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.…

Listeners selectively tune in to the most relevant cues for contrasting sounds, and this process impacts their perceptual sensitivity to these cues (Nosofsky, 1986; Pisoni, 1991). For bilingual listeners, recent work suggests a shared L1/L2 phonology system with the phonetic properties of each sound established in a language-specific way…

Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

Collocations are words that have a tendency to co-occur within a few words' spans, e.g., "drink coffee" and "dark chocolate" in English. Growing empirical evidence suggests that both native (L1) speakers and advanced second language (L2) learners process two-word collocations faster than unconnected word pairs, and that…

Relative clause (RC) production is an important language milestone for children. Incorporating a felicitous context when assessing RC production is of theoretical and clinical value. This study investigated how a felicitous context influenced elicited production of RCs from monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Mandarin-English speaking…

Code-switching has been studied from different approaches, ranging from syntactical, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, phonetically and many others. One key area that phonetic studies have explore has been the production of VOT in Spanish-English bilinguals due to the differences across the languages. To understand how bilinguals co-activate…

Nonnative English speakers are often judged based on their accent, but accent is perceived as well as produced. Race, gender, and religion interact to create complex and nuanced figures of personhood (Agha, 2005) impacting teachers' perceptions of students. Teachers' individual differences, including language proficiency, exposure to language, and…

The present study investigates the time course of acoustic cue integration in the processing of the Korean three-way laryngeal stop contrast by native Korean listeners and English second language (L2) learners of Korean. As such, this study seeks to understand how native listeners and L2 learners weight and integrate fine-grained acoustic…

Upon acquiring or learning another language, cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is an inevitable phenomenon with which a bilingual speaker lives. One key aspect of CLI is its bidirectionality, flowing between both the first (L1) and second languages (L2) mutually affecting each other. However, investigations of L1 CLI on L2 have dominated previous…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This study investigates the effects of four online vocabulary tasks on second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition among learners of different proficiency levels. While tasks are widely used to support L2 vocabulary learning, the efficacy of a task depends on the interplay between task and learner factors. Thus, choosing an appropriate task…