Over a century ago, rhetoricians called on writing instructors in the U.S. to accept and even encourage language diversity among learners. Yet scholars of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies are still advocating for this via arguments for linguistic justice and translingualism, even referring to strict adherence to a single, mainstream…

Scholars have examined and debated the use of African American Language (AAL) in the past but research that has focused on its use in college settings has been scarce. This study uses a case study approach to examine attitudes and perspectives of a university community toward AAL use inside and outside the classroom and beyond. The case study…

Acquisition of the perfective marker "-le" in Mandarin Chinese is a daunting task for second language learners. To date, there has been no consensus on what it is about "-le" that makes it such a challenge to learners. This study investigates the acquisition of "-le" from both a lexical perspective and a discourse…

This thesis investigates the choice between reflexive pronouns (e.g., "herself") and personal pronouns (e.g., "her") in the expression of subject coreference in English locative prepositional phrases. A persistent puzzle for syntactic theories of pronoun licensing, commonly known as binding theories, it has long been observed…

The current study tests the hypothesis that language comprehension is, in part, influenced by language exposure, and the biases that people develop are related to the frequency of exposure to different linguistic input, like, for instance, pronoun coreference. As comprehenders filter the linguistic input they encounter, we ask, what is the impact…

Within the past few decades, notable contributions have been made in heritage language education research that continued to gain ground in language pedagogy and teaching practices (e.g., Davila, 2017; Valdes, 2000; Fishman, 2001; Kelleher, 2010; Polinsky & Kagan 2007). This dissertation is guided by translanguaging and social identity, two…

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,…

This dissertation investigates when and how children figure out the force of modals, that is, when and how they learn that "can/might" express possibility, whereas must/have to express necessity. Learning modal force raises a logical "Subset Problem": given that necessity entails possibility, what prevents learners from…

Usage-based theories of language development underscore the importance of children using language to learn language. Few investigations have applied usage-based theories to dual language learners (DLLs), who comprise a growing share of children attending early education programs in the U.S. Three studies were carried out to investigate the role of…

The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine the (in)effectiveness of the Usage-based grammar approach through explicit instruction of adverbials in the US educational context. One area that can complicate the question of native speakers' grammar knowledge is their awareness of grammatical terms and their functions. Along with exploring…

The relationship between language and thought has fascinated us for centuries. The relationship between the two is far beyond what the two words represent on the literal level, and the discussions around it have been covered in various fields from philosophy and psychology to linguistics. Even complicating the situation, the relationship between…

Critical pedagogy surrounding Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) has focused on the student's attitudes regarding their language and culture, specifically as it relates to Spanish and Latinxs in the United States. These heritage language (HL) learners, who were exposed to Spanish in the home, enroll in Spanish classes to further a sense of…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

An aim of research on bilingualism is to understand how the brain adapts to the use of more than one language. Although several important discoveries and insights about the consequences of bilingualism have been generated over the last several decades, concerns about replicability have narrowed the scope of inquiry and discussion to the…

Spoken words vary phonetically along a number of dimensions, such as duration, pitch, and vowel quality. Much of this variation is associated with social factors like the dialect, age, or gender of the speaker -- a type of variation termed 'socio-indexical'. Traditional theories of speech perception have seen this socio-indexical variation as a…