This dissertation explored the perspectives of stakeholders within a university-level Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) program in Arizona, focusing on their language ideologies and critical language education efforts. The study, rooted in Critical Language Awareness (CLA) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) frameworks, challenges deficit-based…

The revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r) postulates that learners with more precisely defined categories in their native language (L1) exhibit greater proficiency in acquiring sounds in a second language (L2). Despite its recent emergence, empirical studies validating this hypothesis remain scarce. This study aims to investigate the predictive…

Accurately identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in students who speak a home language other than English has proven to be an enduring challenge. Consequently, students with DLD miss out on critical interventions, and those who are acquiring their two languages in a typical manner are placed in settings that do not meet their…

Research in first-language (L1) sentence processing has found evidence that language comprehenders use binding condition A as a filter to rule out noun phrases that are binding-inaccessible before proceeding with the task of finding the correct antecedent. Sturt (2013) notes that this strategy does not appear to apply to advanced speakers of…

Immigrant parents are being challenged in several different ways to maintain their heritage language (HL) in the United States. Majority White, affluent communities are one of the many complex language ecologies that exist across the variety of U.S. societies. The research setting of this study, Southern California, is one of the wealthiest…

Indigenous people of the world fight to maintain our lifeways, culture, and more specifically our languages. Speakers have endured waves of violence and persecution and in the face of that still fought to preserve and bring back languages. Language loss has been observed by communities and linguists and each figures out ways to document and…

The present study examined the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in 22 bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 13;5 years; Med=9;4 years; STD=2.3) who were born and raised in the United States and acquired Spanish as heritage speakers--that is, they learned Spanish, the minority language, in a home setting (Valdes, 2001). Each of the child…

This dissertation explores the relationship between language production processes and recorded typing behaviors among native speakers of English writing in their native language. Typing is quite prevalent in modern societies, as its use is becoming increasingly required in professional and personal settings but it remains largely understudied in…

This research investigated how a Critical Sociocultural Linguistics Literacy (CriSoLL) approach to authentic materials supports student literacy in a mixed Spanish heritage language (SHL) and additional language (L2) Spanish intermediate course at the university level. Using a qualitative approach (Cho, 2018; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021)…

In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, this dissertation examines the role of literacy on predictive processing during spoken language comprehension. Previous studies have shown that comprehenders can use morphosyntactic cues available in the input to generate predictions about upcoming information. Recent key findings also suggest that…

The objective of the present study is to analyze word-initial voice onset time (VOT) in the context of code-switching (CS). More specifically, this study combines research methods from sociolinguistics and phonetics to investigate how 32 heritage Spanish speakers (HSSs) of Mexican descent, living in Indiana, produce VOT for /p t k/ in word-initial…

There is a lack of research about the effective methods English language learners' (ELLs) teachers can use to motivate students to learn English as a second language by transmitting the importance and how they ensure successful student outcomes in all four language domains. Data that leads to effective motivational methods for English language…

The dissertation presents a pioneering investigation into child speech among Bikolano children. It aims to address the underdescription and underdocumentation of Child Bikol as spoken in the Philippines. Bikol, an Austronesian macrolanguage, often coexists with more dominant languages, making Bikolano children both emergent multilinguals and…

Integrating emergent bilingual students into K-12 mainstream classrooms where linguistic support is not provided has the potential to lead to their academic underperformance. This is because the content is delivered in English, which may not be understandable to immigrant students with limited English proficiency, possibly leading to psychological…

In this qualitative study, the experiences, training, and challenges of teachers in primary schools in a community in southwest Nigeria were explored. The purpose of this study was to identify the experiences of teachers about their training for mother tongue instruction and how they teach pupils with the mother tongue or local language of the…