This dissertation explores the construction of the "mixed-heritage" category in Polish community-based heritage language education (HLE) and its effect on school purposes and school operations. As the number of heritage language speakers in the US who identify with multiple ethnicities grows (Parker et al., 2015; Alba et al., 2018), the…

The authors wanted to analyse teachers and specialist councillors and compare their levels of stress, mental wellbeing, their occupational tasks, the assessment of the support received and the additional help that they expected whilst working online during the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 amidst the transformation of the educational system in Poland.…

The study aimed to analyse the production of plosive sounds by trilingual speakers of L1 Polish - L2 English - L3 Norwegian. The main objective was to trace any changes in the VOT production of fortis and lenis stops in all three languages (Polish, English and Norwegian) produced by novice L3 learners with a focus on possible cross-linguistic…

We investigated the comorbidity of low language and reading skills in 6- to 8-year-old monolingual Polish-speaking children (N = 962) using three different approaches: norming data to determine the prevalence of co-morbid difficulties, group comparisons of profiles on key cognitive-linguistic measures, and a case series analysis examining the…

Language learning is a complex issue of interest to linguists, computer scientists, and psychologists alike. While the different fields approach these questions at different levels of granularity, findings in one field profoundly affect how the others proceed. My dissertation examines the perceptual and linguistic generalizations regarding the…

Background: The challenge of assessing all languages of multilingual children by clinicians who do not speak the children's heritage languages is a global problem amplified by the increase in recent migration as well as a lack of available assessment tools. Aim: To evaluate the feasibility of using a novel scoring schema to assist English-speaking…

PEERS® for Young Adults is an evidence-based program aimed at teaching social skills needed to establish and maintain close relationships, including friendship and romantic relationships. The study investigated the effects of the Polish adaptation of the curriculum on the social functioning of adults on the autism spectrum. Fifteen young adults…

In this dissertation, I establish a research program that uses computational modeling as a testbed for theories of phonological learning. This dissertation focuses on a fundamental question: how do children acquire sound patterns from noisy, real-world data, especially in the presence of lexical exceptions that defy regular patterns? For instance,…

Background: For over 30 years, parental reports have been used to study the vocabulary of children under 4 years of age. Research exploring parental checklists as a measure of vocabulary in older children is very limited. Typically, authors of parental checklists report the reliability of the developed tools but do not explore validity in terms of…

In Polish, where different inflectional paradigms apply to female and male names, attributing male gender to female referents such as eminent scientists and authors that pass unnoticed in English becomes visible in scholarly as well as popular scientific texts, exposing the society's gender bias. While gender bias in machine translation has been…

Speakers show cross-linguistic differences in expressing placement events involving support (cup on table) and containment (apple in bowl) in first language (L1) contexts. They rely on either more-general (e.g., Spanish for support, Polish for containment) or more-specific (e.g., German, Polish for support; Spanish, German for containment)…

The number meaning of grammatically plural nouns is to some extent context sensitive. In negative sentences, plural nouns typically receive an inclusive reading referring to any number of individuals (one or many). This contrasts with their more frequent exclusive reading referring to a group of two or more individuals. The present study…

Bilingual children's total vocabulary in each of their languages is often smaller than that of monolinguals. In their seminal study, Bialystok et al. (2010. 'Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children.' "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 13 (4): 525-531) divided children's vocabulary into 'home' and…

This study aims to investigate the nature of phonological awareness in young L3 learners, and the extent to which it changes over time as L2 and L3 learning progresses. Two groups of 12 closely matched multilinguals (total= 24, aged 12-13), who shared their L2 (English) but their L1/L3 (German/Polish) were mirrored, mimicked L2 and L3 accents in…

Bilingual subject instruction, designed to facilitate the acquisition of the Norwegian language, is a support class aimed at immigrant students in primary and lower secondary Norwegian schools. This study delves into the beliefs of two Polish-Norwegian bilingual teachers regarding multilingualism in this instructional context and the factors…