and 16–17-year-old teenagers, across three bilingual groups: those whose first language was Welsh (L1 Welsh), those who learned Welsh and English simultaneously (L1 Welsh–English), and those who learned Welsh as a second language (L2 Welsh), on their receptive knowledge of grammatical gender. Study 2 assessed the same participants on their production of plural morphology. While the results of Study 1 revealed continuous progression toward adult norms among L1 Welsh-speaking bilinguals, with the simultaneous bilinguals progressing at a slower rate, the results of Study 2 revealed performances on plural morphology that were comparable to adult norms among the 16–17-year-old L1 Welsh-speaking bilinguals, and some progression among the simultaneous bilinguals. In contrast, delayed progression was seen among the L2 Welsh-speaking bilinguals across the board, with 16–17-year-old L2 participants lagging behind their L1 peers on both grammatical gender and plural morphology. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the long-term outcomes for bilinguals learning complex structures under minority language conditions are discussed.

Triggered codeswitching: Lexical processing and conversational dynamics

AbstractThis study investigates the psycholinguistic process underlying triggered codeswitching – codeswitching facilitated by the occurrence of cognates – within the context of conversational dynamics. It confirms that, in natural bilingual speech, lexical selection of cognates can facilitate codeswitching by enhancing the activation of the non-selected language. Analyses of a large-scale corpus of Welsh–English conversational speech showed that 1) producing cognates facilitated codeswitching, 2) speakers who generally produced more cognates generally codeswitched more, even in clauses that did not contain cognates, 3) larger numbers of cognates in a clause increased the likelihood of codeswitching, 4) codeswitching temporarily remained facilitated after the production of cognates, and 5) hearing rather than producing cognates did not facilitate codeswitching. The findings confirm the validity of the proposed cognitive account of triggered codeswitching, and clarify the relation between the lexical activation of cognates and consecutive language choice, in accord with current insights in lexical processing.

Pre-aspiration in Bethesda Welsh: A sociophonetic analysis

Previous research has shown that pre-aspiration can be a phonemic and a variable linguistic feature susceptible to linguistic and extra-linguistic influences. In the case of Welsh, previous exploratory work has found the presence of pre-aspiration (Ball 1984, Morris 2010, Spooner 2016, Iosad forthcoming), but the phonetic and phonological properties of this feature and its sociophonetic patterning in the language are not known. This article presents analyses of the variety of Welsh spoken in Bethesda (Gwynedd). It reports the frequency of occurrence of pre-aspiration, its duration, and noisiness. As well as describing pre-aspiration, it attempts to ascertain the extent to which this feature is influenced by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Wordlist data were analysed from 16 Welsh–English bilinguals from Bethesda (Gwynedd, North Wales). Speakers were aged between 16 and 18 years old and the sample was stratified by speaker sex and home language (either Welsh or English). The results indicate that pre-aspiration is frequent in both fortis and lenis plosives (the latter of which are typically devoiced in Welsh). In addition to a number of linguistic influences on its production, both speaker sex and home language were found to be significant predictors of variation for some measures. The results are discussed with reference to previous studies of pre-aspiration in other languages and work on phonetic variation in Welsh–English bilingual speech.

Teaching Asia: English Pedagogy and Asia Literacy within the Australian Curriculum

The study was prompted by the introduction of three cross-curriculum priorities within the new Australian Curriculum, and the growing emphasis for students to become ‘Asia literate’. It aimed to examine the attitudes that New South Wales English teachers currently hold towards addressing the cross-curriculum priority ‘Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia’ within 7–10 classrooms. Sociocultural theory and qualitative research were utilised as a means of exploring and accounting for the ways in which these attitudes have been shaped, and the implications this has on curriculum enactment. The study examines the influences that have shaped teacher attitudes towards addressing the cross-curriculum priority, the perceived evidence of political and economic motivations behind the inclusion of the priority, how English teachers define ‘Asia’ and the consistency of such definitions with those put forth by The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), and whether English teachers feel prepared to address this cross-curriculum priority in a way that enriches student learning and literacy. The research findings reflect that although English teachers believe that there is value in addressing the cross-curriculum priority, many feel ill-equipped or under-resourced to address it in a way that promotes deep learning and understanding for students.

Code-switching within the noun phrase: Evidence from three corpora

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This study aims to improve our understanding of common switching patterns by examining determiner–noun–adjective complexes in code-switching (CS) in three language pairs (Welsh–English, Spanish–English and Papiamento–Dutch). The languages differ in gender and noun–adjective word order in the noun phrase (NP): (a) Spanish, Welsh, and Dutch have gender; English and Papiamento do not; (b) Spanish, Welsh, and Papiamento prefer post-nominal adjectives; Dutch and English, prenominal ones. We test predictions on determiner language and adjective order derived from generativist accounts and the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) approach. Design/methodology/approach: We draw on three publicly available spoken corpora. For the purposes of these analyses, we re-coded all three datasets identically. From the three re-coded corpora we extracted all monolingual and mixed simplex NPs (DetN) and complex NPs with determiners (determiner–adjective–noun (DetAN/NA)). We then examined the surrounding clause for each to determine the matrix language based on the finite verb. Data and analysis: We analysed the data using a linear regression model in R statistical software to examine the distribution of languages across word class and word order in the corpora. Findings/conclusions: Overall, the generativist predictions are borne out regarding adjective positions but not determiners and the MLF accounts for more of the data. We explore extra-linguistic explanations for the patterns observed. Originality: The current study has provided new empirical data on nominal CS from language pairs not previously considered. Significance/implications: This study has revealed robust patterns across three corpora and taken a step towards disentangling two theoretical accounts. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of comparing multiple language pairs using similar coding.

The specific character of Welsh male and female speech behavior conditioned by bilingual situation

The article is devoted to the analysis of speech behavior of Welsh male and female representatives. The speech situation in Wales in characterized by the presence of two languages – English and Welsh. Such situation is connected with the history of Celtic territories. There isn’t any general point of view as to the status of English in Wales. The term “Welsh English” is of mostly common use. The aim of the present paper is to study the prosodic characteristics of English in the speech of Welsh English representatives. Melody being one of the prominent intonation means, participating in making up speech portraits of Welsh representatives was investigated to find out differences in intonational scales functioning. One of the main distinguishing feature of Welsh English is high pre-head (the unstressed syllables at the beginning of intonation pattern) in combination with low terminal tone and gradually rising level of the tail. Gradually Descending Stepping, Scandant and Level Scales prevail among other Heads in the speech of analysed informants. Stepping Head (30%) characterize female speech and Level Head (29%) is more common in male speech. General percentage of Rising, Scandant and Broken Scales comprises 33% in male and 29% in female speech. Emphatic Scales prevail in female speech making it more emotionally coloured. Male speech is more characterized by Scandant and High Head. Thus, we may state that Welsh English can be characterized as having emphatic melody consisting of Rising, Scandant and High Head, which we consider to be the common feature.

Welsh English intonation and social identity

This paper is a sociophonetic study concerned with state-of-the-art description of Welsh English (WE) pitch patterns which may serve as WE regional and social markers. WE pitch patterns in authentic spontaneous conversations are correlated with social factors of regional and cultural background (North Wales, South Wales, Cardiff), generation of speakers (young, middle-aged, old), gender (men, women) and social class (middle, working). The data are compared to Received Pronunciation (RP) tone nomenclature (Crystal, 1969) in search of systemic (i.e. concerned with the total repertoire of tones in each variety), distributional and realisational differences. Within the identical tone systems a considerable difference in the distribution of certain WE pitch configurations is interpreted as the impact of the Welsh language. The data are further specified to the dominant pattern frequency in each region, age, gender and social class. Special reference is made to the acoustic structure of rise-falls in North Wales, which is a new subject of research.