Most current theories of reading and dyslexia derive from a relatively narrow empirical base: research on English and a handful of other European alphabets. Furthermore, the two dominant theoretical frameworks for describing cross-script diversity--orthographic depth and psycholinguistic grain size theory--are also deeply entrenched in Anglophone…

The 23rd Annual Graduate Student Conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature (LLL) at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa was held on Saturday, April 20th, 2019. As in past years, this conference offered the students in the six departments across the college, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, Indo-Pacific…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have known deficits in the verb lexicon and finiteness marking. This study investigated a potential relationship between these 2 variables in children with SLI and 2 control groups considering predictions from 2 different theoretical perspectives, morphosyntactic versus morphophonological.…

This thesis presents a comprehensive phonological analysis of the Weledeh dialect of Dogrib, a Northern Athabaskan language spoken in the Northwest Territories, Canada, based on the author's own fieldwork. The phonology of Northern Athabaskan languages, and Dogrib in particular, has to date been regarded as highly irregular, and subject to…

This dissertation offers a detailed account of the phonology, morphophonology and elements of the morphosyntax of Kubeo, a language from the Eastern Tukanoan family, spoken in the Northwest Amazon. The dissertation is itself an experiment of how language documentation and empowering of the native speaker community can be combined with academic…

The purpose of this eight week study was to provide explicit instruction to improve spelling to 124 sixth grade students who are speakers of African American English (AAE). Two classroom teachers taught 14 different language arts class sections. The research design was a pretest/posttest/posttest design using wait-list-control. The treatment group…

Background: Children with language impairment often exhibit significant difficulty in the use of grammatical morphology. Although English-speaking children with language impairment have special difficulties with verb morphology, noun morphology can also be problematic in languages of a different typology. Aims: Hungarian is an agglutinating…

This thesis provides a comprehensive account of the intonational phonology of Lakota, an indigenous North American language of the Siouan family. Lakota is predominantly a verb final language, characterized by complex verbal morphology. The phonological description of Lakota intonation and prosody presented here is based on acoustic analysis of…