The article compares children’s singing behaviours from China and England, using similar materials and research protocol. In total, N = 5,037 singing performances were collected from Chinese and English Primary school students who had received no specialist singing training other than in their regular music classes. Chinese participants showed a similar level of development across different age groups as their English peers, with assessed singing competency generally increasing with age, especially for children aged ≤ 8 years. Girls generally showed more advanced singing behaviour developmentally than boys in the various age groups in both countries. Any sex difference in singing behaviour was smaller for younger children (age < 7 years).

It has been widely suggested in recent years that exposure to and use of multiple languages can affect cognitive performance, with bilinguals frequently being argued to demonstrate superior cognitive performance to their monolingual peers. The current study investigates whether there are any effects of minimal exposure to second-language (L2) Welsh on the cognitive skills of English-speaking emergent bilingual primary school children in Wales. Participants were divided into two language groups based on their school year, with performance between monolingual (N = 25) and emergent bilingual (N = 38) children compared on a variety of executive function (EF) tasks. Results revealed superior performance for the bilingual children in Reception and Year 1 on all EF tasks aside from the Forward digit recall compared to monolingual peers, with no differences between groups in Year 2. This suggests that the cognitive benefits of bilingualism emerge at very early stages of second-language exposure.

A cosmopolis may be understood as a durable, cross–regional cultural–political order in which a prestigious bridge language provides the central anchor and the shared medium for knowledge, cultural authority and institutional practice across multilingual settings. In this article I hypothesise that, in the early 21st century, English in international employ is beginning to occupy a socio–cultural position comparable in certain respects to that of the pre‑modern formations associated with Sanskrit, Latin and Classical Arabic. To examine this possibility, I begin with a deliberately broad, first‑pass identification of the most salient cosmopolis features, limiting the analysis to the characteristic profile of the prestige bridge language that underwrites each cosmopolis. I then consider whether a comparable profile plausibly holds for global modern English, drawing on existing research on its global role. The results are preliminary, but they suggest that this perspective may offer a useful analytical lens for investigating English in its present sociolinguistic position, and that it merits more systematic follow‑up work.

Using 3,154 tokens from American English, we test whether optionality in verb–particle placement increases speech-planning cost, measured as pre-verbal silence. Tokens were coded for object properties, idiomaticity and verb frequency. We find that pre-verbal silence does not differ between split (pick the book up) and joined (pick up the book) orders. While idiomaticity favours the joined order, it does not raise planning cost. Verb frequency shortens pauses only in fast speech, suggesting predictability acts lexically, not structurally. Choice symmetry does not lengthen pauses. We therefore fail to reject the null hypothesis: the two orders are equally easy to plan. This null result, from tests designed to detect a theoretically predicted effect, aligns with other evidence that syntactic choice imposes no production cost. We conclude that variation in verb–particle constructions (VPCs) is cost-free; distributional differences reflect object properties and idiomaticity, not derivational markedness.

This study investigates individual factors and workplace practices associated with self-perceived communication competence in the workplace (SPCCW) at a university in Norway. Via an online survey, 313 international academic staff members reported their SPCCW in Norwegian as a second language (L2). Although 92% of the permanent staff who responded reported having taken formal training in L2 Norwegian, only 54% of these felt that they knew enough Norwegian to perform their work effectively. Findings showed that, in addition to length of residence in Norway, having a Germanic first language (other than English) was a significant predictor of SPCCW. Qualitative comments indicated that activities in Norwegian outside of work and having patient interaction partners to practise with were perceived as beneficial for L2 confidence in the workplace. The findings are discussed from a second language acquisition perspective and add to our understanding of how the language competencies needed for work in higher education can be developed.

Happiness is a complex concept that has been intensively researched from many perspectives, but the linguistic aspects of this phenomenon are still under-researched. Using corpus-based analysis of semantically similar words (word embedding), the author studies lexical units denoting happiness and joy in three West Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak) and compares them with the corresponding lexical units in English. The results show that despite the mutual linguistic and non-linguistic ties, the Polish, Czech and Slovak understanding of happiness exhibits not only similarities (e.g. the relationship between happiness and joy and the outward orientation of joy) but also significant differences (e.g. the different value of the component ‘luck’ in happiness, a different relationship between joy, sadness and fear, and cross-cultural differences related to religion). The results also highlight similarities and differences between West Slavic languages and English. In addition to this, the study tests the advantages and limitations of the word-embedding analysis for the analysis of concepts and their culturally specific features. The author believes that the method is useful because it offers new insights into the analysed data, but it also requires human oversight and careful interpretation.

This meta-analysis aimed to determine whether Chinese-English bilingual children with reading difficulties (RD) have significant deficits in morphological awareness (MA), phonological awareness, and word reading, in both their first and second languages (L1 and L2). It also evaluated the influence of RD severity, age, diglossia context, and methodological design on effect sizes. The study included 29 samples (N = 4,516) from 14 studies on children with RD in L1 morphosyllabic Chinese and L2 morphophonemic English. Results showed medium effect sizes for MA (g = −0.722) and PA (g = −0.625), and a large effect size for word reading (g = −2.042) in L1 Chinese. In L2 English, medium to large effect sizes were found for MA (g = −1.083), PA (g = −0.857), and word reading (g = −0.730). Age was the only significant moderator, with larger deficits observed as age increased. These findings align with studies on monolinguals with dyslexia and bilinguals with normal abilities or disabilities, recommending MA tasks in assessments.

In this study, we explore L1 and L2 speakers’ use of degree modifiers (DMs) aika/melko/ihan and quite/rather/fairly in a cross-linguistic setting, with academic Finnish and English as languages of interest. As a method, we apply a multivariate approach that considers the constructional features of the DMs. The statistical modelling showed reliably that, in both languages, L1 and L2 speakers made partially different choices when using the DMs. The model predicted the DM use of both languages well, although it explained the variation of the Finnish DMs better. In general, the English L2 use of the DMs was closer to English L1 use than was the case in Finnish, where the populations had a clearly different favourite among the three DM variants. The results suggest that the examined DM group is more fixed in academic Finnish, whereas in academic English the choice between the examined DM variants is more open.

This article examines representations of the Modern English Speaker of Korean (MESK) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), as lexicographers listened to and documented the language of this figure over the past century. I show that, until the early twenty-first century, the most salient type of MESK was the Koreanist, a white, masculine expert on and translator of Korean, the language of a racial other. By contrast, more recent Korean entries, influenced by the global spread of hallyu, have invoked the Korea Fan, a figure that potentially unsettles longstanding ideologies of language, race, and gender. I argue, however, that the dictionary’s techniques of linguistic regimentation continue to represent the MESK, even when expressing Korean fandom, as fundamentally aligned with the Koreanist.

This article proposes and tests an experimental method to assess the psychological reality of hierarchical theories of constituent structure in particular domains. I show that a hierarchical theory of constituent structure necessarily makes the prediction that an association between constituents should be easier to learn than an association between strings that cross constituent boundaries, whereas dependency-based theories of constituency predict that constituents cannot have associations that their parts do not have. Previous research has shown that the major division within an English syllable is between the onset and the nucleus, rather than between the nucleus and the coda. Thus, the nucleus forms a constituent (the rime) with the coda rather than the onset. The hierarchical theory of constituency thus proposes that English speakers should learn rime-affix associations more easily than body-affix associations and that the rime can have associations that its parts do not have. These predictions are confirmed in the present study. Applications of the experimental method and its variants to linguistic constituency in other domains are discussed.

The results of a production experiment show that English speakers distinguish elements under contrastive focus from elements that are merely new in the discourse. A novel paradigm eliciting both contrastively focused and merely discourse-new elements in the same sentence avoids differences in information structure and pitch accenting in the context surrounding the target elements that were confounds in previous studies on the topic. Elements under contrastive focus show greater duration, relative intensity, and F0 movement with respect to other elements in the utterance than elements that are new in the discourse but not under contrastive focus. We argue that the phonetic differences revealed here cannot be explained in terms of systematic manipulation of pitch-accent type or phrasal boundaries, and should instead be analyzed as differences in phrase-level phonological prominence for contrastively focused and merely discourse-new elements.