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Second language learners constitute a significant and expanding portion of the global population and there is a growing demand for tools that facilitate language learning and instruction across various levels and in different countries. The development of large language models (LLMs) has brought about a significant impact on the domains of natural language processing and these advancements hold considerable potential for the realm of educational technology. While the potential use of large language models in education shows promise, it is crucial to conduct further exploration into their impact and limitations. This thesis explores the task of delivering explanation and feedback to learners through different formats, including essay feedback and a question-answering framework, and studies how LLMs can be leveraged for these tasks. The thesis is structured into three main parts: In the first part, we investigate the capabilities of large language models in generating feedback on students' essays. Our findings indicate that current state-of-the-art models are unable to provide learners with specific and actionable feedback. To address this issue, we propose a new corpus tailored for this task and demonstrate that utilizing this corpus in an in-context learning setup allows us to deliver more effective feedback to learners. In the second part, we study a different type of feedback (answering questions about the language, such as grammar or vocabulary questions) and introduce a new challenge dataset comprising metalinguistic questions and answers about the English language. These questions are posed by both English second language learners and native speakers. Our goal with this dataset is to use it as an evaluation benchmark and stimulate greater emphasis on addressing the complexities of metalinguistic question answering within the field. Using this benchmark, we investigate the extent to which language models can articulate their generalizations about language. In the third part, our focus shifts to multilingualism within the question answering framework. We propose using data from grammatical error correction corpora to establish benchmarks for assessing the multilingual capabilities of LLMs in addressing learners' language grammar questions. We ask whether LLMs can answer questions posed in a language other than the one the learner is asking about. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production without considering if and how learners achieve their communicative goals and how they appropriate linguistic resources to do so. Though research has confirmed the benefit of textual borrowing from a model within genre-based pedagogy, scarce attention has been paid to the practice at the novice foreign language level. To fill these gaps, this mixed-methods study focused on 12 first-year foreign language learners of German who wrote personal emails after receiving a model text. Through textual analysis of their texts using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) frameworks and semi-structured interviews, I investigated their linguistic choices and the resources borrowed from the model in support of their communicative goals. Because building the relationship with the reader is one of these goals, I employed the SFL MOOD and ATTITUDE frameworks to assess dialogic interaction and how they appealed emotionally to their readers. The participants adhered closely to the model's generic structure, though 25% of the participants omitted up to two stages, and borrowed lexicogrammatical features characteristic of the genre, including words, word groups, and clauses. The interviews revealed that the students most appreciated the model for the structure, though they also confirmed appropriating vocabulary and grammatical structures. Two interviewees conveyed apprehension about borrowing too closely from the model, indicating that textual borrowing may require additional contextualization. The MOOD analysis showed that participants primarily produced declaratives to give information and only sparingly integrated interrogatives and imperatives to elicit a response from their readers. To connect with their readers emotionally, all expressed evaluations of judgment, affect, and appreciation. In addition to demonstrating assessment methods that focus on the linguistic choices that contribute to achieving a communicative goal, the findings of this study show a need to assist learners in making form-meaning connections to foster strategic borrowing and language development. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Across three separate investigations, this dissertation documents work examining the role of higher-order processes and cognitive effort during the top-down compensatory repair of degraded speech, specifically perceptual restoration. Perceptual restoration is a phenomenon where a listener can perceptually restore or repair speech "missing" from an auditory signal. Because perceptual restoration improves speech intelligibility, this compensatory ability may allow some listeners to function better in challenging listening environments, such as a noisy restaurant. Prior investigations into perceptual restoration have found that there is considerable variability across individuals with regard to their ability to restore missing speech information. This work proposes that higher-order domain-general cognitive and domain-specific linguistic abilities may characterize unexplained variability during perceptual restoration tasks. This dissertation also characterizes cognitive resources devoted to task-related demands during perceptual restoration tasks, both during and after sentence listening. Understanding the role that cognitive effort plays in speech intelligibility and perceptual repair is important because two listeners can exert very different levels of effort at different times, even after listening has ended, while obtaining the same intelligibility score, highlighting aspects of speech recognition that are sometimes overlooked. This work employed speech interrupted by a gap of silence or a burst of noise to force listeners into perceptual restoration and repair. Because listeners with moderate or poorer hearing loss struggle with perceptual restoration tasks, these investigations recruited participants with normal hearing to mild sensorineural hearing loss. By asking listeners with a (near) normal auditory system to process a signal with only 50% of the original speech remaining reduces the impact of the peripheral auditory system and stresses higher-order reprocessing of speech information. The first investigation assessed a range of cognitive abilities as well as a participant's lexical knowledge and lexical access speed. Next, these abilities were related to a participant's ability to restore missing speech information across conditions that varied with regard to sentence predictability, interruption type, and linguistic complexity. This investigation found that a listener's complex working memory and lexical knowledge acted as the best predictor for perceptual restoration ability, followed next by inhibitory control and processing speed. These data suggest that domain-general cognitive processes such as working memory provide an avenue through which domain-specific linguistic mechanisms can repair and restore missing speech. Consistent with existing literature, listeners performed better when sentences were periodically interrupted by bursts of noise rather than gaps of silence, and performance was better for predictable/high context sentences than those where the last word was semantically unpredictable or not related to sentence context. The second investigation used well-validated neurocognitive measures that captured a participant's linguistic knowledge in greater detail. This study also investigated the role of other domain-general cognitive abilities, such as inhibitory control, processing speed, executive functioning, and problem-solving ability in addition to lexical knowledge and lexical access speed. Consistent with the results of the first investigation, complex working memory supported perceptual restoration regardless of condition, suggesting an important role of complex working memory regardless of interruption type, promoting the opportunity for speech recovery using linguistic processes. Notably, lexical knowledge and lexical access speed were important when speech was periodically interrupted by bursts of noise. This is consistent with data indicating that participants perceive the missing speech information as being continuous behind the noise burst, which may permit additional lexical activation and processing. While other domain general-cognitive abilities were not directly related to perceptual restoration, they were significantly correlated with complex working memory, suggesting a hierarchical relationship between these abilities and the role of more advanced cognitive processes. Finally, a third investigation characterized the level of cognitive effort required during perceptual restoration tasks using pupillometry, both during and after sentence listening. Cognitive effort during sentence listening has often been referred to as "listening effort" and reflects the time-course of effort devotion during the listening window. After the sentence has ended, ongoing cognitive effort may be devoted during a relatively short period of time known as the retention interval, which is thought to be when ongoing reprocessing and repair may occur. This investigation found that during the listening window, both interruption conditions resulted in additional pupil dilation, reflecting devotion of task-related cognitive resources compared to uninterrupted sentences. For a brief time near the end of the listening window however, the pupillary response was greatest for the noise burst interrupted sentences, which suggests additional processing occurring while the sentence is still playing. On the other hand, pupil dilation was greatest for the silent gap sentences near the end of the retention interval, which suggests sustained cognitive effort in attempting to resolve lexical or syntactic ambiguity. Taken together, these investigations offer valuable insight into the perceptual restoration process. These data provide clinicians and scientists with information regarding the cognitive and linguistic abilities that are key during perceptual restoration. This may allow for the development of auditory rehabilitation programs that emphasize perceptual restoration and cognitive training or the development of prediction algorithms for hearing aids or cochlear implants aimed at reducing cognitive load under certain listening conditions. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Classifier systems constitute one of the most prominent features of East and South-East Asian languages (Li, 2013). Classifiers categorize referent nouns based on salient semantic features such as humanness, animacy, shape, or others (Aikhenvald and Mihas, 2019). The work described in this dissertation constitutes a thorough quantitative investigation of the distribution and function of classifiers in Mandarin Chinese and beyond. The results of the studies settle longstanding theoretical debates about the categorial nature of classifiers and contribute the first in-depth investigation of their communicative functions. Our main theoretical contribution is the development of a reliable methodology for objectively distinguishing between syntactic categories based on measurable differences in word distribution and functions. With this method, we settle the longstanding theoretical debate about the existence of multiple classifier types in Mandarin (Cheng and Sybesma, 1999; Li and Thompson, 1989; Li, 2013): we show that mensural classifiers should be distinguished from other types of classifiers based on their measurably distinctive distributions and functions. The thesis further investigates the cognitive and communicative functions of classifiers. We show that classifier-noun combinations are optimized to accommodate general communicative pressures (Blevins et al., 2017) of learning and processing, by balancing predictable and discriminative classifier-noun combinations. Previous work on noun classification implies that gender systems are inherently optimized to accommodate communicative pressures on human language learning and processing (Dye et al., 2018). The authors state that languages can make use of either grammatical (e.g., gender) or probabilistic (pre-nominal modifier sequences) noun classification to smooth the uncertainty (entropy (Shannon, 1948)) of nouns in context. We show that a genderless language like Mandarin can rely on nominal classifiers in a comparable way: classifiers appear to play the same functional role as gender markers. Noun-classifier combinations are sensitive to same frequency, similarity, and co-occurrence interactions that structure gender systems. We also present the first study of the interaction between grammatical and probabilistic noun classification. Finally, this work explores the role of classifiers in post-nominal positions in Mandarin. Previous work suggests that linguistic elements in different positions will contribute differently to human learning and processing. Based on an artificial noun learning experiment, Ramscar (2013) shows how humans will tend to rely on prefixed elements to categorize nouns while suffixed elements will help them specify noun meanings. For nouns, meaning specification is especially useful if they carry more general meanings, i.e., for nouns that occur more frequently and in a broader range of contexts. An investigation of the differences between nouns occurring with pre- vs. post-nominal classifiers confirms these findings on natural language data. We find significant differences in the frequencies of the two types of nouns: pre-nominal classifiers tend to pair with lower frequency nouns to aid prediction, while post-nominal classifiers are associated with higher frequency nouns to refine their meanings. Additionally, sortal classifiers, which emphasize the intrinsic features of nouns, are predominantly used in pre-nominal positions for categorization. In contrast, mensural classifiers, known for their flexibility in quantifying nouns, are more commonly found in post-nominal positions to aid in meaning refinement. The implications of this work extend beyond language specific findings. By elucidating the complex interplay between classifiers and communicative efficiency, our study contributes to a deeper understanding of the cognitive processes underlying noun processing and learning. It also provides a framework to further investigate the role of classifiers in other classifier languages and structures. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

To build an Artificial Intelligence system that can assist us in daily lives, the ability to understand the world around us through visual input is essential. Prior studies train visual perception models by defining concept vocabularies and annotate data against the fixed vocabulary. It is hard to define a comprehensive set of everything, and thus they are hard to generalize to novel concepts and domains. In this thesis, I turn to language as a scalable and effective tool to build visually grounded models. Intuitively, natural languages are the most effective medium of learning and communication for humans. I will introduce two lines of work to train models to understand the visual world with language as supervision. The first line of work is inspired by masked language modeling such as BERT, and extends that to build contextualized representation models for vision and language. These models can be fine-tuned to perform vision-language tasks such as answering questions about an image. The second line of work uses language to supervise object detection models and enables object detection with prompts, where the users could specify custom needs and domain knowledge in a text prompt, and the model situates its predictions based on the text on the fly. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation study explores a young Japanese heritage language speaker's learning process of formal writing in Japanese. With a rapid increase in immigrants into the U.S. and growing importance of diversity, many researchers have shown interest in immigrant children, i.e., heritage speakers, from educational and research perspectives and have found that many heritage speakers, even though they have a native-like fluency in informal conversations, cannot read and write in their heritage languages as native speakers at their age do. Regarding Japanese heritage speakers, Japanese supplementary schools play an important role in fostering their Japanese proficiency and cultural identities, but once children leave supplementary schools around age nine because of difficulty in curricula, it is hard for them to acquire advanced Japanese afterward. This dissertation provides a four-week intensive academic Japanese reading and writing program based on a usage-based language acquisition for the Japanese heritage speaker, Sakura, who has never attended Japanese schools. Her argument essays drastically improve, which empirically supports the efficacy of usage-based instruction for formal writing to some degree. The qualitative analysis of this study and its findings suggest multiple implications and possibilities for future research: (1) it is generally held that kango 'Sino-Japanese words' are more challenging for learners than "wago" 'Japanese native words,' but the most difficult words for Sakura are some extremely topic- and genre-specific "wago"; (2) new words are registered in her receptive lexicon through their frequent occurrences, but advancing them to productive lexicon necessitates varying contexts, collocations, and functions; (3) L1 transfer is not limited to beginners, but Sakura's writing also reveals an influence from English to satisfy her L1 linguistic sophistication; and (4) the most crucial factor in Sakura's improvement is her strong "mission-like" motivation with a sense of responsibility, which I call heritage motivation and which is not extractable from a conventional quantitative approach. This motivation has grown in her mind through a positive attitude, or somatic value, toward Japanese and their culture. It suggests a focal shift from "how teachers can teach learners" to "how teachers and others can nurture their positive somatic value leading to motivation." [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

In clinical and forensic evaluations, clinical neuropsychologists measure performance validity using standalone and embedded measures. Given the need to capture neuropsychological functioning through a variety of cognitive tests, newer, more sensitive measures should be evaluated for their utility in comparison to already established measures. Prior iterations of the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) utilized Digit Span scaled score subtracted by Vocabulary scaled score as an embedded measure of validity, with success (Iverson & Tulsky, 2001; Mittenberg et al., 1995). This study retrospectively investigates the utility of WAIS-IV Vocabulary minus Digit Span (VC-DS) in clinical and forensic contexts compared to established criterion measures. Methods: A sample of 95 patients over the age of 18 were examined. Patients underwent a neuropsychological evaluation for varying medicolegal or clinical reasons. Chi-square test of independence was used to examine the relationship between VC-DS and criterion measures in medicolegal and clinical evaluations and across Racial and Ethnicity diverse groups. Results: A significant relationship was found between WAIS-IV Reliable Digit Span and VC-DS using liberal cut points (P=0.014). The relationship between RDS and VC-DS was found in the Caucasian cohort (p=0.34). A significant relationship was revealed between VC-DS and Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM) trial two (p=0.041)and the California Verbal Learning Test Second Edition forced-choice trial using a liberal cut point in forensic populations (p=0.005). Frequency analysis found that among the clinical and forensic evaluations, 74% passed three or more PVTs across the evaluation. Conclusion: The utility of VC-DS is limited, given the current findings and the statistical limitations. Future directions should include further investigation of how culturally and linguistically diverse groups and functionally impaired groups perform on VC-DS in relation to other established measures of validity. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

One of the most important outcomes in a child's education is the ability to read proficiently, which can improve future academic progress and occupational success. Due to the impairments in social and communication areas of development for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), literacy provides the possibility of improved communication as well as the building of relationships with others and their environment. Unfortunately, children with ASD, particularly those with moderate to severe symptomology (level 3) are often excluded from literacy instruction due to the substantial support needed for independence. Research has demonstrated that word comprehension is a critical component to overall reading comprehension, and that reading comprehension is an area where children with ASD are negatively impacted the most in comparison to their neurotypical peers. The gap in research exists with children who have level 3 ASD, because they often display maladaptive or unsafe behavior within the classroom setting and are dismissed from studies. To address this critical need of this underserved population and research gap, the DIP aimed to develop and explore the effectiveness of a vocabulary intervention program for elementary students with level 3 ASD, entitled "ABA Picture to Text Word Comprehension Intervention." Drawing on methods from Innovation/Intervention Research, the DIP employed a changing criterion design (Klein et al., 2015; Manolov et al., 2020; Tanious, 2022) to develop the intervention program. In addition, and Intervention Rating Profile was used to explore the social validity of the program by gathering perspectives of teachers, behavior analysts, and teacher assistants. The intervention took place at a Local Education Agency (LEA) with three male students diagnosed with ASD, who ranged in age from 6 years 2 months to 10 years 3 months. Findings indicate that participants increased word comprehension, decreased maladaptive behaviors, and increased socially appropriate behavior with socially valid perspectives from the immediate stakeholders. Use of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) teaching strategies, along with building of rapport with the participants were likely key factors in the results. The intervention provided a feasible example for improvement in elements of literacy acquisition as well as that it demonstrated the importance of well-designed academic interventions to the development of appropriate social behavior and reduction in maladaptive behavior in the classroom for children with level 3 ASD. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Research on language and cognitive processes in bilinguals over the past few decades has underscored the activation of words in the first language (L1) during comprehension and production of the second language (L2) (e.g., Dijkstra, Van Jaarsveld, & Ten Brinke, 1998; Van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998; Hermans, Bongaerts, De Bot, & Schreuder, 1998; Lemhofer, et al., 2008). This activation extends bidirectionally, with words from the L2 also influencing the processing of the L1 (e.g., Van Hell & De Groot, 2008; Linck, Kroll, & Sunderman, 2009; Schmid & Jarvis, 2014; Schmid & Keijzer, 2009), leading to cross-linguistic interference (CLI) in bilinguals' language processing. However, the nature and extent of this interference may vary depending on the bilingual's dominant language and immersion context. L1-dominant bilinguals may struggle to control interference from their L1s, while the opposite may hold true for L2-dominant bilinguals, even when their L2 is not their native language. Consequently, the formerly dominant L1 of some bilinguals may exhibit signs of attrition. This dissertation explores the relationship between attrition and L2 acquisition, addressing two key questions: (1) to what extent does context (place of residence) and nature of bilingualism influences the amount and direction of cross-language interference? and (2) to what extent (if any) is the activation of form and meaning modulated by the nature of the lexical relationships and individual differences measures? And, if effects are found, how does sentence context modulate those effects? The contribution of this study stems from the novel examination of two types of semantic extensions: a) "new meanings" or words that share form but do not share any semantic relationship across languages, and b) "extended meanings" or words that share form and at least one semantic sense across languages. Additionally, synonyms, unrelated words, cognates, interlingual homographs and translation pairs are also included to explore form-meaning interactions. The comprehension of words with varying degrees of form-meaning relatedness is evaluated in two tasks: (1) a semantic-relatedness decision task (SRDT) within and across languages and (2) a self-paced reading task (SPR). Sentence cues in unilingual language contexts are manipulated in congruent and incongruent conditions to assess interference effects. Participants also complete a flanker task as a measure of cognitive control and a battery of proficiency measures. These tasks are implemented across five participant groups: (1) monolingual speakers of English in the U.S, (2) monolingual Spanish speakers in Argentina, (3) L1 Spanish-L2 English bilinguals in the USA, (4), L1 Spanish-L2 English bilinguals in Argentina and (5) L1 English- L2 Spanish learners in the USA. Results from this study indicate that immersion context influences the direction of language interference, with more L2 to L1 effects observed for immersed bilinguals compared to non-immersed counterparts, and with both groups being vulnerable to CLI effects compared to monolinguals. Despite extended exposure in an L2 dominant context, bilinguals can maintain their L1 proficiency, contradicting L1 attrition views. The activation of form-meaning relationships is directly related to the nature of the lexical relationships, with orthographically and semantically related words (e.g., cognates, extended meanings) showing processing advantages over orthographically related but semantically unrelated words across languages (e.g., false friends, new meanings). Within-language semantic competitors cause more interference during processing compared to unrelated words. Inhibitory control mechanisms or language dominance do not significantly attenuate CLI effects from form-meaning competitors in the non-target language. Results from the SPR revealed that sentence context can modulate interference effects, facilitating the resolution of lexical ambiguities and form-meaning relationships. However, language cues from a sentence alone are not sufficient to constrain CL competition, highlighting the importance of semantic information conveyed by the sentence context for language non-selectivity to occur. Overall, bilingual characteristics, including the type of bilingual, linguistic exposure/experience and levels of L1-L2 proficiency all seem to influence language processing. This dissertation contributes to the field of psycholinguistics of bilingualism, language attrition and second language acquisition. It highlights the importance of understanding language-attrition as a bridge between first- and second-language lexical processing. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

More than nine million students enroll in community colleges annually (Fink et al., 2023) making them accessible entry points for individuals of diverse backgrounds (Fink et al., 2023). Upward transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions creates critical pathways to baccalaureate degree attainment, but only 33% of community college students succeed in transferring to four-year institutions (Velasco et al., 2024). Transfer success from community college to four-year institutions is further confused by the disconnect between the measures of time to completion rates and common terminology that exists among community colleges versus four-year institutions (Burridge et al., 2023). This study investigated the knowledge and confidence first-semester transfer-aspiring Northeast Community College students had about navigating the transfer process at the start of their transfer journey. This study also sought to increase first-semester transfer-aspiring Northeast Community College student confidence and knowledge about the transfer process through a communication plan. Utilizing a mixed methods design, 48 new aspiring community college transfer students were introduced via a communication plan to terminology, institutional agents, types of agreements, benefits, and academic planning needed to successfully transfer to four-year institutions. Analysis of anonymous, matched pre- and post-surveys revealed that aspiring transfer students were overconfident in their general transfer knowledge, while most students did not know specific transfer knowledge, especially related to institutional knowledge needed to successfully transfer. Results from a focus group revealed that the communication plan helped students identify gaps in transfer knowledge to help build early momentum to better navigate the transfer process. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

In this thesis, I use a combination of simulations and empirical data to demonstrate that a small set of structural and functional principles - the basic tenets of predictive coding theory - succinctly accounts for a very wide range of properties in the language processing system. Predictive coding approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference via a biologically plausible mechanism of competition whose unique properties (i) allow it to capture important asymmetries in bottom-up and top-down processing and (ii) offer a critical insight into the functional relationship between behavioral and neural measures of word processing. In addition to accounting for well-known properties of the language processing system, this mechanism of competition allows us to formulate and test a novel empirical prediction - that N400 attenuation can be observed in the presence of behavioral interference - which challenges a widely held assumption that N400 attenuation is essentially synonymous with facilitated processing. Importantly, the computational model that we used to simulate the above psycholinguistic phenomena was tightly constrained by predictive coding principles and the particular class of algorithm we employed (PC/BC-DIM; Spratling, De Meyer, & Kompass 2009), emphasizing how a fundamental, biologically plausible perceptual mechanism that is shared across the cortex can also give rise to psycholinguistic phenomena. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The ongoing tonogenetic sound change in Seoul Korean involves transphonologization in phrase initial position, where the fundamental frequency (F0) of the vowel following aspirated or lenis stops becomes associated with the aspirated-lenis stop contrast (phonologization), while the originally contrastive Voice Onset Time (VOT) values merge (dephonologization). One critical aspect that remains unexplored in this context is the impact of lexical competition, often evaluated through minimal pairs. This dissertation explores the influence of lexical competition on hyperarticulation in Korean stops within this ongoing tonogenetic sound change. It aims to investigate how hyperarticulation influences sound change and how speakers adapt to the change. The study conducted production experiments on both phrase-initial and phrase-medial stops, alongside analyzing a large dialogue corpus dataset. The statistical analyses of experimental data reveal that speakers hyperarticulate the VOT of aspirated stops, resulting in a greater VOT contrast, and tend to hyperarticulate the F0 of lenis stops, leading to a greater F0 contrast when they have a lenis minimal pair. Similarly, corpus analyses indicate hyperarticulation of VOT and F0 in aspirated stops, resulting in an expanded contrast for both of these cues as well. These findings suggest two main points: (1) the hyperarticulation effect observed in the current dissertation is 'context-free' contrastive hyperarticulation, suggesting that this process is related to speaker-internal processes, and (2) the presence of a minimal pair inhibits VOT merger due to its continuing high functional load in the speech community. In phrase medial position, the aspirated-lenis contrast is not reported to involve any F0 contrast. However, statistical results of experimental data on phrase-medial stops show that speakers who rely more on F0 for distinguishing phrase-initial aspirated and lenis stops also now use F0 for distinguishing phrase-medial aspirated and lenis stops. These observations suggest an emerging tonogenetic sound change extending the F0 contrast to the phrase-medial position, marking genuine tonogenesis. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

All individuals develop new skills over time and one important developmental stage is when individuals can learn in the absence of direct reinforcement. Behavior Analytic theories have stressed the importance of these emergent response repertoires and have consistently studied them across fields (i.e. Incidental Bidirectional Naming, Arbitrarily Applicable Relational Responding, Equivalence). Emergent responses are responses that are not explicitly taught during instruction. Recently, behavior analytic perspectives have studied their similarities across perspectives, one area of interest being Incidental Bidirectional Naming (Inc-BiN). Researchers have identified multiple types of Naming, including Pre-Unidirectional Naming (Pre-UniN), Incidental Unidirectional Naming (Inc-UniN), and Incidental Bidirectional Naming (Inc-BiN). Study 1 investigated the basic question about whether verbal development -- in this case degree of Inc-BiN -- is related to academic performance (mathematics and reading). The researcher correlated participants' listener and speaker responses for two Brief Inc-BiN Probes with academic performance (iReady® Diagnostic Mathematic and Reading scores) for 41 participants. Results demonstrated significant positive correlations between degree of Inc-BiN and reading and mathematics performance. Given this correlation, two experiments examined the relationship between verbal development and two specific instructional design tactics that focus on the emergence of novel behavior. Experiment 2 investigated the effectiveness and appropriateness of a relational training procedure (matrix instruction) on participants' emergent intraverbal responses. The researcher used learn units to teach intraverbal atomic units and measured generalized operant responding. The researcher used a matrix with five prefixes and five root words, which combined to make 25-word combinations. The researcher taught five combinations (1 prefix plus 1 root) and tested the other 20-word combinations. The researcher implemented a multiple probe design and measured emergent intraverbals and degree of Inc-BiN prior to and following intervention. Results demonstrated that emergent intraverbal responses varied in accordance with participant degree of Inc-BiN. Experiment 3 investigated the effects of another relational training procedure (Equivalence-Based Instruction; EBI), across participants with ranging degrees of Inc-BiN. During teaching, the researcher taught two of six relations in a class to mastery using learn unit instruction across 13 participants. Results in Experiment 3 demonstrated that, after EBI, participants emitted a greater number of emergent intraverbals when they had higher degrees of Inc-BiN and lower emergent intraverbals when they had lower degrees of Inc-BiN. Experiment 2 and 3 demonstrate similar results that participants with Inc-UniN and Inc-BiN emitted a high percentage of emergent relations following learn unit instruction across the three studies. Data highlight the importance of Inc-BiN's relation to academic performance in general (Experiment 1) and in predicting participants' success with behavior analytic instructional design tactics (Experiment 2 and 3). [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

A disproportionate number of preservice elementary teachers exhibit high levels of math anxiety (Reid et al., 2018). Not only does this inhibit their ability to understand mathematical concepts, but it also negatively impacts their pedagogical approach to math (Beilock & Maloney, 2015; Reid et al., 2018). Teachers who experience math anxiety encounter challenges when it comes to effectively explaining concepts, including the appropriate use of mathematical vocabulary. The use of mathematical language, which includes content specific vocabulary, holds significant importance in shaping students' comprehension of concepts (Riccomini et al., 2015). However, the relationship between math anxiety and correct usage of mathematical vocabulary is a relatively unexplored area. This research used a mixed-methods approach to explore the role of mathematical discourse in enhancing the content knowledge of community college preservice teachers, facilitating their acquisition of mathematical vocabulary, and mitigating math anxiety. Surveys were used to evaluate preservice teachers' level of math anxiety and their beliefs about the importance of using correct vocabulary when explaining concepts. Data were gathered both before and after students completed a mathematical content course for early childhood and elementary education. Interviews with the course instructors were used to ascertain the degree to which discourse was used as a way to strengthen preservice teachers' math vocabulary and conceptual understanding. The findings revealed a decrease in math anxiety as students' content knowledge increased and confidence in their ability to use mathematical vocabulary grew. Students who found both the course and mathematics challenging exhibited a higher degree of math anxiety by the conclusion of the course. Furthermore, students found the class discussions in which they practiced using mathematical vocabulary invaluable for increasing their content knowledge and preparing to explain concepts to their future students. Findings from this research can be used to inform teacher educator programs on the effectiveness of incorporating discourse to increase preservice teachers' mathematical vocabulary and content knowledge and indirectly affect their math anxiety. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

We study how to automatically generate cloze questions from given texts to assess reading comprehension, where a cloze question consists of a stem with a blank space holder for the answer key, and three distractors for generating confusions. We present a generative method called CQG (Cloze Question Generator) for constructing cloze questions from a given article, utilizing neural networks and WordNet with an emphasis on generating multi-gram distractors. WordNet is a hypernym-hyponym network of synsets, where each synset is a set of lemmas with the same gloss labeled by a lexname. CQG harnesses word-sense disambiguation, text-to-text transformation, and WordNet's synset taxonomies and lexical labels to select an answer key from a sentence, segment it, and generate instance-level distractor candidates (IDCs) using a transformer and sibling synsets. After ranking the IDCs based on contextual embedding similarities, synset, and lexical relatedness, CQG forms distractor candidates and checks if they align with people's writing conventions to determine whether they can be distractors. CQG significantly outperforms SOTA results, confirmed by the high quality of the generated distractors assessed by human judges. The effectiveness of CQG, however, is confined by WordNet's limited vocabulary. There are tens of thousands of new lemmas that are not yet included in WordNet. It is therefore desirable to construct an automated system that can add new lemmas to WordNet with their glosses being the only information available, which can be readily obtained from Wikitionary and other open sources. This task is challenging. We tackle this challenge by devising a system called WordNeter that predicts a lexname for the given gloss, determines if a new synset should be formed, predicts a hypernym for the new synset, and updates the existing hypernym-hyponym relations in WordNet. WordNeter excels with a 93.6% F1 score on predicting lexnames for given glosses and 64.8% exact matches of the predicted direct hypernyms with the true direct hypernyms, which significantly outperforms GPT-3.5-Turbo and other models. Even without exact matches of hypernym predictions, most predicted hypernyms are still suitable for generating high-quality distractors. Integrating WordNeter with CQG expands CQG's ability to generate satisfactory distractors for cloze questions with answer keys outside WordNet's current vocabulary, advancing the methodology of cloze question generation. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation delves into the pedagogical implications of handheld/mobile game features on EFL learners' vocabulary learning outcomes. The research is segmented into two comprehensive studies. The first study, a systematic review spanning from 2011 to July 2022, scrutinizes empirical research detailing the correlation between various game features and vocabulary learning outcomes. Key findings highlight the effectiveness of Holograms, Customized Word Lists, Gamified Assessments, and In-game Hints in fostering enhanced vocabulary learning. In the subsequent study, the emphasis shifts to the practical application, where the impact of 'competition' as a game feature is critically assessed. Executed with 331 freshman students in China over four weeks, participants engaged with two variants of the game, 'Vocarena', designed to elucidate the meanings of a hundred unfamiliar English words. Crucially, one version incorporated a competitive element, spurring participants to vie against one another, while the counterpart lacked this feature. Quantitative analysis revealed three pivotal results: the competition feature augmented participants' game-playing duration, bolstered English vocabulary learning outcomes, and was significantly associated with elevated motivation levels. Collectively, these findings underscore the potential of game-specific features in optimizing EFL vocabulary learning, offering valuable insights for future research, educational game development, and innovative teaching methodologies. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Recent studies show that English learning students are a growing population within the United States school system. Language barriers have been shown to negatively influence reading scores as well as math scores, and math scores are a predictor of future academic success in many subject areas. This qualitative action research study demonstrates the difficulties many upper-elementary English learning students have understanding number sense (numeracy) in a math classroom setting in Minnesota, United States. The purpose of this study was to explore whether intentional teaching of math vocabulary could alleviate the difficulties upper-elementary English learning students have in understanding, applying, and having confidence in using number sense during math instruction in the general education classroom. In this way, the study aims to assist in overcoming the achievement and opportunity gaps impacting the English learning student population. Interview, observational, and document data were collected from upper-elementary English learning students in my math classroom during the 2022-2023 school year using purposive sampling methods. Qualitative data on vocabulary instructional methods were also collected and used to inform math vocabulary instruction throughout the school year during which the study took place. The results of this study showed that English learning students' understanding, ability, and confidence in math vocabulary improved their math performance in the classroom and decreased their misconceptions surrounding number sense. Although confidence was only improved with single-step word problems, or with a single number sense ability within a multi-step word problem, the overall findings indicate that learning math vocabulary through the use of structured dialogues contributed to greater understanding of number sense components within math word problems and increased students' ability to visualize and explain how to complete the steps needed to do in a math word problem. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Recreational reading is in a decline for upper elementary aged readers, and along with this decline comes consequent declines in students' ability to make meaning from what they read and their acquisition of different language forms, including the acquisition of new vocabulary words. However, one reading format is increasing in popularity: graphic novels. As graphic novels, along with other texts with both textual and visual elements, become an increasingly prevalent way of reading in the 21st century, it is important to look at the possibilities multimodal texts have for foundational literacy skills, such as vocabulary acquisition. To date, however, the fields of graphic novels and vocabulary acquisition have yet to intersect. To understand the benefits that graphic novels can potentially offer for incidental vocabulary acquisition, we must better understand the words within the graphic novels. This multimodal content analysis explored how challenging words that are likely unknown to readers in third through sixth grade are represented within specific graphic novels. Through the theoretical frameworks of the Lexical Quality Hypothesis, Dual Coding Theory, and Multimodality, this dissertation aimed to inform our understanding of the challenging words' characteristics, textual and visual elements present with the challenging words, and the supports these elements offered. I analyzed how these textual and visual elements worked independently or in combination with other elements to identify how words are being represented and supported in the graphic novels. The findings highlight the types of challenging words readers encounter in graphic novels and the kinds of textual, visual, and multimodal supports that readers will have for acquiring those words. By analyzing the challenging words, their textual and visual elements, and the level of support provided by each, I hope to provide insight into the possibilities that graphic novels can offer for vocabulary acquisition. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

As the United States continues to grow with English language learners entering schools, teachers must focus on helping them improve their reading comprehension. The problem addressed in this study was the lack of vocabulary instruction implemented by teachers impedes the development of English language learners' reading comprehension. The purpose of this qualitative case study of 10 middle school teachers who teach English language learners in a northern South Carolina school district was to explore their vocabulary instructional methods used to improve their English language learners' reading comprehension. The theoretical frameworks that informed this study were Vygotsky's sociocultural learning and language theories. Data were collected using an online questionnaire and individual interviews, which were audio-recorded through Zoom. The analysis method included coding the participants' responses through the NVivo data analysis software, using six of NVivo's seven-step approach to thematic analysis. Thematic analysis was used to identify patterns and themes within the data gathered from the participants. Findings from the study included that vocabulary instruction was a critical component to how English language learners learn how to apply and use academic vocabulary. The teachers used various teaching methods and tools to develop their students' learning to support their reading and vocabulary development. To help English language learners improve their reading comprehension, it is recommended that teachers use a variety of aids, such as pictures, to help students transfer meaning across contexts. Teachers can also execute small group instruction with English language learners consistently to support and provide constructive feedback about their vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation project aims to investigate (1) how three different L2 Spanish instructors treat vocabulary in their beginner Spanish course (SPA 1) depending on their teaching experience, and (2) how an instructor treats vocabulary in a beginner Spanish course during the three academic quarters of his first year of teaching at the university level. Concretely, their classroom talk was analyzed with a focus on the (1) input provided by the instructor, output generated by the students, and the number of student interactions in the classroom, and (2) lexical frequency and word repetition in the input. The aim of the study is to get a better understanding of how different instructors' input and overall classroom management may affect incidental vocabulary learning and how such input may change over time as an instructor gains more teaching experience throughout one academic year. Results from this research will hopefully provide relevant insights into how to better train new instructors and how to better connect instructors to vocabulary research in ways to avoid the current disconnect between the scientific literature on the subject and what instructors do in their classrooms. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Researchers have studied children's exposure to television and the impact it has on children's academic development, and have discovered that educational television programs may positively influence children's vocabulary growth (Fuenzalida, 2017; Heintz & Wartella, 2012; Larson & Rhan, 2015; Linebarger, Moses, Liebeskind, & McMenamin, 2013; Neuman, Wong, Flynn, & Kaefer, 2019; Neuman, Samudra, Wong, & Kaefer, 2019, Peters & Webb, 2018; Williams & Thomas, 2017). However, few studies have been conducted examining the types of vocabulary words contained in television programming and the frequencies of which these words occur. This study attempted to help enhance the literature by executing a quantitative content analysis of tiered academic vocabulary words found within broadcast television networks' Saturday morning educational programs. Through the identification of words as either Tier I, Tier II, or Tier III vocabulary within educational programs, aired on major broadcast television networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX), this study contributes to research regarding television and vocabulary acquisition. By discovering the frequencies of tiered academic vocabulary presented throughout free educational television programs, this analysis uncovered proportions of Tier I vocabulary words representing 68.7% (± 3%) of all tiered vocabulary words recorded from 990 instances across 25 shows and four network channels. The focus of this study, which considered the existence of Tier II vocabulary words, represented 20.4% (± 3%). Tier III vocabulary words represented 10.9% (± 2%). As a network, NBC offers viewers the most evidence of Tier II words for educational programming between 7:00am and 12:00pm on Saturday mornings with an average of 10 Tier II words per show. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

An experimental study was conducted to examine the effects of shared book reading and video viewing on preschoolers' vocabulary and knowledge acquisition in informational text. The study included 60 preschool children who were randomly assigned to three experimental groups --shared book reading group, video viewing group, and shared book reading plus video viewing group. The content in the book and the video clip was equivalent, since the book was an exact transcript of the video, meaning children received the same information content and similar visual images in both media. What was varied was that the images in the print version were static while in the video were animated with music, which represented the distinct differences between the two media. Baseline vocabulary and knowledge measures about the content of the book/video were administered to all children prior to the experiment. After the pretests, children in the shared book reading group were read aloud the book twice, children in the video viewing group watched the video clip twice, and children in the shared book reading plus video viewing group were read aloud the book once and then watched the video once. Thereafter, children's vocabulary and knowledge acquisition were assessed. The Simple Slopes Analysis revealed statistically significant differences between the groups on the dependent variables of vocabulary and knowledge, controlling for the pretest scores, TOPEL, age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status (SES). In terms of vocabulary acquisition, the results demonstrated that there were significant differences between the shared book reading and two-media groups, and between the shared book reading group and the video viewing group when children's scores were one standard deviation below the mean, with better outcomes for children in the two-media and video viewing groups. Also, there was a significant difference between the shared book reading group and video viewing group when children's pretest scores were at the mean, with better outcomes for children in the video viewing group. As for knowledge acquisition, there were significant differences between the shared book reading group and video viewing group, as well as between the two-media group and the video viewing group when children's pretest scores were one standard deviation above the mean, with better outcomes for children in the video viewing group. Cross-classified generalized random-effects (CCGRE) models were used to explore the extent to which the repetition frequencies and difficulty levels of the words influenced vocabulary acquisition. After controlling the pretest scores, both word repetition frequency and difficulty level explained the variance on vocabulary acquisition, with difficulty level explaining more variance than repetition frequency. The discussion of the findings and null findings is followed by limitations and suggestions for future research. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Neoliberalism has become the hegemonic rationality of our time, framing nearly every aspect of our social world in terms of competition. This dissertation sheds light on neoliberal infiltration and naturalization within the field of language education through three distinct but interrelated papers. "In Discourses of Dual Language Bilingual Education," I map out the discursive landscape of the field and, building on Ruiz (1984), I theorize a cross-epistemic model to demonstrate why the English-as-resource paradigm of the nationalist era has transformed into a multilingualism-as-resource paradigm within the current neoliberal era. "In Rebranding Bilingualism: The Shifting Discourses of Language Education Policy in California's 2016 Election," I use critical discourse analysis to compare Proposition 227 (1998), which effectively banned bilingual education in California, with its legislative repeal, Proposition 58 (2016), specifically demonstrating the discursive shift to neoliberalism that occurred between 20th and 21st century language education policies. In "The Mechanisms of Neoliberalization within California's Language Education Policy," I draw on the tools of critical discourse analysis as well as corpus linguistics to examine California language education policy texts spanning from 1967 to the present, laying bare three discursive mechanisms of neoliberalization within the field: 1) infiltration of market-based vocabulary; 2) terminological sloganization; and 3) commodification of multilingualism. While the neoliberalization of language education has contributed to more widespread support of bilingual education--now rebranded as multilingualism--it has also altered the reasons behind this support--from promoting equity and social justice to a market-based rationale of expanding individual opportunity in an increasingly globalized world. My findings point to the ways in which those who have traditionally been served by bilingual education--that is, racially and linguistically minoritized students--are being crowded out by more privileged (i.e., white) students seeking a competitive edge in the global market era. Neoliberal policies--through color-blind, a-historic, and universalistic rhetoric--are deceptively designed to appear objective and democratic ("for all"). I argue, however, that neoliberalism undermines democracy by reproducing colonial relations of power that privilege Whiteness. This collected work contributes to a deeper understanding of the political work of language. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Learning transfer, the ability to apply learning from one situation to another, is expected of students and underlies the entire structure in higher education. Yet, many instructors in higher education do not know what learning transfer is or how to accomplish it. In an effort to understand how instructors in higher education came to teach for transfer, this study investigated the exposure, experiences, and instructional behavior of university and college instructors who self-identified as those who "teach for transfer." The purpose of this study was to understand the context and circumstances of instructor's experiences surrounding teaching for transfer, and how those experiences ultimately affected their instructional behavior. Using a basic qualitative study, the researcher recruited instructors in higher education who self-identified as those who teach for transfer in a university or college setting to take part in semi-structured interviews. Six major themes emerged from the analysis including leaning transfer experiences as students, role modeling as a teaching assistant, formalized content experiences, improving teaching for transfer, barriers to teaching for transfer, and unfamiliar with learning transfer terminology. The findings highlight how experiences affected instructional behavior of those teach for transfer. The study can help academics understand the link between experiences and instructional behaviors and address the barriers present which affect teaching for transfer. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Memory retrieval is well known to modify retention of not only retrieved material, but also related, non-retrieved material. This dissertation consists of two manuscripts that investigated retrieval phenomena in the learning of foreign language vocabulary and science education material. The testing effect--the retention benefit of practicing retrieval compared to studying-- and the pretesting effect--incorrectly guessing a target before learning compared to studying-- demonstrate the advantages of retrieval-based learning, but no extant theories have accounted for both of these effects. In Chapter 1, we investigated an error-driven learning account whereby retrieval-based learning serves to "stress test" the memory system, allowing it to learn to better predict a target from a cue, whereas in studying, there is no opportunity for the system to form a prediction. We predicted that inserting a small temporal "gap" between a foreign language word and its English translation should enhance retention when compared to simultaneous, "no gap," presentation. In four experiments (N = 287) we consistently observed that "gap" conditions benefitted retention compared to "no gap" conditions, which supports the error-driven learning account. We observed that a gap as short as 600 ms benefitted retention one day later, one minute later, and in a pure list design. In Chapter 2, we investigated the sequalae of retrieval practice for non-practiced educational science text material. Some evidence suggests that retrieval practice of main ideas would lead to greater retention of non-practiced information, whereas other evidence suggests that retrieval practice of peripheral information would lead to impaired retention of non-practiced information, when compared to a control group that did not practice retrieval. In two experiments (N = 360) we observed robust testing effects, but we did not observe robust differences in non-practiced material, suggesting that the kind of focal retrieval practice used here has focal effects on science material retention. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Nationwide, institutions are adding elements of volunteerism, civic engagement, and service-learning to both their mission statements and degree completion curriculum (American Council on Education, 2022; Campus Compact, 2022; Niehaus & Kavaliauska Crain, 2013, Reed, et al, 2015). However, very little research has looked specifically at the terminology and the basic perceptions shared by those who partake in these offerings. The purpose of this study was to understand and explore the many terminologies and descriptors given to the overarching concepts that consume student community service and volunteerism at the collegiate level. Through quantitative methodology, this study investigated the perceptions of students, faculty, and staff on such terminology as found in the existing literature and further establish commonality and consistency within higher education volunteerism and service. The findings from this research will have a long-lasting impact on the standardization of terminology and create a more inclusive environment for student engagement. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Researchers have investigated the promise of unimodal and bimodal input in enhancing vocabulary learning from meaning-focused activities. Compared to unimodal input, the simultaneous presentation of written and aural input in bimodal input has been argued to direct L2 learners' attention to words and enhance the form-meaning links for new vocabulary (e.g., Long, 2017; Malone, 2018). However, so far, the research focus has been on the learning outcomes, and there is a lack of studies showing the processing of unimodal and bimodal input for vocabulary learning. Moreover, the learning outcomes have traditionally been assessed through paper-based accuracy tests that tap into conscious, verbalizable knowledge of target words. How bimodal input contributes to fluent form and meaning retrieval of the newly learned vocabulary during a real-time activity (e.g., reading) is still not clear and warrants attention. Therefore, the main motivation of this study was to fill these research gaps by comparing the effectiveness of unimodal and bimodal input in facilitating different cognitive processes and developing different types of vocabulary knowledge. Sixty-three adult L2 English speakers were randomly assigned to reading only and reading while listening groups and read a 9500-word graded reader containing 24 pseudowords with or without audio over two days. Cognitive processes were operationalized using two variables: attention (eye fixations on target words) and awareness (reported recall of encountering a target word in the text). Reading processes were recorded using eye-tracking; awareness in learning the pseudowords were probed using retrospective interviews. Learning outcomes were measured with three written untimed tests (form recognition, meaning recall, and meaning recognition) and one sentence-reading test that indicated fluent retrieval of word form and meaning in real time. Four eye-tracking measures, gaze duration, regression path duration, rereading time, and total reading time, were used to assess the effectiveness of reading only and reading while listening on lexical access and context integration of target pseudowords. The results from eye-tracking measures were analyzed using growth curve models; the results from retrospective reports regarding awareness levels were analyzed using mixed logistic models; and vocabulary tests were analyzed using mixed logistic models (form recognition, meaning recall, and meaning recognition) and linear mixed effects models (sentence-reading test). The growth curve models indicated a nonlinear decrease in reading times from the first encounter with target pseudowords to the last encounter. Moreover, the reading behaviors of the two groups differed for the early and late reading processes. The audio in the reading while listening condition augmented the attention to target pseudowords in early reading processes as reflected in gaze durations, whereas reading only condition promoted increased attention to target pseudowords in late reading processes as reflected in rereading times. Both groups were similar in terms of their awareness levels for the target words in the reading text. They also had comparable learning gains on the meaning recall and meaning recognition tests, but the reading while listening group had significantly higher form recognition scores, particularly on the delayed test. Moreover, the reading while listening group had more robust lexical representations for the target pseudowords as reflected in the reading times in the sentence-reading test. These results pointed to a positive effect of access to phonologic forms through audio in vocabulary learning. Overall, the findings of this study provided a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the cognitive processes and the types of knowledge promoted by unimodal and bimodal input. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Learning to read is a fundamental skill that is understudied among children who hear more than one language at home. A particular limitation in the extant literature is that the samples are often Spanish-dominant and come from low-income households. This literature has evidence that Spanish skills -- both language-specific (i.e., vocabulary) and language-general (i.e., phonological processing) -- predict English reading ability. In the current study, we investigated the effect of oral language skills in both English and Spanish, as well as other pre-literacy skills, on the English reading skill of Spanish-English bilinguals who are English dominant and received English only instruction from school entry. The oral language skills and other pre-literacy skills of 101 Spanish-English dual language learners were assessed at 5 years. English reading skill was measured annually from 6 to 10 years. Latent growth curve analysis was used to model initial English reading skill at 6 years and the growth of English reading skill from 6 to 10 years. Four sets of hypothesized foundational skills measured at child age 5 years were tested as predictors of subsequent English reading skill: (1) English oral language skills, (2) Spanish oral language skills, (3) English and Spanish oral language skills, and (4) English and Spanish oral language skills, with other pre-literacy skills. The results of structural equation modeling indicated that English vocabulary and phonological awareness measured in Spanish were significant predictors when English and Spanish skills were entered separately. When English and Spanish oral language skills were included together, Spanish oral language skills did not explain English reading growth better than when oral language skills were modeled independently. The best model of predictors of English reading for bilingual 5-year-olds included only English vocabulary and English letter recognition. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Interaction has received attention in different fields of applied linguistics. In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), scholars have perceived interaction as a platform where L2 learners can engage in language experimentation. It has been considered in light of Long's (1981) Interaction Hypothesis, which posits that negotiation of meaning is the basis of L2 learning. Researchers also examined interaction from a different perspective, where they described salient features exhibited in different patterns of peer interactions to understand the underlying construct of conversation management in the context of L2 assessment (Galaczi, 2008). Previous studies that investigated L2 interaction mostly used qualitative methods over small datasets. The present study adopted a quantitative approach to understand the construct of interaction. To do so, L2 pair interaction was measured by creating a composite score of interactivity level to understand the relationship between students' degree of interactivity and their use of lexico-grammatical features as well as their L2 fluency. The study also examined the effect of tasks on L2 pair interactivity level. Pearson's correlation tests, as well as Spearman's rank correlation tests, showed that interactivity is associated with discourse particles, response forms, wh-questions, and second-person pronouns, while it was negatively associated with nominal forms (i.e., all instances of nouns, common nouns, and the length of the word) and hesitators. Furthermore, the results showed that interactivity was associated with more fluent L2 talk, where students of higher interactivity levels tended to produce faster speech rates and fewer silent pauses. Additionally, an ANOVA test showed a large effect of task on L2 interactivity. Further analyses suggested that the general communicative purpose of task has a limited effect on L2 pair interactivity. However, the task prompt showed patterns that relate the type of information (e.g., lists of sentences, scientific graphs, words/phrases, images) provided to students in the prompt to patterns of L2 interactivity levels. The study provides insightful information for scholars interested in L2 interaction in oral assessment and L2 dialogic tasks. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The United States history survey course is a standard high school history class in the state of New York. The academic goal is for students to understand key people and developments that molded the United States into its modern identity as a progressive, democratic nation-state. This research examined one manifestation of this course in New York State, the United States History and Government Regents exam. The United States History and Government Regents exam is a mandatory, standardized assessment usually taken by high school juniors after completing their annual survey U.S. history class. From 2001 to 2020, the exam positioned 50 multiple-choice questions with a chronological permutation of the survey course. I analyzed the exam over a two-decade period with 57 individual exams and 2,850 multiple-choice questions. The goal of this research was to interrogate an unsuspecting objective history of the United States as conveyed through this exam. Using a combination of critical theories to look for patterns and trends, I considered both hidden content and featured pillars of the survey course through the medium of the Part I multiple-choice. For included content, I asked if questions were phrased in a way that forced conclusions about certain events, such as the internment of thousands of Americans during World War II. I used discourse analysis to better understand the covert intentions of plural pronouns like we and people. The findings in Chapter 4 revealed that these collective pronouns were used to conceal oppressions against certain groups. The implications section of Chapter 5 deconstructed how the exam was tethered to a master narrative of the United States, and to a linear, progressive history that was unwilling to highlight oppressed voices or recognize unresolved, regressive, antidemocratic choices. For excluded content, I asked whose perspectives were continually missing. Which features were centered on political maps and which features were absent? Whose stories were central and whose stories were sacrificed to bolster a narrative about progress? How were advances for some disguised as advances for all, and at whose expense? What critical historical developments were omitted from the 2,850 questions? The findings are important for multiple reasons. First is that New York State officially committed its public education system to cultural responsiveness in 2019 with the New York State Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education framework. How can curriculum meaningfully evolve in the future if educators do not fully understand the ways it was culturally irresponsive in the past? Second is that the survey U.S. history course is a powerful transmitter of knowledge about the story of the United States. Are we, as culturally responsive educators in New York, willing to extend the curriculum to include traditionally hidden developments, even if those developments interrogate and compromise the master narrative? Can we diversify the evidence, acknowledge regression, and clarify the specific beneficiaries of progress, thereby creating spaces for students to derive their own interpretations about the story and trajectory of the United States? These are difficult questions, yet educators can confront them more intentionally if we are willing to grapple with the complexities of the survey United States history course and the interaction between the discipline of history and the goals of nation building. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This study aimed to find out the implications of linguistic deviations of swardspeak to the language competencies of the gay students. This research also sought to determine the linguistic deviations in swardspeak used by the gay students; investigate the implications of the use of swardspeak to the language competencies of the students; and develop a sociolinguistic primer on swardspeak and its linguistic deviations. The study made use of qualitative method of research wherein the researcher subjected 12 informants from Suba National High School through recording raw conversations of students using swardspeak. They are officially enrolled as secondary students for the school year 2019 to 2020. The linguistic deviation on the process of using swardspeak depends on the ability of the students. The significant role of creativity and linguistic capability may be developed and improved with frequent use of the language, implications on the use of the swardspeak provide identity for gay students, develop their self-expression, deliver exclusive space through concealment, and find comfort zone using their own language. The proposed sociolinguistic primer on swardspeak and its linguistic deviations is ready for the initial implementation and assessment. The language students might be encouraged in using the language creatively and apply it in the learning process. Activities in terms of speaking can always be practiced in the language learning process to boost the confidence of the students in expressing their ideas. Familiarization of the linguistic deviation categories might be discussed to support the students improve their linguistic competence. Conduct follow up study with the use of swardspeak in a new phase was also recommended.

In this thesis, I present three related papers that collectively investigate the instructional supports on screen and in the media viewing context that influenced English and heritage language vocabulary knowledge in DLLs. In study 1, I examine how specific pedagogical approaches used in educational media might benefit DLLs. In study 2, I investigate how the overall instructional context for vocabulary learning influence L2 vocabulary in DLLs. In study 3, I examine how the language of instruction in children's programming help DLLs maintain two languages. Findings from these three studies provided an understanding of how various contexts for learning on screens might affect DLL early literacy development.

Previous research has shown a relationship between robust neural encoding of speech by the auditory brainstem and children's phonological abilities. Two areas of brainstem encoding this work has included are the ABR dimensions of consistency, or how similar responses are to a repeated stimulus, and differentiation, or the degree to which responses to different stimuli differ. Phonology has been routinely measured via standardized tests, however, which are designed to assess particular phonological abilities, but may not provide a realistic picture of online use of phonology in speech processing. As speech unfolds in time, lexical candidates compete for recognition; eye-tracking can be employed to record eye movements during a lexical access to examine this process. In this project, the relationship between brainstem neural encoding of speech and eye movements during a lexical access task was examined. Children were asked to find a word referent among an array of four pictures including a representation of the target, phonological cohort competitors, rhyming words, and phonologically unrelated objects. Findings show that more differentiated neural encoding, in the absence of consistent encoding, may reduce competition between phonological cohort members during lexical access, while the opposite, less differentiated encoding in the presence of highly consistent neural responses, may reduce competition for rhyming words. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The following is a five-chapter dissertation surrounding the use of text mining techniques for better understanding the language of mathematics items from standardized tests to improve linguistic equity of these items to support assessment of English Language Learners. Introduction: The dissertation begins with an overview of the problem that English Language Learners are likely not able to demonstrate their full mathematical ability due to the construct irrelevant variance caused by these items being written in English. This introduction also introduces the idea of text mining as a methodology for use in exploring this test design issue. Article 1: This article presents an exploratory study of the vocabulary used in released math test items for grades 3-8. The author collected and cleaned the data to arrive at a final corpus of 5674 math problems. Next, a series of text mining techniques were performed including the "bag of words" approach, sentiment analysis, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The bag of words approach generated an overall word list for the entire corpus, by grade level, and by mathematical domain. For each of these lists, the majority of the words found were polysemous, meaning they had multiple meanings, which is inappropriate for ELLs. The sentiment analysis results showed that there was not any obvious negative sentiment found in these items. Finally, the LDA results showed that there were 9 latent topics found within the language of these items. Article 2: This article is an exploratory study of the state of the parts of speech used in released math standardized test items for grades 3-8. The author collected and cleaned the data to arrive at a corpus of 5674 math problems. Next, a series of parts of speech analyses were performed to better understand the grammatical structures used within current mathematics items, as well as a bigrams and trigrams analysis of the most commonly used phrases found within these items. The variation in parts of speech and readability of these items was tracked across grade levels and was found to become more complicated as the grade level increased. The grammatical parts of speech were also used to predict the item difficulty for those items (N = 1627) with some of these parts of speech being found to negatively correlated with item difficulty estimates. Article 3: This article describes the development of an open-source text parser for multiple-choice mathematics items intended for students in grades 3-8. To train this parser, initially, seven machine learning classification algorithms were used to predict item difficulty as measured by p-value. The most accurate of these models was a special kind of Support Vector Machine called a Support Vector Classifier which had almost 50% accuracy. This parser was trained to estimate approximate item difficulty level as well as to identify problematic vocabulary words, estimate the readability of the question, and support the user to know which problematic parts of speech are being used in the item. Math Item Parse is operational but is still in a prototype stage because a larger training set is needed to improve the model accuracy. Final Discussion: The dissertation concludes with a short discussion that describes how these findings impact educators, test developers, methodologists, and policy makers, and discusses the biggest limitations of this dissertation and offers some next steps. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Words contain multitudes. This multiplicity of meanings raises two key questions, both of which this thesis attempts to address. First, are word meanings categorical or continuous? The results of Chapters 2-4 support a hybrid model, in which word meanings occupy a continuous state-space (Elman, 2009), which is further discretized along the boundaries of distinct senses. And second, does the amount and distribution of homophony in real lexica reflect a pressure to concentrate meanings in the most efficient, optimal wordforms? The results in Chapters 5-7 suggest that homophony can emerge without a direct pressure for efficiency--and further, that real lexica might select "against" homophones, particularly among the most frequent wordforms of a lexicon. This pressure could even explain other properties of human lexica, such as their large phonological neighborhoods. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation is to explore the academic efficacy and relevance of two comparatively new technologies, video games and Virtual Reality (VR), how they relate to an older cultural phenomenon, theater, and how a discussion of both topics can result in a better understanding of how to supply students in the classroom with the chance to improve various aspects of their L2 acquisition. Examples of these improved aspects within the field of SLA are more often associated with things like vocabulary and grammar. In fact, this has been an extremely popular direction to go in since games were first brought to language classrooms (vocabulary in particular). Aside from lexical and grammatical gains due to gamification, though, there are other aspects to be improved like students' sense of identification, their ability to interact with narratives, their various forms of engagement, and their sense of immersion within the classroom space. This dissertation will help to move the discussion of gaming in this other direction. This project aims to provide and detail an alternative to those looking for a technologically and/or theatrically relevant or game-based teaching method to support students' language learning; Digital Game Based Language Learning (DGBLL), a subfield of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), prizes and plays with various concepts that have come naturally to theater for centuries (e.g., contextualization and verisimilitude), while simultaneously extending a hand toward those who are technologically inclined or interested in incorporating gameful or theatrical tactics in their classroom. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This sequential mixed-method study aimed to explore elementary reading teachers' perceptions and experiences of vocabulary practice and student self-efficacy to increase reading achievement. The quantitative approach utilized a Likert-type survey design shared with respondents through email to identify teachers' perceptions of vocabulary instruction based on their years of teaching experience. Two teachers with one teacher per interview were utilized to address the two qualitative research questions. The findings suggest no significance between teachers' perceptions of vocabulary practice based on their years of teaching experience. Teachers believed that vocabulary practice and self-efficacy are essential factors in increasing students' reading levels. Themes emerged throughout the two interviews to address the two qualitative research questions. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Lack of social-emotional skills such as self-awareness and emotional regulation can have a detrimental impact on behaviors and academic success in elementary school. This study sought to understand and improve the implementation of social-emotional learning (SEL) terminology for students and teachers at a Massachusetts elementary school. Participants and data collected in Cycle 1 consisted of teacher perceptions around social-emotional learning curriculum and professional development opportunities. Action steps were designed, implemented, and evaluated in Cycle 2 to provide trials for four different SEL terminology programs to assess their effectiveness at meeting teacher and student needs. Program terminology was piloted in 12 different classrooms in a Grade 3-6 elementary school over the course of one month. Evaluating the results of the action research study included a thorough assessment of how well students adapted to using the terminology in all grades of the school and how well the terminology fit into the daily routines and curriculum of the school. Teacher and counselor participants and collaborators provided critical feedback that assisted in the evaluation process. Implications for organization included consistent modeling and practice of SEL terminology for the teachers, the students, and the school climate overall. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy levels of kindergarten through second-grade teachers in their ability to provide reading instruction to students with a focus on the five foundational areas of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. In addition, the study sought to make recommendations as to how the district of study can enhance teacher efficacy in delivering reading instruction, as well as assist the district in providing instructional resources and teacher professional development that increase teacher efficacy levels in reading instructional practices. A mixed method approach was used to conduct this study. Data were collected through the use of the Teacher Self-Efficacy in Reading Instruction Survey and focus group interviews. K-2 teachers within the district's summer program were participants. Survey results were analyzed through the use of frequency of response tables. Participant responses from the interviews were coded and themed in order to gain a more thorough understanding of efficacy levels within the five foundational areas of reading. The analysis of collected data shows a strong correlation between professional development and access to effective practices through resources as contributors to the level of efficacy teachers exhibit when teaching reading. Based on the findings, the district should consolidate professional development into a consistent reading instructional program. In addition, the district should provide effective instructional resources to K-2 teachers in all five foundational areas of reading. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the importance of the use of DMs in second language writing, the acquisition and production of DMs in the field of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) has been given little attention. Few studies on the teaching of DMs to Spanish Second Language (SSL) learners have focused on oral discourse and suggest that both explicit and implicit instruction promote the learning and use of DMs among SSL learners (Hernandez & Rodriguez-Gonzalez 2013; de la Fuente 2009). However, pedagogies that promote the use of DMs in SHL writing have not yet been identified in the literature, and pedagogies for the use of DMs in SSL writing are few (Saiz 2003). For this reason, my Dissertation attempts to answer the following research questions: 1) What is the frequency of use of discourse markers used by SHL learners in narrations? and 2) Does the following pedagogical intervention (i.e., Explicit Instruction + Input Flood + Textual Enhancement) increase the production of discourse markers in the narrations of SHL learners compared to traditional instruction? For this study, 39 SHL students enrolled in advanced Spanish writing courses served as participants: 19 served as participants in the Experimental group and 20 in the Control group (i.e., who received traditional instruction). All participants were asked to write two narrations of two different short, silent films: a pre-test narration and a post-test narration. Before writing the second narration, participants in the Experimental group watched a video on the functions and uses of DMs (i.e., explicit instruction) while reviewing a sample narration that incorporated implicit instruction strategies (i.e., Input Flood and Textual Enhancement). Participants in the Control group reviewed a list of DMs and completed a fill-in-the-blank activity using DMs from the list provided. A total of 600 discourse markers from the pre- and post-test narrations were extracted and results indicate that participants resorted to using the same set of DMs: pero ("but") (16.3%), cuando ("when") (16.3%), luego ("then") (8.6%), entonces ("then") (7.5%), and porque ("because") (7.3%); these five DMs accounted for about 48% of the DMs used in the narrations written by participants. Results also indicated that participants showed a preference for singleword DMs that sequence events (e.g., cuando ("when") and luego ("then")). Results also showed that about one-third (i.e., six) of the participants in the Experimental group incorporated new, complex (i.e., two- to three-word) DMs, such as ya que ("given that") and tan pronto como ("as soon as"), in their post-intervention narrations; these DMs were explicitly mentioned and used in the video that served as the pedagogical intervention. This increase in the use of DMs suggests that a combination of Explicit and Implicit Instruction promotes the acquisition and use of DMs in SHL writing. Additionally, an independent samples t-test comparing the number of DMs utilized in the post-test narrations of both the Experimental and Control groups produced a significant t value (t(37) = 2.53, p < 0.02). An examination of the means revealed that the Control group had a lower mean than the Experimental group (M = 5.95 and M = 9.05, respectively). Lastly, this dissertation also addressed the effects of the age at which SHL learners began to produce Spanish on the syntactic complexity, morpho-syntactic accuracy, and fluency of SHL narrations. That is, do the narrations of SHL learners with different experiences with Spanish (i.e., early SHL speakers vs. late SHL speakers), enrolled in a third-year Spanish writing course, differ in syntactic complexity, morphosyntactic accuracy, and fluency measures? If so, what are the differences and/or similarities in the syntactic complexity (i.e., mean length of T-Unit and mean number of clauses per T-Unit), morphosyntactic accuracy (i.e., error-free T-Units per T-Unit and error type), and fluency (i.e., number of words, number of T-units, and number of subordinate clauses per text) of narrations produced by these two types of SHL learners? The analysis of the data collected for this Dissertation indicated that Early and Late SHL learners did not differ regarding the syntactic complexity (i.e., Mean Length of T-unit and Total Number of Clauses per T-unit) and fluency (i.e., Total Number of Words, T-units, and (Type of) Subordinate Clauses) of their narrations. However, Early and Late SHL participants differed regarding the morphosyntactic accuracy (i.e., Error-Free T-units) of both narrations. Nevertheless, both groups were similar in the types of errors most produced in their narrations given that more than 46% of the errors produced by Early and Late SHL participants were preposition and vocabulary errors. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The problem addressed in this study was that students who use passive study techniques when learning medical terminology are less likely to perform well on exams and retain course content in long-term memory. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory multiple case study was to explore the perceptions of college faculty regarding the effectiveness and utility of student use of retrieval practice quizzing and their views about how retrieval practice quizzing might impact students' long-term memory and exam scores. The objective of this study was to understand and provide insight into faculty perceptions about retrieval practice quizzing to derive meaning and to inform professional practice in a real-life context that could be applied to other disciplines (e.g., anatomy, math, nursing, foreign language). The guiding framework of this study centered on identity education (IdEd) which refers to instructors' deliberate and active involvement with students' identity-related processes to facilitate student engagement in the classroom. Study participants included a purposive sampling of eight college faculty who were currently teaching or had taught a college-level medical terminology course. The faculty members participated in individual interviews and a focus group via Zoom. The findings revealed that the study participants perceived retrieval practice quizzing to be effective in improving exam scores and in helping students commit course material to long-term memory. As a result of these findings, recommendations for practice include: (a) encourage faculty to incorporate retrieval practice opportunities in their college-level courses, (b) encourage faculty to consider the IdEd conceptual framework or another documented practice for enhancing student-faculty relationships in the classroom to foster more intentional and purposeful student engagement with the course material, and (c) encourage faculty to provide timely performance feedback and interventions for students to strengthen students' metacognitive control of future study decisions. The recommendations for future research include: (a) explore students' perspectives on retrieval practice quizzing, (b) conduct studies on retrieval practice quizzing in college settings that measure the impact retrieval practice quizzing has on exam scores, and (c) conduct studies on retrieval practice quizzing in college classroom settings that examine the influence of graded versus optional or non-graded retrieval practice activities and its impact on student completion rates of retrieval practice exercises. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Researchers have often considered addressing the readability of special education informational materials developed for parents to improve parent participation. Yet, research examining contextual document aspects is limited and no studies investigate procedural safeguards notices and related informational materials from a lens other than readability. A sequential, component mixed methods design (Greene, 2007) was conducted to examine the extent to which special education informational materials were readable and applicable to parents of children who are or may be eligible for special education, as well as the extent to which social constructions of child ability and parent participation were strength-based. Overall, results indicated that documents were not considered readable or applicable to parents, and further analysis revealed problematic issues among special education informational materials along with considerable variation across states. Specifically, measures of document complexity that included syllable, sentence, and document length revealed patterns similar to readability measures, in which the federal mandate was the most complex or difficult to comprehend and the guidance documents were considerably easy. Discursive patterns that perpetuated a parent-professional power imbalance were evident across the corpus, whereas discursive nuances and cascading contradictions only appeared in additional guidance documents and may generate confusion for parents by propagating partial truths and misrepresentations. Recommendations for policy, research, and practice are discussed. By examining contextual document features from a critical perspective, this study contributes insights to new possible directions for more meaningful education policy, research, and practice. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The spoken word production process includes four identifiable stages: conceptualization, lexical selection, form encoding, and articulation. This dissertation studies the spoken word production process of producing Mandarin monosyllabic words, focusing on lexical selection and form encoding. The Chinese languages, including Mandarin, differ from well-researched Indo-European languages such as English in at least three crucial aspects, which could have led to different processing dynamics in spoken word production: (1) the use of contrastive lexical tone; (2) the relatively simple syllable structure, and the limited number of syllables; (3) the prevalence of homophony and a more saturated lexicon. Four experiments investigate the Mandarin spoken word production process, using the picture-word interference paradigm and its variants. In a standard picture-word interference experiment, participants name a target word cued by a picture and ignore a distractor word. Experiment 1 uses the standard picture-word interference procedure. Trials paired with a semantically related homophone have a shorter naming latency than trials paired with a semantically unrelated homophone. Experiment 1 reveals that homophones participate in lexical selection. Experiment 2 uses picture distractors. When an Exact Homophone distractor (identical syllable and lexical tone) is present, the naming latency is longer than when a Simple Homophone distractor (identical syllable but different lexical tone) is present. Moreover, compared with an unrelated distractor, a Simple Homophone distractor leads to a shorter naming latency. Experiment 2 finds that lexical tone is relevant for defining homophony during lexical selection, and there is continuous information flow from lexical selection to form encoding. Experiment 3 uses pseudo-word Pinyin distractors to study the form encoding stage. Experiment 3a examines the encoding of segments. Consistent with the previous literature, evidence supports the access of the syllable before onset and rime. Experiment 3b addresses the encoding of lexical tone. Evidence suggests that the encoding of lexical tone is early, potentially concurrent with the encoding of the syllable. The present dissertation demonstrates how language-specific properties modulate the spoken word production process. The results broaden and deepen our understanding of the Chinese languages as exemplified by Mandarin and the dynamics of spoken word production. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have high requirements regarding science knowledge and academic vocabulary that need to be taught to students using research-based curriculum and teaching techniques. Students who receive Special Education services or who are ELL are known to encounter difficulties learning new and complex scientific concepts but, according to NGSS, they need to be held accountable to the same standards as their typical peers. Numerous studies show that Project-Based Learning (P-BL) together with scaffolding and group learning have been used successfully in science classrooms at different grade levels. Since school districts started to implement NGSS, there has not been enough research conducted to indicate how the new requirements address the various needs of a diverse student body, and there is still need of more studies that are assessing different ways in which the new science standards are being applied in classrooms. This study searches for evidence of whether a science curriculum that is currently used in a school district in Southern California and which was designed as a P-BL, integrated science curriculum for General Education classes, is also effective for students who receive Special Education services or who are ELL. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

As part of the project to create short skit-based movies for teaching English vocabulary words, 3 styles of videos were created -- (a) animation movies with animated 3D characters with text-to-speech voices (anime TTS), (b) animation movies with animated 3D characters with human voices (anime HV), and (c) live-action movies with human actors (live-action). An online study was conducted to examine whether different video styles would produce different vocabulary learning outcomes and different levels of learner engagement. Fourteen undergraduate and 32 graduate students were recruited from 19 UNL courses across 8 disciplines as well as through newsletters and listservs at 4 university departments and offices and were randomly assigned into the 3 learning conditions. Each student watched a set of 7 vocabulary videos in either the anime TTS, anime HV, or live-action format and took comprehension, immediate retention, and delayed retention tests to measure their vocabulary learning outcomes. They also completed a survey that measured the levels of their engagement with the movies they had watched. Separate one-way and two-way ANOVAs were performed to compare the 3 groups on their vocabulary learning outcomes as well as on their engagement levels. There were no differences among the 3 groups on their vocabulary learning outcomes. The effect of gender and the interaction effect of video style and academic level reached near significance on the delayed vocabulary retention and comprehension tests respectively, but they were most likely due to the small sample sizes and unequal variances. The engagement survey indicated that human voice still sounded livelier and more authentic than machine voice even though AI-powered machine voices were used in the current study. The survey also indicated that character liveliness was influenced by how lively the characters sounded, but not by how lively they looked. It is possible that a ceiling effect due to the robust vocabulary instructional methods might have made it hard to detect small effects of video style. The small sample sizes might also have resulted in less statistical power. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This multiple paper dissertation addressed several issues revolving around the estimation of effect sizes for computer-based scaffolding in problem-centered STEM education. STEM jobs are outpacing all other jobs and STEM workers are expected to solve complex problems. However, students often struggle with complex problem activities. Research on computer-based scaffolding has been shown to produce large learning gains in STEM fields. Yet, previous meta-analyses have not been able to pinpoint which scaffolding characteristics impact learning gains the most. This lack of insight impedes researchers and learning designers from developing more effective computer-based scaffolds. This dissertation (a) provides insights on the gaps in computer-based scaffolding syntheses, (b) reveals the conflation of terminology that has been used to characterize scaffolding, (c) details a taxonomy for the various forms of computer-based scaffolding, and (d) conducts a meta-analysis to estimate which scaffolding forms and combinations of computer-based scaffolding forms produce the largest learning gains in collegiate engineering education. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

For students to be successful in future mathematics classes, mathematics teachers must be able to help students decipher content in Algebra I, the foundation of higher mathematics. Research on vocabulary in the math classroom shows there are multiple ways to represent vocabulary and reading comprehension. The research question, which focused on the impact of teaching vocabulary strategies and reading comprehension in an Algebra I classroom, was answered through interviews. Fourteen teacher interviews and a focus group were used as a data collection method in this study. The results were used to develop a plan of action which includes a training module for teachers, a blog for social media, and a summer camp for Pre-Algebra students. As a result of the materials developed in this research, teachers may acquire new skills and knowledge in math literacy to better support Algebra I students. The themes in this study were as follows: 1) Algebra I teachers believe that students need to 'speak' Algebra I language; 2) Algebra I teachers believe that the use of reading comprehension strategies is the key to student success; 3) Algebra I teachers need to have connections to students by using real-life situations; 4) Algebra I teachers need to be intentional about the use of vocabulary strategies in the classroom; 5) Algebra I teachers need specific staff development for math literacy in vocabulary attainment and reading comprehension; and 6) Algebra I teachers need time to plan and work with Professional Learning Communities to develop lessons that include vocabulary attainment and reading comprehension. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

One of the most important benefits of read alouds in the early years is the exposure children gain to new words. Although many early skills support later reading success, early vocabulary knowledge improves reading in several ways, including supporting comprehension of words that children decode; helping children recognize words more quickly; fostering phonological awareness skills; and increasing children's understanding of content-area instruction. However, the nature of interactive read alouds in young children's homes is evolving, as families are increasingly turning to digital texts from a very young age. This phenomenon, coupled with the indisputable benefits of children reading print books, necessitates a critical need to identify the affordances of digital texts for young children's vocabulary development. To that end, the purpose of this mixed-methods study is to examine one type of preschool digital text -- interactive storybook apps -- for the affordances they may provide for young children's vocabulary development. Specifically, my study seeks to understand: (a) the degree to which preschool storybook apps introduce new vocabulary words to young children; (b) the types of words children can learn from these texts; (c) the degree to which interactive features in storybook apps highlight new words; and (d) to what extent interactive features closely aligned to the words in the story might promote caregivers' word-related talk while reading aloud. To answer these questions, I designed two separate but related studies. In the first study, I conducted a content analysis of 70 best-selling preschool storybook apps from three popular app stores: the Apple Store, Google Play, and the Amazon App Store. Using the Words Worth Teaching List as a guide, I analyzed 26,744 total words from these 70 apps to determine what percentage of words might be considered new for preschool-aged children. Furthermore, I described the types of words children might learn from these texts using three word-level features: parts of speech, frequency, and word difficulty. Finally, I determined to what extent new words in storybook apps are highlighted by interactive features. In the second study, I conducted an observational study of 37 caregivers of four- and five-year-old children to determine how interactive features closely aligned to new words in storybook apps might promote more word-related talk during read aloud of these texts. During this study, caregivers read four stories each -- two print books and two storybook apps in counterbalanced order -- for a total of 68,635 words in 148 sessions, totaling over 2,220 minutes of read aloud time. Findings from this study suggest that preschool storybook apps are ripe with opportunities to learn new words. The sample apps contained a total of 1,376 new words -- for an average of nearly 20 words per story. Furthermore, storybook apps highlight approximately 23 percent of new words with interactive features, such as providing examples of a word (18.2 percent); demonstrating the meaning of a word (29.2 percent); or saying the word out loud when a reader taps on a picture of it (35.1 percent). Notably, caregivers talked about significantly more new words with their children when they were highlighted by these interactive features. However, I found that the number of interactive features per word, the types of interactive features in the text, and whether caregivers had engage with the word on the screen (i.e., tap on the screen to activate the interactive features) did not significantly influence whether and how caregivers talked about a new word in the text. This study contributes to the field's understanding of preschool digital texts and their affordances for young children's vocabulary development, as well as how caregivers use these texts during read alouds in the home environment. The findings from this study have implications for teacher professional development, teacher preparation, community-based outreach programs, and storybook app developers. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Textbooks are an important aspect of formal education, and education and gender-related research clearly demonstrates that "within schools, textbooks play a significant role in the gender socialization of children" (Lee & Collins, 2010, p. 121). The goal of the current study is to look at textbooks that are used in Saudi social studies classes and provide a critical discourse analysis of how context and visuals are used to present gender. The present study focuses the representation of gender and Saudi government policy in fourth grade textbooks from the 2019-2020 school year. Questions guiding this study were: 1. What kinds of words choices are present in fourth grade Saudi social studies textbooks? 2. Do they represent or reinforce any prevailing ideology, or stereotype in terms of men and women in order to support the Saudi Vision 2030? 3. How are genders represented in Saudi fourth grade social studies textbooks? The results indicated that the majority of the illustrations and text examples were dominated by men and displayed men characters in dominant roles and women characters in passive, domestic, or subservient roles. This suggests that, while great discursive and policy progress has been made toward gender parity or equity, this has not automatically led to an enhanced position for women as workers, citizens, or family members in the curriculum. The findings indicate the continued need for studies of the gendered nature of knowledge and the role education can play in re-shaping gender identities and gender hierarchies. This study is valuable because, to date, no studies have explored gender representations in the Saudi social studies textbooks. A possible direction for future research is the continued charting of gender representations in Saudi Arabia's school curriculum as well as in other countries in the region. For example, it would be enlightening to compare findings in the current study with countries that surround Saudi Arabia to identify commonalities and similarities. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation investigates the development of cross-linguistic transfer in the use of strategies to repair preconsonantal word-external empty onsets (i.e., /C#V/) in Spanish heritage speakers. The main focus of this work is to analyze the use of /[glottal stop]/-epenthesis as a strategy to repair empty onsets, as its use is asymmetrical in the Spanish and English phonologies. A total of 190 participants (i.e., monolingually raised Spanish speakers, monolingually raised English speakers and Spanish heritage speakers) took part in Spanish and/or English word production tasks that elicited function + content word sequences in real words (e.g., Sp. "un elefante" 'an elephant', En. "an umbrella") and in phonotactically legal novel words (e.g., Sp. "un anbo," En. "all embos"). Participants are divided in three main age groups: younger children, older children, and adults. First, I examine whether the use of glottal phonation is a repair strategy employed more often in English than in Spanish, and whether it is conditioned by age. Overall, I find that in English glottal phonation is the preferred strategy to repair prosodically-prominent onsetless syllables, whereas, in Spanish, the preferred repair strategy is modal phonation in both prosodically and non-prosodically prominent syllables. For the Spanish real words, I find no effects of language development in the experiments with real words. In the experiment with novel words, I show that older children and adult children produce a greater rate of glottal phonation than younger children, which I explain as an effect of the unpredictability of the novel words in the context. In English, the rate of glottal phonation in the real words is not affected by age. For the English novel words, older children produce greater rates of glottal phonation than the adults, demonstrating a U-shaped behavior during language development. Next, I formalize the Spanish and English results using MaxEnt grammars and accounting for three repair strategies: /[glottal stop]/-epenthesis, no repair (i.e., coda consonant), and resyllabification/ambisyllabicity. I introduce the effect of prosodic prominence in the grammars using constraints on phonological enhancement. I then compare the results of the Spanish heritage speakers to those of the monolingually raised Spanish and English speakers. For the Spanish real and novel words, I find that the younger and older child HS produce greater rates of glottal phonation than the monolingually raised Spanish speakers, but no significant difference is observed between the adult monolingually raised Spanish speakers and the adult heritage speakers. To account for these results, I claim that child heritage grammars are more permeable to cross-linguistic transfer than adult heritage grammars. In addition, in the Spanish real words, my results show that heritage speakers with a higher amount of Spanish output glottalize less often than heritage speakers with a low amount of Spanish output, which brings to the forefront the importance of language use to control transfer from the majority language. In English, my results show that, overall, heritage speakers produce lower rates of glottal phonation than monolingually-raised English speakers (i.e., the dominant language may also suffer from negative transfer from the heritage language). Finally, I argue that the results for the heritage grammars can be formalized using a model of language coactivation during input evaluation a la Goldrick et al. (2016). The two sets of language-specific constraints are scaled by the speaker-specific activation scores, which set the intended language and reflect the speaker's language dominance. To account for the apparent development of language control during language maturation (i.e., greater permeability of language transfer during adulthood), I posit the existence of a prior applied to the constraint weights during input evaluation. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]