Linguistics Commons^™

The Association Between The Number Of Languages Spoken, Working Memory, And Emotional Regulation In Monolingual English Speakers And Fluent Multilingual English And Non-English Speakers, Eun-Sung Chang

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite the growing linguistic diversity of the population in the United States, multilingual individuals remain underrepresented in psychological research and often experience disparities in access to culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health care. Using a cross-sectional design and quantitative methods, the present study examined the relationships among the number of languages spoken, working memory, and emotional regulation. A total of 94 participants (30 monolingual English speakers and 64 multilingual speakers who spoke English and at least one other language fluently) completed the Working Memory Index (WMI) of the WAIS-IV and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). Results revealed no …

Omoiyari In The Performance Of American Learners Of Japanese: An Analysis Of Second Culture Compilation And Pragmatic Transfer, Shizuka Fukuo

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines omoiyari (consideration for others) as a Japanese cultural theme by examining how it is enacted by native Japanese speakers and American learners of Japanese during an invitation scenario. L2 learners' incorporation of the target culture's linguistic and behavioral norms is essential to fully participate in ways that read as natural in that culture. However, relatively little research has examined the extent to which L2 learners are able to enact culturally embedded norms in L2 interaction. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to explaining the cultural theme of omoiyari as it is enacted in an invitation role-play provides …

Social And Structural Factors In The Development Of Baltimore's Low Back Vowels, Aidan J. Malanoski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is concerned with the low back vowels of Baltimore English: what low back systems occur, and how these systems have changed among Black and white Baltimoreans. I draw on two sources of data: 48 interviews that I conducted with natives of Baltimore and its inner suburbs, and 18 oral history interviews that were conducted from 1978 to 1981. In Chapter 3, I argue for the inclusion of the pre-rhotic sets START and NORTH in typologies of English low back vowels. With these sets included, several previously unattested low back systems are found in Baltimore. These are united by …

The Negotiated Identities Of Refugee-Background Women During Resettlement, Iuliia Fakhrutdinova

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Refugee-background women experience unique challenges while resettling in the U.S. as they navigate complicated transnational gender roles, education gaps, migration trauma, learning a new language, and literacy in the adaptation process during resettlement, which can derail the productive paths they are on. Therefore, ignoring refugee-background women’s unique experiences and failing to understand their identities prevents our society from doing social justice and creating a space for a smooth adaptation to the new context. Language plays a paramount role in identity formation, as it moves away from the belief that identity is an essential concept. For refugee-background women during resettlement, their …

Cognitive Flexibility In Broader Autism Phenotype: Does Bilingualism Benefit And Emotion Hinder?, Nardin M. Yacoub

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The broader autism phenotype (BAP) is a milder manifestation of autistic traits just below the clinical threshold for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and provides a framework for studying and defining these traits in individuals related to autistic people. Cognitive flexibility (CF) is an executive functioning (EF) skill characterized by the ability to switch between tasks or thoughts based on environmental demands. The current study examined whether BAP was associated with CF and how bilingualism and emotion influenced this relationship across development. Previous research has found that bilinguals show enhanced task-switching abilities. Individuals with BAP may show differences in emotional processing, …

Co-Constructing The Common Ground: Responses In American Sign Language Conversation, Deborah Wager

Linguistics ETDs

Common ground between two people consists of the things they both know, that they know they both know. This body of knowledge grows in conversation, through both verbal and nonverbal responses. Responses communicate whether what has been said was accepted into the common ground, and return responses acknowledge this acceptance in turn (H. H. Clark, 1996). In addition to the semantic content of utterances, stance is communicated through a variety of means, and alignment with that stance is also communicated through responses.

This study explores ways in which responses are used in American Sign Language (ASL) conversation to co-construct the …

Documenting Regional And Individual Variation In Taiwan Sign Language, Devin Alexander Tankersley

Linguistics ETDs

Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) has been characterized by a north-south dialectal divide since the beginning of its development in the early twentieth century, further complicated by contact with Chinese Sign Language and with Mandarin. Considering increased interconnectivity across Taiwan, this dissertation asks: does the traditional north-south dialectal distinction still hold? To address this question, fieldwork was conducted across six areas of Taiwan to develop a data set consisting of word elicitations and sociolinguistic interviews. Findings from quantitative and qualitative analyses of these data suggest that TSL is not undergoing straightforward dialect leveling, but rather convergence towards a mixed variety shaped …

You Can't Teach Kids From A Book: Language, Authority And Revitalization In Jicarilla Apache Life, Mariann Skahan

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation examines how Jicarilla Apache is learned, taught, and used across community life, with particular attention to contemporary language revitalization. Based on ethnographic research with elders, educators, language workers, families, and community institutions, it follows language practices across classrooms, culture camps, homes, ceremonial settings, and collaborative archival projects. I show that linguistic knowledge does not carry the same authority or consequences in every setting. Words may be recognized without being taken up, speakers may possess linguistic knowledge without being authorized to teach or correct, and archival texts may preserve linguistic forms without preserving the relations needed to interpret and …

A Modest Proposal For Discourse Analysis In Nonbinary Communities: Method And Case Study, Nikoli Michael Daigneault

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While linguists have long used discourse analysis to study language variation in binary and nonnormative gender groups, nonbinary people have often been excluded from analyses or treated without a nonbinary-informed framework. Nevertheless, nonbinary language use can provide key insights into the relationship between gender and language. In this thesis, I propose Nonbinary Discourse Analysis, a set of recommendations and best practices for conducting discourse analysis in nonbinary communities. These methods are informed by previous empirical research on nonnormative gender identities and theoretical work in trans linguistics (Zimman, 2020) and trans epistemologies (Nordmarken, 2019; Raclaw, in press). To demonstrate the methodology, …

Teaching Intercultural Communicative Competence (Icc) At The Afl Novice Level: Teachers’ Practices And Constraints, Nancy Fahmy

Theses and Dissertations

Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) is widely recognized as a core objective in language education; however, its implementation in novice-level Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) classroom remains insufficiently examined. This study explores what strategies do AFL teachers use to integrate ICC principles at the beginner level (A1–A2), the constraints that shape classroom practice, teachers’ assessment approaches, and perceived professional development needs.

Using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, quantitative data were collected through a bilingual (Arabic–English) online survey completed by 54 AFL teachers working across instructional contexts in Egypt, Jordan, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Qualitative data were subsequently gathered …

“The Influence Of Utilizing Ai-Powered Tools (Chatgpt-5) On Afl Speaking Fluency And Learners’ Willingness To Communicate (Wtc)”, Manar Shabayek

Theses and Dissertations

The growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in education has expanded opportunities for interactive, technology-mediated language learning. This study investigates the influence of AI-mediated speaking practice using ChatGPT-5 on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) speaking fluency and willingness to communicate (WTC) among beginner Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) learners (A1–A2). It also examines the linguistic and technical challenges learners encounter during AI-supported speaking interaction. Using a mixed-method case study design, the study involves five beginner AFL learners. Data are collected through pre- and post-speaking tests, a modified online WTC questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and systematic classroom observation. Speaking fluency is analyzed …

Automatic Glossing In Under-Resourced Languages: Case Studies In Bribri And Cook Islands Māori, Carter D. Anderson

Linguistics Undergraduate Senior Theses

Interlinear glossing is a major task in Indigenous language documentation. In this paper, I explore how effectively two Large Language Models, ByT5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash, can produce interlinear glossed text. I also examine how prompting an LLM with different types of information (dictionary entries, other training samples, and translations) can augment model performance. I apply these models to two under-resourced Indigenous languages: Bribri, which is morphologically complex from Costa Rica, and Cook Islands Māori, which has a simpler morphology and is from the Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean. ByT5 exhibits much better performance when glossing Cook Islands Māori …

Computational Contrast Of Argument-Adjusting Operations In Cook Islands Māori: An Initial Exploration, Daisy Li

Linguistics Undergraduate Senior Theses

This paper presents the first corpus study of the semantic and syntactic features of active, actor emphatic, and passive constructions in Cook Islands Māori, a Polynesian language of the Cook Islands. Using computational techniques, including Universal Dependencies parsing, this project identifies and evaluates these constructions in corpus data. The actor emphatic construction is of particular interest because it is only found in Eastern Polynesian languages. However, it has historically been difficult to study due to its cross-linguistic variability and relative infrequency. This study compiles, to my knowledge, the largest corpus of Cook Islands Māori actor emphatic sentences to date, analyzing …

The Merger Of Short Rising And Falling Pitch Accents In Serbo-Croatian: A Socio-Phonetic Study, Aleksa Sotirov

Linguistics Undergraduate Senior Theses

This thesis is a sociophonetic study investigating the surface realisation of the short-falling and short-rising pitch accents in different dialects of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language. In particular, it investigates the hypothesis of a merger-in-progress between these two pitch accent contours in Belgrade and surrounding areas by analysing phonetic data collected from 17 young speakers of various dialect areas.

The study shows several significant results. We find that the two short accents are, indeed, continuing on their merging trajectory, and most strongly in the Belgrade area. Unexpectedly, we find that they tend to merge in favour of the rising accent, …

The Unspoken And The Unseen: An Analysis Of Victim Gender And Linguistic Framing Of Sexual Assault In Judicial Discourse, Sarnika Ali

Quantitative Social Science Undergraduate Senior Theses

Sexual assault is a profound legal and social crisis. However, it is also fundamentally a linguistic one. The words used, or conspicuously not used, to describe victims, perpetrators, and their actions are not neutral arbiters of fact. They are powerful mechanisms that shape perceptions of harm, attributions of blame, and assignments of credibility. The central battleground for survivors is credibility, and while a “credibility discount” is often applied to female victims, the male victim is rendered nearly invisible. This research is therefore guided by one central, overarching question: how does a sexual assault victim’s gender influence the judicial language used, …

The Tagamo3 Accent: Linguistic Stylization, Enregisterment, And Social Meaning In Egyptian Digital Discourse, Jannah M. Abdelaziz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the Tagamo3 Accent (TA), a socially recognizable speech style associated with elite urban Egyptian identity, through a qualitative multimodal discourse analysis of twelve Egyptian TikTok videos, including both naturally occurring lifestyle and influencer content as well as parody and commentary videos that explicitly imitate, discuss, or evaluate the accent. Drawing on theories of enregisterment (Agha, 2003), stylization (Coupland, 2007), and indexicality (Silverstein, 2003; Eckert, 2008), the study examines how TA is linguistically performed, socially recognized, and ideologically circulated within Egyptian digital spaces. The findings suggest that TA does not function as a structurally bounded dialect or geographically …

The Security Of Llm-Generated Code, Christopher Brian Gonzalez Ayala

Student Theses

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software development has transformed coding practices by enabling automated code generation, completion, and optimization. Despite these advantages, concerns persist regarding the security and reliability of LLM-generated code. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of both the functional correctness and security of code produced by three prominent LLMs as of early 2026. A total of 4,800 code snippets were generated using 100 security-focused programming prompts derived from the OWASP Top 10:2025, translated across eight natural languages and two phrasing styles (literal and natural developer-oriented prompts). To assess performance, a multi-stage experimental framework …

Covert Scrambling To The Edge In Tshangla: An Analysis Of Wh- In-Situ, Tshering Y. Dorji

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the syntactic derivation of wh- in-situ constructions in Tshangla, an understudied Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan. Argument wh-items can remain in-situ in islands—including sentential subjects, adjunct clauses, relative clauses, and coordinate structures—while projecting their scope to the matrix level. This island-insensitivity for certain wh-items suggests a lack of movement in the narrow syntax, yet diagnostic tests, including crossover effects, reconstruction effects, and parasitic gap licensing, provide compelling evidence for a movement-based account. I propose an analysis involving covert LF scrambling to the left edge of an island clause. This movement is driven by semantic requirements …

Black Language Matters: Capitalizing On Black English For Educational Success Through Linguistic And Cultural Competence Training, Fritz Lauriston

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

This dissertation explores the impact of culturally responsive professional development on K–12 educators’ perceptions and understanding of Black English, also known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The study responds to the longstanding marginalization of Black English in educational environments and its implications for academic equity, cultural identity, and student performance—particularly among African American learners. The central intervention, titled “Do You Understand Me? Linguistic and Cultural Competence Black English Professional Development,” was designed to increase teachers’ linguistic awareness, dismantle deficit perspectives, and promote inclusive instructional practices that validate students’ home language.

Using a mixed-method design, 59 certified educators participated in …

Japanese Learners And Mixed-Speech Styles, Nana Kawada

Dissertations and Theses

This study explores to what extent Japanese as a Target Language (JTL, henceforth) learners use mixed-speech styles. "Mixed-speech styles" refers to the phenomenon that occurs when speakers shift speech styles during the course of an interaction. The three primary speech styles are (1) the desu/masu forms, which are generally considered formal speech-level markers, (2) the non-desu/masu forms, considered informal speech-level markers, and (3) the Chūto shūryō-gata, which I translate to unfinished utterances that do not contain a clear style-marker.

The studies examined naturally occurring conversation point out that Japanese speakers often strategically manipulate and mix these speech styles …

G&P2p: A Multi-Source Approach To Grapheme To Phoneme Conversion, Chun-Yi Peng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis introduces G&P2P, a multi-source framework for grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion that integrates side pronunciations from multiple lexical resources. Unlike traditional single-source approaches, G&P2P fuses data from multi-sourced pronunciation dictionaries—including CELEX, PronLex, NETTalk, and WikiPron—through several fusion strategies. The goal is to improve model performance on out-of-vocabulary words through multi-source learning. Experiments were conducted with attentive LSTM, pointer-generator LSTM, and pointer-generator Transformer architectures. Models were trained on combinations of datasets and evaluated using word error rate (WER) across five random seeds.

Results show that fusing expert-curated dictionaries such as CELEX and PronLex consistently improves accuracy, achieving an 11.81-point absolute error …

A Machine Learning Approach To Disentangling Developmental Language Disorder From Typical Development In Russian-Speaking Children, Katsiaryna Aharodnik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated a machine learning (ML) approach to identifying Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in Russian-speaking children using narrative data. ML methods can capture subtle linguistic patterns that distinguish typical and atypical development, which is especially important in cross-linguistic contexts where morphosyntactic variation affects the manifestation of DLD. Diagnosis remains challenging in less-studied languages due to limited knowledge of language-specific deficits and a lack of validated assessment tools. This study evaluated whether ML algorithms can provide a more efficient alternative to traditional screening methods.

Two binary classification studies were conducted using corpus data: 1) classification of narratives told by Russian …

Voices Of The Young: Exploring Child Agency In Heritage Language Socialization In Chinese American Families, Yiyang Guan

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how young children in Chinese‑heritage families participate in heritage language development and maintenance (HLDM) in everyday family life. It asks four questions: what agentic behaviors young children display in heritage language socialization (HLS) and family language policy (FLP) co-construction; how they conceptualize language ideologies; what attitudes they hold toward HLDM; and whether differences in agency, ideologies, and attitudes relate to socioeconomic background.

Using a qualitative multiple‑case design, the dissertation focuses on seven families in the San Francisco Bay Area. Data includes parent and child interviews, child language portraits, child audio diaries, parent‑recorded natural conversations, and family background …

Talk To Me: Exploring The Sociocultural Ecology Of Home Language And Literacy Practices Of Families In India, Surbhi Puri

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Existing research highlights the role of home language and literacy environments (HLLE) in shaping early language and literacy development, yet few studies have examined the practices of multilingual families in India. While home environments offer rich learning opportunities, broader sociocultural and policy contexts influence how families support literacy and language development. Families’ insights into home language use, literacy routines, and cultural practices remain underexplored in early childhood education research.

The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the HLLE of preschool-aged children in India and examine how families support early language and literacy development within multilingual home …

Here-, There-, And Every Where-: Exploring The Role Of Pronominal Adverbs In Legal Language, David Chandler

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Legal language is distinctive and sometimes difficult to understand. One type of word that appears to be part of so-called ‘legalese’ is the pronominal adverb (PA). The purpose of this thesis is to examine the prevalence of PAs in legal registers compared to more general registers of contemporary American English to determine the extent to which these words are distinctly legal. The study will also explore why different types of PAs may be (in)frequent in specific legal registers to better understand their use. The frequency of PAs was extracted from corpora that are designed to represent six registers of English …

Torá: A Description Of A Dormant Chapacuran Language From Legacy Materials, Akasha Synclair

Linguistics ETDs

Torá, an Amazonian language of the Chapacuran family, went dormant as the Torá people survived colonization. Yet, in the early 1920’s, over 600 Torá words, phrases, and sentences were documented. Despite interest by today’s Torá community in language revitalization, no comprehensive analysis of the data has been undertaken. This project used methods of linguistic reconstitution, cross linguistic comparison, and the creation of an open-access database to produce a phonological and morphosyntactic analysis of Torá. Phonological findings of particular interest include evidence for vowel harmony and variable oralization of nasals. In structure, Torá is very similar to related languages, displaying a …

The Role Of Cumulative Usage In Language Learning And Language Variation: Evidence From Spanish Voiced Stops, Sarah Lease

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation investigates the cumulative repercussions of a word’s typical context of use on lexical representations and speech production, both in cases of language learning and language variation, through the lens of Usage-Based Linguistics. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-speaking children and adults of Mexican heritage living and working in the Pacific Northwestern United States. Each study examines Spanish word-initial /bdɡ/ productions using a myriad of statistical approaches. The dissertation adds to our understanding of the long-term storage of variation in lexical representations, as well as its nuanced impact on children’s and adults’ speech production. The dissertation also …

Understanding Behavioral And Representational Divergences Of Humans And Machines, Thomas Lasman Botch

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Human behavior and cognition are strikingly variable: people differ from one another in their preferences and abilities, and even from themselves across situations. Yet this diversity arises from common neural machinery shaped by the complex environments humans inhabit. A central objective of cognitive neuroscience is to understand how this varied experience emerges from interactions between brains, agents, and environments. In this dissertation, I argue that comparing behavior and neural computation across humans, artificial systems, and contexts is essential for understanding the flexibility of human cognition. Across three chapters, I use this comparative approach to examine how the rich, multimodal contexts …

Complementation In Guadeloupean Creole: An Experimental And Computational Account, William Joseph Kezerian

Theses - ALL

This thesis presents an experimental and computational investigation of complementizer variation in Guadeloupean Creole (GC). Despite its morphosyntactic innovations distinct from its lexifier, French, the subordinate structure of GC remains understudied. The project presented here involves a psycholinguistic experiment targeting complementizer usage, using binary choice tasks to gather grammaticality judgments. This was administered during field research in Guadeloupe to 9 youth speakers and 11 adult speakers of GC and French. Ethnographic interview recordings in GC were also collected from adult speakers, which were then transcribed for the purpose of text extraction of key words. I use NLP text-mining methods such …

Values-Based Clinical Ethics: A New Model Of Health And Ethics Consultation For Patients Suffering In Extremis, Adam Trainer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that contemporary clinical ethics is inadequately equipped to support patients suffering in extremis because it relies on an insufficiently discriminating account of health and a constrained model of moral reasoning. Drawing on Bernard Lonergan, it reconceives health as an emergent, multi-layered, heuristic notion shaped by biological, psychological, social, and existential goods. On that basis, it critiques principlism’s global applicability thesis and the undergirding claim that its principles form part of the common morality, arguing that this justificatory structure is philosophically insufficient and practically limited for clinical ethics in cases marked by profound suffering, moral plurality, and normative …