Although coaching has a long history guided in the apprenticeship or mentorship model (Taylor & Garratt, 2013), research has primarily focused on the athlete, rarely on the coach, and almost never on whom the coach is serving as an apprentice to, or being mentored or supported by. Internationally, this role has been termed a 'coach developer,'…

The acquisition of a sound system is an integral component of second language (L2) communication, yet it is one of the most difficult skills to teach and is therefore largely ignored in L2 classrooms (Derwing, 2010). In laboratory settings, phonetic training studies have typically examined syllables, rather than words, with no referential meaning.…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to memory for future intentions (e.g. remembering to press a button when you see an animal word). Researchers classify PM intentions in the laboratory as focal or nonfocal primarily in two ways. One way, task-appropriateness, refers to how the processing for the intention relates to the processing required for an…

This dissertation explores why grammatical structures are better learned implicitly or explicitly by investigating differential object marking (DOM) in Spanish. To address the effectiveness of implicit versus explicit instruction in the classroom, the researcher focused on two of the main features that constrain DOM in Spanish: animacy and…

The present study examines instructional approaches and cognitive factors involved in elementary school children's thinking and learning the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS), a critical aspect of scientific reasoning. Previous research has identified several features related to effective instruction of CVS, including using a guided learning…

Accurate and rapid word recognition requires highly-specified phonological, orthographic, and semantic word-specific representations. It has been established that children acquire these representations through phonological decoding in a process known as orthographic learning. Studies examining orthographic learning and its predictors have thus far…

Late second language (L2) learners often struggle with L2 prosody, both in perception and production. This may result from first language (L1) interference or some property of how a second language functions in a late learner independent of what their L1 might be. Here we investigate prosody's role in determining information structure through…

We represent events as composed of participants. In "Joan was eating lasagna in the lecture hall," for example, this eating event is "partitioned" into participants, including at least Joan, the lasagna, and the lecture hall. In this dissertation, I address two questions about events and the participants that populate them:…

The field of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) has expressed interest in pursuing a research agenda that expands the current heritage language (HL) strand of research to investigate how this heterogeneous population re-learns their family language, and how this experience differs from that of second language (L2) learners. This…

This dissertation proposes a dynamical computational model of the timecourse of phonological parameter setting. In the model, phonological representations embrace phonetic detail, with phonetic parameters represented as activation fields that evolve over time and determine the specific parameter settings of a planned utterance. Existing models of…

Indirect metaphors are pervasive in everyday language: People talk about "long" vacations, "short" tempers, and "colorful" language. But, why do we use concrete lexical items that are associated with the physical world when we talk about abstract, or non-physical, concepts? A potential answer is provided by proponents…

This is a pilot study of a proposed model for examining the main and interactionist effects of achievement goal orientations on moral function and the role of perceived ability as a potential moderator in sport morality levels through cluster analysis procedures. One hundred and three elite (103) athletes participating in Division I wrestling…

People are increasingly looking to online social communities as ways of communicating. However, even as participation in social networking is increasing, online communities often fail to coalesce. Noted success factors for online communities are linked to the community's purpose and culture. They are also related to structures that allow for…

This dissertation introduces and evaluates a new methodology for studying aspects of human language processing and the factors to which it is sensitive. It makes use of the phoneme restoration illusion (Warren, 1970). A small portion of a spoken sentence is replaced by a burst of noise. Listeners typically mentally restore the missing phoneme(s),…

The new developments in syntactic theory under Minimalism reconsiders the relation between the language faculty and general cognitive systems whereby language acquisition is accomplished by the interaction of Chomsky (2005)'s three factors: (F1) a minimally specified UG (Genetic endowment); (F2) Primary Linguistic Data (PLD), i.e., input; and (F3)…