This dissertation analyzes the production and perception of lexical stress in trilinguals' first, second, and third languages (L1, L2, and L3) to evaluate how the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis applies to L3 acquisition. According to this hypothesis, acoustic cues to stress have different weights across languages, and results from both…

This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English-French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children…

Even though engineering and science are tasked with developing solutions and knowledge for a diverse population, Black and Brown communities remain severely underrepresented in these disciplines. The problem exceeds easy solutions like "a seat at the table" and requires rethinking with whom and for whom the field designs ideas and…

Monolingual children identify referents uniquely in gesture before they do so with words, and parents translate these gestures into words. Children benefit from these translations, acquiring the words that their parents translated earlier than the ones that are not translated. Are bilingual children as likely as monolingual children to identify…

Previous studies have yielded contradictory results on the relationship between perception and production in second language (L2) phonological processing. We re-examine the relationship between the two modalities both within and across processing levels, addressing several issues regarding methodology and statistical analyses. We focus on the…

Bilingual children's dominance can predict a variety of language and cognitive outcomes. The purpose of this study was to test the validity of parents' classifications of 3- to 6-year-old bilingual children's dominance against relative receptive vocabulary scores. In Study 1, the parents' classifications of Mandarin-English bilingual children's…

This study investigated the impact of language modality and age of acquisition on semantic fluency in American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Experiment 1 compared semantic fluency performance (e.g., name as many animals as possible in 1 min) for deaf native and early ASL signers and hearing monolingual English speakers. The results showed…

The present study draws on the theoretical framework of translanguaging and seeks to shed light on the patterns of translanguaging and how translanguaging affects meaning-making processes among bilingual children in preschool. This case study focuses on 8 months of observation and recordings of pupils ranging in age from 3 to 6 years. The gathered…

Previous studies comparing emotion and emotion-laden word processing have used various cognitive tasks, including an Affective Simon Task (Altarriba and Basnight-Brown in "Int J Billing" 15(3):310-328, 2011), lexical decision task (LDT; Kazanas and Altarriba in "Am J Psychol", in press), and rapid serial visual processing…

This study examines the role of cross-linguistic transfer versus general processing strategy in two groups of heritage speakers (n = 28 per group) with the same heritage language -- Russian -- and typologically different dominant languages: English and Estonian. A group of homeland Russian speakers (n = 36) is tested to provide baseline…

This dissertation research examines the acquisition of second language vowels. For second language learners, learning a new languages' sound inventory, particularly its vowels, presents a challenge perceptually and in terms of production. Incorrectly perceiving and producing sounds in a second language results in a foreign accent in many adult…

Most language experiences take place at the level of multiple sentences. However, previous studies of second language (L2) comprehension have typically focused on lexical- and sentence-level processing. Our study addresses this gap by examining auditory discourse comprehension in 32 English/French bilinguals. We tested the prediction of the noisy…

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the…

Because dual-language books (DLBs) are written entirely in two languages, they have the potential to help readers develop multilingual literacy skills while acting as cultural and/or linguistic windows and mirrors. However, the ways in which publishers choose words when translating, format languages, and represent cultures have implications for…

This ethnographic study utilized border theory to examine how a bilingual Latinx teacher created equitable instruction for Mexican immigrant second-graders in a 50-50 dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. Midwest. Approximately half the students in the DL classroom came from Spanish-speaking, working-class homes, and half from English-speaking,…