With the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses globally, the overall aim of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the linguistic aptitude of autistic individuals. Given that the autism diagnosis is a spectrum, we rely on the Autism Quotient (AQ) test, which measures the quantity of autistic-like traits an individual possesses,…

Previous literature has shown that voicing contrast is a difficult feature for Chinese-English emergent bilingual learners of L3 Spanish (Bravo Diaz, 2020; Chen, 2007; Zhang, 2022). The production of voicing contrast in stops has been broadly investigated in second and third language studies (e.g., Zampini, 1998; Llama, 2010; Wrembel, 2014), but…

While language aptitude and motivation are considered to be important contributors to second language (L2) attainment, two major gaps in the past research have been (1) a lack of nonlinear models stemming from a naive and tacit assumption that learning outcomes are linearly related to their predictors, and (2) a lack of unified and integrative…

Despite the importance that learners must place on using prosody appropriately in EIL interaction, pragmatic functions of prosody have been largely disregarded in teaching materials and classroom instruction (Nikolic, 2018). Moreover, with a recent change in classroom paradigms instigated by the global development of educational technologies and…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

As part of the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism (DMM), Herdina & Jessner (2002) cite multilinguals' increased metalinguistic awareness as one of the key factors that distinguish third language acquisition from second language acquisition. Many TLA studies have sought to show that this increased metalinguistic awareness and the beneficial…

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationships between working memory (WM) and three commonly used learning strategies or conditions in the nature of proficiency among adult L2 Russian learners. Based on the aptitude-learning condition interaction framework articulated by Robinson (2002b), the study identifies two types of…

This study examined the second language (L2) development of adult learners of Spanish at three levels of proficiency during and after a semester of instruction. A fundamental goal was to identify cognitive and psychosocial individual differences (IDs) that can explain between-learner variation over time in order to expand our understanding of the…