General principles of human cognition can help to explain why languages are more likely to have certain characteristics than others: structures that are difficult to process or produce will tend to be lost over time. One aspect of cognition that is implicated in language use is working memory--the component of short-term memory used for temporary…

This study aimed to examine the validity of the "simple view of reading" (SVR) model in the diglossic Arabic language. Using a longitudinal design, we tested whether decoding and listening comprehension (LC) in kindergarten can later predict reading comprehension (RC) in the first grade and whether the contribution of LC to RC differs…

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant ("good") and task-relevant ("bad") parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token…

Iterated learning models of language evolution have typically been used to study the emergence of language, rather than historical language change. We use iterated learning models to investigate historical change in the accent classes of two Korean dialects. Simulations reveal that many of the patterns of historical change can be explained as…

Many individuals with autism experience challenges using language in social contexts (i.e., pragmatic language). Characterizing and understanding pragmatic variability is important to inform intervention strategies and the etiology of communication challenges in autism; however, current manual coding-based methods are often time and labor…

Computational models of child language development can help us understand the cognitive underpinnings of the language learning process, which occurs along several linguistic levels at once (e.g., prosodic and phonological). However, in light of the replication crisis, modelers face the challenge of selecting representative and consolidated infant…

Subtitling is one of the most commonly employed types of audiovisual translation, for being cheaper and easier to be compared with other types, and also being adopted as the process of rendering aural, visual, and written modes into one single mode of communication, The current study is a translation analysis of the first fifty minutes of the…

Until now, there has been very little unified analysis of metadiscourse across speech and writing. Drawing on a reflexive metadiscourse model, this article conducts a multidimensional analysis of metadiscourse across 10 spoken and written registers in a corpus of 626 texts. Two metadiscourse dimensions, participants' interaction and discourse…

Language documentation is increasingly seen as a collaborative process, engaging community members as active participants. Collaborative research produces better documentation that is valuable for both the academic community and the speakers. However, in many communities, speakers and language advocates lack the skills necessary to fully engage in…

As English continues to spread as an international lingua franca, there is a growing diversity in its use around the world. As a result, there are calls for embracing the diversity in the teaching, learning and assessment of the language. At the same time, there is a growing criticism against the widely taken language tests such as the Test of…

Haugen's model (in "Sociolinguistics," Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp 97-111, 1972 [1966]) of standardisation has been widely adopted in general histories of particular languages, not least because of its clarity and simplicity. In this article, I focus on its treatment of codification, with a view to suggesting refinements to this part of…

Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…

Research in phonetics has established the grammatical status of gradient phonetic patterns in language, suggesting that there is a component of the grammar that governs systematic relationships between discrete phonological representations and gradiently continuous acoustic or articulatory phonetic representations. This dissertation joins several…

A new trend in the creation of multimodal products has been to include various ethnicities and languages to be more representative of current societies. The presence of more than one language can be problematic and challenging for translators, and consequently, various scholars have attempted to propose possible strategies for rendering such…

Traditionally, many English language teachers around the world have conformed to an English as a foreign language (EFL) model. In this model, they expose their students to the standard language norms of English-dominant nations, such as the United States and the United Kingdom. However, English learners do not only need language skills to…