The present study explored perceptual and articulatory techniques addressing the pronunciation of Spanish rhotics by means of a week-long computerized training. Through a quasi-experimental design approach, the study tested the utility of the online training and its effects on the phonetic production of taps [voiced alveolar tap or flap] and…

Semantic illusions are recognition errors that occur when an individual fails to notice that information contradicts their prior knowledge (Barton & Sanford, 1993; Erickson & Mattson, 1981). For example, after hearing the question, "If a plane crashes while flying over state lines, where should the survivors be buried?" many…

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping…

Errors in mathematics are common hurdles for teachers and students; therefore, it is important to learn what errors students make and how students treat them. This study initially identified the types of errors students made while working with algebraic expressions and documented and analyzed the process of students completing an error analysis…

In second language acquisition, it is well known that an early age of onset and an extensive amount of naturalistic input are key elements promoting successful learning outcomes. What is less well known is what outcomes we can expect when the main source of these elements is full-immersion schooling, defined for the purposes of this study as a…

In an increasingly complex world, it is imperative that undergraduate science courses prepare students to make confident, informed decisions and predictions. The research presented in this thesis focuses on supporting students to engage in mechanistic reasoning (MR) about phenomena in chemistry and biology (that is, thinking about how and why…

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…

Typically developing (TD) children, as young as four years of age, have demonstrated enhanced noun learning when orthographic representations are presented during learning tasks. This dissertation investigated the impact of orthographic support on word learning in diverse populations, focusing on children from a variety of clinical categories…

Academic speech in the higher education community is an important form of communication and connection for scholars. Metacognition of academic speech for international multilingual graduate students is an understudied area. The purpose of the current study was to understand metacognition during academic speech for international multilingual…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Previous literature has shown that voicing contrast is a difficult feature for Chinese-English emergent bilingual learners of L3 Spanish (Bravo Diaz, 2020; Chen, 2007; Zhang, 2022). The production of voicing contrast in stops has been broadly investigated in second and third language studies (e.g., Zampini, 1998; Llama, 2010; Wrembel, 2014), but…

This dissertation analyzes the production and perception of lexical stress in trilinguals' first, second, and third languages (L1, L2, and L3) to evaluate how the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis applies to L3 acquisition. According to this hypothesis, acoustic cues to stress have different weights across languages, and results from both…

Bilingual advantage literature proposes that bilinguals perform significantly better on tasks of executive functioning when compared to monolingual individuals. This study explored the theory of the bilingual advantage when individuals were exposed to an increased cognitive load due to emotionally valenced stimuli. Due to the limited capacity of…

This dissertation consists of three projects that were designed to investigate collegiate instrumentalists' practice habits and motivation orientations. The first investigation was a review of the literature about instrumental practice strategies, motivation orientations, and social factors influencing music practice. The second investigation was…

"Natural language understanding" (NLU) of text is a fundamental challenge in AI, and it has received significant attention throughout the history of NLP research. This primary goal has been studied under different tasks, such as Question Answering (QA) and Textual Entailment (TE). In this thesis, we investigate the NLU problem through…