Second language learners constitute a significant and expanding portion of the global population and there is a growing demand for tools that facilitate language learning and instruction across various levels and in different countries. The development of large language models (LLMs) has brought about a significant impact on the domains of natural…

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…

This dissertation makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with an eye toward creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual machine translation systems. The aim of the present dissertation is to create a grammar library of information structure for the…

The purpose of this qualitative, narrative inquiry was to explore and analyze the narrative stories of native English speaking adults who matriculated through a multicultural, dual language program from prekindergarten to 6th grade to understand the influence of the program on their lives, and the relationship between those experiences and their…

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…

This dissertation develops a theoretical and empirical framework for the model of metalinguistic community, a community of positioned social actors engaged primarily in discourse about language and cultural symbols tied to language. Building upon the notions of speech community (Duranti, 1994; Gumperz, 1968; Morgan, 2004), linguistic community…

Few studies on English language learners (ELLs) focus on teachers' perceptions of bilingualism and bidialectalism and describe the impact of those perceptions on language arts pedagogy. While numerous studies have explored the teaching of diverse students and the negative effects of standardized tests on the quality instruction these students…