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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.

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]