The present study addresses a core issue in the study of speech perception, the question of how stable phonological representations are accessed from an inherently variable speech signal. In particular, the research investigates the perception of accented English speech by native and non-native listeners. It is known from previous research that foreign-accented speech is harder for native listeners to process than native-accented speech. The reason for this lies in not only qualities of the input (deviation from native production norms, for example) but also in qualities of the listener. Specifically, listeners' speech perception systems are tuned from an early age to pay attention to useful distinctions in the language environment but to attenuate differences which are not useful. This quality of the listeners' speech processing system suggests that in addition to being native speakers of a language or languages, we are also native listeners. However, what is a liability for native listeners (non-native input) may be a benefit for non-native listeners. When the foreign accent is derived from a single language shared between the speaker and the listener, application of native-language processing strategies to the accented input may result in more efficient processing of the input. The experiments in this dissertation address this possibility. In an experiment involving Dutch listeners processing Dutch-accented and American English-accented sentence materials, a reaction time advantage was observed for the mutually-accented materials. Experiments testing the main hypothesis with native Spanish-listening participants showed a different pattern of results. These participants, who had more experience with English overall that the Dutch participants, performed similarly to native-listening controls in displaying faster verification times for native accented materials than mutually-accented materials. These experiments lead to the conclusion that native-like listening, as assessed by the sentence verification paradigm employed in these experiments, can be achieved by non-native listeners. In particular, non-native listeners with little experience processing spoken English benefit from hearing input produced in a matching accent. Non-native listeners with sufficiently more experience processing spoken English, however, perform similar to native listeners, displaying an advantage for native accented input.

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how five middle school students used humor in young adult literature as a vehicle for understanding according to Louise Rosenblatt's transactional reading theory. The study was conducted in an honors language arts classroom in the Southwestern region of the United States. Methods for data collection included twenty semi-structured interviews, observational fieldnotes, transcripts of audiotaped and videotaped literature circle discussions, journal entries, a humor survey and other miscellaneous written artifacts. Data were collected for seven months. Instructional materials included a variety of young adult novels and short stories representing historical fiction and contemporary realistic fiction genres. Analytic induction, constant comparison, organizational charts, and various forms of member checking were used to analyze the data. The results of the study indicate that the students used humor to construct meaning while reading. Specifically, students visualized action humor in the texts enhancing their comprehension. Discussions referencing experiential and textual connections were commonplace. Some students found humor in the use of archaic language or the use of dialects different from their own. The students read the adolescent literature both efferently and aesthetically (Rosenblatt, 1995) as they attended to humor setting conditions for engaging the humor. First, if the humor was the result of superiority humor where the focus group members could predict the targeted character would be hurt, disappointed or promote a negative change in the character's development, then they would not engage in the humor. Second, if the humor was closely related to their world of understanding, then the humor was embraced only after careful deliberation. Third, if the characters presented themselves as resilient and unaffected by the humor, then the students were willing to laugh at the characters.

This longitudinal, nine-semester, teacher research investigation focuses upon young, hearing-impaired students' responses to literature through the sign systems of Language, drama and art. Theories underlying this study are the transactional theory of literature as conceptualized by Louise Rosenblatt (1938-1983) and the semiotic process of signification put forth by C. S. Peirce (1839-1914). The questions guiding this investigation focused upon (1) the role of literature in this classroom, (2) the role of dramatization in students' "lived-through" experiences of literature, (3) patterns of visual and verbal response in these students' drawings and dictations, and (4) changes in these children's visual and verbal literary responses over the course of time. Research findings indicated a steadfast pattern of visual response (n = 559), i.e., students depicted story characters (94%), story settings (3%), or something else brought to mind (3%) in responding to literature through art. This focus was found also in students' accompanying dictations which explicated story characters' actions or feelings 41% of the time. These dictated responses revealed that students also gave retellings of story events (22%), paraphrases of story events (20%), identifications of items in drawings (4%), combined paraphrase/retellings of story events (4%), evaluations (6%) or other types of statements (1%). This study indicates that retelling as a form of literary response can serve multiple purposes within the classroom context and merits further investigation. Uniquely characteristic and focused themes of personal response were found in this investigation as well. Three of these themes are explicated in case studies of selected students whose responses to classroom literary experiences led each to pursue a path of self-realization as an artist, language learner, and contemplator of self-identity. This study indicates that contextualized literary experience within and across multiple sign systems allowed these hearing-impaired students to develop multifaceted understandings of literature, art, drama, language and life. These multifaceted understandings, in turn, led these children to deeper understandings of their own worlds of experience.

The current study has attempted to answer the question whether there is an interaction between the Aspect Hypothesis and the Discourse Hypothesis by investigating the use of Japanese tense-aspect morphology by native speakers of English learning Japanese as L2. These two hypotheses were argued for independently in previous studies, but never consolidated to account for the distributional pattern of L2 tense-aspect morphology. The Aspect Hypothesis claims that the L1 and L2 learners initially mark lexical aspect of the verbs with tense-aspect morphology; they tend to associate past with achievement verbs and progressive with activity verbs. On the other hand, according to the Discourse Hypothesis, the learners use the tense-aspect morphology to distinguish grounding; they tend to mark foreground with past more frequently than background. The current research used two methods: a multiple-choice task and a storytelling task. The former task was referred to as Study 1. The use of tense-aspect morphology in the story-telling task was analyzed in terms of lexical aspect, referred to as Study 2 and grounding, referred to as Study 3. Study 1 and Study 2 examined whether the use of tense-aspect morphology is different in obligatory contexts and in narrative discourse. The results of Study 1 supported the Aspect Hypothesis; L2 learners initially associated past inflection with achievement verbs and tended to mark the process encoded in activity and accomplishment verbs with present durative. The results of Study 2 supported the Aspect Hypothesis as regards the association of activity verbs and present durative. However, the frequent marking of past on achievement verbs across the proficiency levels suggest that the textual function of tense-aspect morphology plays a role in narrative discourse. Study 3 argued that the Japanese tense-aspect morphology weakly mark grounding. Finally, I claimed that the Aspect Hypothesis and the Discourse Hypothesis account for the different acquisition stages of the L2 tense-aspect system. There is a time lag among the tense-aspect morphemes in the process of acquisition; past marking functions as the temporal and textual device in narrative discourse at the relatively early stage while present durative remains as the marker of lexical aspect.

The present study investigated the reading process in Arabic by drawing on the Goodman Model of English Reading, and testing its applicability to Semitic languages. Due to the multi-tier nature of Arabic orthography (i.e. letters and diacritics), two questions were addressed: (1) how the absence/presence of diacritics affects the readers' performance on the reading tasks, and (2) how readers assign phonology and inflectional features in reading unmarked texts (i.e. texts that are written in Modern Standard Arabic with no diacritics). The study was conducted in Tucson, Arizona, and involved fifteen Saudi male undergraduate students enrolled at The University of Arizona. Due to the multi-tier nature of Arabic orthography, a new multi-tier methodology had to emerge. The methodology involved the designing of three tasks: (1) the Diacritic Placement Task (DPT), (2) the Arabic Text Reading Task (ATRT), and (3) playback interviews. The DPT showed that, in assigning phonology and inflectional features to context-free sentences with no diacritics, readers of Arabic rely on their linguistic knowledge. Readers' choices are not random, and they seem to follow a regular pattern depending on their degree of markedness. Readings that are unmarked or more frequent (i.e. immediate readings) precede the marked or less frequent ones (i.e. delayed readings). Immediate readings include the active voice and the passive voice sentences, whereas delayed readings include causative sentences. The ATRT showed how reading was relatively faster for most readers when they were inferring the diacritics that were absent. The presence of diacritics made reading relatively slower, because readers saw them as a "controlling system" which they had to follow. Most of them, however, preferred reading texts with diacritics if they were to read in front of an audience. The study provides evidence that reading is not a process of word identification. Reading is a universal sociopsycholinguistic process that operates within a specific sociocultural context and involves an interaction between language and thought. The study also shows that, by adding a multi-tier extension to it, the Goodman Model of Reading provides a powerful account of the reading process in Arabic.

Despite the rapid growth of software use in foreign language education, many language-specific issues in computer-mediated instruction have not been investigated in research. One example is L2 orthography in CALL. When the target language is a non-alphabetic type, such as Japanese, decoding the unfamiliar script becomes a difficult task. Although the type of current Japanese language software ranges from immersion to translation-mediated, the method for script presentation is not spelled out with a clear pedagogical principle. Furthermore, due to the lack of empirical evidence, we have yet to find out which feature of CALL assists most effectively the Japanese beginner's L2 vocabulary acquisition. The present study attempts to evaluate the impact of using Romaji, or alphabetic spellings of Japanese, on beginners' learning of Japanese vocabulary. Sixty-one students enrolled in first-semester Japanese were recruited from two American universities. Individually the subjects participated in a vocabulary CALL experiment created with the HyperCard authoring system. The control and experimental groups were exposed to CALL lessons that taught 40 new Japanese words in conversational context. Immediately after the instructional phase, both groups were assessed on their retention of the vocabulary items in the same computer program. The only difference was the intervention of the Romaji script added to the vocabulary instruction of the experimental group. Both learner processes and performance data were collected and were analyzed. Major findings from this CALL study are (1) contrary to the prediction, the aid of Romaji did not facilitate the learner's short-term vocabulary retention, (2) the subjects who used the "sound" button more frequently recalled more words, and (3) the CALL vocabulary instruction assisted the learners of beginning-level Japanese in retaining a majority of the vocabulary items for recognition posttests but not for production tests. It is implied that the orthographic accommodation in CALL is not effective in assisting English-speaking students' Japanese vocabulary learning. Regardless of the presence or absence of Romaji, the intensive use of audio recordings was found to play the most crucial role in Japanese beginners' short-term vocabulary retention.

This study aimed to achieve three goals. First, it investigated the notion that the process of L2 idiom comprehension and interpretation is not the same as that for L1 comprehension, that is there are some fundamentally different ways in which second language (SL) learners grasp idiomatic meaning of Vivid Phrasal (VP) Idioms. Second, it researched the notion that the L2 comprehension process of idioms may be universal with regard to Spanish, French, and German. Third, it researched the extent to which SL learners want idioms to be an integral part of their language and culture training. The dissertation then proposed a systematic program for developing idiomatic competence in second and foreign languages in the context of meaningful authentic use. The subjects of this study were 60 third-year adult university learners of Spanish, French, and German. Employing three types of data-collection practices--(1) Computer-mediated Reading Tasks (Idiom Detection Task, Zero Context Task, Full Context Task, and Eureka Task), (2) Interactional Reading Tasks (Think-Aloud Reading Tasks, Retellings, and Introspection), and (3) Demographic Data Collection and Post-Task Evaluations--this study involved within-subject repeated measures of data and included both quantitative and qualitative analyses of 30 computerized idiomatic texts from each language group. The results strongly suggested that the L2 comprehension process of idioms is not the same as that for L1 comprehension and, moreover, that there is indeed a universal process of comprehending and interpreting VP idioms in second languages, at least with respect to the languages investigated. More specifically, the study provided strong evidence that (1) SL readers are quite capable of detecting VP idioms in texts successfully using a variety of contextual cues and reading strategies, including, but not limited to, word and idiom recognition, lexical access and retrieval, contextual and pragmatic support, background and world knowledge, formal schemata, and strategy use; (2) matching idioms between L1 and L2 (Lexical-Level or LL Idioms) are processed and comprehended faster and with greater ease than partially-matching idioms (Semi-lexical Level or SLL Idioms) or non-matching idioms (Post-lexical Level or PLL Idioms) between L1 and L2 and, finally, (3) increased context and an individual's pragmatic knowledge exert a significant impact on the comprehension and interpretation of all VP idioms, especially on those of the PLL type.

In natural language processing subject-verb agreement sometimes derails yielding ungrammatical sentences such as *The cost of the programs have not yet been estimated. In light of questions concerning the semantic versus syntactic nature of sentence subjects and the interactivity of language processing, researchers have investigated the occurrence and possible causes of erroneous agreement. In complex subject noun phrases such as The cost of the programs, the plurality of the noun in the lower clause has been shown to significantly affect the frequency of subject-verb agreement errors. This effect has been shown in English (Bock and Miller, 1991) and in Italian and Spanish (Vigliocco et al., 1995 and 1996). More importantly, a cross-linguistic difference appears with respect to distributivity, the semantic notion of plurality represented in a singular complex subject noun phrase. The phrase The label on the bottles can have a multiple token interpretation where several instances of the same label are conceptualized. Native (L1) English speakers show no effect for distributivity in light of subject-verb agreement errors, whereas L1 speakers of Italian and Spanish do. The primary question addressed in the current study is the following: Do the subject-verb agreement errors of non-native (L2) speakers of Spanish pattern in the same way as those of L1 speakers of Spanish, particularly with respect to distributivity? The results of the current study indicate that at least some L2 speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the effects of distributivity when processing subject-verb agreement. It is argued that the observed cross-linguistic variation with respect to the effect of distributivity on subject-verb agreement is attributable to differences in processing load resulting from cross-linguistic configurational variation within the subject noun phrase.

Models for science education, rather than paralleling the process of scientific discovery, have traditionally involved the dissemination of information through texts and controlled lab experiences. These have had limited effect in the development of science concepts. Therefore, the focus of this study was to investigate alternative avenues, such as the use of narrative, for science conceptualization. Despite the potential for narrative as an avenue for science conceptualization, for the most part studies involving literature have not explored this relationship. The purpose of this study was to investigate the process of science conceptualization, with a specific focus on narrative. This was done through a fifth grade classroom based study where learning experiences were created, focused on the concept of interdependence in relationship to water. These experiences included open-ended, hands-on science experiences, literature discussion groups, self-selected research projects and the creation of narrative pieces based on those research projects. Data sources included: (a) audio and videotaped literature discussion group sessions; (b) audio and videotaped study group interviews and curricular sessions; (c) individual interviews; (d) learning log entries and reflections; and (e) student narratives. Data analysis was conducted within a semiotic theoretical framework and involved the process of retroduction. Retroduction entails a kind of spiraling dialectic between theoretical considerations and data incidences, from which are generated possible explanations. These possible explanations or abductions, provide direction for further forays into the data. The process of retroduction lends itself to the creation of data analysis chapters that highlight theoretical issues in relationship to the data or "theoretical memos". Three theoretical memos emerged from this process. Theoretical memo one explores the role of experience in conceptualization; theoretical memo two focuses on the role of analogy and narrative experiences in relationship to intertextuality in conceptualization; and theoretical memo three highlights metaphor in relationship to the intertextual process of transmediation, whereby conceptualization is symbolized through student generated narratives. Together, these memos provide some insights into aspects of the process of conceptualization that are often ignored both in "real" science as well as science instruction. The implications of the study findings are summarized in light of what is known about the discovery process, as compared to what happens in traditional science instruction.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the benefits of collaboration while cross-age students and teachers conducted research. The cross-age collaboration investigated ways that students assist each other with writing and concept development as they researched a topic. The collaborative teacher research explored ways that classroom teachers assist each other with their professional development while they are examining ways to assist their students. This was a participant-observational study which took place over a semester. The cross-age students conducted research on teacher selected topics. The teachers held meetings to share their questions, observations, reflections and plans regarding the cross-age collaboration. Data sources included student surveys, student interviews, teachers' reflective journals, and transcriptions of teachers' meetings. The methods of analysis were domain analysis and constant comparison. The findings suggested that students assisted each other with writing and concept development when provided the opportunity to collaborate. They used language for constructing and reconstructing knowledge as they researched their topics. As they used language for learning, they also assisted each other with language development by using scaffolding strategies. A major finding in this study is that the students and teachers place high value on the interpersonal relationship that develops through the collaborative process. They found that encouragement, listening to one another, and respecting each other's ideas were foundational for igniting the collaborative process. Findings also suggested that the collaborative process gave the classroom teachers opportunities to assist each other with professional development. The teachers were able to assist each other by sharing their beliefs and knowledge about teaching and learning. Sharing beliefs about teaching and learning caused harmony in planning, as well as tensions. Variances in belief systems caused tensions which led to rich discussions about professional knowledge. The teachers reconstructed their knowledge through collaborative research.