The current dissertation investigates factors that influence usages of Japanese honorifics and explores how instructors can introduce honorifics more effectively to second-language learners. Apart from existing literature, my data includes a corpus of real-life usages of Modern Japanese, classroom observations, interviews with Japanese language…

The goal of this study is to contribute to the field of Japanese pedagogy by examining how Japanese native speakers and learners of Japanese as a foreign language with American cultural backgrounds take stances in discussions in Japanese. As stancetaking is a fundamental human behavior (Du Bois & Karkkainen, 2012; Iwasaki, 2015; Kiesling,…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

This dissertation examines how L2 Japanese speaker international students experience their subjectivity (Harre & Gillett, 1994), that is, how their language use and actions convey their thoughts and feelings, their sense of self, and how they relate to the world around them, in casual conversations with L1 Japanese speaker peers. In order to…

This study was an investigation into the aural and written receptive knowledge of the English semantics of English lexis that is loanwords in the Japanese language and the predictive strength of the variables of semantic distance, concreteness/abstractness, polysemy, phonological distance, number of syllables, number of phonemes, number of…

Recoverability refers to the ease of recovering the underlying form--stored mental representations--given a surface form--actual, variable output signals s (e.g., [Daet^, Daet[superscript h] ] ? /Daet/ "that"). Recovery can be achieved from phonetic cues explicitly present in the acoustic signal or through prediction from the context.…

The present dissertation extracted 17,291 questions from Aki, Ryo, and Tai and their mother's spontaneously produced speech data available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000; Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, 1998). The children's age ranged from 1;3 to 3;0. Their questions were coded for (1) yes/no questions that include a sentence-final…

This study is concerned with the acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese. Both a verb's semantic class (Levin, 1993; Pinker, 1989) and its frequency (Ambridge et al., 2008) have been proposed to influence the acquisition of verbs in L1. For example, verbs whose meaning entails change-of-location or…

The proliferation of online simulation games across the globe in many different languages offers Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) researchers an opportunity to examine how language learning occurs in such virtual environments. While there has recently been an increase in the number of exploratory studies involving learning experiences of…

The purpose of this dissertation is to reconsider reflexives in Japanese through the following three steps: (a) separation of genuine reflexive elements from elements that are confounded as reflexives, (b) classification of reflexive anaphors into subtypes based on their semantic difference, and (c) classification of predicates that occur with…

Study abroad is an under-researched domain of language learning. Moreover, most investigations of this phenomenon adopt traditional structuralist approaches, wherein outcomes of study abroad are assessed solely in terms of proficiency gains as measured through conventional exams. The present study builds upon an emerging body of poststructuralist…

This dissertation offers a micro-analytic study of the use of language and body during storytelling in American English and Japanese conversations. Specifically, I focus on its beginning and explore how a story is "projected." A beginning of an action or activity is where an incipient speaker negotiates the floor with co-participants; they…