When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation…

Theoretical approaches to the principles governing the coordination of speech gestures differ in their assessment of the contributions of biomechanical and perceptual pressures on this coordination. Perceptually-oriented accounts postulate that, for consonant-consonant (C1-C2) sequences, gestural timing patterns arise from speakers' sensitivity to…

This dissertation investigates how boundary temporal and tonal events are coordinated to oral constrictions in Greek. Regarding the temporal events, most studies agree in that boundary lengthening is cumulative (i.e., larger the stronger the boundary) (e.g., Cho & Keating 2001, Tabain 2003b) and progressive (i.e., decreasing with distance from…

Background: The newly formed discipline of engineering education is addressing the need to (a) enhance STEM education for precollege students and (b) identify optimum ways to introduce engineering content starting, perhaps, from the early ages. Introducing engineering at the Prekindergarten through 12th grade (PreK-12) education level requires…

This conceptual paper represents an attempt to reflect on the notion of the "ancient Greek polis"--a subject of study and sometimes heated debate for many philosophers and historians worldwide--as a paradigm of a city that can offer some insight into modern states, in an era of globalisation and tense multiculturalism. By providing a…

Today's corporate world is in a state of flux. The globalisation of business activity and the escalating economic crises force even small/medium enterprises to become international. This impacts on the competitiveness, profitability and survival of organisations, and as a result the companies' recruitment strategies and language policies,…

Against the backdrop of the ongoing crisis-led migration from Southern to Northwestern Europe, the present paper reports on a case study of two families who have recently migrated from Greece to Luxembourg. Luxembourg has a trilingual education system and many pupils of migrant background face difficulties on this account. Drawing on the framework…

Learning nonnative speech contrasts in adulthood has proven difficult. Standard training methods have achieved moderate effects using explicit instructions and performance feedback. In this study, the authors question preexisting assumptions by demonstrating a superiority of implicit training procedures. They trained 3 groups of Greek adults on a…

James E. Alatis has a distinguished career in Foreign Language teaching and Bilingual Education that spans 50 years. Early in his career he served as a language researcher for the U.S. Departments of Education and State. At Georgetown University in Washington, District of Columbia (DC), he has been a professor of linguistics and Modern Greek since…

This study investigated the performance of school age Greek-speaking children with SLI on verbal short-term memory (VSTM) and Subject-Verb (S-V) agreement in comparison to chronological age controls and younger typically developing children. VSTM abilities were assessed by means of a non-word repetition task (NRT) and an elicited production task,…

A new approach for overcoming the language and culture barriers to participation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is reported. It is hypothesised that the juxtaposition of English as the "language of instruction," used for interacting with course materials, and one's preferred language as the "language of participation,"…

The complex notion of the public/private distinction of social spheres has not been systematically investigated in sociolinguistics; particularly in the case of bidialectal kindergarten age children and how they construct their social lives around this distinction in a public environment such as that of school. No simple continuum can clearly…

In this study we propose a classification system for spelling errors and determine the most common spelling difficulties of Greek children with and without dyslexia. Spelling skills of 542 children from the general population and 44 children with dyslexia, Grades 3-4 and 7, were assessed with a dictated common word list and age-appropriate…

The scope of this paper is to present the development of a web-based evaluation system that adjusts to the level of knowledge of each student. The underlying concept is to split the questions into pools (bins) of distinct difficulty at the same time assigning a different level of accuracy to each possible answer that the student may select. Given…

This article presents results from an initial investigation of Greek oral reading fluency and prosody. Although currently held perspectives consider reading the product of reading decoding and reading comprehension, there is enough evidence (both Greek and foreign) to suggest that other variables may affect reading, as well. Such variables include…