Volume 46, Issue 3 -

Is There Compensatory Vowel Lengthening in the Language Acquisition of a Child with a Cochlear Implant Compensatory vowel lengthening (CVL) is found in both adult and children's language. CVL is a process where the loss of a segment is compensated elsewhere by lengthening. It occurs mostly in languages with phonemic vowel length (de Chene and Anderson 1979). We examine CVL in the acquisition of Israeli Hebrew (IH), a language without phonemic vowel length, in a child with a cochlear implant (CI). Preliminary findings reveal: (1) a preference for the vowel /a/; (2) longer vowel duration before: (a) sonorant codas than obstruent codas; and (b) deleted sonorant codas than before preserved sonorant codas and open syllables. There is no significant difference in vowel duration before preserved and deleted obstruent codas and open syllables. We hypothesize that CVL appears in IH-speaking children but in sonorant codas only. The findings are discussed in terms of the representation of CVL in children's grammars as well as auditory deprivation, which may affect auditory perception and motor coordination.

Mental Pollution Hypothesis and Foreign Vocabulary Retention Research into second language acquisition lists several factors - social, psychological, cognitive, and affective - as reasons for the failure or low performance of many adult language learners. This present study was conducted to show that in addition to these factors it can also be greatly slowed by mental pollution - any ‘contamination of the mind’ by various forms of affective visual distractors, ranging in scope from violent or sexually suggestive images to comedic commercial advertisements and coming from a variety of media sources - from which younger learners are mostly protected but older learners are accustomed to encountering on an almost daily basis. In order to test the mental pollution hypothesis, 106 university students participated in the experiment which comprised vocabulary teaching along with two different treatments: mental pollutants being the first and free class time with relaxing music in the background comprising the second. The Equivalent Materials, Pretest, Posttest Design together, including descriptive statistics and paired sample t-tests, were used to analyze the vocabulary scores derived from the two treatments. The findings of the experiment indicate that when learners are exposed to high level of mental pollution, they demonstrate low retention of new vocabulary in a foreign language.

Strategic use and Perceptions of English as a Lingua Franca English as a Lingua Franca is today a thriving and vibrant field of research which has sparked considerable debate but also a wealth of studies in various directions. This paper builds on recent research in this field and focuses on two areas of investigation, namely pragmatic strategies and perceptions of ELF, while placing them within the larger theoretical framework of ELF studies.

Values of the 2004 E.U. Enlargement in Media Discourse Values and ideology are assumed to be discursive phenomena. Therefore, the aim of the analysis in the present paper is to present linguistic markers of values that are responsible for organisation of various spheres of life, and the same time, for the shape of ideology of the 2004 EU enlargement as it has been presented in the print media. To exemplify these assumptions, a Press release corpus consisting of some 30,000 words was gathered. It encompasses articles published between 15 April and 7 May 2004 which represent such journalistic genres as press note, report, commentary, report with elements of commentary and coverage. In the course of the study, expressions pointing to particular spheres of life were identified and analysed as referring to particular values of the E.U.

Can (An) Elf Have a Life of Its Own? In this paper I wish to look at whether English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is likely to acquire an identity of its own and be universally perceived as a linguistic entity different from, and independent of, native speaker English(es). The discussion begins with a brief overview of certain controversies surrounding the ELF case, before turning to the so-called Latin analogy theme. The fate of Latin, another well-known example of a language of international communication in the history of mankind, was in fact sealed by the emergence - in the early Middle Ages - of a non-native variety of the language, decidedly distinct from the natural language that later developed into Romance. The paper will attempt to present certain aspects of the Latin-English analogy, with a view to obtaining clues as to the possible future development of the modern lingua franca.

Native and Non-Native Models in Elt: Advantages, Disadvantages, and the Implications of Accent Parallelism As a response to the diversification of Englishes into a great many native and non-native varieties, scholars such as Kirkpatrick (2007: 195) have proposed that "context and learner needs" should decide whether native or non-native models are adopted in ELT. However, an analysis of some of the arguments used in Kirkpatrick (2007) and Jenkins (2000, 2007) suggests that they have overemphasised the importance of non-native models, without giving due consideration to those Expanding Circle contexts where native models would be equally, or perhaps even more, appropriate. It will be suggested that a thorough examination of learners' needs and aspirations in different local contexts reveals that these too are actually subject to diversification. In particular, it is important for those learners who prefer to continue to refer to native-speaker models (without necessarily attempting to attain native-speaker targets) to be aware of their interlocutors' attitudes to stigmatised accent features - especially in those cases where parallels exist between native and non-native realisations (e.g. the absence of dental fricatives). Research by Van den Doel (2006) indicates that attitudes to these stigmatised accent features are difficult to predict, and that it would therefore be undesirable to recommend their general use in any pronunciation models.