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This study seeks to further the research on online language learning by examining the level at which intermediate ESL students understand and process sociopragmatic information in their second language (L2) in globally networked environments like Twitter. In this semester-long study, L2 English learners from a variety of first languages (Chinese, Spanish, Arabic) analyzed authentic English-language tweets produced by well-known native speakers, with a focus on abbreviations, hashtags and tweeter mood. Results revealed that high intermediate ESL students relied most heavily on word choice when making sense of English tweets, demonstrating that a majority were able to extract significant meaning from common abbreviations, prosified hashtags, indices of tweeter mood and the tweet's larger context. This investigation highlights Twitter's status as an authentic and dynamic L2 setting that facilitates the cultural enrichment of learners and enhances their socio-pragmatic awareness, while developing their multiliteracy skills in an L2.

The data from this study investigate phrase-final vowel devoicing in Metropolitan French among L1 and L2 speakers, in terms of number of times a speaker devoices a phrase-final high vowel and percentage of the vowel that is devoiced. The goal is to assess whether experienced L2 speakers use style-based variation in response to the same factors as native speakers. Results from a set of role playing and word list tasks revealed that L2 devoicing rates matched those of the natives, but were conditioned by different factors in each group. The duration of L2 speaker devoicing, however, was found not to match native levels. Notable differences emerged in response to shifts in style: L1 speakers showed higher rates and enhanced degrees of devoicing in pragmatic contexts that favored either slower or more formal speech, while L2 speakers responded very little to pragmatic shifts within role plays, instead responding more pronouncedly to different tasks.

The term aegyo refers to a cute style of speech in Korean with numerous reported phonetic correlates. One of these is obstruent fortition (OF). The present study examines the gender and age effects of OF across 21 romantic couples and across eight mock situations (date, workplace, family, comfort, date-planning, request, expression of love). Results revealed a significant interaction between performance of aegyo and age, such that younger participants exhibited higher rates of OF when performing aegyo than when not performing aegyo, whereas older participants did not. Results also revealed a gender effect such that women employed more OF than men, and a situation effect such that OF was more likely to occur in romantic situations, suggesting its indexicality of romantic intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korean is often described as neutralizing its obstruents to unreleased stops in coda position. However, a stylistic truncated form of the intimate past tense expressing avuncularity, contradicts this description by realizing a fricative word finally. Despite tokens elicited from informants lacking phonetic evidence for a word-final vowel, speakers report hearing [ɨ] word-finally in these truncated forms. The present article gives an optimality theoretic (OT) account (McCarthy & Prince 1995) of this phenomenon by utilizing Benua's (1995) base-truncated form (BT) constraints to explain the production of the form and Boersma & Hamann's (2008) cue constraints to explain the mismatch between the production and perception in parallel to the treatment of loanwords. This suggests that output-output constraints and perceptual cue constraints may interact to create differences in phonological form between production and perception, even within native phonologies, and lends further support for the need for separate production and perception phonologies (Boersma 1999). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phrase-final fricative epithesis (PFFE), often indicated in informal writing with a final -h or -ch, e.g. beaucoup_h, oui_ch, is a sociophonetic variable of Hexagonal French in which utterance-final vowels give way to intense fricative-like whistles. Production research has found PFFE to be used at equal rates among men and women, and perception research has found that native French speakers perceive it to mark either formal speech or intense affect. This research furthers the special issue's line of inquiry on French variation in forms of digital media by extending the analysis to a sociophonetic variable with a robust life on Twitter. The study compares the pragmatic value of tweets containing PFFE with previously described values and then examines interactions of gender, hostword phrasal location and lexical frequency on its realization. 96.8% of PFFE occurrences in the 2060-token corpus were classified into the pragmatic categories of Formality and Intense Affect. Results suggest that PFFE has become a salient enough sociophonetic variable that 21st-century French users represent it graphically in their tweets, however, its usage is structurally more permissive than in spoken language, signaling that it has taken on an iconic value in digital spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital discourse, often referred to as computer-mediated communication, has revolutionized communication practices since the advent of the personal computer (Crystal, 2011), with ever-growing effects, as smart devices proliferate in every aspect of twenty-first-century human existence. Linguists in the francophone world first took note of these new digital interactional practices in the 1980s with the onset of conversation via Minitel (Levy, 1993), a French-born service that consisted of a computer terminal that connected via telephone lines to remote services like chatrooms, interactive games, and purchasing platforms, years before most Americans had ever heard of the world wide web (Mailland, 2017). Minitel terminals remained functional some 30 years later; the service was ultimately decommissioned in 2012 on account of outdated modems, an inability to support advancements in graphics and the earlier mass migration (in France and beyond) to the present-day internet (Mailland, 2017). But the introduction of virtual interactional spaces – in the francophone world and beyond – had marked the beginning of a new linguistic trend in which users found themselves regularly engaged in the production of written language infused with vernacular tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data from this study investigate phrase-final vowel devoicing in Metropolitan French among L1 and L2 speakers, in terms of number of times a speaker devoices a phrase-final high vowel and percentage of the vowel that is devoiced. The goal is to assess whether experienced L2 speakers use style-based variation in response to the same factors as native speakers. Results from a set of role playing and word list tasks revealed that L2 devoicing rates matched those of the natives, but were conditioned by different factors in each group. The duration of L2 speaker devoicing, however, was found not to match native levels. Notable differences emerged in response to shifts in style: L1 speakers showed higher rates and enhanced degrees of devoicing in pragmatic contexts that favored either slower or more formal speech, while L2 speakers responded very little to pragmatic shifts within role plays, instead responding more pronouncedly to different tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]