Speech exhibits quasi-rhythmic regularities at multiple timescales, which seem to be crucial to comprehension. Both children's ability to extract rhythm from complex stimuli and to produce rhythmic patterns are known to undergo changes from infancy to adulthood. However, it remains unclear what rhythm skills specifically related to speech look…

This dissertation is about implicit prosody, the prosodic structure that readers assign during silent reading. The dissertation has several goals: determining which reading tasks are appropriate for studying implicit prosody, establishing how grammatical principles could guide incremental assignment of prosodic structure, and investigating how…

This study investigated English phonological awareness in adult native speakers of English (L1) and in relation to their phonological awareness skills and proficiency in their German (L2). Most research in L1 phonological awareness focuses on younger children, their phonological awareness development, the relationship between reading and…

Stuttering is a developmental speech disorder characterized by interruptions of fluency. A large body of research suggests that stuttering occurs due to a reduced ability to generate timing signals in order to sequence speech sounds. One piece of supporting evidence for this is that when speaking along with an external timing source like a…

This dissertation examines heritage language learners of Spanish enrolled in university Spanish courses, focusing on their strategic use of suprasegmental speech features in two speaking tasks. The research investigates attitudes' influence on heritage language learners' speech production in different task types. Participants engaged in two…

This embedded experimental mixed-methods study examined the implementation and outcomes of World Music Drumming (WMD) curriculum on reading fluency in primary elementary children and teacher perceptions of its effectiveness in student-to-curriculum, student-to-student, and student-to-teacher interactions in a summer camp setting. WMD, with its…

This dissertation analyzes the production and perception of lexical stress in trilinguals' first, second, and third languages (L1, L2, and L3) to evaluate how the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis applies to L3 acquisition. According to this hypothesis, acoustic cues to stress have different weights across languages, and results from both…

Millions engage in learning a Second Language (L2) using their mobile devices with a wide range of success. Concomitantly, there exists a growing interest in research on the effects of mobile-assisted language learning and predictors of learner outcomes (e.g., Loewen et al., 2020; Sudina & Plonsky, 2023). However, few of these apps and studies…

Prosody (prominence, rhythm, intonation, etc.) is crucial for using language efficiently and conveying one's intended meaning at different linguistic levels. Therefore, a child has to acquire the prosodic system of the language in order to become a competent speaker of that language. Even though the importance of prosody is well known, we still do…

Moving beyond purposes for reading as fixed outcomes, this dissertation project explores the possibilities of affect theory for decentering or weakening those purposes so they might be seen as one element among many interacting in the classroom space. Because these purposes become the expected outcomes of reading with youth in secondary English…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of written cues on the second- language (L2) language perception, processing, and word learning, especially when the person's first language (L1) belongs to a different rhythmic type of language than L2. The first objective was to examine whether late bilinguals as L2 learners can benefit more from…

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…

The ability to understand and convey one's thoughts and emotions through spoken language is important for successful communication. The prosody of spoken language, including the intonation, rhythm, and stress present in speech, is important for language acquisition, language comprehension, and communication (Mehler et al., 1988; Nazzi, Bertoncini,…

This dissertation research is a longitudinal classroom ethnography in a second-grade classroom in a public Northeastern suburban school. It is a story of surprise for me as researcher, as I discover the multiplicity of how engagement can be conceptualized in this English-medium classroom with emergent bi/multilingual children. As tensions flowed…

Native speakers of Standard Chinese have significant difficulty judging the prominence of words with tones in a consistent way. How then can metrical structure in the language be diagnosed? This study approaches the question by investigating how metrical structure interacts with other aspects of phonology, especially tone; what foot type is used…