Emilia Alonso Marks

Reading Texts in Instructed L1 and FL Reading: Student Perceptions and Actual Selections

Using a questionnaire study, this research examines the perceived reading wants and needs of two groups of high-school students, one with L1 English and FL Spanish in the US, and the other with L1 Spanish and FL English in Spain. The results suggest that the perceived wants in FL Spanish are considerably greater than those in FL English, while the perceived needs are marginally higher far FL English. Par the English and Spanish L1s, the perceived wants and needs are remarkably similar in distribution, especially the needs, and the perceived wants in both cases far outweigh the perceived needs. In pedagogical terms, teachers and educators need in take seriously into considerations student reading needs and wants across the curriculum in first, second, and foreign languages in order to see not only improvements in terms of reading competency but also to instil and promote the desire in read.

The rhythmic characterization of two varieties of Portuguese

As spoken in Europe, Portuguese is said to be stress‐timed, while Brazilian Portuguese appears to display characteristics of both stress and syllable timing [P. A. Barbosa, D.E.L.T.A. 16, 369–402 (2000)]. We employed the Ramus et al. metric, based on acoustic‐phonetic measurements [Ramus et al., Cognition 73, 265–292 (1999)], to investigate the possibility of distinguishing between the two varieties of the language. Five native speakers of European Portuguese and five native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese recorded the same short prose passage taken from a magazine. The talkers were asked to read at a normal, comfortable rate. The reading time of the passage averaged 60 s, with considerable differences among the talkers. From the vocalic and consonantal intervals, the Ramus metrics, percent vocalic interval and standard deviation of consonantal and vocalic interval, were calculated. The five talkers of the two language varieties differed on the values of these parameters. The values of %V and SD‐V showed...

The influence of the feature (sonorant) in lexical access in Spanish

Does the feature (sonorant) influence access to lexical entries? In current feature geometry, the feature (sonorant) is a root node feature, distinguishing resonants from obstruents. Marks, et al. (2002) demonstrated its influence in lexical access using the word reconstruction task in Spanish. Participants heard a nonword, e.g., dirmar, and were asked to change it into a real word (firmar) by changing just one consonant. Errors in recovering the correct word (firmar) were much higher when the word contained an obstruent that had been replaced with a resonant (nirmar) than when the word contained an obstruent that had been replaced by another obstruent (dirmar). Obstruent target words were easier to recover when the target segment and the replacing segment matched on the feature [sonorant]. Why do obstruents show this matching effect? The present study subdivided obstruents into stops and fricatives. Two experiments compared them separately to resonants in the word reconstruction task. Are fricatives alon...