Educational outcomes for students with ADHD are often negative. To better understand this problem, the purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the representation of individuals with ADHD in contemporary American English. Data was obtained from the Corpus of American Contemporary English (COCA), using all sections except the academic…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the representation of black students in contemporary American English. Two questions were addressed, what is the semantic prosody of Black students, and what are the semantic roles for Black students. All the concordance lines containing the phrase Black students were downloaded from the Corpus of…

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…

This research examined how linguistic differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children process sentences and learn new information. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these linguistic differences adversely impact how AAE-speaking children use contrastive inflectional verb…

The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) started a new approach to viewing metaphors in languages. Traditionally, metaphor is considered as one of the rhetorical devices. Conceptual metaphor, however, is an approach for us to understand abstract notions in terms of relatively concrete concepts. The HEART metaphor in Chinese…

Background: Bilingual speech production studies have highlighted that level of proficiency influences the acoustic-phonetic representation of phonemes in both languages (MacKay, Flege, Piske, & Schirru 2001; Zarate-Sandez, 2015). The results for bilingual speech production reveals that proficient/early bilinguals produce distinct acoustic…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine the (in)effectiveness of the Usage-based grammar approach through explicit instruction of adverbials in the US educational context. One area that can complicate the question of native speakers' grammar knowledge is their awareness of grammatical terms and their functions. Along with exploring…

The present dissertation explores the effect of exposure to non-native speech via foreign film on non-native speech production and perception. In order to explore potential effects, two main experiments were developed, which examined French production and perception by monolingual native speakers of English before and after exposure to French…

Many studies evidence the flexibility of speech perception in the first language (L1), which allows rapid adaptation to unfamiliar foreign accents. Two influential studies by Bradlow and Bent (2008) and a follow-up study by Baese-Berk et al. (2013) found that increased variability as a function of the number of talkers and accents facilitated the…

During conversation, talkers may adapt their speech in a variety of ways. One form of speech adaptation is clear speech, in which a talker selectively hyperarticulates segments when faced with specific communication challenges. The present speech production experiment investigated how talkers adapt a common feature of American English dialects:…

The importance of input on language learning cannot be overstated. One method of providing input to learners at a level that is appropriate for them is called extensive reading, in which learners read an abundance of texts. In practice, for learners of English as a second or foreign language, these texts are often books that have been written and…

This study investigates the politeness strategies employed by Saudi EFL teachers when expressing their disagreements on Twitter. It examines the factors affecting Saudi EFL teachers' choice of politeness and disagreement strategies. It compares Saudi EFL teachers' disagreement expressions with those of American ESL teachers on Twitter. Four…

Purposefully selecting text is a longstanding challenge for teachers of multinational, adult learners enrolled at language schools. International students come from diverse cultural backgrounds, have been educated in different academic systems, are of different ages, and have separate interests; therefore, it is difficult for teachers to…

In phonetics research, language alternation--including code switching (speaker-initiated) and cued switching (researcher-prompted)--can be used as a tool to investigate various aspects of speech production and perception in bilingual or multilingual speakers (Bullock & Toribio, 2009a). Studies on the production of voice onset time (VOT) during…