This dissertation examines the interface between music and language in "Huju", which is a Shanghai dialect based regional opera. Chapter I is a short introduction. Chapter II presents a thorough review of the studies on linguistic tone and music tune, and provides descriptive background information about "Huju" and Shanghai…

There is an academic achievement gap between White and Black male students as evidenced by the significant difference between standardized test scores beginning in the third grade and continuing throughout secondary education. It has been postulated that this gap is influenced by differences in how teachers interact with students of color. This…

This dissertation explores language as a resource for the formation and expression of ethnic identity among the members of an Asian American college sorority. As a community of practice organized around ethnicity, the sorority provides an excellent site to examine the mutually constitutive relationship of language and ethnic identity. Two features…

This dissertation investigated the effects of technological mediation on second language (L2) learning, focusing, as a case study, on gains in listening perception of the subtle but important feature of pitch placement in Japanese. Pitch accent can be difficult to perceive for non-native speakers whose first language (L1) does not rely on pitch or…

With the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2001), schools have become aware of the consequences of successfully teaching children to read. A major building block in early childhood education includes the decoding of phonemes, rhymes, and the rhythm of spoken and written word. As reading is crucial to success in any subject area or career…

Speech utterances are more than the linear concatenation of individual phonemes or words. They are organized by prosodic structures comprising phonological units of different sizes (e.g., syllable, foot, word, and phrase) and the prominence relations among them. As the linguistic structure of spoken languages, prosody serves an important function…