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Linear algebra is gaining increased attention due to its applications in many modern high-tech industries, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. Coordinate systems underlie many concepts in linear algebra and promote students' spatial thinking of key concepts by imposing a visual aspect to courses that may otherwise be abstract and computational. Despite the importance of coordinate systems, there is surprisingly little research on them within the context of linear algebra. This dissertation reports the results of one-on-one clinical interviews involving a series of ten tasks with five undergraduate STEM students who had taken a linear algebra course. The goal of the clinical interviews was to explore student thinking of a location and its coordinate pair when space is described by a single coordinate system as well as multiple coordinate systems. I identified that students engage with three entities: Magnitude/location, Coordinates, and Unit lengths when they name a location (Naming and Re-Naming) and they locate a name in space (Locating and Re-Locating). When interacting with multiple coordinate systems, I found that students reasoned either proportionally or reciprocally to determine what operations to perform numerically in a situation. This dissertation also presents the results of teaching experiment interviews involving a series of instructional tasks and a GeoGebra applet. These interviews were conducted with three selected students out of five who completed the clinical interviews. The goal of the teaching experiments was to support students in extending their interpretations of matrix entries and in reasoning with matrix multiplication under nonparallel linear coordinate systems. I describe both their initial and progressive interpretations in three main ways. First, students extended their ways of interpreting entries of a matrix from a string of numbers facilitating a coordinate conversion process to a set of basis vectors that constructs a coordinate system. Second, when interacting with multiple coordinate systems, students extended their proportional and reciprocal reasoning to involve matrix multiplication. Third, students developed two ways of representing coordinate pairs using their extended interpretations of matrix entries: coordinate as a coefficient in linear combination, or coordinate as a component in an ordered list. [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.]

Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language processing (NLP) applications, developing a DA annotation scheme or A taxonomy is often a first step in working with a corpus. The development of these annotation schemes provides a set of DA labels that are used to manually label a specific corpus, thus capturing the fine-grained intended meanings of utterances. However, dialogue act annotation is a complex task that requires not only an understanding of the linguistic content of an utterance but also of the context in which it was uttered. Researchers who wish to annotate a new corpus are thus tasked with developing a new taxonomy based on a subset of an existing taxonomy, a combination of two or more existing taxonomies, or creating an entirely new taxonomy. Consequently, researchers are more commonly inclined toward developing newer dialogue act annotation schemes, further increasing the number of distinct DA labels and making it difficult to effectively train DA classification models that can be generalized across related or different corpora. Moreover, without access to the specific corpora, it is even more difficult to define and agree upon a fixed dialogue act annotation scheme that can be applied across different corpora, even within similar domains. In collaborative learning, DAs are used to represent the pragmatic goals of utterances. They offer many cues for assessing the effectiveness of collaboration and understanding the kinds of dialogue behaviors that impact learning, performance, and problem-solving abilities. By assigning DAs to collaborative dialogue, researchers can better assess the effectiveness of collaborative learning efforts. They also allow researchers to identify the kinds of dialogue patterns or behaviors that may have a positive or negative effect on the collaborative learning process, such as predicting learners' satisfaction with their partners. However, collaborative learning dialogue takes place in highly domain-specific contexts, which makes DA classification particularly challenging. To mitigate the manual effort required for dialogue act classification, the rise of more advanced machine learning and deep learning text classification models holds potential for training DA classification models for the automatic classification of dialogue acts in the collaborative learning context. However, existing dialogue act classification models often struggle to generalize effectively, even within similar domains or collaborative learning contexts, due to variations in dialogue patterns, domain-specific tasks, dialogue act labels, and the insufficient amount of data needed to train the classification models. This dissertation aims to investigate four main challenges for dialogue act classification in collaborative learning contexts: 1) limited data to adequately train a high performance classification model; 2) too many classes to train a high performance classifier due to fine-grained DA labels; 3) difficulty in mapping dialogue act labels across corpora due to variations in dialogue act annotation schemes; and 4) data privacy concerns restricting data sharing, which limits opportunities for model improvement via cross-corpora training. This dissertation work addresses these challenges by investigating two main transfer learning approaches: cross-corpora domain adaptation, which aims to mitigate the problem of insufficient unique data, and federated transfer learning, which aims to address the data privacy concerns that arise during DA classification model training. To examine the impact of the cross-corpora domain adaptation approach on DA classification, experiments were conducted using fine-tuned pretrained transformer models across three corpora of collaborative learning data. Experimental results showed that the cross-corpora fine-tuned models resulted in an overall improvement in accuracy and F1-scores compared to baseline models fine-tuned using any individual corpus. Additionally, the cross-corpora fine-tuned models outperformed baselines in scenarios with limited dialogue act representation. The results show that this approach has the potential to improve classification performance, especially when a corpus has limited representation of certain dialogue acts. This work highlights the potential benefits of this approach for future domain-specific dialogue act classification tasks. To investigate the impact of the federated transfer learning (FTL) approach on DA classification, I implemented FTL using two standard aggregation methods and conducted experiments using BERT and RoBERTa models. Taking the three corpora as representative of physically separate data locations, the results showed the feasibility of training a global model from multiple, distributed datasets concurrently. Although the experimental results showed that the FTL models underperformed in comparison to the baseline models, the findings represent a possibility for improvement for the FTL models. The protection of data privacy afforded by FTL is important for future data-driven investigations. Meanwhile, using a domain-related model as the global model during the federated transfer learning produced improved performance compared to using the original pretrained model. The main contributions of this research include the novel finding that shows cross-corpora domain adaptation approach produces improved performance for dialogue act classification in collaborative learning context. Contributions also include the implementation of FTL for DA classification. These approaches could potentially set a new benchmark for future work in cross-corpora domain adaptation, federated transfer learning, and dialogue act classification in the context of collaborative learning. This work could also serve as a helpful reference for NLP researchers using transfer learning to improve performance in downstream tasks. In addition, this work may have practical implications for various NLP applications in educational contexts, including the design and development of dialogue systems to support learners, educational technologies using collaborative techniques, and collaborative learning environments. [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 dissertation, I will present social-cognitive frameworks that support the use of mental imagery for possible self enhancement; and articulate and evaluate a pedagogical intervention designed for the foreign language class. This intervention will allow students to explore and develop prominent and vivid mental representations (self-schemas) of their L2 possible selves (L2 referring to foreign, second language) using guided mental simulation, also called task-guided imagery. The desired aim of this intervention is to help activate students' social cognitive repository in order to elaborate the foreign language part of their self-schemas and thereby increase their L2 competency beliefs and their desire and effort to continue learning a foreign 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.]

Mastering the phonological aspects of a second language (L2) poses significant challenges for adult learners, often affecting their intelligibility in acquiring that language (Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998). McAllister (1997) has highlighted L2 learners' struggles in perceiving and producing novel segmental features, which is corroborated by The Perceptual Assimilation Model of L2 speech learning (PAM-L2) proposed by Best & Tyler (2007), which posits that the perception of L2 phonetics is a critical precursor to their accurate production. Against this backdrop, the present study aims to improve the intelligibility of Arabic pharyngeals (/[arabic symbol ommitted]/ and /h/) among English-speaking learners studying Arabic as a second language (ASL). Research by Hussein (2020) has shown that learners with English as their first language (L1) struggle to discern and articulate Arabic pharyngeals (/[arabic symbol ommitted]/ and /h/). This study employs a pre-and post-test design, with five treatment sessions in between focused on enhancing Arabic pharyngeal pronunciation, on assessing the effectiveness of two distinct pedagogical approaches: traditional pronunciation instruction and task-based instruction (TBI). Before the intervention, participants underwent an initial session ('session zero') to receive explicit instruction, laying the groundwork for subsequent lessons (Schmidt, 2010). Subsequent treatment sessions followed either the traditional or task-based instructional methodology. The efficacy of these instructional methods was assessed through a mixed-method analysis, leveraging both quantitative and qualitative data to address the research questions. Quantitatively, participants' pronunciation was rated before and after the instructional intervention, revealing a median rating increase from 2 to 6, signifying a marked improvement in pronunciation intelligibility of Arabic pharyngeals. A mixed regression analysis further indicated the superiority of task-based instruction (TBI) over traditional methods. TBI was associated with an increase in pronunciation rating of approximately 1.11 units (SE = 0.26), with a statistically significant t-value of 4.181 (p < 0.001).Qualitative insights were gleaned from post-intervention interviews, which provided a deeper understanding of the participants' perceptions of Arabic pronunciation and the effectiveness of the treatment sessions. The interviews yielded rich data on the acquisition and learning process of Arabic pharyngeals. Overall, the study not only underscores the challenges inherent in L2 phonological acquisition but also contributes to the field by comparing the impact of two instructional strategies on the acquisition of Arabic pharyngeals by English-speaking learners. The findings incorporate the TBI method, endorsing its effectiveness in enhancing L2 phonological skills and offering implications for pronunciation pedagogy in the context of ASL learning. [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 about a particular style of research. The philosophy of this style is that in order to scientifically understand deep learning, it is fruitful to investigate what happens when neural networks are trained on simple, mathematically well-defined tasks. Even though the training data is simple, the training algorithm can end up producing rich, unexpected results; and understanding these results can shed light on fundamental mysteries of high relevance to contemporary deep learning. First, we situate this methodological approach in a broader scientific context, discussing and systematizing the role of "model systems" in science and in the science of deep learning in particular. We then present five intensive case studies, each of which uses a particular combinatorial task as a lens through which to demystify puzzles of deep learning. The combinatorial tasks employed are sparse Boolean functions, sparse parities, learning finite group operations, performing modular addition, and learning Markov chains in-context. Topics of explanatory interest include the inductive biases of the transformer architecture, the phenomenon of emergent capabilities during training, the nuances of deep learning in the presence of statistical-computational gaps, the tradeoffs between different resources of training, the effect of network width on optimization, the relationship between symmetries in training data and harmonic structure in trained networks, the origins of the mechanisms of in-context learning in transformers, and the influence of spurious solutions on optimization. [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 examines whether and how psycholinguistic priming, and social knowledge are integrated in the identification of sociolinguistic variants. Using the English variable (ING), the alternation between -ing and -in' (e.g. thinking vs. thinkin') as a testing ground, this dissertation probes whether and how individuals utilize constraints of different types when they perceive variation in real time. Through six perception experiments, I combine existing experimental paradigms in a novel way to probe how listeners make inferences about the identity of sociolinguistic variants under circumstances of uncertainty. Listeners hear synthesized stimuli in which there is ambiguity between two sociolinguistic variants, -ing and -in', and are placed in situations that require them to resolve this ambiguity through categorization. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods I will use to introduce uncertainty at the word level and the sentence level. I show in Chapter 4 that phonological variant identification in perception is subject to psycholinguistic priming. All else being equal, hearing a clear -ing makes listeners more likely to choose -ing again, given an ambiguous target for categorization. This phonological variant priming effect, however, decays rapidly over time, after only one monosyllabic word, suggesting that phonological variant priming is activation-based. In Chapter 5, I further investigate whether phonological variant priming is sensitive to social expectations. Results show that psycholinguistic priming and talker accent both come into play when listeners categorize ambiguous variants, and crucially, they interact by way of prime variant relative frequency, suggest -ing that social and linguistic unexpectedness jointly modulate priming. In Chapter 6, I establish that listeners possess and make use of dynamic social factors such as stylistic covariation during phonological variant identification. Additionally, target whole-word frequency can be revealing of the perceptual consequences of different types of s-conditioning. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses implications of these empirical results in the context of the typology of conditioning on variation in individuals. Overall, this dissertation establishes that psycholinguistic, social and linguistic factors all play a role when listeners perceive variation. However, different factors and processes are not integrated in the same way, suggesting that individuals have sophisticated knowledge of how variation is conditioned but how this knowledge is used is context-dependent. By combining the framework of variationist sociolinguistics with the methods and theories of psycholinguistics, the results of my dissertation shed light on how sociolinguistic variation is processed in real-time language use. This ultimately has the potential to develop a better understanding of the structure and systematicity of language at the community level. [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.]

Students studying in beginning level foreign language classrooms often lack the opportunity to speak spontaneously (Kogan, 2023). Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is a pedagogical approach to language instruction that advocates for the use of tasks to develop learners' second/foreign language (L2) abilities. Games can act as tasks that prepare students for real world interaction while also allowing them to forget they are being instructed, potentially leading to implicit learning (Kogan, 2023; Poole et al., 2019). Due to a global interest in video games, this dissertation proposes to use a commercial-off-the-shelf digital puzzle game, "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes" (KTANE), to promote the development of fluency and spontaneous speaking in low (Novice High-Intermediate Mid) proficiency learners of Russian. This dissertation investigates the use of KTANE within three separate Russian language courses through recording students while they played the first level of KTANE in Russian. The gameplay recordings, along with participant interviews, were then transcribed and analyzed to provide micro-evaluations of TBLT (Ellis, 2011). There are several findings from this study. First, KTANE mechanics can be mapped onto TBLT task criteria and low proficiency learners of Russian were able to successfully play and complete the first level of KTANE. This suggests that KTANE and Digital Game-Based Language Learning (DGBLL) can be used with TBLT in beginner language classrooms. Second, this study found that students were able to increase their fluency as measured by words per minute and task completion time. Evidence for lexical learning gains (Russian word for 'wire', color terms, and ordinal numbers) also are noted, although there was a general lack of evidence for phonetic and grammatical learning gains from KTANE gameplay. Participant interviews suggest that playing KTANE was enjoyable, increased learners' self-confidence in Russian speaking skills, increased awareness and interest in alternative learning methods to support classroom instruction, and led to lexical learning gains, among other comments on KTANE's affordances, limitations, and suggestions for implementation in the language classroom. As a result, it is proposed that KTANE, and therefore DGBLL, has the potential to be a language learning tool that can assist low proficiency students in developing their L2 speaking abilities, while also providing a motivating and enjoyable introduction into alternative methods for language learning to students who might not otherwise have considered them. [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.]

Counterfactuals are a type of conditional sentences used to convey situations that do not correspond to reality. Tense morphology is a core ingredient to encode counterfactuals in English and most Indo-European languages. Mandarin Chinese (hereafter Chinese) lacks tense morphology and does not require counterfactuals to be formally distinguished from other types of conditionals. In the past, this lack of obligatory and systematic counterfactual marking led scholars to hypothesize that Chinese native speakers (NSs) may have a diminished ability to reason counterfactually. Research involving NSs has eventually debunked this belief, unveiling the existence of specific linguistic strategies systematically used in Chinese counterfactual expression. However, no study has tested learners on either production or comprehension of Chinese counterfactuals. This study contributes to filling this gap by investigating how L1-English learners of Chinese-as-a-foreign-language (CFL) interpret and produce counterfactuals in Chinese by means of different linguistic strategies. To this end, a truth-value judgment task and a written sentence-completion task were devised and administered to 51 CFL learners and 29 Chinese NSs. The results revealed that both comprehension and production are modulated by foreign language proficiency, and the targeted linguistic strategies are mastered at different stages of acquisition, with differing patterns between comprehension and production. Furthermore, despite the fact that counterfactuals need not be overtly marked in Chinese and can be expressed and interpreted based on context and world knowledge, results indicated that in the absence of linguistic marking, most learners do not reach counterfactual interpretation. The qualitative examination of learners' task responses also suggested that L1-English partially influences the acquisition process of Chinese counterfactual expression, both in a facilitative and non-facilitative fashion. Lastly, the findings of this study confirmed that even if not explicitly taught, learners can eventually acquire the linguistic strategies used to express counterfactuals in Chinese. [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.]

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three experiments to investigate whether phonological similarity in newly acquired object labels influences perceived semantic associations of objects. Experiment 1 provides preliminary support for the influence of phonology on meaning in monolinguals. The experiment was designed so that phonological similarity in the pseudoword names highlighted either color or shape commonalities between alien figures. Results showed that when same-shape aliens had names that overlapped at word onset (e.g., Bonmet, Boncas, and Bondil), participants gave higher visual similarity ratings to them after name learning compared to before. Similarly, same-color aliens were rated as more visually similar after participants learned color-biased names. These findings demonstrate that phonological similarity in linguistic labels could strengthen semantic associations by raising the salience of existing perceptual commonalities between alien figures. However, the lack of a phonological effect in the friendship likelihood rating task and group sorting task suggests that when more salient perceptual features are in place, effects of linguistic features may be harder to observe. Experiment 2 examined how bilingual language experience influences the degree to which semantic processing is affected by phonology. Spanish-English bilinguals were tested on the same tasks as Experiment 1, and their performance was compared to that of monolinguals. The results from Experiment 2 revealed that bilinguals may be more resistant than monolinguals to both phonological and perceptual biases when making semantic association judgements about newly encountered objects. Bilinguals did not show increases in visual similarity ratings for same-shape [-color] aliens after learning shape- [color-] biased names as monolinguals. Instead, they demonstrated a greater tendency to overcome initial visual biases on semantic association judgements after word learning. It is possible that bilinguals' heightened awareness of symbolic arbitrariness and increased inhibitory control have made them more resistant to lower-level influences on semantic associations. To test the hypothesis that shared phonological features can strengthen conceptual links even between objects that share no visual features, Experiment 3 eliminated shape and color as reliable cues of category membership and explored the role of phonology in the construction of meaning. The effect of phonology was observed in the friendship likelihood rating task and the group sorting task, where phonologically similar aliens were rated as more likely to be friends and more often sorted together into groups (no effect of phonology was observed in the visual similarity rating task, likely because aliens' perceived friendliness was a more salient perceptual bias than phonology). These findings extend existing theories on the interaction between phonological, lexical, and semantic processing, and indicate that common visual features may not be necessary for linguistic features to influence the associations between semantic representations. Taken together, the results from this dissertation shed light on the linguistic relativity hypothesis and inform our understanding of general mechanisms of monolingual and bilingual language processing. Conclusions may be drawn that how we conceptualize the world is influenced by the speech sounds we use to denote objects and ideas. Unbeknownst to us, phonological similarity between object labels may lead us to develop closer semantic associations between otherwise unrelated concepts. [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 communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied factor that may contribute to this variability, namely print exposure, and argue that print exposure is related to spoken language at multiple levels of the grammar. In Chapter 1, I present evidence that individuals with higher levels of print exposure provide more polarized ratings on a standard syntactic acceptability judgment task and argue that this is due to greater evidence for licit syntactic structures because of additional input due to exposure to print. In Chapter 2, I provide further evidence for this argument by examining the relationship between print exposure and participants' resolution preferences when confronted with sentences exhibiting quantifier scope ambiguity. I find that individuals with higher print exposure give lower ratings to sentences exhibiting quantifier scope ambiguity and have significantly longer reaction times for inverse items in particular, than lower print exposure participants. From this, I conclude that high print exposure may strengthen expectations for the dominant surface scope interpretation, again because of greater evidence for the more common or preferred structure. Finally, in Chapter 3, I explore the phenomenon of variability in scalar implicature, specifically with respect to the accessibility of stronger alternatives. I suggest two novel methods: one for generating scales for use in tasks on scalar implicature, and one for testing whether an implicature has occurred. I find some evidence that accessibility is an important factor in the computation of scalar implicature, but also note various improvements that should be considered with respect to the task design for the two new methods introduced in this study. [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.]

With the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses globally, the overall aim of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the linguistic aptitude of autistic individuals. Given that the autism diagnosis is a spectrum, we rely on the Autism Quotient (AQ) test, which measures the quantity of autistic-like traits an individual possesses, to provide a quantitative value for the diagnosis. The goal of this study is to better understand how autistic-like traits may affect a child's phonological abilities at the segment-level, measured by their ability to imitate voice onset time (VOT) when producing stop consonants of a novel second language (L2). Our participants are both typically-developing (TD) and neurodiverse children, all 18 of whom are English-dominant children ages seven to 11 years old based in New South Wales, Australia. The methodology includes a parent survey completed on behalf of the child and experimental tasks, completed in person by the child, across two sessions that were separated by four to seven days. The experimental tasks consist of both English and Spanish read-aloud tasks, as well as Spanish immediate imitation tasks, and perception tasks featuring manipulated syllables spanning the full range of Spanish and English stop consonant VOT values. These tasks allow us to evaluate how well the participants imitate and learn to produce Spanish words with the appropriate, shortened VOT values. Since individuals with higher AQ scores have more autistic-like traits, such as greater attention to detail and focus, we predict these individuals will be better L2 phonetic learners. The results show that autistic-like traits are not predictive of a child's L2 phonetic imitation, nor short-term or long-term L2 phonetic learning abilities. That being said, regardless of diagnosis, our participants show a significant VOT reduction on the L2 phonetic imitation task and they learn to maintain a reduced VOT when producing Spanish word-initial stops, in both the short-term and the long-term. All of the children in the present study are capable L2 phonetic imitators and learners; thus, we encourage L2 learning in classrooms to offer an additional communicative outlet and improve children's social skills, neurodivergent or not. [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 investigated how English language writers in a Chinese university were able to paraphrase following instruction with an online module. Participants were separated into two groups: Group A (Individuals) and Group B (Dyads). They were then trained and assessed in their ability to complete paraphrasing tasks with a pre and posttest. Prewriting collaboration between the dyads was collected and measured through participant notes and responses. Participants completed questionnaires after the training and posttests. All participants improved significantly from the use of the paraphrasing strategy. No significant difference (p = 0.337, 0.646, 0.509) was found between mean scores from the Training task and the Post task. This suggests that participants were able to produce more complete paraphrases than in the Pre task using the RAIWC strategy even without the step-by-step guidance that they had received in the training modules. [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.]

Arabic emphasis refers to the production of consonants resulting from a primary constriction in the dental or alveolar region and a secondary constriction in the back of the vocal tract, recognized as 'Emphatic.' These have contrastive consonants produced in the dental or alveolar region, recognized as 'Plain.' The existing research on emphasis in Arabic has identified specific acoustic parameters that distinguish between plain versus emphatic consonants in production and factors that have been shown to influence the perception of emphatics. While previous studies have established these patterns for both native speakers of Arabic and L2 learners of Arabic, they have not yet been tested for Arabic heritage speakers, who acquired the heritage vernacular language at home since birth and the majority language of society at school age. In this dissertation, we focused on the Arabic heritage speakers' production and perception of monosyllabic CVC word pairs that were contrasted in the initial or final, with consonants as plain or emphatic. We compared their performance to that of L2 learners of Arabic. Specifically, we asked whether Arabic heritage speakers maintain the contrast between plain and emphatic consonants better than L2 learners in the acoustic parameters F1 and F2 of surrounding vowels, the COG of fricatives, and the VOT of stops, and whether vowel context and position of the emphatic consonant within a word modulate emphasis perception for heritage speakers versus L2 learners. The study involved 18 Arabic heritage speakers and 18 English-speaking learners of Arabic who participated in oral production and word identification tasks. The results show that Arabic heritage speakers outperformed L2 learners in maintaining the contrast between plain and emphatic consonants in the acoustic parameter F2 of surrounding vowels. As for F1, VOT of stops and COG of fricatives were unreliable acoustic cues of emphasis in Arabic. The vowel context influenced perceptual accuracy, but in ways that differed across consonant types. For emphatic consonants, accuracy was relatively similar across different vowel contexts, but for plain consonants, accuracy changed according to the vowel contexts /ae/>/u/>/i/. Word position influenced accuracy in ways that differed for the two participant groups. Arabic heritage speakers identified the contrasts in both word positions with comparable accuracy, whereas the L2 learners exhibited decreased accuracy in the word-final position. The study findings indicate that Arabic heritage speakers demonstrated some benefit from exposure to vernacular input in producing and perceiving emphatic-plain contrasts. [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.]