https://arvinfomedia.com/myjournals/index.php/GTILLR <p><strong>Global Trends and Insights: Linguistics and Language Research</strong> is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing high-quality original research articles, comprehensive reviews, and selected high-impact reprints in the field of world’s languages in all their diversity. The journal aims to foster multidisciplinary scholarship, generate practical applications, and provide a platform for research addressing language structure, use, acquisition, cognition, variation, and preservation. It welcomes contributions that integrate theoretical, experimental, computational, and applied perspectives in linguistics.</p> <p>Published half-yearly, the journal is available in both print and electronic formats, ensuring wide accessibility to the research community.</p> en-US Global Trends & Insights: Linguistics & Language Research https://arvinfomedia.com/myjournals/index.php/GTILLR/article/view/475 <p>Increased experience with a second language (L2) can affect one’s speech perception and production. Some studies have suggested that experience does not affect the production of English bilabial stops by Arabic speakers. They produce the English bilabial stops /p/ and /b/ as the Arabic /b/, which differs in VOT. However, the effect of English experience on the perception of English bilabial stops remains underinvestigated. This study examines the effect of L2 immersion experience on the perception of the English stops /p/–/b/ to investigate whether the lack of /p/ in Arabic can affect the perception of the /p/–/b/ contrast and whether L2 experience shifts the category boundary toward that of native speakers. Sixty-six participants, comprising two groups of Arabic speakers with differing L2 experience and a control group of native English speakers, completed identification and discrimination tasks using the /p/–/b/ VOT continuum. The regression analysis showed that listeners with more L2 experience (i.e., ≥3 years in the UK) had a closer category boundary to that of native listeners than those with less L2 experience. However, category discrimination accuracy did not differ significantly between the Arabic groups. The results highlight the importance of L2 immersion experience in altering VOT perceptual strategies, which can help in designing future training studies that focus on VOT perception as an L2 phonetic cue.</p> Wafaa Alshangiti Copyright (c) 2026 Global Trends & Insights: Linguistics & Language Research 2026-10-19 2026-10-19 15–32 15–32 https://arvinfomedia.com/myjournals/index.php/GTILLR/article/view/474 <p>This paper investigates how referentiality interacts with the syntax of Hindi–Urdu. It argues that three patterns, namely, object reduplication, association with the focus particle h¯ı, and cross-clausal agreement, are manifestations of a single structural contrast determined by object shift. With our novel observations, we show that only objects that introduce discourse referents undergo displacement to a higher syntactic position, where they can trigger agreement or serve as associates of the focus particle h¯ı. Reduplicated nominals, which lack referential features, must remain inside the VP and are consequently excluded from these dependencies. The analysis formalizes this correlation through a referential licensing condition that restricts movement to SpecvP to arguments bearing a referential feature [+Ref]. This condition derives the observed interactions between object shift and interpretation of the object. The resulting account integrates phenomena of agreement and focus with the semantics of specificity, offering a unified model of how referential interpretation is encoded in the clause structure of Hindi–Urdu.</p> Pravaal Yadav Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu Copyright (c) 2026 Global Trends & Insights: Linguistics & Language Research 2026-10-19 2026-10-19 1–14 1–14