The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

Minority languages in diglossic situations with a majority language face the danger of eventual loss of vitality. The first sign of this is when child language acquisition begins to erode. This dissertation investigates the intergenerational transmission of the Isan language, spoken in the Northeastern region of Thailand. While the Isan community…

Automated assessment using Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the potential to make English speaking assessments more reliable, authentic, and accessible. Yet without careful examination, NLP may exacerbate social prejudices based on gender or native language (L1). Current NLP-based assessments are prone to such biases, yet research and…

The digital transformation in educational assessment has led to the proliferation of large-scale data, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance language learning, and testing through machine learning (ML) techniques. Drawing on the extensive data generated by online English language assessments, this dissertation investigates the efficacy…

Learning new languages is a complex task involving both explicit and implicit processes (i.e., that do/do not involve awareness). Understanding how these processes interact is essential to a full account of second language (L2) learning, but accounts vary as to whether explicit processes help (e.g., DeKeyser, 2007), hinder (e.g., Ellis &…

Growing up in the digital era, young children are exposed to numerous educational applications and programs, some with well-designed curricula and others focused more on entertainment or game-like qualities. With the increasing popularity of mobile language-learning applications among young children, this dissertation raises a crucial question: do…

Generalization is the ability to apply regularities to novel instances, for example, correctly guessing that the plural for the novel English word 'wug' should be 'wugs'. Early language learners make overgeneralization errors like 'mouses', applying regularities beyond their attested uses. Theories concerned with the question of how learners learn…

Conceptual Metaphor (CM; e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Kovecses, 2020) is central to our thinking and ubiquitously manifested in our language. Given its importance, the teaching of conceptual metaphors has gained much attention in Cognitive Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. While most empirical studies have focused on specific aspects…

Lexical semantics provide many important resources in natural language processing, despite the recent preferences for distributional methods. In this dissertation we investigate an under-represented lexical relationship, that of scalarity. We define scalarity as it relates to adjectives and introduce novel methods to identify words belonging to a…

Vocabulary researchers have started expanding their assessment toolbox by incorporating timed tasks and psycholinguistic instruments (e.g., priming tasks) to gain insights into lexical development (e.g., Elgort, 2011; Godfroid, 2020b; Nakata & Elgort, 2020; Vandenberghe et al., 2021). These timed sensitive and implicit word measures differ…

This dissertation study explored the feasibility of using authenticated spoken texts to test L2 Chinese listening comprehension. The spoken texts used in the study were created using an "authenticating" technique, in which scripted spoken Chinese texts were infused with characteristics of real-world, unscripted spoken Chinese. In the…

Some contrasts in the second language (L2) impose difficulty in processing for learners, especially when these contrasts are not used phonemically in a learner's first language (L1). This thesis is to examine how American English speakers learning Japanese discriminate and store information regarding the L2 contrasts as a part of their lexicon…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of written cues on the second- language (L2) language perception, processing, and word learning, especially when the person's first language (L1) belongs to a different rhythmic type of language than L2. The first objective was to examine whether late bilinguals as L2 learners can benefit more from…

Nonword repetition (NWR) tasks represent one assessment tool for Specific Language Impairment (SLI). The use of such tasks has been established and verified for monolingual children. However, the diagnostic accuracy of NWR tasks for bilingual children has had variable results and must address several unique characteristics of this population. Gaps…

The field of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) has expressed interest in pursuing a research agenda that expands the current heritage language (HL) strand of research to investigate how this heterogeneous population re-learns their family language, and how this experience differs from that of second language (L2) learners. This…