In the last decade, the number of English Learners (ELs) in higher education has significantly grown due to the increase of immigrants and refugees coming to the United States. For these students, attending community colleges is usually the first foray into higher education. This is particularly the case in New England, which is experiencing rapid…

This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take…

In the context of the critical need to support children's early language development, teacher knowledge may enhance children's opportunities to build linguistic skills. In this study we explored how early childhood teachers' (n = 86) pedagogical content knowledge for language and vocabulary, and their book-reading implementation across the school…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing in classrooms has become commonplace. However, there are little data on the effect of face-masks on children's language input and production in educational contexts, like preschool classrooms which over half of United States children attend. Leveraging repeated objective measurements, we longitudinally…

In the context of the critical need to support children's early language development, teacher knowledge may enhance children's opportunities to build linguistic skills. In this study we explored how early childhood teachers' (n = 86) pedagogical content knowledge for language and vocabulary, and their book-reading implementation across the school…

Background: Early and effective treatment for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) is important. Although a growing body of research shows the effects of interventions at the group level, clinicians observe large individual differences in language growth, and differences in outcomes across language domains. A systematic…

Tender Shoots is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) for parents aimed at improving preschool children's oral language skills relevant for later reading. Parents of 72 preschool children (M = 50 months) were randomly assigned to either a Rich Reading and Reminiscing (RRR) condition, a Strengthening Sound Sensitivity (SSS) condition, or an…

Purpose: We explore the extent to which speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are operating under assumptions about speech, language, and literacy that are not supported by evidence or are contradicted by evidence. Method: SLPs (N = 106) marked the degree to which they endorsed or rejected four true and 11 myth (i.e., false) statements on a visual…

Mind-mindedness is associated with positive developmental outcomes. However, much of the literature uses mostly White, middle to high socioeconomic status (SES) samples despite evidence that the benefits of mind-mindedness may vary based on degree of social risk. Additionally, few studies have examined relations between mind-mindedness and…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

Background & Aims: Even though evidence for the use of linguistic-phonological intervention approaches in children with a cleft (lip and) palate (CP±L) is still limited, these approaches are being used by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to treat active or compensatory cleft speech disorders in clinical practice. It is, however, unknown to…

The increasing number of English learners (ELs) in U.S. public schools calls for teacher preparation programs to adequately prepare prospective teachers to meet the learning needs of ELs in general education classrooms, and to be culturally responsive to this growing population. This longitudinal study responds to the need to prepare prospective…

This article explores Lesson Study, a professional development tool for teacher candidates. Teacher candidates engaged in a lesson study cycle focused on dialogic reading, an evidence-based literacy practice for young children. Teacher candidates explored the power of dialogic reading on comprehension and language development, collaboratively…

Background: Language learners are taking advantage of the increased accuracy afforded by machine translation (MT) tools like Google Translate. There is a growing debate as to whether these tools support or hinder English as a foreign language (EFL) education. Some EFL students are drawn to MT tools to save time and energy when communicating, but…

This dissertation investigated how four factors -- the degree of L2 experience, L1 sound structure, age difference in L1 language development and age of L2 exposure -- affect the perceptual cue weighting of duration and spectral differences for English tense-lax vowel contrasts. Four major hypotheses were tested: desensitization hypothesis (DH)…