Maritime Sign Language (MSL) emerged in the easternmost provinces in Canada with origins traced as far back as to the Weald, a region in Southeastern England. Therefore, British sign language is a root language that led to the creation of MSL. This type of language emersion is known as a Deaf community sign language, which occurs when Deaf people…

This dissertation describes the features of co-speech gestures of English/ASL bilinguals and addresses three main questions: 1) How do English/ASL bilinguals gesture differently than non-signers? 2) How do native ASL/English bilinguals gesture differently than non-native English/ASL bilinguals? 3) Do English/ASL bilinguals gesture differently to…

The main research question of this dissertation is the nature of language interaction effects observed in linguistic patterns of multilingual children. Such effects--often described as syntactic transfer/influence of one of the languages on the other--have been richly documented in the multilingualism literature. I review an influential model…

Bilinguals sometimes outperform age-matched monolinguals on non-language tasks involving cognitive control. But the bilingual advantage is not consistently found in every experiment and may reflect specific attributes of the bilinguals tested. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if the way in which bilinguals use language, specifically…