We need to consider that influences of reading on cognition are not restricted only to knowledge effects obtained from the content of what is read. Reading enhances cognitive skills that are highly relevant and useful for doing well in intelligence tests. There is robust evidence that reading massively trains and consequently improves many different perceptual and cognitive abilities: The science of how reading enhances the human mind reveals the many perks of being a bookworm.

The standard model of the historical formation of South African English posits that anglophone SAfE is an early-to-mid nineteenth-century overseas variety of English. In this chapter an alternative, three-stage koinéisation model is advanced which places emphasis on the role played by a koinéisation process in the greater-Johannesburg area spanning the first half of the twentieth century. As such, the first half of the current chapter will be focused on outlining the history of the development of this variety, with a particular focus on the Johannesburg period. The second half is focused on providing evidence from sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-six (26) L1-Broad WSAE speakers born in the first half of the twentieth century, one-half of whom are first-generation speakers from Johannesburg, one-half of whom are (non-first-generation) speakers born in the Eastern Cape. More specifically, the degree of inter- and intra-speaker variability in relation to two sociolinguistic variables (the quality of BATH and (-in/-ing)) is investigated. The results indicate that while there is no clear difference between the two regions in terms of BATH, the presence of substantial -ing/-in variation in the speech of Johannesburg-born speakers points to koinéisation in this area, thus providing support for the three-stage model.

Brain rhythms at different timescales are observed ubiquitously across cortex. Despite this ubiquitousness, individual brain areas can be characterized by "spectral profiles," which reflect distinct patterns of endogenous brain rhythms. Crucially, endogenous brain rhythms have often been explicitly or implicitly related to perceptual and cognitive functions. Regarding language, a vast amount of research investigates the role of brain rhythms for speech processing. Particularly, lower-level processes, such as speech segmentation and consecutive syllable encoding and the hemispheric lateralization of such processes, have been related to auditory cortex brain rhythms in the theta and gamma range and explained by neural oscillatory models. Other brain rhythms – particularly delta and beta – have been related to prosodic processing (delta) but also higher-level language processing, including phrasal and sentential processing. Delta and beta brain rhythms have also been related to predictions from the motor cortex, emphasizing the tight link between production and perception. More recently, neural oscillatory models were extended to include different levels of language processing.

New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the most well-researched varieties of English in the world. This is largely due to the existence of several high-quality spoken corpora, including the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) corpus. This corpus has provided the foundation for work on new dialect formation, sociolinguistic variation and sound change. However, published descriptions of the emergence of NZ English are based on data from only a sub-set of speakers from the ONZE corpus. More recent work has begun to utilise data from the full ONZE corpus, and other spoken and written corpora of NZ English. This chapter will first provide an overview of the existing received wisdom on the development of New Zealand English, before focussing on several recent studies showing how much further we have now come in our understanding of the history and development of this variety.

English in Liberia consists of two distinct but overlapping varieties, Kolokwa and Liberian Settler English (LSE), with a third, Standard Liberian English, superposed upon them. Kolokwa (< colloquial) is widely spoken. The Liberian descendant of a more general West African Pidgin English, it has been heavily influenced by LSE. The latter is the language of the descendants of the 16,000 African Americans who immigrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century. This study first presents a political history of English-lexifier varieties in Liberia. Drawing on data collected in the late 1980s, just prior to the outbreak of civil war, it then considers aspects first of LSE and then Kolokwa grammar. It examines LSE vis-à-vis African American English. It frames Kolokwa within the continuum model. A distinctive aspect of LSE and, especially, Kolokwa is the extent of coda consonant deletion; its impact on inflectional morphology is also addressed.

Mastering rhythm is essential in learning a second language (L2). This study explores whether shared rhythmic classes in a first language (L1), between English and German as opposed to French, facilitate L2 speech rhythm learning. We analyzed rhythmic patterns in a corpus of accented utterances utilizing a novel rhythm metric based on amplitude envelope modulation frequency. The analysis showed that German-accented English and English-accented German are more likely to be classified as native compared to their French-accented equivalents. Furthermore, German-accented English was classified as English significantly more frequently than German-accented French as French. Importantly, word-based pronunciation proficiency was found to be higher for German and English speakers in their respective L2s, with German speakers exhibiting greater proficiency in English than in French. These findings indicate that shared L1 rhythm significantly aids L2 speech learning and that rhythm planning may be influenced by the words and their segmental compositions.

We conducted two experiments, testing the iambic–trochaic law (ITL) with speakers of English, Greek, and Korean. They heard sequences of tones varying in duration, intensity, or both; stimuli differed in the magnitude of the acoustic differences between alternating tones and involved both short and long inter-stimulus intervals. While the results were not always compatible with ITL predictions and did not show strong grouping preferences, language-related differences did emerge, with Korean participants showing a preference for trochees, and Greek participants being more sensitive to duration differences than the other two groups. Importantly, grouping preferences showed substantial individual variation, evinced by responses to both test sequences and controls (sequences of identical tones). These findings indicate that results from ITL experiments are influenced by linguistic background but are also difficult to replicate, as individual preferences and specific experimental conditions influence how participants impose rhythm structure to sound sequences.

Driven originally by colonization and more recently by globalization, for more than four centuries the English language has been spreading to all corners of the globe, producing distinct and stable young varieties as well as the young discipline of ‘World Englishes’ to describe and analyze them. The present paper surveys and discusses several models that have been developed to explain the bewildering variety of forms and contexts which characterize these varieties. Early classifying approaches include categorizations and visualizations of varieties and variety types based on some of their properties, most importantly Kachru’s ‘Three Circles’ model. An evolutionary perspective is at the center of the ‘Dynamic Model’ of postcolonial Englishes. More recent trends at theorizing capture the ongoing dynamism and diversification of English by highlighting ‘forces’ which drive this process; in general, boundaries between nations are seen as diminishing also through the unbounded spread of linguistic forms in cyberspace. A few more suggestions at and reflections on modelling, most importantly Hundt’s comparison of theoretical and statistical modelling, are summarized and assessed.

This chapter reviews the history and development of Māori and Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand, focusing on both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of their phonetics/phonology. We review evidence that Māori English has higher pitch and more syllable-timed rhythm than Pākehā English, and suggest that a distinctive Māori English voice quality is not yet well understood. L1-type and L2-type varieties of Pasifika English are distinguished, highlighting the role of transfer in the formation of these varieties. The differences between Pākehā, Māori and Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand are a matter of frequency of use, rather than of absolutes, both in terms of the linguistic features and the social variables with which they co-occur. We problematise any straight-forward description of these varieties as revolving solely around ethnicity, given the interconnectedness of ethnic identities in New Zealand.

This chapter outlines the development of pidgin and creole varieties of English worldwide. The foundational assumption is that creole languages emerge from pidginized varieties or at least ones strongly shaped by second-language acquisition. As such, the Australian and Oceanic languages such as Tok Pisin and Australian Aboriginal English will be treated as creolizations of initial pidgins (rather than as “pidgins” themselves, as they often have been), as will the West African languages often called “pidgins” such as Nigerian and Cameroonian “Pidgin” English. The chapter will also treat the creoles of the Caribbean and surrounding area along with the aforementioned West African varieties as sister languages born of an ancestral pidgin. Hawaiian “Pidgin” English, including controversy over its origins, will also be covered, as well as Chinese Pidgin English and Pitkern/Norf’k.

In speech perception, timing and content are interdependent. For example, in distal rate effects, context speech rate determines the number of words, syllables, and phonemes heard in an unchanging target speech segment. Such results confront psycholinguistic theory with the chicken-and-egg problem of concurrently inferring speech timing and content, and the interrelated issues of narrowing the search space of speech interpretations without bias and optimizing the speed/accuracy tradeoff in online processing. We propose listeners address these issues by managing the timing of speech-related computations. Specifically, we claim: (1) Listeners model speech timing as part of a speaker model; (2) variable-length sequences of morphosyntactic units are the basic increments of speech inference; and (3) listeners adaptively schedule inferential updates and computationally intensive operations according to (4) fluctuations in uncertainty predicted by the speaker model. We illustrate these claims in a mechanistic model – vowel-onset-paced syllable inference – explaining multiple psycholinguistic results, including distal rate effects.

Children are active learners: They selectively attend to important information. Rhythmic neural tracking of speech is central to active language learning. This chapter evaluates recent research showing that neural oscillations in the infant brain synchronize with the rhythm of speech, tracking it at different frequencies. This process predicts word segmentation and later language abilities. We argue that rhythmic neural speech tracking reflects infants’ attention to specific parts of the speech signal (e.g., stressed syllables), and simultaneously acts as a core mechanism for maximizing temporal attention onto those parts. Rhythmic neural tracking of speech puts a constraint on neural processing, which maximizes the uptake of relevant information from the noisy multimodal environment. We hypothesize this to be influenced by neural maturation. We end by evaluating the implications of this proposal for language acquisition research, and discuss how differences in neural maturation relate to variance in language development in autism.