Thesiss

This dissertation is an conversation analytical study on the sequential organization of politeness in native-nonnative speakers' interaction. The Persian politeness phenomenon of taarof was identified and analyzed in telephone conversation openings and offers. Taarof is a system…

The role of basic language processing components, in general, and that of lower-level phonological and orthographic processing skills, in particular, is not well understood in second language reading. Most research in second and foreign language (L2) reading has followed top-dow…

The primary goal of this dissertation is to contribute to a predictive model of Spanish heritage grammars by applying recent advancements in machine learning to ferret out factors and covariates that give rise to the Spanish subjunctive. Given that “[p]redictive models would ent…

This study examined the production of lexical stress by native speakers of Jordanian Arabic, English, and Arab learners of English. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the acoustic correlates to lexical stress in Arabic. Experiments 1 and 2 show that Arabic speakers produce stressed sy…

This study investigates the use of word formation processes in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) by adult L2 learners of mainly English-speaking background. Forty-four L2 learners, and 40 native speakers of Arabic took part in this study, and performed three tasks (a production task …