This dissertation offers a micro-analytic study of the use of language and body during storytelling in American English and Japanese conversations. Specifically, I focus on its beginning and explore how a story is "projected." A beginning of an action or activity is where an incipient speaker negotiates the floor with co-participants; they…

This dissertation study explores how dominant discourses in multicultural education can be informed by perspectives in poststructuralist theories and curriculum studies, and vice versa. This inquiry explores possibilities of conducting identity research that go beyond unitary ways of understanding cultural sameness/difference. A major focus in…

Articulation rate, speaking rate, as well as the duration and location of pauses, were analysed in 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and a comparison group of seven younger children producing utterances of similar lengths. Children with SLI were significantly slower in articulation rate, but not speaking rate or pausing time,…

What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar--but objectively incorrect--questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more…

Perceived support is consistently linked to good mental health, which is typically explained as resulting from objectively supportive actions that buffer stress. Yet this explanation has difficulty accounting for the often-observed main effects between support and mental health. Relational regulation theory (RRT) hypothesizes that main effects…

Although it is relatively well established that access to orthographic codes in production tasks is possible via an autonomous link between meaning and spelling (e.g., Rapp, Benzing, & Caramazza, 1997), the relative contribution of phonology to orthographic access remains unclear. Two experiments demonstrated persistent repetition priming in…

This study examines the changes in teaching practices during the implementation of a pedagogical model called the mathematics reasoning approach (MRA), which was founded on 2 critical areas in mathematics, problem solving, and writing to learn. Three algebra teachers implemented the approach with their classes, which were divided into control…

Right-handed participants respond more quickly and more accurately to written words presented in the right visual field (RVF) than in the left visual field (LVF). Previous attempts to identify the neural basis of the RVF advantage have had limited success. Experiment 1 was a behavioral study of lateralized word naming which established that the…

Paired speaking tests are now commonly used in both high-stakes testing and classroom assessment contexts. The co-construction of discourse by candidates is regarded as a strength of paired speaking tests, as candidates have the opportunity to display a wider range of interactional competencies, including turn taking, initiating topics, and…

Early post-natal nutrition influences later development, but there are no studies comparing brain function in healthy infants as a function of dietary intake even though the major infant diets differ significantly in nutrient composition. We studied brain responses (event-related potentials; ERPs) to speech sounds for infants who were fed either…

The present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each…

Liaison and elision in French are phonological phenomena that apply across word boundaries. French-speaking children make errors in contexts where liaison/elision typically occurs in adult speech. In this study, we asked if acquisition of French liaison/elision can be explained in a constructivist framework. We tested if children's liaison/elision…

To further investigate the possible regulatory role of private and inner speech in the context of referential social speech communications, a set of clear and systematically applied measures is needed. This study addresses this need by introducing a rigorous method for identifying private speech and certain sharply defined instances of inaudible…

The present study explored when and how the top-down intention to speak influences the language production process. We did so by comparing the brain's electrical response for a variable known to affect lexical access, namely word frequency, during overt object naming and non-verbal object categorization. We found that during naming, the…

Using confirmation theory, this study investigated how romantic couples' (N = 100) accepting and challenging communication was associated with several weight management (WM) outcomes (i.e., partners' general effectiveness in motivating each other to enact healthy behaviors, productivity of WM conversations, and diet and exercise behaviors).…