In this dissertation, I examine how fingerspelled words and core signs in American Sign Language (ASL) reduce as they are repeated. This investigation is motivated by theories of language production that posit that reduction may be shaped not only by reducing articulatory effort, but also by accommodation to an interlocutor's understanding of the…

This dissertation is about the learnability of different generative, Separationist approaches to nominal morphosyntax. The core of my investigation is number, gender, and declension class, as manifested across nouns, adnominals (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, and quantifiers), and articles. An extreme position would require that all of…

Many pragmaticists claimed that pragmatics developed mainly from 1970s and 1980s, taking the emergence of its series of pragmatic theories (e.g., Cooperative Principle, Conversation Implicature, Relevance Theory, etc.), methodology, and the official issue of "Journal of Pragmatics" (1977) in Amsterdam as its marks. However, few scholars…

This study aims to assess the evidence regarding the relationship between previous and new schools of linguistics. According to Kuhn (1970), old linguistic paradigms incorporate vocabulary and apparatus from previous or traditional paradigms. In particular, this review addresses the Question: Do new paradigms in linguistic arise from old or…

A strong predictor of children's language is performance on non-word repetition (NWR) tasks. However, the basis of this relationship remains unknown. Some suggest that NWR tasks measure phonological working memory, which then affects language growth. Others argue that children's knowledge of language/language experience affects NWR performance. A…

The lack of diversity in the language sciences has increasingly been criticized as it holds the potential for producing flawed theories. Research on (i) geographically diverse language communities and (ii) on sign languages is necessary to corroborate, sharpen, and extend existing theories. This study contributes a case study of adapting a…

With the advent of the post-pandemic era, the integration of online and offline education has become one of the future development trends and major challenges. This article utilizes the Semantic Wave Theory to teach the "Film and Television Creative Course" through a combination of offline and online methods. While offline teaching is…

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

Psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on verbal material. Yet, metaphors frequently occur in a multimodal format, blending words and pictures to convey meaning. Here we compared verbal and multimodal metaphors by using item pairs where stimulus one was always a word (e.g., "language" in the metaphorical conditions and…

In Krashen's theory of second-language acquisition he claims that there is distinction between language acquisition and language learning, a distinction which other second-language acquisition researchers have called "perhaps the most important conceptualization" in the field and which has made possible the most productive models of SLA.…

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their…

Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models…

Metaphors and similes have been treated as the same comparable types of figurative speech since Aristotle. In early theories, metaphors are interpreted as corresponding similes by paraphrasing. Based on this theoretical framework, some experimental studies interpret simile understanding as evidence for metaphor understanding. However, according to…

This study investigated how input frequency (i.e., type frequency and token frequency) and proficiency levels enhanced the perception of English nominal suffixes by first language (L1) Thai learners. Based on the Usage-based Account (Tomasello, 2003), it was hypothesized that input frequency, i.e., token frequency (frequency of derived forms…