Adults undertaking the endeavor of learning a new language can attest to the difficulty involved with producing the sounds and prosody of the target language. A principal aim of research on adult speech production is to comprehend the mechanisms and processes that differentiate adult bilingual speech development from bilingual speech that develops earlier in life. It is clear that individuals who learn an additional language in adulthood typically encounter some difficulties that early learners do not. In particular, these difficulties arise at the segmental level when acquiring novel sound categories and novel sound contrasts, as well as at the suprasegmental level when learning to produce non-native prosodic structures related to intonation, stress, rhythm, tone, and tempo. The present chapter provides a selective overview of the current state-of-the-art in adult bilingual speech production. Furthermore, this chapter considers theoretical and methodological areas for improvement, as well as avenues for future research.

Language use is a skill that requires exposure to language, feedback on usage, and practice. So children need exposure from expert speakers, feedback on the language being acquired, and on any errors children produce, and practice along the way. Languages differ, so the paths children follow within and across languages may vary, and some constructions may be harder to acquire in one language, easier in another. The goal is to learn to use language for communication. Language is essentially social, relying on common ground. Part I (Chapters 2-6) focusses on how adults talk with children; children’s analysis of the speech stream; their first production of words; and how they assign meanings to words. Part II (Chapters 7-11) focusses on children’s acquisition of structure: elaborations of information inside clauses, and combinations of clauses. They also rely on structure when coining new words. Part III (Chapters 12-14) looks at turn-taking, learning to be polite, persuasive, and informative, and how to tell stories. Children who hear two languages have two such systems to learn. Part IV (Chapters 15-16) summarizes evidence for biological specialization for language and considers how continuity and change are reflected in language processing.

Gestures of the face have a relatively limited presence in scholarly gesture discourses. The use of facial movements as intentional communication has been historically undermined in facial behavior research. The face has been primarily studied as expressions of emotion, traditionally theorized as involuntary signs of internal affective states. Emotion expressions are differentiated from facial movements that serve conversational functions in face-to-face dialogue. The facial gestures presented in this chapter illustrate the flexibility and diversity of meanings conveyed by facial communicative actions. Gestures can refer to affective events not present in the immediate here and now, communicate understanding of another individual’s affective experience, and convey information about a target referent. Other facial gestures have counterparts in hand gestures with similar pragmatic and semantic functions. The study of facial gestural components of linguistic communicative events is important to the construction of a comprehensive model of language.

The present chapter provides an overview of the book by introducing its main tenet, advancedness, a term coined by Ortega and Brynes (2008), in the context of higher education. It also conceptualizes L2 learners as actors on a global stage, emphasizing the importance of their views of language use and of their own identity as L2 learners. It then provides an overview of the book. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses, Part I examines L2 Spanish learners’ beliefs about, and assessment of, advanced-level oral Spanish in social and cognitive contexts, and posits hypotheses about L2 learner identity. Part II taps into language ideologies of professionals working in the field of foreign/second languages in higher education. Quantitative and qualitative analyses yield individual as well as institutional biases about bilingualism and the “ideal” L2 speaker. Finally, Part III addresses assessment of advancedness through the lens of critical language awareness and L2 learner identity using mixed methodologies. The book’s last chapter presents conclusions based on the findings of its studies and makes a call to continue investigating advancedness from a sociocognitive perspective.

Differential Object Marking (DOM) is vulnerable to change in heritage speakers of Spanish and heritage speakers of Hindi. DOM is also vulnerable to L1 attrition in Spanish-speaking first-generation immigrants but not in Hindi immigrants. This chapter examines DOM vulnerability in Romanian. The chapter describes the sociolinguistic characteristics of the Romanian-speaking population in the United, followed by a summary of the overall results of the linguistic background questionnaire and the linguistic tasks. The overall results show that, compared to the Spanish and Hindi-speaking populations, the Romanian-speaking population in the United States is far less numerous, yet their Romanian language skills remain relatively strong compared to the other two groups. The accuracy with DOM of the first-generation Romanian immigrants on all linguistic measures did not differ from those of the Romanian speakers in Romania. Just like in the Hindi study, there appears to be no evidence of language change in the homeland nor signs of attrition of this phenomenon in the first-generation adult immigrants sampled in this study. Yet, DOM and accusative clitic doubling (CD) were found to be somewhat vulnerable to omission in heritage speakers, especially in those exposed to English since birth or very early in life (the simultaneous bilinguals).

This chapter asks whether DOM—which is a vulnerable grammatical area in Spanish in the United States—is also vulnerable in Hindi as a heritage language. The results of the study presented in this chapter show that some Hindi heritage speakers also display omission of DOM in all tasks. But unlike what was found for the Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants in the Spanish study discussed in the previous chapter, there is no indication of ongoing language change in the Hindi spoken in the homeland nor apparent signs of attrition of DOM in the Hindi-speaking adult immigrant group. The sociolinguistic characteristics of the Hindi/Urdu-speaking population in the United States is discussed. The results of the linguistic background questionnaire and the linguistic tasks (oral narrative task, elicited production task, written task, bimodal acceptability judgment task, auditory/written comprehension task) are presented and discussed.

The acquisition of DOM in Spanish monolingual children and Spanish-speaking bilinguals has been intensely investigated in the last two decades. One of the main objectives of the in-depth study of DOM conducted for this project was to confirm and evaluate the strength of previous findings of DOM omission in Spanish-English bilingual children and in young adult heritage speakers. If erosion of DOM in Spanish as a heritage language is indeed a robust phenomenon, it should be documented in other groups of heritage speakers. Although hypotheses about the potential role of the parental generation in contributing to heritage language grammars abound, at the time the Spanish study reported in this book was conceived, there were no studies of potential attrition of DOM in adult immigrants. Therefore, the first-generation immigrant group was included to put the language transmission hypothesis to the test. This chapter presents a brief overview of Spanish in the United States before summarizing the main results of the language background questionnaire, and of the production, comprehension and judgment tasks described in Chapter 5.

Academic writers with different linguistic backgrounds communicate scientific findings following objective norms, although they do so in different ways, as is evidenced in intercultural studies. This chapter focuses on the identification of boosters and hedges used by Spanish and Chinese researchers to persuade readers about scientific findings in engineering and linguistics. The objectives were to categorize and compare the frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters used by nonnative writers of English, to study whether there are any linguistic and cultural differences, and to identify boosting and hedging features different from those used in English as a mother tongue. The material was a corpus of 120 academic papers on linguistics and engineering papers written by Spanish and Chinese researchers. Boosters and hedges were spotted and occurrences extracted and classified with METOOL, a tool designed to identify metadiscourse markers. In the results, it was shown that Chinese writers used more boosters and hedges than their Spanish peers. To conclude, it was observed that although Chinese and Spanish writers tend to be assertive in their mother tongue, mitigation was used to adopt an academic style.

In Chapter 1, we define the components and criteria of cross-cultural pragmatic analysis and introduce the basics of a model of cross-cultural pragmatic analysis, consisting of contrastive and ancillary pragmatic research. We also discuss the relationship between language and culture, and the ways in which cross-cultural pragmatic research examines the language and culture interface, by arguing that our cross-cultural pragmatic research only pursues interest in certain layers of culture due to our pursuit of replicability. Finally, we consider the reasons for the importance of doing cross-cultural pragmatic research. The chapter also provides a summary of the contents of the book and discusses various conventions that we follow across the chapters.

Chapter 2 discusses the relationship between language and thought from a methodological perspective. It explores how language has been viewed as a representation of thought, and used as a 'window' to human cognition, across various disciplines, spanning cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and other areas. In cognitive science, unconstrained verbal production data are frequently used to investigate dynamic cognitive processes, whereas psycholinguistic approaches address cognitively significant distinctions between a set of available options in controlled situations, typically with a focus on language production and comprehension. Following a general outline of other relevant disciplines and areas in which cognition is addressed through language, this chapter spells out in some detail how CODA builds on, relates to, and is distinct from both of these most central approaches.