Affirmative consent initiatives advocate that college students understand sexual consent and refusal. There has been an influx of research focused on students' definitions or understanding of consent; however, research examining students' definitions of sexual refusals is limited. Additionally, different terminology (e.g., non-consent vs. sexual…

Critical Discourse Analysis is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse regarding language as a form of social practice. As a specific discourse, news discourse is a representation of the journalists' expression and construction of events, as well as readers' understanding and cognition of the events reported. It functions as a…

This dissertation uses the Conceptual Blending Hypothesis from the socio-cognitive method presented and refined by Kecskes (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2020) to explain how the lexical choice of bilinguals differs across sociocultural situations. Quantitative (lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication) and qualitative (lexical…

This exploratory study examines the role of foreign and second language contexts in the acquisition of conventional expressions. A group of 21 ESL learners was compared to 25 EFL learners randomly selected from a larger pool. Both groups completed an aural multiple-choice discourse completion task (MC-DCT), which was developed from a previously…

There is emerging evidence that collocation use plays a primary role in determining various dimensions of L2 oral proficiency assessment and development. The current study presents the results of three experiments which examined the relationship between the degree of association in collocation use (operationalized as t scores and mutual…