<jats:p>Based on the Competition Model, the current study investigated how cue availability and cue reliability as two important input factors influenced second language (L2) learners' cue learning of the English article construction. Written corpus data of university-level Chinese-L1 learners of English were sampled for a comparison of English majors and non-English majors who demonstrated two levels of L2 competence in English article usage. The path model analysis in structural equation modeling was utilized to investigate the relationship between the input factors and L2 usage (frequency and accuracy of article cue production). The findings contribute novel and scarce empirical evidence that confirms a central claim of the Competition Model, i.e., the changing importance of cue availability and cue reliability in the frequency and accuracy of production. Cue availability was found to determine L2 production frequency regardless of level of L2 competence. Cue reliability was the input factor that differentiated competence levels. When learners stayed at a relatively lower L2 proficiency, cue reliability played an important role in influencing L2 frequency of usage rather than accuracy of usage. When learners developed increased exposure to and stronger competence in the target language, cue reliability played a significant role in determining learners' success of cue learning. The study is methodologically innovative and expands the empirical applicability of the Competition Model to the domain of second language production and construction learning.</jats:p>

This article considers how Indigenous peoples in Central Australia share and keep digital records of events and cultural knowledge in a period of rapid technological change. To date, research has focused upon the development of digital archives and platforms that reflect Indigenous epistemologies and incorporation of protocols governing access to information. Yet there is scant research on how individuals with little access to such media share and hold—or not, as the case may be—digital cultural information. After surveying current enabling infrastructures in Central Australia, we examine how materials are held and shared when people do not have easy access to databases and the Internet. We analyze examples of practices of sharing materials to draw out issues that arise in managing storage and circulation of cultural records via Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives, mobile phones, and other devices. We consider how the affordances of various platforms support, extend, and/or challenge Indigenous socialities and ontologies.

Australia is home to a rich and diverse range of Indigenous narrative practices and verbal art forms. These are highly valued and part of the ‘intangible cultural heritage’ of Indigenous Australians. Making string figures is one such practice, and early records from across the continent suggest that the tradition has a time span that stretches back, at least to the early days of colonization. In this paper we outline some of the sociocultural contexts of Arandic string games from central Australia, and then give a structural analysis of the figures recorded. We look at both similarities and differences in figure construction, comparing the Arandic figures to other records of string figures, both from within Australia and further afield in part of Oceania. We then apply a formal analysis, in the string figure tradition, to our collection of Arandic string figures and highlight some figures and methods of construction that appear to be unique to central Australia.

Vowel elision is common in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara connected speech. It also appears to be a locus of language change, with young people extending elision to new contexts; resulting in a distinctive style of speech which speakers refer to as muṯumuṯu (‘short’ speech). This study examines the productions of utterance-final past tense suffixes /-nu, -ɳu, -ŋu/ by four older and four younger Pitjantjatjara speakers in spontaneous speech. This is a context where elision tends not to be sociolinguistically or perceptually salient. We find extensive variance within and between speakers in the realization of both the vowel and nasal segments. We also find evidence of a change in progress, with a mixed effects model showing that among the older speakers, elision is associated with both the place of articulation of the nasal segment and the metrical structure of the verbal stem, while among the younger speakers, elision is associated with place of articulation but metrical structure plays little role. This is in line with a reanalysis of the conditions for elision by younger speakers based on the variability present in the speech of older people. Such a reanalysis would also account for many of the sociolinguistically marked extended contexts of elision.

This paper examines comparability of descriptive grammars across typologically different languages. Focusing on the Nepal Himalayas, which has high language diversity that extends beyond areal, genetic, and historical categorization, the paper examines similarities across grammars and the influences motivating these. It reports on the construction and use of a database comprising materials from 18 descriptive grammars of Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal written over a 30-year period. This includes a small sub-database of metadata noting grammarian linguistic training, career affiliations, and dissertation supervisors and a larger sub-database of fully tagged tables of contents for each of the grammars. The overarching relational database links sections containing similar content, enabling search functions to explore the locations of similar information and feature labels across grammars in the database. While some grammar-features in the corpus reflect broader structural properties across grammars, findings indicate strong local influences. We find evidence of three foundational linguistic “schools” connecting the structural organization of the grammars across multiple generations of linguists, correspondences across chapter titles, sections, as well as school-influenced organization of verbal paradigms, treatment of marginal topics, and terminological choices.

In this paper, we demonstrate that Anindilyakwa, spoken on Groote Eylandt, East Arnhem Land, is genetically closely related to Wubuy (Gunwinyguan). Anindilyakwa has long been believed to be a family-level isolate, but by a rigorous application of the Comparative Method we uncover regular sound correspondences from lexical correspondence sets, reconstruct the sound system of the proto-language, and suggest how the proto-phoneme inventory derives from the proto-Gunwinyguan system through phonological innovations. Although it has been hinted before that Anindilyakwa and Wubuy are related and together with Ngandi form a subgroup, this hypothesis is not borne out here: while Wubuy and Ngandi have been shown to share a significant amount of core vocabulary and irregular verbal paradigms, Anindilyakwa and Wubuy appear to have undergone separate development for a considerable length of time. Moreover, Anindilyakwa has independently undergone extensive further sound changes, resulting in a language that is phonologically (though not lexically or grammatically) quite unusual in Australia.

This paper is a preliminary account of speech rhythm and some phonological properties of Chilean Spanish in spontaneous dialogues. Different dialects of Spanish have been studied using rhythm metrics measuring the durational variability of vocalic and consonantal intervals. There are, however, methodological issues regarding the segmentation of intervals, often overlooked in previous research, such as the criteria for categorising certain segments into the different intervals and the segmentation of different voice qualities. The present study addresses this gap and compares rhythm metrics obtained using two methods of segmentation based on the available literature. The analyses reveal that a strictly 'acoustic' approach to segmentation of intervals results in slightly inflated metrics. Nevertheless, both methods show there is significant durational interval variability in Chilean Spanish, compared to other dialects of Spanish, that may be connected to phonological properties of the variety.

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of the complete lute music of Francesco Canova da Milano (1497-1547) edited by Arthur J. Ness and the impact of the edition on contemporary understanding of renaissance lute music, and its impact on musical performance