Heritage grammars, linguistic varieties emerging in the context of intergenerational language loss, are known to diverge from the corresponding full-fledged baseline varieties in principled and systematic ways, as typically illustrated by errors made by heritage speakers in production. This dissertation examines "covert" restructuring of aspect in…

Language proficiency before school entry has proven to be a powerful predictor of literacy development. This longitudinal study examined how simultaneous exposure to two richly inflected languages from birth contributes to the development of language-related literacy precursors at preschool age compared to peers exposed to one language. The…

Social psychologists have suggested that language-based ideologies related to "stereotype threat" (i.e. variations in performance-based on ability perceptions of language groups) may affect students' academic achievement regardless of school language support. However, it is unclear whether efforts to support students' first language…

This study investigates the cross-cultural realization of request patterns. The goal of the study is to compare the realization of requests produced by adult American English speaking learners of Russian (NNS) to that of native speakers of Russian and native speakers of English to identify the similarities and differences between native and…

Previous research indicates that multiple levels of linguistic information play a role in the perception and discrimination of non-native phonemes. This study examines the interaction of phonetic, phonemic and phonological factors in the discrimination of non-native phonotactic contrasts. Listeners of Catalan, English, and Russian are presented…

New York City sets itself apart from many locations in the USA due to its citizens' unparalleled diversity. The degree to which schools either build upon or suppress the backgrounds of their linguistically and culturally diverse students is dependent on the degree to which they can provide an education that is both bilingual and multicultural.…

Much attention has been paid to the delay in writing acquisition caused by irregularities of Russian orthography, but little is known about their effect on reading acquisition. Results of the present longitudinal reading acquisition study of Russian first graders suggest that phonological recoding is the dominant strategy in the initial phase of…

In Ukraine, the Russian and Ukrainian languages have historically alternated in policy and practice in their official status and social prestige. As in many areas of the world, English is emerging in Ukraine as a language of economic value, social prestige, and education though it is not a language of wider communication. The goal of the research…

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationships between working memory (WM) and three commonly used learning strategies or conditions in the nature of proficiency among adult L2 Russian learners. Based on the aptitude-learning condition interaction framework articulated by Robinson (2002b), the study identifies two types of…

The purpose of this case-study was to understand the relationship between success in college and L2 academic writing of three Generation 1.5 Russian-speaking middle-class college students and to describe the factors that could have contributed to the levels of academic literacy that these students developed. The following research questions were…

In this article we report on the development of an interactive open source extensible software, dubbed "The 7 Keys of the Dragon," for the teaching/learning of Albanian and Russian to students (9-12 years old) with the respective languages as their heritage languages. Based on the assumption that games in language learning are associated…

The present paper addresses the issue of cross-linguistic transfer of phonemic awareness and word identification skills across two linguistically distant languages (Russian and Hebrew). The role of early literacy learning was directly assessed by distinguishing two groups of Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals; bi-literate (n = 39) and…

Total enrollments (undergraduate and graduate) in languages other than English dropped by 9.2% between fall 2013 and fall 2016, as reported in the Modern Language Association's twenty-fifth language enrollment census. Despite the overall drop, there were gains in nearly half of all language programs (45.5%) that mitigate somewhat the downward…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the mediational function of the gesture-speech interface in the instructional conversation that emerged as teachers attempted to explain the meaning of English words to their students in two EFL classrooms in the Ukraine. Its analytical framework is provided by Vygotsky's sociocultural psychology…