Social information is cognitively linked to linguistic information, evidenced by bidirectional influences on perceptual processing of speech. Models of sociophonetic cognition theorize that the way linguistic experiences are interpreted and stored in memory is mediated by listener attention, which is guided by ideology. This relationship, however,…

This dissertation investigates how feminist and LGBTQ undergraduate students involved in activism on UC Davis use language to construct their identities, focusing on two gender and sexuality-based resource centers (the women's center and LGBTQ center). It seeks to address two research questions. First, how do cisgender, trans, and nonbinary…

*English Learners in secondary school settings often face discrepancies in opportunities and outcomes. Methods to address these discrepancies are grounded in an instrumental approach to instruction, wherein educational practitioners are understood to require methodological intervention in the form of professional development by a more experienced…

Increasingly, speakers of minoritized languages around the world are becoming uprooted due to economic pressures, political forces, and environmental destabilization. As communities leave their traditional homelands, they often experience accelerated language shift. Although youth are in a critical position to further transmit their languages to…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

This qualitative research study sought to understand the affordances and limitations of a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) approach to teaching composition at the community college level. The study took place over the course of a semester in two developmental college composition classes using the language of SFL to teach writing through…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

In our increasingly multicultural and multilingual world, an understanding of how we perceive language, dialects, and linguistic variation and the relationship these features have to language attitude, plays an increasingly important role in shaping social behavior and policy. This study, situated at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience,…

This dissertation advances research in sociolinguistics by analyzing phonetic variation in a majority Asian American community in San Francisco, California. As one of the first community studies focusing on Asian Americans in an urban US context, this work speaks to ongoing discussions about speaker ethnicity, phonetic variation, and regional…