The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the perception of unstressed vowel reduction (UVR)--also known as vowel devoicing--in Central Mexican Spanish. UVR is a variable, gradient process in which vowels undergo a constellation of phonetic weakening processes including shortening, devoicing, and apparent deletion (Gordon 1998). While it is…

Bilinguals employ both global and local control mechanisms to manage coactivated languages that compete for selection, yet little is known about how they operate on morphosyntactic information. The current study investigated bilingual language control mechanisms for a morphosyntactic production task. Across two experiments, 48 early…

Attitudes are learned and one's personal experience and social environment play a role in shaping them. Teachers in particular exert a significant impact on the formation of students' language attitudes. This study targets prospective teachers. It is a replication of a survey whose data collection took place 18 years ago in the Basque Autonomous…

The most recent "Open Doors" report by the Institute of International Education (IIE, 2020) indicates that the number of non-white U.S. study abroad students has been steadily growing over the past 10 years, and now it accounts for 31% of all students pursuing part of their education abroad. This study focuses on four Spanish heritage…

While much of the literature regarding Spanish as a heritage language has focused on higher education institutions and areas of traditional immigration in the United States, less research has specifically examined Spanish heritage language learner (HLL) policies in states like Tennessee that have recently experienced an exponential rise in the…

Computer science and computational thinking (CT) education in K-12 schools have been escalating in recent years. A couple of CT instructional models have been proposed to depict the roles of CT in K-16 education. Yet, neither of them discussed CT infusion into a subject course. In this article, we proposed a CT-integration model called…

Motivated by a series of interconnected studies on simultaneous attention to form and meaning, we revisit L2 learners' real-time processing of text by using eye-tracking as an unobtrusive method to provide concurrent data on attention allocation. Seventy-five L2 Spanish learners were instructed to attend to an assigned form in a reading passage…

Learners must develop the ability to perceive linguistic and social meaning in their second language (L2) to interact effectively, but relatively little is known about how learners link social meaning to a single phonetic variable. Using a matched-guise test targeting coda /s/ (realized as [s] or debuccalized [h]), we explore whether L2 Spanish…

Since there are no systematic pauses delimiting words in speech, the problem of word segmentation is formidable even for monolingual infants. We use computational modeling to assess whether word segmentation is substantially harder in a bilingual than a monolingual setting. Seven algorithms representing different cognitive approaches to…

Background: Previous research has shown that syllables are important units in visual word recognition in Spanish. If they are treated as real phonological units, then other related phonological features such as lexical stress (syllable prominence) may also play a role in this process. At times, lexical stress is the only difference between minimal…

Cross-linguistic influence has been observed across all domains of language. However, nothing is known about the role of cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speakers' use of vocal fry. Several recent studies have identified an upsurge in the use of vocal fry among female speakers of American English. We sought to identify cross-linguistic…

Researchers have stressed the need for more bilingual counselors to serve the growing Spanish-speaking, Latinx population (Biever et al., 2002; Delgado-Romero et al., 2018; Santiago-Rivera, 1995). Bilingual counselors must be properly trained to provide competent bilingual counseling services as many undertrained bilingual counselors report…

This paper is motivated by growing, inexorable tensions between societal impetus to advance inclusive (non-binary) linguistic change across many Spanish-speaking communities, and the seemingly removed reality of the Spanish as a world language classroom. As a first step in reconciling these tensions and breaking free from apparent disciplinary…

Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds. Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a…

In this paper, we address a lack of assessments of partner language development in dual language immersion (DLI) programs. We propose several important considerations that are necessary for the creation of research-based assessments of partner language development in DLI programs, focusing on Spanish as an example. We first discuss what these…