Socio-economic status (SES) impacts the amount and type of input children hear in ways that have developmental consequences. Here, we examine the effect of SES on the use of variation sets (successive utterances with partial self-repetitions) in child-directed speech (CDS). Variation sets have been found to facilitate language learning, but have…

This dissertation investigates the pathways and causes of the development of glide deletion in Seoul Korean. Seoul provides fertile ground for studies of linguistic innovation in an urban setting since it has seen rapid historical, social and demographic changes in the twentieth century. The phenomenon under investigation is the variable deletion…

This study was conducted with both Bulgarian and Turkish eight-grade students, who studied in two different middle schools. It was aimed to understand Bulgarian, Romanian and Turkish students' metaphors on STEM disciplines. 18 Bulgarian, 23 Romanian and 20 Turkish students voluntarily participated in this study. Within this context, four separate…

In the way of commentary, I offer a brief, summative reflection on the complex, multifarious nature of people's semiotic engagements in and with space. Against the backdrop of three snapshot case studies, I suggest there are actually few neat boundaries to be drawn between the linguistic and non-linguistic, between the semiotic and the spatial,…

We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the 'south' and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the Américas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have…

Classrooms are not always linguistically permeable, and instruction focused on bolstering English reading comprehension too often neglects students' additional linguistic resources in languages other than English. However, to the task of comprehending English text, multilingual readers bring a host of communicative resources across multiple…

For more than a decade, research on heritage speakers' (HSs') mood selection has documented a high degree of variability in their interpretation and use of mood morphology in variable contexts. Most of the previous literature, however, has focused on late-acquired alternations, and often limited analyses to one form (i.e., subjunctive), making it…

The present paper addresses the study of non-arbitrariness in language within a deep learning framework. We present a set of experiments aimed at assessing the pervasiveness of different forms of non-arbitrary phonological patterns across a set of typologically distant languages. Different sequence-processing neural networks are trained in a set…

A number of studies have reported the cultural representations in English textbooks in many contexts, especially those in Asia. However, these studies relied on a small data set and the findings suffered severe limitations. To overcome such shortcomings, we self-built a corpus that has 40 volumes/books of over one million words to examine the…

This study enlists a transformative approach to mixed methods research in order to problematize what different methods can offer for expanding understandings of educator language attitudes and ideologies. Analyses consider Likert-scale survey responses and linguistic autobiography data from a sociolinguistics course in an online Educating…

This paper investigates optimal practices for teaching Chinese as a foreign language, situated within the context of adult learning theories, with a specific focus on adopting Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective. The examination delves into the theory of genre and its role in constructing meaning within cultural and social contexts, exploring its…

This essay discusses the rhetorical impacts of the consumption metaphor on how advisors think about their work using student responses to the COVID-19 pandemic to highlight the problematic nature of the consumption metaphor for higher education. Academic advisors should reconsider how they "think about" their work and their messages to…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

The current study explored the vocabulary use and examined the rhetorical move structure of World Health Organization Emergencies Press Conferences on the Coronavirus Disease. Vocabulary use was described using a corpus of 140 press conferences containing 1,139,248 running words that was analysed based on three indicator variables: vocabulary…

Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study…