This study explores the experiences of second-generation Latine adolescents by examining the impact of bilingualism on self-esteem and depressive symptoms. Drawing on Suarez-Orozco and colleagues' (2018) model, this study shows the multifaceted acculturation process, emphasizing linguistic acculturation as crucial for navigating two cultures. The…

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 dissertation uses the Conceptual Blending Hypothesis from the socio-cognitive method presented and refined by Kecskes (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2020) to explain how the lexical choice of bilinguals differs across sociocultural situations. Quantitative (lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication) and qualitative (lexical…

This dissertation investigated how a bilingual's experiences can affect how their first language pronunciation can differ from monolingual speakers of their two languages. We used a methodology incorporating quantitative phonetic measurements of voice onset time and vowel formants, grammar and vocabulary tests, and qualitative measures of language…

The number of English language learners (ELLs) in early childhood education (ECE) continues to increase, particularly with students whose first language (L1) is Spanish. Recent studies have shown the connection between teachers' self-efficacy and student achievement, but very few specifically address early childhood education teachers'…

Bilingualism is associated with lifelong cognitive benefits that correlate with facilitated achievements in subsequent language learning. Second language (L2) instruction as well can promote the development of cognitive abilities involved in language learning, and among these, L2 input processing. Crucial to L2 acquisition, input processing is the…

Reading development in students who are second language learners (SLLs) has been a concern of many educators. It is important to understand reading development in students who are SLLs to effectively support their reading development. The dissertation consists of two studies, presented in two stand-alone manuscripts, that aimed to deepen our…

This study explores the relationship between language selection and identity construction in contemporary Indonesia through an examination of the function of English, a language that still receives stigma from many Indonesians and the government, particularly in Indonesian popular texts published after 1998. Utilizing hybrid critical approaches…

Negation is a unique and fascinating property of human language which has been given extensive theoretical and typological treatment. One categorization divides negation use into metalinguistic negation and descriptive negation (Horn, 1985). Descriptive negation (DN) is the truth-functional semantic operator which has received the most attention…

Bilinguals sometimes outperform age-matched monolinguals on non-language tasks involving cognitive control. But the bilingual advantage is not consistently found in every experiment and may reflect specific attributes of the bilinguals tested. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if the way in which bilinguals use language, specifically…

The present study explores the use of discourse markers (DMs) in talk-in-interaction of Korean-English bilingual children and their monolingual peers in two languages. The corpus-driven analysis proposes a core meaning of the two DMs as signaling contextual divergence in two monolingual groups. Both similarities and differences coexist in the…

This dissertation describes the phonetic characteristics of a phenomenon that has previously been denominated "unstressed vowel reduction" in Andean Spanish based on the spectrographic analysis of 40,556 unstressed vowels extracted from the conversational speech of 150 residents of the city of Cusco, Peru. Results demonstrate that this…

A significant and growing proportion of students in the United States speak primarily a non-English language at home. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of academic achievement patterns among language minority students in the United States. The first essay uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey Kindergarten Class…

The universality of reading comprehension strategies across languages is a view generally accepted. What has not been clearly established, however, is the degree to which specific comprehension strategies are used by skilled L1 and L2 readers in the early grades. To investigate this issue, similarities and differences in the reading strategies of…

Math anxiety levels and performance outcomes were compared for bilingual and monolingual community college Intermediate Algebra students attending a culturally diverse urban commuter college. Participants (N = 618, 250 men, 368 women; 361 monolingual, 257 bilingual) completed the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (AMAS) and a demographics instrument.…