Students bring cultural and linguistic richness to the English Language Arts classroom in the form of English language diversity; that being said, English Language Arts (ELA) education has traditionally privileged Standard American English (*SAE) and its related white culture rather than embrace the aforementioned diversity. With calls for more…

Speech is highly variable and systematic, governed by the internal linguistic system and socio-indexical factors. The systematic relationship of socio-indexical factors and variable phonetic forms, referred to here as "socio-indexical structure," has been the cornerstone of sociophonetic research over the last several decades. Research…

Dialects vary in their allophonic patterns, which can affect listeners' phonological and lexical representations. I explore how different exposure to dialect-specific allophonic patterns for two vowels in American English, /ae ai/, affects listeners' lexical processing behaviors across three perception tasks: perceptual similarity, priming, and…

To become a native speaker, beyond obligatory rules, children need to learn systematic variation in the language, as it is present at all levels of language structure and is an integral part of linguistic knowledge. To give an example in English, speakers sometimes pronounce words ending in -ing with -in' (e.g., working vs. workin') depending on…

Some links between linguistic meanings and markers change systematically and cyclically in what are known as "grammaticalization paths." Although the empirical observations that give rise to these characterizations are cross-linguistically robust, the representations and cognitive processes that support these shifts are still not well…

The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

Language is inherently variable, and learner language is particularly variable. The variationist paradigm considers learner language a heterogeneously variable yet inherently rule-governed system. Specifically, learners' alternation between native-like and nonnative-like variants of a variable or invariable target native speaker (NS) form…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

This dissertation presents the results of a tripartite exploration of English use by Latinxs in post-Katrina New Orleans, defined here as an ethnolinguistic repertoire that I call New Orleans Latinx English (NOLAE). The project considers how contemporary English use differs from that found in a pre-Katrina sample, how social network geometry…

Itoman, one of the varieties spoken in the southern part of Okinawa Island, exhibits several tone patterns. Although the tone patterns of Itoman were examined in previous studies (Nakasone ms., Hattori 1959, Oshiro 1963, and Hirayama et al. 1966), they ended at the descriptive level, and no phonological accounts for the surface tone patterns were…

North Kyungsang Korean (NKK) is a pitch accent language in which each word has one of a restricted set of possible tonal patterns, and where the tonal pattern of a given lexical word is not fully predictable. This dissertation reports on a corpus study of accent patterns in existing words and the results of a study in which NKK speakers were asked…

This study examines a major linguistic event underway in New York City. Of its 10 million inhabitants, nearly a third are speakers of Spanish. This community is socially and linguistically diverse: Some speakers are recent arrivals from Latin America while others are lifelong New Yorkers. Some have origins in the Caribbean, the historic source of…

This study employs a relational database consisting of thousands of Old High German (OHG) nominal attestations to reconstruct noun class paradigms found primarily in the four OHG texts extensive enough to provide complete nominal paradigms: "Isidor", "Benediktinerregel", "Tatian" and Otfrid von Weissenburg's "Evangelienbuch". This study captures…

The present study is concerned with language contact between Creole English and Spanish spoken by bilingual West Indians who live in Panama City, Panama. The goal of this study is to examine the speech patterns of monolinguals of Creole English and Spanish and Spanish-Creole English bilinguals in the local communities of this region, by employing…

It has been argued for many years that a new standard of Mandarin is developing within Taiwan, distinct from the official form based on the Beijing pronunciation, as well as the nonstandard vernacular, Taiwan-guoyu. The parameters by which this new standard, Taiwanese Mandarin, may be recognized, however, and the extent to which it exists in…