This dissertation is an analytical exploration and evaluation of the concept of diversity. It springs from the author's concern that within the teacher education discourse there is an apparent deficiency regarding analytical effort toward challenging ordinary terms, their strong convictions, and categorical statements stemming from them. In…

When speaking, how do we convert our thoughts into the sounds that come out of our mouths? Though seemingly effortless, the process of word production is realized by a complex system working over different levels of representation. By focusing on the sublexical factors, this work investigates the representations and dynamics of the word production…

This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A[right arrow]AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A[right arrow]AB). The children in…

In 1988, civic and business leaders worked collaboratively with university representatives to establish a campus of the University of Southern Maine in the Lewiston-Auburn area, and they decided to build the new college on a solid foundation in the liberal arts. Rather than establishing a curriculum focused myopically on professional preparation,…

This research examined children's questions and the reactions to the answers they receive in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers' (ages 2-4 years) causal questions in…

A number of recent studies have questioned the idea that lexical selection during speech production is a competitive process. One type of evidence against selection by competition is the observation that in the picture-word interference task semantically related distractors may facilitate the naming of a picture, whereas the selection by…

Young children use and comprehend different kinds of speech acts from the beginning of their communicative development. But it is not clear how they understand the conventional and normative structure of such speech acts. In particular, imperative speech acts have a world-to-word direction of fit, such that their fulfillment means that the world…

This article focuses on the communication of compensatory self-presentations (CSP) (i.e., self-presentations that people engage in after publicly receiving unfavorable feedback), with prior work showing that people prudently constrain CSP to areas unrelated (vs. related) to the initial feedback. With the current project we examine the influence…

At the one-word stage children use gesture to "supplement" their speech ("eat" + point at cookie), and the onset of such supplementary gesture-speech combinations predicts the onset of two-word speech ("eat cookie"). Gesture thus signals a child's readiness to produce two-word constructions. The question we ask here…

The present study looked at how children establish a relationship between the conceptual and linguistic dimensions of linearization in descriptive text composition. Written productions were compared with oral ones. French-speaking participants, drawn from the fifth, seventh, and ninth grades, produced both a written and an oral description of a…

Four experiments investigated infants' preferences for age-appropriate and age-inappropriate infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Two initial experiments showed that 6-, 10-, and 14-month-olds preferred IDS directed toward younger infants, and 4-, 8-, 10-, and 14-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, preferred IDS directed…

This study tested the production of tensed finite verbs and participles referring to the past and future in agrammatic speakers of Turkish. The agrammatic speakers did not make more time reference errors in tensed verbs than in participles. This is interesting because tense in general cannot therefore be the main problem, since time reference for…

Oral communication ability has become increasingly important to many EFL students. Several commercial software programs based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies are available but their prices are not affordable for many students. This paper will demonstrate how the Microsoft Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK), a…

The growing participation of nonnative English-speaking (NNES) international students in English-speaking graduate schools has prompted scholars to explore the different challenges (i.e., linguistic, social, and financial) that complicate these students' academic pursuits. The analyses offered by previous studies have often focused on students'…

Surveys of employers continually highlight the need for better communication skills among recent college graduates. Yet, writing instruction in higher education serves far more than a transactional purpose. Writing facilitates learning, helps students gain skills in analysis and synthesis, and supports a range of other personal and intellectual…