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The widespread applications of emotion recognition (ER) in various fields have recently attracted much attention from researchers. Consequently, an array of advanced techniques has emerged, driven by enhancing the accuracy and robustness of these recognition systems. As emotional dialogue comprises sound and spoken content, the proposed model encodes the information from audio and text sequences using two separate channels and merges them for emotional classification. The two channels used inputs from audio and text modalities. The audio channel is encoded using a deep convolutional neural network with residual connections and further transformed using a self-attention-based multihead attention network called channel-wise global head pooling. Unlike the vanilla multihead attention network, an adaptive global pooling is used after concatenating all the heads. The text channel is encoded using a pre-trained BERT model. The proposed ER method is validated on four benchmark databases: Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture in English, the Berlin emotional speech dataset in the German language, Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song in North American English and Crowd-sourced Emotional Multimodal Actors Dataset in English. The classification accuracy on the above emotional corpora is 85.71%, 79.52%, 76.71% and 73.91%, respectively. Furthermore, cross-corpus analysis is presented to understand the variability of speech and text features and the robustness of the proposed architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific methods have evolved over the past three centuries, and modern trends are oriented toward evidence-based medical science. Humans, as researchers, no longer use primarily observational and descriptive methods to study the processes around them but rely on their participation and influence. In the case of health care professionals, practice-oriented paradigms require not only natural but also experimental research methods. At the core of nursing and midwifery is the care for the healthy and the ailing individuals, which requires in-depth knowledge in various medical and social-humanitarian disciplines. In line with technological and informational progress, the requirements for the type and quality of health care increase. The scientific methods used in nursing science are diverse and correspond to those of other medical fields - quantitative, qualitative and mixed. The founder of nursing research and one of the pioneers in medical quality science is Florence Nightingale. The road to building scientific research in nursing faced many challenges in the beginning but experienced a significant upsurge after the middle of the last century. The founders were the North American and English nurses and midwives and their associations. Gradually, the enthusiasm is transferred to European and Asian countries, which in recent years have proven a significant contribution to the development of nursing science and methodology. Research in the field of health care professionals has a dual significance. On the one hand, it is a mandatory step for the acquisition of new knowledge, skills and approaches in a theoretical aspect, and on the other, it has an evidential and educational role for practicing specialists. The current scientific and research activity in Bulgaria is a new phenomenon but with a positive development trend. Healthcare professionals are the main driving force behind supporting research and evidence-based practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues of intelligibility may arise amongst English learners when acquiring new words and phrases in North American academic settings, perhaps in part due to limited linguistic data available to the learner for understanding language use patterns. To this end, this paper examines the effects of Data‐Driven Learning for Pronunciation (DDLfP) on lexical stress and prominence in the US academic context. 65 L2 English learners in North American universities completed a diagnostic and pretest with listening and speaking items before completing four online lessons and a posttest on academic words and formulas (i.e., multi‐word sequences). Experimental group participants (n = 40) practiced using an audio corpus of highly proficient L2 speakers while comparison group participants (n = 25) were given teacher‐created pronunciation materials. Logistic regression results indicated that the group who used the corpus significantly increased their recognition of prominence in academic formulas. In the spoken tasks, both groups improved in their lexical stress pronunciation, but only the DDLfP learners improved their production of prominence in academic formulas. Learners reported that they valued DDLfP efforts for pronunciation learning across contexts and speakers. Findings have implications for teachers of L2 pronunciation and support the use of corpora for language teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, grounded in sociolinguistics, examines the identity building, language transmission and educational strategies of immigrant d/Deaf multilingual learners (IDML). The scientific literature mainly focuses on a single pair of languages – the national spoken language and the national signed one. For example, Deaf Studies traditionally analyse the situation of the White Deaf user of English and American Sign Language (ASL). A major change has recently occurred with the emergence of multilingual, multicultural and inclusive Deaf Studies. At the same time, professionals and members of the school community regularly have to face the increasing diversity of d/Deaf students’ profiles. Qualitative data were collected on an IDML cohort residing in and attending primary or secondary schools in France from families who use a spoken or signed language other than French or French Sign Language (LSF) at home. The main results reveal how the building of d/Deaf identity depends on linguistic and cultural transmission within families and to what extent the diversity of IDML is considered in educational strategies at school. The goal of the present paper is to stress the urgent need for this new and crucial research area on IDML to be developed in the French context and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The loss of /hw/ in English in words like where and wheat is virtually complete in contemporary North American English, though /hw/ has lingered in Ontario, Canada. For vernacular speech from Almonte and Parry Sound, the authors analyze the decline of /hw/ in apparent time among individuals born from the 1880s to the 1950s. They place these observations within the field of language obsolescence and suggest that Parry Sound and Almonte are examples of intermediate isolation, less profound than is typical in studies of dialect loss. Almonte has retained /hw/ much longer than Parry Sound; this pattern parallels the greater share of /hw/-ful Scots and Irish speakers in Almonte's early immigration and accords with Parry Sound's increased outside contact due to a rising tourism industry. Both communities uniformly exhibit more /hw/ in content words than in function words as the feature recedes to total absence for speakers born in the 1950s. This pattern is an example of linguistic order persisting during obsolescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of his illustrious career, Ken Stevens focused on examining and documenting the rich detail about vocal tract changes available to listeners underlying the acoustic signal of speech. Current approaches to speech inversion take advantage of this rich detail to recover information about articulatory movement. Our previous speech inversion work focused on movements of the tongue and lips, for which "ground truth" is readily available. In this study, we describe acquisition and validation of ground-truth articulatory data about velopharyngeal port constriction, using both the well-established measure of nasometry plus a novel technique—high-speed nasopharyngoscopy. Nasometry measures the acoustic output of the nasal and oral cavities to derive the measure nasalance. High-speed nasopharyngoscopy captures images of the nasopharyngeal region and can resolve velar motion during speech. By comparing simultaneously collected data from both acquisition modalities, we show that nasalance is a sufficiently sensitive measure to use as ground truth for our speech inversion system. Further, a speech inversion system trained on nasalance can recover known patterns of velopharyngeal port constriction shown by American English speakers. Our findings match well with Stevens' own studies of the acoustics of nasal consonants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voice and speech production change with age, which can lead to potential communication challenges. This study explored the use of Landmark-based analysis of speech (LMBAS), a knowledge-based speech analysis algorithm based on Stevens' Landmark Theory, to describe age-related changes in adult speakers. The speech samples analyzed were sourced from the University of Florida Aging Voice Database, which included recordings of 16 sentences from the Speech Perception in Noise test of Bilger, Rzcezkowski, Nuetzel, and Rabinowitz [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 65, S98–S98 (1979)] and Bilger, Nuetzel, Rabinowitz, and Rzeczkowski [J. Speech. Lang. Hear. Res. 27, 32–84 (1984)]. These sentences were read in quiet environments by 50 young, 50 middle-aged, and 50 older American English speakers, with an equal distribution of sexes. Acoustic landmarks, specifically, glottal, bursts, and syllabicity landmarks, were extracted using SpeechMark®, MATLAB Toolbox version 1.1.2. The results showed significant age effect on glottal and burst landmarks. Furthermore, the sex effect was significant for burst and syllabicity landmarks. While the results of LMBAS suggest its potential in detecting age-related changes in speech, increase in syllabicity landmarks with age was unexpected. This finding may suggest the need for further refinement and adjustment of this analytical approach [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A corpus study of 100+ years of usage of the verb GRAB in American English contributes to the understanding of the way bleaching takes place. The meaning of GRAB as 'take or seize suddenly or eagerly' is firmly established in usage from 1910 through 1980, but in the 1990's many instances of a bleached sense of 'take or get easily or casually' begin to occur. The proposed hypothesis that bleaching results from hyperbolic uses is supported by the finding that bleaching occurs within three common contexts: narrative sequences of GRAB followed by another verb; contexts expanding on grab a bite (to eat); and GRAB plus human object, which changes from a sense of 'take custody of' to simply 'capture the attention of'. In addition, the interactional context of requests and offers (often of food and drink) hastens the bleaching of GRAB while also contributing the resulting interpretation of GRAB as 'get or take easily or casually'. The same conversational actions constitute the contexts in which GRAB is established in the ditransitive construction, as well as the contexts in which it takes on the social meaning of getting or taking in a quick, easy and casual manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Next-speaker selection refers to the practices conversationalists rely on to designate who should speak next. Speakers have various methods available to them to select a next speaker. Certain actions, however, systematically coselect more than one particular participant to respond. These actions include asking "open-floor" questions, which are addressed to more than one recipient and that more than one recipient are eligible to answer. Here, next-speaker selection is inclusive. How are these questions multimodally designed? How does their multimodal design differ from the design of "closed-floor" questions, in which just one participant is selected as next speaker and where next-speaker selection is exclusive? Based on eyetracking data collected in naturalistic conversation, this study demonstrates that unlike closed-floor questions, openfloor questions can be predicted based on the speaker's gaze alternation during the question. The discussion highlights cases of gaze alternation in open-floor questions and exhaustively explores deviant cases in closed-floor questions. It also addresses the functional relation of gaze alternation and gaze selection, arguing that the two selection techniques may collide, creating disorderly turntaking due to a fundamental change in participation framework from focally dyadic to inclusive. Data are in British and American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative concord (NC) is used in many English varieties but usually considered ungrammatical in ‘standard’ contemporary English, where negative polarity items (NPIs) are used. In this paper, we take a novel experimental approach to the use of NC versus NPI constructions, in relation to register, sets of speech repertoires linked to specific situational and functional parameters. We report on two rating experiments with American and British English participants using interlocutor relations as a formality manipulation. Results show that (i) across both samples, NC constructions were rated as less appropriate than NPI associates, and (ii) there was a register effect in the American English data in that NC was rated less appropriate in formal than informal contexts. Our study is the first to provide experimental evidence for the register-sensitivity of NC constructions in American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compared language samples from typically developing 4-year-olds who spoke African American English (AAE), Jamaican English (JE), or Mainstream American English (MAE) to assess the value of using language sample analysis (LSA) measures for characterising language use across dialects of English. Specific LSA metrics included mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes and in words, the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn), Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) and measures of lexical diversity. Children demonstrated diverse linguistic patterns across dialects, but a Kruskal–Wallis H test did not reveal significant differences in scores obtained through LSA measures. Notably, the IPSyn captured morphosyntactic structures in each category across dialects where prior research has highlighted limitations. This preliminary study uses a case-based approach to illustrate the applicability of LSAs in describing linguistic variations across children who speak different dialects of English. Moreover, the findings from this study underscore the potential use of LSAs in describing linguistic patterns to support the characterisation of communication profiles for culturally and linguistically diverse children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports the results of an experiment (N = 502) investigating how speakers are socially categorized based on accent (Standard American English [SAE] or Nigerian) and race (White or Black) separately and concurrently, as well as the intergroup outcomes of such categorizations as mediated by language attitudes (status, solidary, and dynamism). Findings revealed that SAE-accented speakers were evaluated more favorably than Nigerian-accented speakers on status. Status also mediated the relationship between accent and (a) symbolic threat and (b) social distance. Additionally, Black males were rated higher on solidarity and dynamism than White males. Finally, status mediated the combined effect of the speaker's race and accent on symbolic threat, intergroup anxiety, and social distance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major purpose of this paper is to study the important role of historical painting art on the creation of space-age era eight decades ago in 1950s. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary , the first known use of "space age" was in 1946. In the Collins Dictionary , the space age is the present period in the history of the world when travel in space has become possible, and people use "space-age" to describe something that is very modern and makes you think of the technology of the space age. In American English, space age is the period in modern history characterized by space exploration, usually considered as beginning on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit around the Earth. In the ancient time, many artists including Giovanni di Paolo, Albrecht Dürer, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot and Vincent van Gogh created masterpieces of space related paintings. Even in the extreme ancient era, the cave art already evidenced humans' astronomical knowledge. Besides the technological research and development for space explorations, groups of workers and artists in the areas of culture, painting, architects, installation artwork, etc. had done many contributions in the development of space-age cultural and aesthetic art before 1950s. They not only created so many masterpieces with plenty of space-age aesthetics, but witnessed and recorded the development history of the space age. It goes without doubt that historical space painting art played an important role on the creation of space-age era in 1950s. Therefore, it is mandatory to investigate and reveal the fact. • To study the important role of historical painting art on the creation of space-age era eight decades ago in 1950s. • The first known use of "space age" was in 1946, considered as beginning on October 4, 1957 when Sputnik I launched. • Giovanni di Paolo, Albrecht Dürer, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot and Vincent van Gogh created masterpieces of space related paintings. • In the extreme ancient era, the cave art already evidenced humans' astronomical knowledge. • Groups of artists in the areas of culture, painting, architects, etc. contributed space-age cultural and aesthetic art before 1950s. • Historical space painting art played an important role on the creation of space-age era in 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the role of African American Language (AAL) and *Standardized American English (*SAE) in Black/African American same-race teacher-student relationships. The teachers in this study (1) used AAL as a valuable tool for building rapport and trust with their students; (2) were aware of their positions as linguistic role models; and (3) encouraged AAL-speaking students to use *SAE due to concerns about racial and linguistic profiling. Results suggest that because AAL-speaking African American teachers understand the United States to be a racially stratified society, they encourage their students to use *SAE with intentions of helping students advance socially and economically. This study illuminates why African American teachers use their shared language proficiency with their same-race students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using visual spectrographic examination of vowel nasalization to diagnose the syllabic affiliation of phonologically ambisyllabic nasal consonants (e.g., gamma), Durvasula and Huang [(2017). Lang. Sci. 62, 17–36] argued that anticipatory vowel nasalization in these words patterns with word-medial codas. Using nasometry, the current study finds that anticipatory nasalization before monomorphemic and multimorphemic (scammer) ambisyllabic nasals differ from word-medial coda (gamble) and word-final nasals (scam), but not from other intervocalic nasals. Additionally, vowel nasalization is sensitive to the manner of the preceding phoneme. These findings demonstrate that quantifying anticipatory nasalization using nasometry differs from visual spectrographic criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrant children in the U.S. often learn English before their caretakers, leading them to take on the role of day‐to‐day translators ("language brokers"). This study explores the familial socialization of immigrant, linguistic‐minority families in the U.S. by drawing on deductive‐inductive thematic analysis of 14 semi‐structured interviews with Asian American and Latinx young adult language brokers reflecting on how this role shaped their childhoods and prepared them for adulthood. The bulk of interviewees experienced working‐class childhoods. Despite this, respondents seem to have experienced a family socialization model that reflects elements of both middle‐class and working‐class models. "Immigrant Linguistic Maturation" (ILM) consists of linguistic scaffolding in English and heritage languages, verbal airtime, and engagement with authority figures, while also leading children to hold adult knowledge, roles, and responsibilities. Racial and ethnic differences primarily lie in the actors involved in ILM socialization processes. Extended family, and especially grandparents, played a more active role in the ILM socialization of Asian American brokers, while ILM socialization of Latinx brokers was primarily driven by parents, particularly mothers. The case of Asian American and Latinx language brokers calls attention to the importance of factors like immigrant background and linguistic marginalization in shaping familial socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the strategies employed in the representation of masculinity in a sample of 50 advertising campaigns launched between 1999 and 2020. The chosen posters advertise products targeted at men that fit into five categories: beverages, food, daily care products, male fragrances, and clothing. Among the brands advertised are American Apparel, Clinique, Coca-Cola, Dove, Givenchy, McDonald's, and Nike. The analysis of discursive strategies is complemented by an analysis of the Corpus of Contemporary American English that investigates the most salient collocates of real man/men in US English; this search was conducted due to the frequent mention of the term real men in the slogans under investigation. The corpus analysis supports the key findings of the study by showing that language and advertising operate in a circular structure and mutually impact one another. The five major strategies identified as recurrent in the representation of masculinity include gentleman's look, gender equality and fatherhood, sex appeal, sex and dominance, and strength. The findings reveal the prevalence of stereotypical representations of masculinity that foreground sex appeal, strength, and dominance over women, and to a lesser extent, the image of the classic gentleman. The Dove Men Care Collection promotes the idea of fatherhood and gender equality, which might be considered a slight departure from the usual representations of masculinity in advertising, though it is still embedded within the dominant framework of hegemonic masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw from 102 interviews with American and English adults who attended the 2019 Women's World Cup to examine how fans perceive women footballers as 'role models', with attention to the operations of gender ideology. Despite the recent professionalization and commercialization of women's football, there is a dearth of research on fan perspectives of players as role models. Our findings show that most fans perceive role modelling as women's accessibility and authenticity in interaction. Fans naturalize women's often uncompensated labor as role models through a supposed love for their sport and desire to see its future growth, endorsing a gender essentialist view of women as notably caring and giving in comparison to men. However, a minority of fans embrace a more critical view by identifying role modelling as an expectation placed disproportionately on women within an already unequal resource environment. We conclude that role modelling is a gendered expectation for elite women footballers and that fans can be a source of pressure towards its enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of teaching and learning English largely depends on language teachers. In addition to their technical and pedagogical expertise, the teachers' proficiency in several languages is crucial in ensuring that learners acquire English to the greatest extent possible. Filipino English teachers vary in terms of their experiences in teaching English in nations where it is used as a foreign language (EFL), English as a second language (ESL), or English as a native language (ENL), especially when it comes to using the English variety in the classroom. The study aims to determine Filipino teachers' teaching experiences and perceptions of using English varieties in teaching in the ENL/ESL/EFL countries. This qualitative study employs the case study design and follows Kachru's Three Concentric Circles Model. Three Filipino teachers were chosen as participants using purposive sampling were selected according to the following criteria: Filipino female teachers who are teaching English to middle/junior high school in ENL, ESL, and EFL countries only, ages ranged from 25-45, with Masters degree related to their field of teaching, and has taught English for more than two years. The research questionnaire, one-on-one interview, and focus-group discussion were used to collect relevant data about the study. The direct transcriptions from the audio recordings of the individual interviews were subjected to data processing using Creswell's Thematic Analysis. The study's findings showed that the use of different English varieties is intimately related to the linguistic society's dominant language and the primary teaching objectives. Although teachers consider American English the mainstream variation, it is evident that all three linguistic groups also utilize the local varieties of English. It also showed that their beliefs on using different forms of English in the classroom were primarily based on functionality, proximity, inclusivity and awareness, and propensity for comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of English animal-related terms used figuratively with reference to types of parenting. To be more precise, we make an attempt to investigate the scope of the conceptual metaphor PARENTS ARE ANIMALS. What ignited our interest was the ubiquity of linguistic metaphors featuring animal terms employed with reference to types of parenting present in everyday language, thus we have decided to delve into what types of animals are typical source domains in metaphors of this type. The methodology adopted is the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, originally proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and further developed in numerous subsequent publications, especially those by Kövecses (2003, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2017a, 2017b). Our results are supported by evidence from the online Corpus of Contemporary American English and News on the Web Corpus, which may be said to corroborate not only the conceptual nature of metaphors as such, but also their impact on social cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to accurately classify accents and assess accentedness in non-native speakers are challenging tasks due primarily to the complexity and diversity of accent and dialect variations. In this study, embeddings from advanced pretrained language identification (LID) and speaker identification (SID) models are leveraged to improve the accuracy of accent classification and non-native accentedness assessment. Findings demonstrate that employing pretrained LID and SID models effectively encodes accent/dialect information in speech. Furthermore, the LID and SID encoded accent information complement an end-to-end (E2E) accent identification (AID) model trained from scratch. By incorporating all three embeddings, the proposed multi-embedding AID system achieves superior accuracy in AID. Next, leveraging automatic speech recognition (ASR) and AID models is investigated to explore accentedness estimation. The ASR model is an E2E connectionist temporal classification model trained exclusively with American English (en-US) utterances. The ASR error rate and en-US output of the AID model are leveraged as objective accentedness scores. Evaluation results demonstrate a strong correlation between scores estimated by the two models. Additionally, a robust correlation between objective accentedness scores and subjective scores based on human perception is demonstrated, providing evidence for the reliability and validity of using AID-based and ASR-based systems for accentedness assessment in non-native speech. Such advanced systems would benefit accent assessment in language learning as well as speech and speaker assessment for intelligibility, quality, and speaker diarization and speech recognition advancements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are three main types of number used in modern, industrialized societies. Cardinals count sets (e.g., people, objects) and quantify elements of conventional scales (e.g., money, distance), ordinals index positions in ordered sequences (e.g., years, pages), and nominals serve as unique identifiers (e.g., telephone numbers, player numbers). Many studies that have cited number frequencies in support of claims about numerical cognition and mathematical cognition hinge on the assumption that most numbers analyzed are cardinal. This paper is the first to investigate the relative frequencies of different number types, presenting a corpus analysis of morphologically unmarked numbers (not, e.g., "eighth" or "21st") in which we manually annotated 3,600 concordances in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Overall, cardinals are dominant—both pure cardinals (sets) and measurements (scales)—except in the range 1,000–10,000, which is dominated by ordinal years, like 1996 and 2004. Ordinals occur less often overall, and nominals even less so. Only for cardinals do round numbers, associated with approximation, dominate overall and increase with magnitude. In comparison with other registers, academic writing contains a lower proportion of measurements as well as a higher proportion of ordinals and, to some extent, nominals. In writing, pure cardinals and measurements are usually represented as number words, but measurements—especially larger, unround ones—are more likely to be numerals. Ordinals and nominals are mostly represented as numerals. Altogether, this paper reveals how numbers are used in American English, establishing an initial baseline for any analyses of number frequencies and shedding new light on the cognitive and psychological study of number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communicating with a speaker with a different accent can affect one's own speech. Despite the strength of evidence for perception-production transfer in speech, the nature of transfer has remained elusive, with variable results regarding the acoustic properties that transfer between speakers and the characteristics of the speakers who exhibit transfer. The current study investigates perception-production transfer through the lens of statistical learning across passive exposure to speech. Participants experienced a short sequence of acoustically variable minimal pair (beer/pier) utterances conveying either an accent or typical American English acoustics, categorized a perceptually ambiguous test stimulus, and then repeated the test stimulus aloud. In the canonical condition, /b/–/p/ fundamental frequency (F0) and voice onset time (VOT) covaried according to typical English patterns. In the reverse condition, the F0xVOT relationship reversed to create an "accent" with speech input regularities atypical of American English. Replicating prior studies, F0 played less of a role in perceptual speech categorization in reverse compared with canonical statistical contexts. Critically, this down-weighting transferred to production, with systematic down-weighting of F0 in listeners' own speech productions in reverse compared with canonical contexts that was robust across male and female participants. Thus, the mapping of acoustics to speech categories is rapidly adjusted by short-term statistical learning across passive listening and these adjustments transfer to influence listeners' own speech productions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on accent shift or stylization to American English features in Anglophone pop-rock music and examines linguistic constraints alongside music-related considerations, as well as the effect of changes in musical genre on variable accent shift. The case study is the British band Mumford and Sons and their variable production of non-prevocalic rhotics as either present or absent. Mumford and Sons is of interest because they have displayed a change in their musical style throughout their career from Americana to alt-rock. The band's four studio albums were auditorily analyzed and coded for rhotic vs. non-rhotic with aid from spectrograms. The linguistic factors considered were word class, preceding vowel according to the word's lexical set, complexity of the preceding vowel, syllable complexity, stress, and location within the word and phrase. In addition, the effect of singing-related factors of syllable elongation and rhyming, and of the specific album, were also explored. Results show that rhoticity is favored in content words, stressed contexts, complex syllables, and NURSE words. This pattern is explained as stemming from the perceptual prominence of those contexts based on their acoustic and phonological characteristics. Results further show that syllable elongation leads to more rhoticity and that rhyming words tend to agree in their (non-)rhoticity. Finally, the degree of rhoticity decreases as the band departs from Americana in their later albums, highlighting the relevance of music genre for accent stylization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a corpus-based study, exploring three synonymous verbs: "join," "participate," and "attend," in terms of the degree of formality and collocation. The data were derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results demonstrated that "participate" is the most formal word as it commonly appears in academic texts. Similarly, "attend" is as formal as "participate" and frequently emerges in newspapers. On the other hand, "join" has the highest number of occurrences in informal contexts, that is, spoken and television and movie subtitles. For the purposes of this study, the top-thirty frequently listed noun collocates with MI scores higher than three were examined. The collocates were categorized into themes according to semantic preference. It was found that "participate" and "attend" are more synonymous as these two verbs share a number of particular noun collocates. Moreover, "participate" and "attend" have some overlapping collocates as represented by the emerging themes. These shared themes highlight the close sense of relation between the two verbs. However, "join" is the least synonymous among these three verbs as it has its own unique sets of noun collocates. The conclusion made from distinctions in object noun collocates and the degree of formality can illustrate the usage of the three target synonyms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study explores some euphemistic expressions in common usage in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). It evaluates the degree to which Saudis are familiar with these expressions and how frequently they use them. The KSA covers a large area with a variety of dialects: thus, any socio-linguistic research which deals with slang should be meticulous. One enabling factor for this study is that Saudis are comparatively religious and avoidant of linguistic taboos, and consequently employ euphemisms often. Several research papers have tackled taboos in the KSA, but most of these have been contrastive to or comparative with British English or American English, while others have explored standard euphemistic expressions in classical Arabic. This study is unique in dealing with selective euphemisms used in Saudi slang through a survey devised to measure peoples' degree of knowledge as well as their usage of such expressions. After analyzing the results of the questionnaires, it is possible to derive several attitudinal results, the most important of which include the findings that present-day Saudis are generally well-acquainted with euphemism in their language and that they are inclined to employ it in everyday situations wherever appropriate. The population selected for this study is resident within the Al Riyadh region, or what can be called "Najid". As the heart of the KSA, this region has Saudis from various regions and with a range of linguistic differences. However, it is recommended that similar studies be taken up in different parts of the KSA so as to pinpoint regional variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to depict the hegemony and the way cultural hegemony influences cultural issues in Wild Child film. Therefore, the main data sources were the script of The Wild Child by Nick Moore and the book which tells the contents of the film. To collect the data, the researcher used library research. The qualitative descriptive was used to explore the issues found in this study. Based on the study, it was found that there are some norms found in which the English hegemonies to the American girl of the main character in this film. Those are norms, language, and values. The study also showed that the behavior of the main character "Poppy" was influenced by the Americans. Based on the data result there are two (character, and attitudes) influenced of cultural Hegemony among the Americans and English in this film [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to determine the most prevalent African American Language (AAL) phonological and grammatical features in slavery- and Civil Rights–themed children's literature. Seventy-six books were initially selected to determine if they used AAL in dialogue or in narration. Of the 76 books, only 39 included AAL. The 39 books were analyzed further to categorize the specific AAL features used. The results revealed that the reduction of the final g (e.g., thinkin ') was the most prevalent phonological feature. Moreover, phonological features were used more often in slavery-themed texts than in Civil Rights texts. Additionally, the most frequently used AAL grammatical features were negation tense markers (e.g., didn't and neither) and subject-verb agreement (he listen). Grammatical features of AAL appeared more often in slavery-themed texts than Civil Rights themed texts. Implications for practice include suggestions for selecting, evaluating, and reading the books from this study with students. Implications for research include investigating other AAL features in slavery- and Civil Rights-themed books, authenticating the storylines of slavery- and Civil Rights–themed books, and analyzing other books with AAL that do not use these themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research scrutinizes expressions of modality at both word and clause ranks. Expressions at the former rank encompass modal verbal operators, modal adjuncts, and modal nominalizations, and expressions at the latter rank encompass 'explicit subjective' orientation such as I think and 'explicit objective' orientation, such as it is possible. These latter expressions are designated as interpersonal metaphors of modality within the framework proposed by Halliday. Previous studies delimited the distribution of expressions of modality either at word rank or at clause rank; in addition, they undertheorized the relationship between this distribution of modality and formality of registers because the register is testified to be an influential factor in the distribution of expressions of modality. This study, drawing on such statistical methods as variation analysis and correlation analysis, explored the distribution of expressions of modality at both word and clause ranks across registers with different degrees of formality by employing the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings are summarized as follows. First, registers in COCA employ expressions of modality with low and/or median values to judge the proposition at issue for the purpose of entertaining other varying voices. Second, in more formal registers, language users seem to prefer modal nominalizations to modal verbal operators and modal adjuncts at word rank, and 'explicit objective' orientation to 'explicit subjective' orientation at clause rank. In doing so, they could efficiently conceal the commentators' subjective meaning, and thus, the objectivity of propositions is highlighted. This study will shed light on the full understanding of the distribution of expressions of modality across registers and the application of such theory as interpersonal metaphor of modality in SFL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into vocabulary knowledge often differentiates between breadth (how many words a person knows) and depth (how well the words are known). Both theoretical categories are essential for understanding language learners' lexical development, but how the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge interconnect has not received the same attention as each individual dimension, especially in terms of productive knowledge. This study analyses lexis from mid-frequency lemmas in the K3–K9 frequency bands from the learner corpus PELIC (The University of Pittsburgh English Language Institute Corpus). Critically for learners, mastery of lexis in this frequency range is essential for achieving the English proficiency required for university study. From these mid-frequency items, a dataset of 7,554 tokens were collected from word families with multiple derivations and manually annotated. The findings showed high rates of collocational and derivational accuracy for the forms learners opted to use. However, compared to expert speaker texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), learners overused the verb forms and underused the noun forms of these lexical items. These patterns provide evidence of the interplay between breadth and depth in learners' productive vocabulary usage, suggesting that increased lexical depth will naturally lead to greater lexical breadth and vice versa. Pedagogical implications reaffirm the importance of developing learners' explicit morphological awareness and collocational accuracy. Suggestions for mid-frequency lexical items to prioritize in language learning are also provided, with a view to helping learners achieve academic readiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates a previously unresearched use of the discourse marker so : prefacing answers to questions from an interlocutor, informally coined "backstory so " and found to signal that the answer necessitates background information, or more complexity or length than the asker assumes the questioner expects, a function known to be carried out by well. This investigation was motivated by (i) negative attitudes toward this use of so , describing the speakers with attributes like annoying, condescending, confusing, and wrong; (ii) layperson claims that it is new; and (iii) non-scholarly writings by linguists reporting controversy over whether answering questions with so is actually new or a Zwickian Recency Illusion. This paper draws on spoken data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English from 1990 to 2016, and presents findings of 774 target tokens by 544 unique speakers starting in 1992. Results of a logistic regression show a statistically significant increase in the rate of this form over that time. I tentatively suggest that previous constraints against the discourse marker so prefacing answers to mark added information seem to have undergone a rapid language shift, competing with the older use of well , and supporting the layperson intuitions of newness. • Prefacing the answer to a question from an interlocutor with so shows evidence of being an innovation on the rise. • This use of so marks added background information that the answerer assumes the questioner lacks, a function often carried out by well. • Grassroots prescriptivists in the online discourse criticize so -prefacing answers and claim that it has been increasing. • The rise of this form may have started in the early 1990s, which does not support a Zwickian Recency Illusion. • Those laypeople associate so -prefacing answers with expert interviews on NPR , which was also the most common source in the corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, sociolinguists have begun to take greater interest in how public figures, such as politicians, may employ variation at different levels of linguistic structure in the construction of a public persona. These figures are of particular interest because their public and constructed usages may also illuminate wider social usages and indices of specific linguistic variables. This article presents results from analyses of multiple aspects of ethnolinguistic variation in the speech of Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2019–20 Democratic Party primary debates. In particular, it focuses on her use of selected morphosyntactic features associated with African American Language, vowel systems associated with California and African American identities, and topic-based differences in the use of selected prosodic variables. Together, these results show how Harris selectively employs both enregistered and subtle linguistic variables in the establishment of a highly specific sociolinguistic identity that comports with her unique positions politically, socially, and racially. The results of this study expand our knowledge about how the complexities of speaker identity are reflected in sociolinguistic variation, while further illuminating how speakers in the public sphere use variation to reflect and construct both who they are and who we want them to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a conceptualization of identity-based content creation in the digital sphere, examining the cases of two TikTok content creators, Amy and Erin, who leverage their identities to establish distinctive brands. Amy, a white American English teacher in Korea, highlights the differences between her and Korean society in her content about Korea, while Erin, a Korean American, critiques Amy's content by emphasizing the distinction between her experience as an immigrant and Amy's experience as a white American. The study explores how the emphasis on self-branding can obscure power dynamics and historical inequalities within identity-based content creation, which inherently reflects geopolitics and racial hierarchy. The research further examines how this type of content creation can serve as a space for the negotiation of power dynamics between dominant and non-dominant identities while also functioning as a means to build a self-brand in the digital content creation field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Prescriptivism--a concept concerned with "correctness in language use" (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2019, p. 8)--serves an important purpose when editors and other language professionals apply the findings from empirical linguistic studies to practical communication tasks (Oaks, 2021). Usage guides catalog usage rules, but they treat these rules with varying levels of prescriptivism. Therefore, advice varies across usage guides. This study empirically investigates levels of prescriptivism observed in usage guides. Method: Using a scale from 1 (minimally prescriptive) to 4 (maximally prescriptive), two raters coded the level of prescriptivism observed in entries for eight well-known usage problems (e.g., who/whom and lay/lie) from 11 current usage guides relating to American English. Based on the codes assigned to these entries, an overall prescriptivism index was calculated for each usage problem and usage guide. Results: A range in levels of prescriptivism was observed. Overall, the treatment of usage problems skewed high on the prescriptivism scale with six of the eight being treated as maximally prescriptive by at least two usage guides and six having mean indexes at or above the scale's midpoint of 2.50. Similarly, seven of the 11 usage guides gave maximally prescriptive advice for at least one usage problem and eight had mean indexes at or above 2.50. While these findings indicate a bias toward prescriptive advice, a noteworthy amount of prescription-breaking advice was also observed. Conclusion: The findings demonstrate that usage guides vary considerably in their levels of prescriptivism; therefore, writers and editors must critically consider which advice to follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Country music has become commercially successful both in the US and worldwide. It is perceived as a genre that values authenticity, which may be reflected in the choice of linguistic features, with (White) Southern American English (SAE) serving as the "default" variety. Given the recent diversification of the genre, the question arises whether the use of SAE features is still considered obligatory as a kind of "supralocal norm". This study compared the lyrics of 600 highly successful songs by male and female artists from White Southern, Black Southern, and White non-Southern backgrounds. The aim was to test (i) whether morphosyntactic SAE features are used to index authenticity in the sense of having become enregistered for this music genre and (ii) whether non-Southerners engage in the styling of relevant markers. It emerged that non-Southerners use more of these features than their Southern counterparts, providing preliminary evidence for "genre fitting" as a means of indexing authenticity. However, there is only one marker that qualifies as a core Country feature used across all artist groups, namely negative concord. As this item arguably is better categorized as vernacular universal, SAE morphosyntax appears to have largely lost its indexical function in Country, while accent features are still vital to establishing cultural authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The normative institutional practices of White, native English speakers have been explored in detail by CRT scholars in US academia, and these practices perpetuate a system which maintains White privilege to the detriment and systemic exclusion of the Other. Consequently, students of colour and non-native English speakers are inclined to face a number of forms of inequality, inequity, discrimination and harassment based on Whiteness and nativism including English speaker centrism, and this eventually serves to reproduce Whiteness and White racial domination. To better understand this institutional practices based on Whiteness in US academia, this paper explores how structural inequity based on linguistic racism and White privilege is reproduced by patterns in everyday institutional practice in US academia, and how intersectional structural inequity influences non-White, non-native speakers of American English such as international students from Asia by interviewing an Asian international ELL Ph.D. student, and exploring his counterstory in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Native speakers of English commonly perceive some social variants of their language to be more prestigious than others. It is less clear, however, whether nonnative English speakers from immigrant communities come to internalize similar language stereotypes. The present study analysed, through a language attitude survey, a total of 40 Korean American college students' reactions to tape-recorded samples of five socially stratified varieties of English commonly heard in the U.S. Results indicated that Korean American college students perceived a Standard American English (SAE) typical of broadcast English in the U.S. most favourably. Nonstandard varieties (regional and ethnic dialects), especially African American English, were judged as less favourable. SAE and its speaker was associated with positive qualities on rating scales, while nonstandard guises were rated less favourably on the same characteristics. This study provides a greater understanding of how different English varieties are perceived by an immigrant community in the U.S. and invites future studies of English language attitudes in other minority communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on exploring translanguaging pedagogies in education, particularly regarding multilingual learners' experiences and the impact of incorporating home languages into the classroom. Topics include the twin skin of ethnic and linguistic identity; the exclusionary effects of monolingual classroom instruction; and the potential of translanguaging pedagogies to challenge colonial linguistic practices and values in schools.

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The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between an American English Digits in Noise (DIN) test and commonly used audiological measures to evaluate the DIN test's ability to detect hearing loss and validate hearing aid fitting. QuickSIN and DIN tests were completed by participants with untreated hearing loss (n = 46), prescription hearing aids (n = 15), and over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids (n = 12). Performance on the QuickSIN showed moderate positive correlations with DIN for untreated hearing loss participants and prescription hearing aid users, but not for OTC hearing aid users. For untreated hearing loss participants, both QuickSIN and DIN tests showed positive moderate to strong correlations with high frequency puretone averages. In OTC users, DIN scores did not significantly change over a 6-month time period and were better when conducted remotely compared to in-person testing. Our results suggest that the DIN test may be a feasible monitoring option for individuals with hearing loss and those fitted with hearing aids. However, due to small sample size in this pilot study, future research is needed to examine DIN test's utility for fitting and validating OTC hearing aids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores what I call Dissociative Syntactic Amalgam (DSA) constructions, observed in conversation parts of fictional varieties of English, such as film/TV scripts and novels. I provide 27 cases of DSAs, most of which come from Corpus of Contemporary American English and Movie Corpus. A paradigm example is I get off at ten past I'm never going out with you (as an answer to What time do you get off (work) tonight?), where I'm never going out with you is clausal but fills a nominal slot. In DSAs, the speaker initially lures the hearer to create a positive expectation (e.g., I can go out with her), but the speaker 'dissociates' herself from this expectation, that is, expresses her negative attitude (e.g., irritation) towards it. DSAs have received little (if any) analytic attention, and this paper aims to fill this gap in the literature. More specifically, I describe interpretive aspects of DSAs in comparison with the standard cases of syntactic amalgams (e.g., Ken sent you'll never guess how many letters to Naomi) and develop a cognitive–pragmatic account in relevance theory, explicating the interpretive path a hearer takes in comprehending a DSA utterance. • Identifying the Dissociative Syntactic Amalgam (DSA) construction. • Considering the ways in which a speaker conveys a variety of emotive meanings. • Presenting a theory-neutral description of interpretive aspects of DSAs. • Developing a cognitive–pragmatic account of DSAs in relevance theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fronting of the vowels /u, ʊ, o/ is observed throughout most North American English varieties, but has been analyzed mainly in terms of acoustics rather than articulation. Because an increase in F2, the acoustic correlate of vowel fronting, can be the result of any gesture that shortens the front cavity of the vocal tract, acoustic data alone do not reveal the combination of tongue fronting and/or lip unrounding that speakers use to produce fronted vowels. It is furthermore unresolved to what extent the articulation of fronted back vowels varies according to consonantal context and how the tongue and lips contribute to the F2 trajectory throughout the vowel. This paper presents articulatory and acoustic data on fronted back vowels from two varieties of American English: coastal Southern California and South Carolina. Through analysis of dynamic acoustic, ultrasound, and lip video data, it is shown that speakers of both varieties produce fronted /u, ʊ, o/ with rounded lips, and that high F2 observed for these vowels is associated with a front-central tongue position rather than unrounded lips. Examination of time-varying formant trajectories and articulatory configurations shows that the degree of vowel-internal F2 change is predominantly determined by coarticulatory influence of the coda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of studies in pragmatics, second language acquisition, and related fields have opted to use sitcom conversations as a substitute for natural conversations in their analyses. However, few studies have critically examined the validity of this substitution. Taking this into consideration, the present study aims to examine the lexical similarities and differences between sitcom and natural conversations by utilizing the Friends Corpus and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English as samples under a synthesized analytic framework of six lexical categories that have been frequently examined in previous research. The findings indicate that there are significant differences between sitcom and natural conversations at the lexical level, particularly in terms of word lengths, keywords, and the use of discourse markers, personal pronouns, vocatives, and religious words. While sitcom conversations tend to be more concise, interactive, evaluative, and involving, natural conversations provide more explanations for their speech acts and refer to their parties who are not present in the conversations. Additionally, sitcom conversations use more intensifiers and vocatives while using fewer tentative modals, expletives, and religious words. Based on these results, it can be concluded that sitcom conversations do not fully depict the conversations in sitcoms, and thus substituting natural conversations with those in sitcoms should be approached with caution in language teaching and research. This study provides insight into the differences in lexical patterns between two types of conversations, and highlights the importance of using natural conversations as a basis for language teaching and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schwa in English shows a considerable amount of contextual variation, to the extent that previous work has proposed that it is acoustically targetless. Although the consensus of previous research seems to suggest that schwa is targeted, the sources of schwa's contextual variation have yet to be fully explained. We explored a potential source of variation in English schwa, namely, whether schwa occurs in a content word (word-initial schwa, e.g., accompany) or is a function word (phrase-initial schwa, e.g., a company). We sought to determine whether English speakers distinguish word- and phrase-initial schwas in production, as well as whether word- and phrase-initial schwas differ in their level of targetedness. To elicit hyperarticulation of word- and phrase-initial schwas and thereby facilitate our ability to observe their targets, participants produced ambiguous and unambiguous word- and phrase-initial schwa pairs in neutral and biased sentence contexts. The first and second formant trajectories of the schwas were analyzed using growth curve analysis, allowing us to demonstrate that word-initial and phrase-initial schwas are both targeted and have different targets. Ultimately, our results suggest different underlying representations for schwas in function and content words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While culturally responsive teaching is widely acknowledged as essential to student success, a lack of consistency in what it is called, what it looks like, and how to enact it can present a challenge for educators. Further, the trend toward political polarization has spread fear and misunderstanding of critical race theory and is now taking aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in education and society, including culturally responsive teaching. Thus, it behooves scholars and educators to assert unequivocally that culturally responsive teaching is not an approach that silences or condemns any group of students' cultural knowledge, beliefs, or perspectives, be they mainstream or underrepresented. Rather, one essential component across multiple nuanced definitions of culturally responsive teaching is a focus on identifying and leveraging all students' cultural strengths in service of learning. One well-established cultural asset of many African American students, who consistently experience inequitable outcomes in U.S. schools, is their language. As African American Language (AAL) has been identified as the most widely studied language variety in the world, the body of scholarship identifying and exploring its strengths is rich and robust. Using the framework of Foster et al.'s Heuristic for Thinking about Culturally Responsive Teaching (HiTCRiT), this review explores scholarship on the use of AAL in three spheres—everyday discourse, literature and expository texts, and popular media—to illustrate both the challenges and potential of enacting asset-focused pedagogies by leveraging a broad and diverse variety of texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pluricentricity of English language has led to the appearance of new trends in English language education. This is especially important in Expanding Circle (EC) countries to develop intercultural communication among learners. The current study attempted to investigate the views of Iranian English teachers towards the relevancy of English as an international language (EIL) to their practice of English language teaching and the influence of teacher education on shaping their attitudes. To this end, a mixed method sequential research design was used to collect data, sing a questionnaire delivered to115 EC teachers who, at the time, were taking an online teacher education workshop held in a Language Institute in Tehran regarding EIL and varieties of English. Subsequently, semi-structured interviews were carried out with 34 teachers who had expressed their agreement to be interviewed. The analysis of the data showed that although the EC teachers had mostly expressed positive perceptions about EIL and varieties of English, their perceptions misaligned with their practices in ELT classes. The mismatch between teachers' conception of EIL and its relevance to their context of teaching seemed to have undermined their self-confidence in applying this concept to practice. They seemed to have taken it for granted that American English is the sole variety to be practiced in Iran, as it is considered the most desirable target language variety. Implications of the results for educators and policy-makers on bridging the gap between theory and practice in ELT classes are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides regional or economic reasons, communities may form and segregate based on political alignment. The latter, referred to as political polarization, is of growing societal concern across the world. Here we map and quantify linguistic divergence across the partisan left-right divide in the United States, using social media data. We develop a general methodology to delineate (social) media users by their political preference, based on which (potentially biased) news media accounts they do and do not follow on a given platform. Our data consists of 1.5M short posts by 10k users (about 20M words) from the social media platform Twitter (now "X"). Delineating this sample involved mining the platform for the lists of followers (n = 422M) of 72 large news media accounts. We quantify divergence in topics of conversation and word frequencies, messaging sentiment, and lexical semantics of words and emoji. We find signs of linguistic divergence across all these aspects, especially in topics and themes of conversation, in line with previous research. While US American English remains largely intelligible within its large speech community, our findings point at areas where miscommunication may eventually arise given ongoing polarization and therefore potential linguistic divergence. Our flexible methodology — combining data mining, lexicostatistics, machine learning, large language models and a systematic human annotation approach — is largely language and platform agnostic. In other words, while we focus here on US political divides and US English, the same approach is applicable to other countries, languages, and social media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the centrality of language in human life, scholars and others have long been interested in whether and how languages might influence thought. This paper describes a line of anthropological research on this issue that moves from a structural comparison of number marking in American English and Yucatec Maya to an assessment of associated cognitive effects on classification and memory, to an exploration of the functional factors involved in the emergence of new language-thought connections in middle childhood, and then finally to a consideration of related functional issues surrounding language standardization, literacy, and schooling. Throughout, the research utilizes a multilevel theoretical framing that emphasizes the contributions of the various subfields of anthropology, and it highlights key methodological challenges not only to design effective research but also to address the reflexive challenges of having our own language categories affect our understanding of other languages and of our experience more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]