Digital Commons Network^™

Do It Like A Syntactician: Using Binary Gramaticality Judgements To Train Sentence Encoders And Assess Their Sensitivity To Syntactic Structure, Pablo Gonzalez Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The binary nature of grammaticality judgments and their use to access the structure of syntax are a staple of modern linguistics. However, computational models of natural language rarely make use of grammaticality in their training or application. Furthermore, developments in modern neural NLP have produced a myriad of methods that push the baselines in many complex tasks, but those methods are typically not evaluated from a linguistic perspective. In this dissertation I use grammaticality judgements with artificially generated ungrammatical sentences to assess the performance of several neural encoders and propose them as a suitable training target to make models learn …

The Effects Of Language Background And Foreign Accent On Listening Comprehension, Sita Carraturo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The act of listening to a linguistic signal is an involved process, and, rarely occurs in absolute silence. A person trying to listen and comprehend speech is likely in an environment that has some sort of additional noise: white noise from a fan, passing traffic, construction, or just other talkers. Each of these additional auditory signals creates an unfavorable environment for the listener who is trying to capture the target signal. Research has been able to quantify and describe the effects of noise on the comprehension of linguistic signals, and has also shown that that bilinguals and monolinguals — though …

Heritage Speaker And Late Bilingual L2 Relative Clause Processing And Language Dominance Effects, Leeann S. Stevens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traditionally, heritage speakers are recognized as a heterogeneous group whose skills in their heritage language are unlike those of monolinguals or L2 learners of that language. Indeed, much evidence confirms the cognitive and linguistic uniqueness of this population. However, highly proficient heritage speakers may pattern more similarly to another bilingual population than typically assumed: first-generation late bilinguals.

The present study examines group-level processing differences between Spanish heritage speakers and Spanish-English late bilinguals in English, the second-learned and current societal majority language of these populations. Dominance is also analyzed as a possible effect of group processing differences, since traditionally and definitionally …

Mood Choice And Context Availability: A Variationist Approach To The Subjunctive In New York City Spanish, Joanna Birnbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the variable treatment of the Subjunctive in Spanish in New York City. Both Mood choice (Subjunctive versus Indicative) and Linguistic context availability (the presence and absence of Subjunctive-inducing contexts in speech) are studied. Data are from sociolinguistic interviews with 142 informants, stratified with respect to immigrant generation, gender, age, socio-economic status, national origin, etc. Subjunctive rates are analyzed, at the macro-level, in nine linguistic contexts and, at the micro-level, in the four most popular contexts (Modal, Protasis Si, Temporal, and Apodosis Si). Results of bivariate Pearson correlations and Chi-square tests reveal consistent usage patterns of …

Demographic Factors As Domains For Adaptation In Linguistic Preprocessing, Sara Morini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Classic natural language processing resources such as the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al. 1993) have long been used both as evaluation data for many linguistic tasks and as training data for a variety of off-the-shelf language processing tools. Recent work has highlighted a gender imbalance in the authors of this text data (Garimella et al. 2019) and hypothesized that tools created with such resources will privilege users from particular demographic groups (Hovy and Søgaard 2015). Domain adaptation is typically employed as a strategy in machine learning to adjust models trained and evaluated with data from different genres. However, the present …

‘Its Something You Do Bro’: Language And Identity On A Male Erotic Hypnosis Messageboard, Eric Chambers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on a seven-year corpus of data (total words N = 86,881) on a publicly-accessible messageboard on which self-identified gay men discuss their experiences undergoing erotic hypnosis, this study applies Critical Discourse Analysis methods to understand how posters understand their sexual identities and those of others. This study identifies the emergence of two main identity-types at-play on OnYourKnees: the jock and the coach. Jocks are generally characterized by a focus on sports and body-consciousness, a disinterest or inability to engage in scholarly/academic pursuits, and a desire to be submissive to others to achieve sexual pleasure. Coaches, on the other hand, …

Cue-Based Reflexive Reference Resolution: Evidence From Korean Reflexive Caki, Namseok Yong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to reveal cognitive mechanisms and factors that underlie the reflexive dependency formation. In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to the question of how our mind works in building linguistic dependencies (including an antecedent-reflexive dependency) because relevant research has proved promising and illuminating in regard to the properties (e.g., system architecture, computational algorithms, etc.) of human language processor and its close connection with other cognitive functions such as memory (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006; McElree, 2000; McElree, Foraker, & Dyer, 2003; Van Dyke & Johns, 2012; Wagers, Lau, & …

This Is What A Feminist Tweets Like: "Women's Language" And Styling Activist Identities In A #Yesallwomen Twitter Corpus, Eleanor A. Morikawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents results of a study of linguistic practice in the context of feminist activism on Twitter. Twitter has become a primary medium for social and political activism and a rich venue for study of the relationship between digitally mediated language and identity production. The focus of this study is the viral Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen, a hashtag that rose in popularity following a misogyny-motivated terrorist attack in the spring of 2014. This dissertation treats the #YesAllWomen hashtag as an imagined space and a Discourse (Gee, 2015) where language serves as a site for the production of gender and feminist …

Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguities In Declarative And Interrogative Contexts: Oral Reading Data, Tyler J. Peckenpaugh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Certain English sentences containing multiple prepositional phrases (e.g., She had planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase) have been reported to be prone to mis-parsing of a kind that is standardly called a “garden path.” The mis-parse stems from the temporary ambiguity of the first prepositional phrase (PP1: in the drawer), which tends to be interpreted initially as the goal argument of the verb cram. If the sentence ended there, that would be correct. But that analysis is overridden when the second prepositional phrase (PP2: into her briefcase) is encountered, since the …

Linguistic Features Of False Confessions And Confessions Not In Dispute: A Corpus Analysis, Lucrezia Rizzelli

Student Theses

Confessions are considered the gold standard of evidence, and yet many cases of false confessions causing wrongful convictions have come to the surface in the past decades. Currently, a method to identify false confessions does not exist and studies focusing on the content of the confessions have found similarities rather than points of distinction. In this study, we approached confessions from a stylistic rather than qualitative point of view, utilizing corpus analysis to outline the linguistic features of two samples of confessions: false confessions (n=37) and confessions not in dispute (n=98). Subsequently, we created a model …

The Practice Of Mainland Chinese Students Adopting English Names And Its Motivations, T. Leo Schmitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the Chinese practice of adopting English names in the context of Chinese international students studying at American institutions of higher education. This work adopts the position of Bourdieu (1991) that there is a fundamental unity of the market, in that economic and political capital is connected to linguistic and cultural capital. Prosperity in one area is linked to others; people who have wealth and power tend to use language and have names that are similarly valued. In this situation, we are able to make choices about our linguistic and cultural stances based on our status within society. …

Stabilizing Forces In Acoustic Cultural Evolution: Comparing Humans And Birds, Daniel C. Mann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Learned acoustic communication systems, like birdsong and spoken human language, can be described from two seemingly contradictory perspectives. On one hand, learned acoustic communication systems can be remarkably consistent. Substantive and descriptive generalizations can be made which hold for a majority of populations within a species. On the other hand, learned acoustic communication systems are often highly variable. The degree of variation is often so great that few, if any, substantive generalizations hold for all populations in a species.

Within my dissertation, I explore the interplay of variation and uniformity in three vocal learning species: budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus), …

Analyzing Prosody With Legendre Polynomial Coefficients, Rachel Rakov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This investigation demonstrates the effectiveness of Legendre polynomial coefficients representing prosodic contours within the context of two different tasks: nativeness classification and sarcasm detection. By making use of accurate representations of prosodic contours to answer fundamental linguistic questions, we contribute significantly to the body of research focused on analyzing prosody in linguistics as well as modeling prosody for machine learning tasks. Using Legendre polynomial coefficient representations of prosodic contours, we answer prosodic questions about differences in prosody between native English speakers and non-native English speakers whose first language is Mandarin. We also learn more about prosodic qualities of sarcastic speech. …

Estudio Variacionista Sobre Las Formas De Tratamiento En Buga, Colombia, Diego Vargas Barona

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

En el español actual existen variedades que exhiben un sistema tripartito compuesto por las formas de tratamiento tú, usted y vosque abreviamos FTt, FTv, FTu. En Colombia se muestra una variación mayor en el uso de estas formas de tratamiento. En este estudio se examinan las formas de tratamiento en el español que se habla en Buga, Colombia, particularmente las variables sociolingüísticas externas e internas que influyen en el uso de la FTu y la FTv. Los datos para el presente trabajo fueron recogidos a través de grabaciones de emisiones de habla espontánea y real. El Paquete Estadístico y data …

The Perception Of Mandarin Tones In "Bubble" Noise By Native And L2 Listeners, Mengxuan Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous studies have revealed the complexity of Mandarin Tones. For example, similarities in the pitch contours of tones 2 and 3 and tones 3 and 4 cause confusion for listeners. The realization of a tone's contour is highly dependent on its context, especially the preceding pitch. This is known as the coarticulation effect. Researchers have demonstrated the robustness of tone perception by both native and non-native listeners, even with incomplete acoustic information or in noisy environment. However, non-native listeners were observed to behave differently from native listeners in their use of contextual information. For example, the disagreement between the end …

Reverse The Curse: Colonialist Legacies Of The Magic Poem, Karen E. Lepri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the conceptual relationships between poetry, magic, and race and their effects on both intellectual and creative practices from modernism through the post-war era. In doing so, this study works cross-disciplinarily, tracing early anthropological and sociological characterizations of primitive religion in connection to early-to-mid-twentieth-century literary study and writing. In working across disciplines at this particularly fungible moment in the history of the academy, this dissertation attempts to understand how the concurrent colonial global context effects the production and organization of knowledge just prior to and during modernism. It ultimately seeks to de-colonize literary thinking about poetry by performing …

Generative Adversarial Networks And Word Embeddings For Natural Language Generation, Robert D. Schultz Jr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We explore using image generation techniques to generate natural language. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), normally used for image generation, were used for this task. To avoid using discrete data such as one-hot encoded vectors, with dimensions corresponding to vocabulary size, we instead use word embeddings as training data. The main motivation for this is the fact that a sentence translated into a sequence of word embeddings (a “word matrix”) is an analogue to a matrix of pixel values in an image. These word matrices can then be used to train a generative adversarial model. The output of the model’s generator …

Articulation Of The Japanese Moraic Nasal: Place Of Articulation, Assimilation, And L2 Transfer, Ai Mizoguchi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The moraic nasal /N/ in Japanese has been transcribed in multiple ways, but very few studies have examined its articulation. The nature of its assimilation has often been described in phonology, but again, very few articulatory investigations have been conducted. Also, while a first language (L1) effect on second language (L2) production has been discussed for some phonemes, there is no good research on the effect of Japanese /N/ on L2 English syllable-final nasals. This dissertation investigates the articulation of the moraic nasal /N/ in Japanese using an ultrasound articulatory imaging technique to assess 1) its place of articulation, 2) …

Mandarin Assessment In Chinese-English Bilingual Preschoolers, Jennifer A. Chard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Immigrant children who grow up in linguistically and culturally diverse households are at risk for misdiagnosis for language impairment and inappropriate placement in or exclusion from special education classes. Research shows that native language testing is essential in determining eligibility for disability services, as reflected both in federal law (Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004). However, despite growing agreement that native language assessment is a critical component to understanding the abilities and challenges bilingual students face, the standard assessments currently used are largely administered in Standard English and normed on monolingual English speakers. Few options are available to …