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…

This study explored subprocesses of reading for 157 fifth grade Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) by examining whether morphological awareness made a unique contribution to reading comprehension beyond a strong covariate-phonological decoding. The role of word reading and reading vocabulary as mediators of this relationship was…

Purpose: Inference-making skills are necessary for reading comprehension. Training in riddle appreciation is an effective way to improve reading comprehension among English-speaking children. However, it is not clear whether these methods generalize to other writing systems. The goal of the present study was to investigate the relationship between…

This dissertation is about the elements that build verbs, the elements that introduce arguments, and how these elements interact to determine the interpretation of arguments and events. A theory of argument structure is a theory how arguments are introduced syntactically, interpreted semantically, and marked morphologically, and how this…

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…

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 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…

This dissertation focuses on the apparent linguistic discontinuity reflected in notarial texts from the twelfth to the thirteenth century in the Iberian Peninsula. Particular attention is given to the historical development of Spanish personal a (the direct object animacy marker), which can be used to trace the communicative continuity that must…

The vast majority of American-born adults are exposed to written language from a very early age. Most Americans live in a print-based society where letters and words are everywhere! Drive, walk, or bike down any American street and you will see numerous eye-catching billboards, signs, and storefronts. Our towns, cities, neighborhoods, and homes…

Malay (Rumi) is alphabetic and has a transparent, agglutinative system of affixation. We manipulated language-specific junctural phonetics in Malay and English to investigate whether morphophonemic L1-knowledge influences L2-processing. A morpheme decision task, "Does this "nonword" sound like a mono- or bi-morphemic English word?", was developed…

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…

The purpose of the present research is to examine which of the two factors: (1) the iconic-semiotic factor; or (2) the human-phonetic factor is more relevant in explaining the appearance and distribution of the hand shape B-bent in Israeli Sign Language (ISL). The B-bent shape has been the subject of much attention in sign language research…

Purpose: The purpose of this experiment was to determine if nonreferential morphophonological information was sufficient to facilitate the learning of gender subcategories (i.e., masculine vs. feminine) in individuals with normal language (NL) and those with a history of language-based learning disabilities (HLD). Method: Thirty-two adults…

The goal of the present study was to explore the pattern of lexical connections between translation equivalents represented in the cognitive system of an Arabic-Hebrew bilingual. To achieve this goal, repetition priming effects (reaction times (RTs) and accuracy measures) were compared between translation equivalents in the two forms of Arabic,…

Women are better than men at verbal memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory, while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural memory, predicts a female…