Amy Sheldon

The Acquisition of /r/ and /l/ by Japanese Learners of English: Evidence That Speech Production Can Precede Speech Perception.

This study examines the relationship between the production and perception of English /r/ and /l/ by native Japanese adults learning English in the United States. For some subjects, production of the contrast was more accurate than their perception of it, replicating and extending a previous finding reported by Goto (1971) in Japan. The difficulty in perception of the liquid contrast varied with its position in the word. Prevocalic /r/ and /l/ in consonant clusters yielded the greatest perceptual errors, while word-final liquids were accurately perceived. This pattern of errors is not predictable on the basis of contrastive phonological analysis, but might be the result of acoustic-phonetic factors. Implications for second language pedagogy are discussed.

Pickle fights: Gendered talk in preschool disputes

This paper examines the effect of gender on how young children construct the texts that embody their everyday social interactions with peers. The analysis focuses on conflict talk among 3‐year‐old friends playing in same‐sex triads at their day‐care center. The gendered aspects of two disputes are made visible by interpreting them in terms of two models. Maltz and Borkers anthropological linguistic model characterizes feminine language style as affiliative and masculine style as adversarial. Gilligans psychological framework, describing gender differences in reasoning about moral conflicts, characterizes the feminine orientation as focusing on the relationship and the masculine as focusing on the self. The two dispute sequences studied are also consistent with predictions made by Miller, Danaher, and Forbes (1986) and Leaper (1988), that boys’ conflict process is more heavy‐handed and their discourse strategies more controlling, whereas girls’ conflict is more mitigated and their discourse strategies mo...

On strategies for processing relative clauses: A comparison of children and adults

Adults were tested for the way in which they process four types of subject and object relative clauses. The results support an anti-interruption and anti-rearrangement constraint that has been proposed by Slobin. The reason why interruption and rearrangment of linguistic units is hard for adults is explained in terms of language-processing strategies that they are hypothesized to be using, in particular the Adjacency strategy. Adult behavior is compared to the performance of 4- and 5-year-old children in a previous study. The results of these two studies support the claim that children and adults are following the same strategies in processing these sentences, and that the difference between them is in which strategies they rely most heavily on, and, consequently, which sentences they make the most mistakes on.