While considering Makoni and Pennycook's (2006) critique of the colonial nature of the notion of singular languages in this dissertation, a documentation and investigation of English and Spanish use on billboards in Carolina, Guaynabo, and San Juan, three cities in Puerto Rico, is presented. The billboards in these towns make use of Spanish, the…

The ability to speak in a second language (L2) requires a certain level of linguistic proficiency, but the ability to "live" in a second language requires a certain level of "sociolinguistic" proficiency. L2 sociolinguistic variables present acquisitional challenges for language learners, since informal discourse features are…

Originating in the 1960's with the work of William Labov, the field of sociolinguistics has given way to a rich literature that continues to uncover the many ways in which social factors influence how we produce, perceive, and process speech. Sociolinguistic research has burgeoned alongside increasing globalization and migration, which has, in the…

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…

Many phenomena in psycholinguistics have been studied using artificial paradigms due to laboratory limitations. Code-switching may be one of the phenomena experimentally studied with the most egregious disregard for the environment it appears in and purposes it serves. Our research group has emphasized the necessity of introducing these factors…

The founding and inception of Coral Way's bilingual program marked the beginning of Miami's multilingual era, as well as the start of modern bilingual education in the U.S. As multilingual and multicultural Miami has evolved, bilingual programming has not remained a priority in the school district. This dissertation study examines how language…

This dissertation examines the linguistic behavior of code-switching in three groups of highly proficient Cantonese-English bilinguals. Code-switching refers to alternating between two or more languages within the same sentence or between two sentences. While traditional research on bilingualism often compares bilingual speakers against…

This dissertation explores Spanish copular verbs, "ser" and "estar" (both 'to be' in English), in pre-adjectival contexts within two Spanish varieties: first-language (L1) Chilean speakers from Santiago (N = 29) and second-language (L2) English-speaking learners studying in Chile (N = 31). Bridging sociolinguistics and second…

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…

This dissertation explores Spanish nominal plural formation from a morphophonological perspective. The primary objective is to better understand heritage bilinguals' (HBs') phonological categorization of the morphological element of number in their heritage language. This is done by way of picture-naming elicitation tasks of consonant-final nouns…

This qualitative case study explores how five multilingual student writers (re)negotiate their multilingual literacies histories with emergent U.S. academic writing conventions as part of a first-year multilingual composition (FYMC) class. In pursuit of examining this (re)negotiation, first, I define multilingual literacies as nomadic (Ciolfi…

In Thai, the presence of a surface contrast between /r/ and /1/ in onsets is sociolinguistically governed--in formal contexts, the surface variants are contrastive, while in less formal contexts, they are often indistinguishable. This dissertation examines whether this effect also occurs in the American English production of the /r/-/l/ contrast…

English teachers, especially those in the field of basic writing, have long debated how to teach writing to students whose home language differs from the perceived norm. This thesis intervenes in that stalemated debate by re-examining "elaborated codes" and by arguing for a type of correctness in writing that includes being correct…

Since 1980, the number of people in the United States who speak a language other than English at home has increased by 140% (United States Census Bureau, 2010). Therefore a greater percentage of students now are multilingual. Throughout the world, multilingualism is considered the norm and monolingualism is the exception (Auer & Wei, 2008). In…

This sociolinguistic-variationist investigation sheds light on two little-studied issues concerning Spanish DOM, or variable use of a before animate "direct objects" (DOs), in vernacular language: the complex interaction of co-occurring linguistic (type of verb; definiteness, specificity, grammatical number, topicality, type and…