This dissertation investigates the interaction of developing extralinguistic cognitive systems with early language learning and processing through the case study of verb argument structure. The interaction of these systems with the linguistic system underpins fundamental theories of language learning and use: language does not exist in isolation.…

Usage-based Phonology proposes that language users' knowledge is stored in the form of exemplars reflecting experience of language usage. Exemplars encompass all visual and auditory information perceived during a language interaction, but few studies have examined the role that visual information plays. This dissertation addresses this question…

Emotions are ubiquitous in education. However, most discussion of emotional learning and development is focused on the student. Yet, teachers are human and experience strong emotions in their work. This research sought to look at the emotional skill sets of emotionally intelligent educators. The framework for emotional skill sets consisted of…

Registers are culturally recognized varieties of language that are associated with situations of use (Biber, Egbert, & Keller, 2020). Variation in frequencies of linguistic forms across registers is thought to be functional for the situations they are associated with; that is, certain language features are more common in one register than…

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,…

Educators often inquire about the readability of books and other documents used in the classroom, with the idea that readability supports students' reading comprehension and growth. Documents used in classrooms tend to be language-based, so readability metrics have long focused on the complexity of language. However, such metrics are unsuitable…

Some links between linguistic meanings and markers change systematically and cyclically in what are known as "grammaticalization paths." Although the empirical observations that give rise to these characterizations are cross-linguistically robust, the representations and cognitive processes that support these shifts are still not well…

Language is a quintessentially human trait. Many decades of neurolinguistic research provided evidence of neural structures which specialize in complex linguistic and cognitive processes supporting human communications. Because the world is multilingual, (Crystal, 2010; de Bot, 2019) a prominent question related to brain processes supporting…

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) may result in a wide array of cognitive deficits, including executive functions. A proposal by Ferretti and colleagues (2011 & 2013) has suggested that executive dysfunction caused by traumatic brain injury (TBI) impact navigation and discourse abilities in similar ways, suggesting that these skills may share…

Engagement in online classes can promote student success but can be met with challenges associated with students feeling isolated from their peers, their instructors, or the course when learning online. Building opportunities for student interaction is one way to combat this isolation. A common activity in online courses that allows for student…

We are currently experiencing unprecedented waves of forced migration (UNHCR, 2022a), leading to an increase in anti-refugee rhetorics which in turn fuel policies that have life or death consequences for refugees (Gotlib, 2017). In this context, refugee voices are urgently needed in scholarly, public, and political realms, yet these perspectives…

The purpose of this study was to challenge autonomous views of writing and deficit views of students who struggle with school literacy. This study is an exploration of students' use of social, linguistic, and cognitive resources to construct meaning in narrative writing events in school. The following research questions guided this inquiry: What…

This dissertation investigated the relationship between Linguistic Empathy and Psychological Empathy by implementing a psycholinguistic experiment that measured a person's acceptability ratings of sentences with violations of Linguistic Empathy and correlating them with a measure of the person's Psychological Empathy. Linguistic Empathy…

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.…

How are linguistic and cognitive practices shared among individuals (and more broadly) populations and cultures? Further, how are cognitive strategies shared at the local level? Li and colleagues (Li & Gleitman 2002; Li et al 2011; "inter alia") suggest that the variation observed in reference frame practices among populations of the…