A growing infrastructure of digital conservation surveillance is transforming human-wildlife relationships in the ‘Digital Anthropocene’, an epoch characterized by the increasing mediation of interspecies encounters through digital surveillance technologies, the tracking affordances of social media platforms, and citizen science networks. This article examines how digital surveillance technologies are generating magnetic landscapes where digital surveillance practices are ‘pulling’ humans and endangered marine wildlife into new relations of cohabitation, as well as unpredictable multispecies futures of care, commodification, and control. I explore how digital practices of wildlife surveillance and tracking are generating new forms of digitally-mediated human-wildlife intimacy. As this ‘digital intimacy’ increasingly shapes possibilities for human coexistence and co-adaptation with monk seals under climate change, I suggest how sociolinguistic research on semiotic landscapes might fruitfully contribute to these emerging lines of research on the multispecies entanglements that technologies of digital tracking and surveillance are generating in the Digital Anthropocene. (Multispecies, semiotic landscape, nexus analysis, mediated discourse analysis, conservation, Anthropocene)

The emergence of large language models, exemplified by ChatGPT, has garnered growing attention for their potential to generate feedback in second language writing, particularly automated written corrective feedback (AWCF). In this study, we examined how prompt design – a generic prompt and two domain-specific prompts (zero-shot and one-shot) enriched with comprehensive domain knowledge about written corrective feedback (WCF) – influences ChatGPT’s ability to provide AWCF. The accuracy and coverage of ChatGPT’s feedback across these three prompts were benchmarked against Grammarly, a widely used traditional automated writing evaluation (AWE) tool. We find that ChatGPT’s ability in flagging language errors grew considerably with prompt sophistication driven by the integration of domain-specific knowledge and examples. While the generic prompt resulted in substantially lower performance than Grammarly, the zero-shot prompt achieved comparable results to it and the one-shot prompt surpassed it considerably in error detection. Notably, the most pronounced improvement in ChatGPT’s performance was observed in its detection of frequent error categories, including those of word choice or expression, direct translation, sentence structure and pronoun. Nonetheless, even with the most sophisticated prompt, ChatGPT still displayed certain limitations when compared to Grammarly. Our study has both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it lends empirical evidence to Knoth et al.’s (2024) proposition to separate domain-specific AI literacy from generic AI literacy. Practically, it sheds light on the pedagogical application and technical development of AWE systems.

Continuous speech presents a challenge to the ab initio learner, as the language-specific segmentation strategies they use in their first language are not always reliable cues in other languages (Cutler 2001 International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting, 5(1), 1–23). Yet, they are able to use more general acoustic, prosodic, and statistical cues to word boundaries, as well as lexical similarity to their first language (e.g., Shoemaker & Rast 2013. Second Language Research, 29(2), 165–183) to recognize words at first exposure to a new language. In the current study, we investigated whether adult ab initio learners’ ability to recognize words after brief exposure to continuous speech in a new language is improved when that speech is produced using an infant-directed register, a style of speech found to facilitate segmentation in infancy (Thiessen et al. 2005. Infancy 7(1), 53–71). In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that although English ab initio learners of German benefited from infant-directed speech, their performance was generally lower than in previous studies unless task demands were reduced. These learners also benefited from word length and from frequency of occurrence, as has been shown previously, but these did not interact with register. As in infancy, learner-directed speech registers appear to facilitate initial processing and recognition in adult ab initio learners.

The condition of planetary crisis widely referred to as the Anthropocene is ubiquitous, but it is often unmarked or unseen. This article examines why through a study of Oman’s ‘Grand Canyon of Arabia’, where the absence of birds provides a lens for two sociolinguistic approaches to planetary crisis: (i) a planetary perspective on semiotic landscapes indicates that allegedly ‘natural’ landscapes are produced by human and more-than-human semiotic interventions, and (ii) the perception of space is shaped by attention, as the power of orientation around a discourse structures semiotic ideologies. An analysis of ethnographic fieldwork and digital data subsequently describes how orientation around Nature/culture dualism produces the Grand Canyon of Arabia as a ‘natural’ landscape, which is disturbed by disorienting Anthropocenic signs. Rather than resisting such disturbances, it is suggested that disorientation presents a way forward into planetary crisis, as attunement to more-than-human signs and entanglements yields relational landscapes. (Nature, tourism, posthumanism, semiotic landscapes, attunement, environment, Oman, Gulf, Anthropocene)

This article explores how the Anthropocene is semioticized in people’s everyday consciousness in conflict over urban redevelopment. Focusing on the multi-billion-dollar Atlantic Yards project, in Brooklyn, NY, we examine how political economy is discursively mobilized with urban Anthropocenic landscapes. Using ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods, we present three case studies (blight studies, architectural renderings, and activists’ manipulations of architectural renderings) to show how semiotics and discourse are utilized to depict the project as either a utopia, on the part of the developer, or as a dystopia, on the part of opponents. We examine the opposition’s critiques within a political context of discursive and physical extraction of people, resources, and value. At the same time, we consider how both utopian and dystopian assessments through semiotization continue to inhabit a neoliberal, my-topian, Anthropocenic framework in which not only are humans centered, but they are the only species that matter. (Anthropocene, blight, renderings, Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park, Brooklyn, urban redevelopment)

This study explored the effects of repeating a video-lecture-based task on second language (L2) learners’ input processing and the relationship between online processing patterns and lecture comprehension. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The comparison group (n = 30) performed the task once, whereas the repetition group (n = 30) repeated the same task three times, with each group completing a free-recall test after their last performance. The stimulated-recall participants (n = 15) completed the task once, twice, or three times and described their thought processes during their last task performance. The lecture featured an instructor introducing fundamental concepts of neurobiology with labeled diagrams. Participants’ visual attention to the instructor and diagrams was captured using an eye-tracker. Results revealed an increase in learners’ visual attention to the instructor and a decline in their visual attention to the diagrams across repetitions. Additionally, more visual attention to the instructor was related to lower comprehension.

Bilingualism research has long been challenged by a lack of a unified approach to quantifying language dominance and degree of multilingualism. While numerous questionnaires (e.g., LHQ, BLP, LEAP‑Q, and LUQ) provide valuable data on language background variables, they lack a standardized formula to compute key measures from it. We introduce two formulas that synthesize critical linguistic variables to efficiently calculate language dominance and a multilingualism score that ranges from perfect monolingualism to native-like proficiency in multiple languages. Validation across two large datasets shows our dominance measure closely aligns with more complex PCA methods while being simpler and more efficient.

This article examines human-elephant engagements in the tourist town of Sauraha, Nepal, by focusing on the semiotic, spatial, and embodied practices that shape its eco-semiotic landscape. Using the heuristic of sites of engagement and ethnographic data, it analyzes how neoliberal conservation materializes through signage, sculptures, media, and corporeal performances. Findings show that the multispecies encounters are shaped by the political economy of wildlife tourism and reflect tensions between commodification, care, and tradition. Anthropomorphic events like elephant polo and beauty pageants spectacularize elephants by promoting conservationist rhetoric while obscuring the precarious conditions of elephants and the labor of mahouts. Meanwhile, ritual and affective practices of care reveal more reciprocal interspecies relationships. I argue that sociolinguistic inquiry is essential for understanding how animals are branded, consumed, and at times dignified in tourism economies and contribute to broader debates on neoliberal conservation, interspecies ethics, and human-wildlife entanglements in the Anthropocene. (Anthropomorphism, conservation, elephant, Nepal, political economy, wildlife tourism)

In this article, I hone in on complex, assemblaic relations of human, non-human, more-than-human, animal, spatial, digital, environmental, and political economic questions questioning the role that language and other modes of semiosis have in the powerful production of planetary matters and anthropocenic landscapes. New theoretical and methodological directions are paved in the field of linguistic and semiotic landscape studies that underscore entangled space, methodological attunement, and the political economy as planetary actor. In this issue, we encounter ‘epistemic rupture’ in real time among numerous sensescapes on land, sea, and in the sky. This means it is time for scholars to acquire planetary repertoires and different ways of semiotic de-coding and meaning-making as it pertains to the Anthropocene, where human language is devalued. Post-humanism and assemblage theorization are put forward as promising frameworks while methods from off and online spaces may be the new norm in LL studies. (Anthropocene landscapes, planetary repertoires, perceptual coding, political economy, multispecies communication, epistemic rupture, linguistic and semiotic landscapes, assemblage theory, post-humanism)