In the ever-changing digital era, the surge of online informal language learning platforms has revolutionized the way we learn new languages. This dissertation delves into the critical role of interactional feedback (IF) in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), a cornerstone for optimizing these digital learning spaces. Anchored in…

Prior research has extensively explored audiovisual speech perception and literacy skills in various linguistic contexts. Studies have shown that children's ability to integrate auditory and visual speech cues plays a crucial role in language acquisition and development (Erdener & Burnham, 2013; Lalonde & Werner, 2021). Furthermore,…

Writing in English is considered an important skill for ESL learners, and qualified teachers are needed in order to provide the students with written corrective feedback (WCF). Much previous research on WCF has looked at its overall effectiveness, with less attention paid to the teachers' perceptions of WCF methods and expected outcomes when they…

What is the nature of conceptual representations? Models of semantic memory often describe concepts as a distributed feature space. However, it remains unknown which subset of this feature space constitutes the invariant representation of a concept. In this dissertation, I investigate the nature of modality-independent representations and their…

Orthography-phonology mapping in world languages exhibits variations. Extensive research has investigated whether orthographic-phonological consistency impacts the cognitive processing of written words. A major body of work has focused on the recognition of phonographic first language (L1) written words. Results show that the more transparent the…

Text messaging is the most popular form of communication (Lionbridge, 2019; Ceci, 2022), and mobile phone ownership is high, especially among university students (Chen & Denoyelles, 2013). Research on mobile language learning is increasingly found on the forefront of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) (Loewen et al., 2019; Stockwell,…

Singular "they" is becoming increasingly common and accepted, but many people find it difficult to learn, instead making seemingly-counterintuitive errors like "she uses they/them pronouns." Existing pronoun production models argue that speakers select pronouns based on morphosyntactic information associated with a name, or…

This dissertation investigates a typologically rare linguistic phenomenon found in Irish from three different perspectives: how it challenges phonological theory, how it is used by contemporary speakers, and how its written representation affects its acquisition. Initial consonant mutation (ICM), as it appears in the Celtic languages, is known to…

This dissertation provides an in-depth linguistic description and analysis of the discourse in a target domain of digital games, a domain referred to as "single player offline role-playing games." Gaming discourse from this domain is represented by a 4.8-million-word corpus of spoken and written language extracted from the digital files…

Achieving proficiency in core foundational oral language (OL), reading, and writing skills remains difficult for students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) and foundational OL difficulty (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2022). Despite evidence linking OL skills in grammar (morphosyntax, syntax) and vocabulary (semantics) to…

Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study was to determine whether English learners who participated in transitional kindergarten perform equally or better than English learners who did not participate in transitional kindergarten in the areas of oral language, written language, and overall language as measured by the…

This study was an investigation into the aural and written receptive knowledge of the English semantics of English lexis that is loanwords in the Japanese language and the predictive strength of the variables of semantic distance, concreteness/abstractness, polysemy, phonological distance, number of syllables, number of phonemes, number of…

"How can teachers help students improve their second language (L2) speaking accuracy?" This is a question that most L2 educators ask themselves every day. Although L2 writing is a popular topic among Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers, the consideration that L2 writing has the potential to act as a scaffold for L2 speaking…

Attaining Advanced proficiency and beyond has been a principal goal for second language learners, practitioners, and researchers. Achieving this level in writing requires producing connected discourse of paragraph-level length and nurturing the ability to arrange various linguistic units to form a unified and cohesive whole. This ability, known as…

Language is a tool for communication. People use it when they converse with each other. One way to comprehend what is being said is based on understating the intended meanings of the conversation, or what is called the underlined meanings (pragmatics). Pragmatic studies how different meanings are conveyed, depending on the utterances provided. A…