Learning to read any script requires paying close attention to the orientation of the character because it is a crucial part of what defines it. Learners of any script therefore get extensive practice of some of the skills that underlie mirror image discrimination. Proficient and automatic mirror discrimination abilities, however, only develop when the reader learns to read a script with mirror characters such as English. Thus, learning to read in general, and learning to read a script with mirror letters specifically, enhances visual discrimination skills.

This chapter describes the history and development of English in Nigeria. Starting from first contacts with English-speaking traders in the sixteenth century, English was firmly implanted in Nigeria with the establishment of schools and British colonial rule during the nineteenth century. By 1960, Nigeria gained independence from Britain, but due to the multilingual nature of the country and the prestige accorded to English by many speakers, English continues to function until today as the preferred language for official and formal contexts. In Nigeria, English co-occurs with Nigerian Pidgin and about five hundred indigenous Nigerian languages, which all have been shown to influence its use. This has resulted into the domestication and acculturation of English in Nigeria, leading to a distinctive variety of English called Nigerian English, which has characteristic lexical, phonological, morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic features and which can be divided into several sub-varieties based on speakers’ ethnicity and educational status.

Learning to read an alphabetic writing system enables individuals to segment spoken language into fine-grained speech sound units. This increased awareness of the phonological structure of spoken language enhances literate people’s ability to analyze and reflect on speech. Reading may also improve spoken word recognition; however, current research suggests that such benefits depend on the specific writing system and the degree of transparency with which language maps speech sounds onto graphemes.

Reading proficiency does not end once a reader can fluently decode a writing system. Literacy acquisition is a continuum that progresses from basic script decoding to efficient access and retrieval of information, to the ability to integrate and interpret embedded content within texts. At the highest levels, literacy involves critical reflection and the evaluation of complex texts, taking into account cultural, historical, societal, social, and power structures that may influence or obscure the validity of the information. Reaching these advanced levels of literacy requires regular engagement with sophisticated texts, along with the development of strong critical thinking and reasoning skills.

Australia has a comparatively recent history of European settlement and English language development. Yet, it is already quite distinct. The different mixes of original dialects that came in during the early years, as well as the physical separation from other English-speaking regions, have allowed this distinctiveness to flourish. Regional variation within Australian English is still minor compared to other varieties, although local differences have been increasing. Contact with languages other than English has also been adding to the complex multilinguistic reality that is modern-day Australia. Recent years mark the rise of new multicultural identities for Australian English speakers in the form of migrant ethnolects and varieties of Aboriginal English. Such ethnically marked ways of speaking are no longer the consequence of second language learning but relate to attitudes around identity and cultural heritage.

How likely it is that literacy, as we have known it, will be preserved in the years ahead? Or, perhaps the question has already shifted, from whether the written medium will fade to how soon that disappearance might occur. Generative artificial intelligence and related technology can support the transition toward new forms of literacy that evolve alongside emerging media. Large language models, in particular, may help preserve some of the cognitive and communicative advantages associated with “traditional” book-based language. In this way, technology could shape future media landscapes, keeping the perks of being a bookworm while softening some of the downsides of newer formats.

Reading and writing impose the logic of language more directly on thinking than speech does, as they foster deeper awareness of and sustained engagement with the rules and linear structure of language. Literacy enables readers to reason about topics that extend beyond personal experience, cultivating the ability to apply universal formal principles when evaluating events. This, in turn, enhances one’s understanding of the causal chains of reasoning required for deductive thinking.

Reading-induced abstraction processes take time but they are the foundation of what may be called abstract intelligence. Abstract intelligence is related to what often is called “out-of-the-box thinking”; seeing similarities and focusing on generalization enables thinking about something from a new perspective. Abstraction makes us more intelligent, which is one reason why reading makes us smart.

In this chapter, we discuss research from behavior, event-related brain potentials, and neural oscillations that suggests that cognitive and neural constraints affect the timing of speech processing and language comprehension. Some of these constraints may even manifest as rhythmic patterns in linguistic behavior. We discuss two types of constraints: First, we review how the unfolding acoustic and abstract context affects the timing of incremental processing on different linguistic levels (e.g., prosody, syntax). Second, we consider context-invariant constraints (e.g., working-memory trace decay, period of electrophysiological activity) and how these limit the duration of our processing time windows, thus restricting our segmentation and composition abilities.

Australian Aboriginal English (henceforth ‘AE’) is an enregistered contact-based variety spoken by over 80 per cent of First Nations people in Australia. AE has been observed to differ systematically from standardised Australian English across levels of linguistic structure, and is usually placed on a continuum ranging from ‘light’ (acrolectal) varieties to ‘heavy’ (basilectal) varieties. The ‘light’ varieties are closest to standardised Australian English; the ‘heavy’ varieties are sometimes closer to Kriol, an English-lexified creole language spoken across northern Australia. Across the continuum, AE is distinctive for its group focus and its cultural connection with storytelling. This chapter outlines some of the distinctive linguistic features of AE, embracing a culturally appropriate methodology in which a corpus of data from group sessions has been collected under First Nations leadership. The recordings capture speakers in their home settings mostly in ‘Nyungar country’, in the Southwest of Western Australia, and are based on ‘yarning’, a First Nations cultural form of storytelling and conversation. We discuss the ways that the yarns collected in our corpus have allowed us to hear the voices of those seldom included in linguistic research and how hearing these yarns is allowing us to tell a different story.

Spoken and written language are likely to share many aspects of how they are represented in the human mind. For instance, it would be highly inefficient for the brain to store the meaning of words separately for its spoken and written forms. Instead, shared representations across modalities allow for interaction between them, meaning that the effects of written language can directly influence spoken language processing. As a result, predictive learning that occurs during reading naturally transfers to spoken language. Knowledge accumulated through reading, along with the predictive behavior it fosters, can thus directly support prediction in speech as well.

The current chapter describes the history and development of English in (what is today) Kenya and Tanzania from the earliest linguistic influences of colonial powers to the latest nation-specific developments in language policy and lexicon. Colonial history and national language policy in Tanzania and Kenya have resulted in Kiswahili becoming the national lingua franca, though to different degrees, and have so far impeded the development of a national variety of English in the general triglossic ecology of local languages, Kiswahili, and English. The African language substratum, almost completely Bantu in Tanzania but one-third Nilo-Saharan in Kenya, influences forms of English. In general, regional, national and subnational usage features can be distinguished, i.e. many (sub-)national features in pronunciation, some national and cultural features in the lexicon, and mainly regional (or universal L2 features) in grammar. Recent developments can be illustrated by examples from digital sources, especially online newspapers and social media.

What is the relation between rhythm and stuttering in speech production/perception? Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental speech disorder that has an impact on the timing and rhythmic flow of production. It is marked by several repetitions, blocks, or lengthening of sounds and syllables that unsettle the rhythm of speech. There is a lot of behavioral and imaging research on speech disruptions; however, the mechanism behind stuttering is still unclear. Speech timing is rhythmically structured. Children who stutter do not easily generate an internal rhythm; they have a worse rhythm discrimination ability than typically developing children. In this chapter we investigate how adults who stutter pace their speech. We illustrate evidence of rhythm perception/production dysfunctions, assessing the hypothesis that neurodevelopmental stuttering is associated with a deficit in temporal processing and rhythmic patterning. Speech rhythm has been quantified using rhythmic measures (especially the pairwise variability index = PVI).

The city-state of Singapore is officially quadrilingual (Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English) and home to a diverse population. Colonised by Britain in 1819, English has since had a special place on the island. Initially confined to the elite, it soon became a desired commodity, learnt and acquired by different groups at different times, always in conjunction with the other languages with which it co-exists. As Singapore embarked on its path towards independence, English became a compulsory subject in education, and, in 1987, was made the sole medium of instruction. These developments resulted in large-scale language shift, with English now the majority language in Singaporean homes (2020 census). The local vernacular Singlish has its origin in this high-contact situation. It features influences primarily from Malay and southern Chinese. While it is regarded by policy-makers as undesirable, Singlish enjoys some acceptance in the population, not least as a marker of local identity.

English has become an important part of the linguistic repertoire of black South Africans. Education was important to nineteenth and twentieth century access to the language, first in mission schools and later under the apartheid government. In the post-apartheid phase, extensive diversification in experience yields native, cross-over and traditional Black South African English (BSAE) varieties of South African English (SAE). The phonology of traditional BSAE is characterised by the neutralisation of the tense/lax vowel contrast, the rarity of vowel reduction to schwa in unstressed syllables, a tendency towards syllable-timing, stress shifts to the penult and weight sensitivity to the final syllable, as well as the more extensive use of tone contrasts. Distinctive grammatical patterns include the use of the progressive aspect in an extended range of contexts to mean ongoing duration without a temporal limit, copy pronouns, the higher frequency of modal adverbials and some innovative collocations like can be able to. Lexical and semantic innovation occurs through loanwords reflecting ongoing social change in especially culture and politics, on top of older geographical borrowings, alongside semantic extension to capture locally relevant meanings beyond the conventional range of the same expressions in other varieties.

Some hierarchical models of speech timing represent prosodic constituents as oscillators that are coupled, thereby influencing each other’s duration. Alternative approaches focus on the systematic distribution of localized speech-timing effects, such as phrase-final lengthening and stress-based lengthening. In this review, we explore how oscillator-based speech-timing models may be informed by, and possibly reconciled with, approaches that emphasize local timing effects. We consider data from temporally constrained speech production tasks, such as speech cycling, and explore the nature of the hierarchical coordination of prosodic constituents observed therein. In particular, we examine how variation – between dialects and between languages – in the magnitude of the durational contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables may help to account for observed patterns of temporal coordination. Finally, we explore how speech behavior in temporally constrained tasks may be informative about speakers’ coordination of turn-taking in natural dialogues.