Our own Jupitara Ray is presenting a poster (co-authored with Prof. Chang) at this week’s 50th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 50)! The title of their presentation, scheduled for the Friday afternoon poster session, is “L2 influence, L1 resilience: Change and stability in early bilingual speakers of Indian English”.
Congratulations to Jupitara Ray, whose abstract with Prof. Chang was accepted to the 189th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, the sixth Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Acoustical Society of Japan, to be held this December in Honolulu, HI! The title of their poster is “Greater L2 phonetic accommodation does not predict greater L1 phonetic drift in early bilinguals”.
Abstract: To facilitate objective measures of proficiency for language users of diverse backgrounds, recent research in second language acquisition and multilingualism has developed short, yet reliable, tests of lexical knowledge in a wide range of languages. In this paper, we describe the development of LexKO, a brief lexically based test of Korean language proficiency, including its underlying logic, composition, intended use, and limitations. Three rounds of pilot and validation testing with first- and second-language Korean users resulted in a highly reliable Korean test comprising 60 items that can be completed in a few minutes. Freely available for other researchers to use, LexKO produces scores that correlate significantly with both first- and second-language Korean users’ scores on a standardized proficiency test (an abridged version of the Test of Proficiency in Korean) and may thus be helpful in multi-part studies for obtaining a quick, valid measure of proficiency in Korean, one of the world’s fastest-growing foreign languages.
Our own Jupitara Ray is talking about her dissertation work in Northeastern Linguistics’ Speaker Series this week! On October 7, she will speak about “L2 change and L1 stability in early sequential bilinguals of Indian English”.