Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…

This research seeks to understand how secondary science students make space for themselves in the classroom. Specifically, this study examines the interplay between classroom structures and students' agentic negotiations while identifying the relationship between students' enacted agency and their authored science identities by drawing from a…

There is a significant diaspora of Mixtec people residing along California's Central Coast, mostly working in the agricultural sector. The new realities in the diaspora have brought Mixtec varieties in contact in new contexts where they co-exist with other Mexican Indigenous languages, as well as with Spanish and English. We urgently need more…

Language exposure plays a large role in language acquisition, and bilingual children must acquire both of their languages in environments that typically include abundant speech variability. The specific goals of this dissertation were to examine how speech exposure affected phonological retuning and lexical access in bilingual children's second…

The use of writing to represent the heritage language represents a contentious issue for many members of Puebloan societies in the American Southwest. Many community members resist the use of writing for this purpose on the grounds that it acts as a form of colonialism, while others accept the use of writing in the heritage language because it is…