Digital Commons Network^™

The Influence Of Native Language And Sentence Form On Memory Of Motion Events, Stephanie L. Lopez

LSU Master's Theses

This study utilized four experiments to investigate the extent to which native language influences memory in accordance with linguistic relativity. In Experiment 1, monolingual English speakers and Spanish/English bilinguals were divided into a verbal encoding condition and a verbal suppression encoding condition and watched motion events of low or high physical salience. Participants engaged in a recognition memory task followed by an event memory similarity judgment task. In Experiment 2, native monolingual English speakers were divided into an English-like (or manner-on-verb) description group, a Spanish-like (or path-on-verb) description group, mimicking the language groups of Experiment 1 respectively, and a verbal …

Voice Training Through "The Mirror And The Lamp", Rockford Sansom

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Contributions Of Immediate Retrieval And Spaced Retrieval To Word Learning In Preschoolers With Developmental Language Disorder, Laurence B. Leonard, Justin B. Kueser, Patricia Deevy, Eileen Haebig, Jeffrey D. Karpicke, Christine Weber

Faculty Publications

Background and Aims: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) benefit from word learning procedures that include a mix of immediate retrieval and spaced retrieval trials. In this study, we examine the relative contribution of these two types of retrieval.

Methods: We examine data from Haebig et al. (2019) in their study that compared an immediate retrieval condition and a condition of spaced retrieval that also included immediate retrieval trials. Participants were 4- and 5-year old children with DLD and same-age peers with typical language development. Each child learned novel (made-up) words referring to unusual plants and animals in both conditions. …

Prüfung: A Deconstruction Of Assessment Across Three Languages, Thomas Erich Benz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research aims at deconstructing and questioning certainties about assessment as an educational institution on its most fundamental levels. To achieve that, I am utilizing theoretical frameworks inspired by concepts on the existence of cultural and social capital, by artifact mediated cognition, and by a recently proposed discipline on pedagogy of assessment. The research operates with the application of narrative synthesis and network text analysis of material, on which they have not previously been used. As such, I aim to contribute to a methodological application of both methods on exam data, understood as the totality of curricular documents which govern …

Brown's Stages Of Morphosyntactic Development Applied To The Typical Development Of Italian, Marie Laiche

LSU Master's Theses

Background: In A First Language (1973), Roger Brown called for an increase in crosslinguistic data and analysis of morphosyntax across languages as more research in this field is crucial for working out the overarching determinants of language acquisition order and for the ability to accurately compare child language acquisition across different languages. An increase in this research would benefit linguistic researchers and speech-language-pathologists offering services to or evaluating children speaking a different language or more than one language. The current study seeks to add to the field of crosslinguistic research by adapting Brown’s guidelines of English language acquisition to the …

Experienced And Inexperienced Listeners' Perception Of Childrens' /L/ Productions And Their Acoustic Correlates, Emily A. Coniglio

LSU Master's Theses

The phoneme /l/ is one of the highly misarticulated sounds for young children. Referrals for articulation are often based on a listener’s perception of the problem. The aim of the current study was to examine three listener groups’ perception of word-initial /l/ produced by young children to understand if level of experience with child speech impacts listeners’ perception on /l/. The three groups were separated based on their years of experience: speech-language pathologists with at least 10 years of experience (SLP group), graduate students in speech-language pathology (GS group), and naive listeners with no clinical phonetics experience (NL group). Specifically, …

Derivational Development: Derivational Word Processing In Three English-Speaking Populations, Lisa Suzanne Kemp

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Native-English speaking adults use morphological decomposition to understand complex words (e.g. farmer becomes farm-er). Whether decomposition is driven by semantic organization is still unclear. It is also unclear whether ESL adults and elementary age children use the same word processing strategies as native speaking adults. This study tested an identical experimental procedure across three English-speaking populations: native speaking adults, non-native speaking adults and elementary age children. The first task tested how readers use base and suffix information in complex words and nonwords when the word featured only a base word, only a suffix, both a base and …

Acquiring Native-Like Norms Of Making A Request In Spanish During Short-Term Study Abroad In Argentina And Spain, Christine H. Song

LSU Master's Theses

The current study examines if L2 learners of Spanish acquire native-like norms of making a request during short-term study abroad in Argentina and Spain via Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT). The investigation included 3 groups of the participants: an experimental group of 15 U.S. students who studied in Argentina or Spain; a control group of 12 U.S. students who had not studied abroad; and a control group of 7 native speakers of Spanish. The results show that students in the study abroad group became more native-like in making a request to a certain extent. Firstly, the students in the experimental group …

Pragmatics And Pedagogy In University Level Spanish Second Language Textbooks, Vanessa M. Cardenas

LSU Master's Theses

This pragmatic and pedagogical investigation analyzes six university level Spanish second language textbooks (L2Ts) used in the classroom setting. The materials used in this investigation include three beginning level textbooks Dicho y Hecho (2012), Experience Spanish (2012), and Puntos de Partida (2012), and three intermediate level textbooks ¡Avance! (2008), Conexiones (2010), and Interacciones (2013). The purpose of this investigation is to closely examine if the L2Ts communicatively present the speech acts of requesting, refusing, and apologizing, and address forms, with sufficient pragmatic context for the L2 learner to acquire native-like production. The results have shown that the speech acts under …

Quantifying Coherence In A Transdiagnostic Sample: A Methodological Investigation Of Computationally-Derived Coherence Using Ambulatory Assessment, Taylor L. Fedechko

LSU Master's Theses

Schizophrenia is a clinical diagnosis assigned to individuals that experience positive (e.g., hallucinations and delusions), negative (e.g., blunted affect), and disorganized (e.g., incoherent speech) symptoms. One particularly disabling symptom is incoherence, which is defined as the meaning-based relationship between ideas. This symptom can drastically affect an individual’s quality of life by affecting areas such as social and occupational functioning. Currently, the mechanism behind this symptom is unknown and requires further study. One way to examine incoherence is to understand its level of expression in other clinical populations. With the advent of computationally-derived natural language processing (NLP), coherence can be quantified …

Producing "Fabulous": Commodification And Ethnicity In Hair Braiding Salons, Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Greensword

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Black women wearing fabulous braids are a striking feature of the Afro-diasporic cultural landscape. However, the braiders and salon owners who enable this aesthetic engineering are seldom acknowledged. This dissertation investigates the experience and role of Caribbean and West and Central African women in the hair braiding industry, a rapidly growing business in the U.S. I address the complexity of these women’s multiple social roles and the multiple consciousness (King, 1988) associated with their demographic characteristics (color, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and immigrant status). The commonalities between the braiders and their mostly African American customers contrast vividly with their perception of …

Pragmatic Comprehension Of English Refusals By Spanish-English Bilinguals, Clevia Josefina Perez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigated the pragmatic comprehension and production of the speech act of refusals in English by a group of Spanish-English bilinguals (SEB) in comparison with native English speakers (NES), taking into account variables such as length of residency in the L2 environment, type of refusals and level of politeness. Other variables explored included speed of lexical access and working memory. SEB who learned English as adults were divided into two groups (short, long) according to their length of residency in an English language environment. All participants performed a Pragmatic Listening Task (PLT) and an oral production task both involving …

Language Processing And The Artificial Mind: Teaching Code Literacy In The Humanities, Jerry Scott Weltman

LSU Master's Theses

Humanities majors often find themselves in jobs where they either manage programmers or work with them in close collaboration. These interactions often pose difficulties because specialists in literature, history, philosophy, and so on are not usually "code literate." They do not understand what tasks computers are best suited to, or how programmers solve problems. Learning code literacy would be a great benefit to humanities majors, but the traditional computer science curriculum is heavily math oriented, and students outside of science and technology majors are often math averse. Yet they are often interested in language, linguistics, and science fiction. This thesis …

Split-Intransitivity In Swahili And Hittite: An Optimality-Theoretic Perspective, Tina M. Villa

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Much research on unaccusativity has been done over the past three-and-a-half decades since the formulation of the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978). Researchers have examined the semantics of intransitive verbs as well as their syntax to account for the classification of a verb as either unaccusative or unergative; however, for the most part, a similar conclusion across researchers has been reached that neither the semantics of the verb nor the syntactic structure is sufficient by itself to satisfy certain diagnostics of unaccusativity (Legendre and Sorace 2003). Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) argue that the syntactic classification of all verbs is semantically …

Domestication And Foreignization Strategies In Translating Sinbad Of The Arabian Nights, Safa M. Elnaili

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Over the centuries translation theories have provided strategies to help the translator overcome various linguistic and cultural obstacles that arise in any intercultural exchange between different languages and cultures. Idioms and culturally-bound expressions are among prominent translation problems, especially when the translation is between two completely different languages like Arabic and English which diverge both linguistically and culturally. The most debated translation strategies are Domestication and Foreignization. This research examines the use of these two strategies in four English translations of one of the world`s most famous cultural collections, The Arabian Nights. The study specifically investigates the use of domestication …

International Adoption Discourse Analysis : Interdisciplinary Approaches To Media Discourse, Youngae Lee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research is focused on media discourse analysis with interdisciplinary perspectives in language, culture, and gender studies. The purpose of this study is to analyze the media discourse of live interpreter-mediated events with distinctive perspectives involving socio-cultural, structural, and linguistic approaches. The discourse used as data is collected from a live Korean TV program called “I Miss That Person” (IMTP). From IMTP, I titled the first clip “Han, Youngwoong’s Discourse” as Data 1 and the second clip “Lee, ChunShik’s Discourse” as Data 2. Two clips of each data can be seen at www.youtube.com. The analysis of the media discourse is …

Cognitive Case Studies Of Chinese In Discourse Analysis And Classroom Teaching, Yanqiu Yang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the first case study, a piece of recent BBC news reported on Chinese netizens leaving random but funny comments on a Western website attracted people’s attention. A closer look at those comments reveals that understanding the Chinese netizens’ comments requires metaphorical and cultural knowledge. This study starts with theoretical explanations on metaphor from different perspectives and then presents cultural variations in Western and Eastern metaphors. With theories and cultures grounded, a detailed analysis was done to show people without Chinese cultural background how to understand the Chinese Internet metaphors that drew people’s attention. The second case study takes a …

The Refusal Speech Acts Of Two Generations Of Korean Women : Mother-In-Law And Daughter-In-Law In Interaction, Saem Han

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The aim of this study is to analyze and interpretate the refusal speech acts of two generations of Korean women: mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. To be specific, it examines if daughters-in-law’s use of strategies were dependent on the age difference/ hierarchies and to see if there was any difference in the type of strategies used by daughters-in-law depending on whether mothers-in-law have social power or not. The data were collected from three soap operas. Compared with previous data collection methods, such as discourse completion tests or role-plays, this data collection method has advantages for a pragmatics study. The results indicated that …

A Stylistic Analysis Of Libyan Short Stories : The Connotation Of Adjectives, Safa M. Elnaili

LSU Master's Theses

ABSTRACT Between 1969 and 2011, Libya experienced an oppressive dictatorship that paralyzed the country`s political, economical, and social growth. Libya`s literary identity was oppressed due to the policy of censorship and authors were unable to express their opinions freely. In fear of punishment, most Libyan writers criticized the regime and discussed their struggles in the society only implicitly. Censorship has led Libyan writers to adopt different literary styles to reflect on society. In this paper, I will shed light on one of the writers` techniques by examining six Libyan short stories using a stylistics analysis approach. I analyze the lexical …

Korean Parents' Attitudes, Motivations, And Home Literacy Practices Toward Bilingualism Between Korean And English In Korea, Byunghyun Jang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of the study is to examine Korean parents’ attitudes, motivations, and home literacy practices toward their children’s participation in bilingualism in Korean and English in Korea. The success of foreign language learning is influenced by positive attitudes and the level of motivation regarding the target language. Language learners’ attitudes and motivations toward a target language are closely related to their development of language proficiency, and children are often strongly influenced by their parents. The present study was conducted by the survey that was comprised of four-part Likert-type statements. The participants consisted of parents who have children enrolled in …

Decoding Comics: Essential Elements For Transcription, Ni Tyjah Thigpen

LSU Master's Theses

Comics (plural in form but used with a singular verb as defined by Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, HarperPerennial) provides a fresh perspective on the interaction of culture and language and spans from simple one-frame comics to graphic novels. Speech in comics is fully interpretable only in relation to the other elements; therefore a transcription system that includes them all is necessary. I have developed a unique transcription method which incorporates all the salient aspects of comic art revealing the linguistic codes embedded within. I show that transcription techniques, while primarily focused on speech, can also be applied …

I Can Has Thesis? A Linguistic Analysis Of Lolspeak, Jordan Lefler

LSU Master's Theses

Lolspeak, which I characterize as an internet dialect of English that is used in conjunction with images of cats, exhibits distinctive variations and patterns which differ from those of standard English. Lolspeak has influenced other language use and may have a significant impact on the English language, due in part to the internet’s role in the evolution of English (Crystal “Language and the Internet,” 2006:26-27). To approach this data, I created a multi-modal discourse transcription technique for analyzing Lolspeak utterances within the context of their images based on Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss “The Discovery of Grounded Theory” 2007:9). I …

The Interdependence Of Modality And Theory Of Mind, Danielle Rachel Alfandre

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Modality is traditionally defined as the expression of possibility or necessity. In English, modality is expressed by the modal auxiliaries such as can, would, should, or might; adjectives and adverbs such as possible, necessary, maybe, and absolutely; or phrasal verbs such as going to or have to. Theory of Mind (ToM) is broadly defined as the ability to attribute thoughts and beliefs to other people. ToM is usually expressed using propositional attitude verbs such as think as in Mary thinks that it will rain. Hegarty (2006, 2010) proposes that propositional attitude verbs are covertly modalized and can be analyzed using …

1337 W4yz Of {Dollar}P34king: Toward A Unifying Pragmatic Theory Of Virtual Speech Community Building, Tracy Rene Leblanc

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Building a speech community requires building a shared history of communicative interaction. Within a virtual medium, speech community members employ accommodations for the lack of shared physical space that face-to-face interactions provide. These accommodations, amassing through extended discourse, bring to light the communicative strategies that virtual interlocutors employ in order to build community. Drawing from a corpus of unscripted, naturally occurring discourse of a particular virtual speech community, I engage three frames of linguistic analysis in order to recognize the communicative strategies that constitute speech community building. Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) accounts for the individual cognitive work involved …

A Study Of The Aspectual Complements Of 'Begin' And 'Start', Xinzheng Zhao

LSU Master's Theses

Abstract The main purpose of this thesis is to study the aspectual complements of the aspectualizers begin and start. Aspectualizers are verbs that give aspectual readings to the sentence. I started with a summary of Freed’s (1978) analysis. In this summary, semantic differences among seven aspectualizers that take to V and V-ing complements were explained. The semantic distinction between to V and V-ing was also discussed. Following the summary, a brief research on aspectual complements was conducted. Based on Freed’s analysis, I first examined the difference in meaning and in frequency of occurrence between the to V and the V-ing …

Extraversion And Oral Proficiency In Esl, Joshua Boyd Howard

LSU Master's Theses

Extraversion has been proposed as an influence on the success of a second language learner, although studies in this area have produced mixed results (Dewaele & Furnham, 1999; Marin-Marin, 2005; Wakamoto, 2007). Through a narrative retell task, the current study investigated the effects of extraversion on the spoken English performance of 25 native speakers of Spanish. Extraversion was measured with a Spanish version of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire or EPQ (1975). Narratives were elicited using the wordless picture story Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). Drawing on the work of Dewaele (1998), Dewaele and Pavlenko (2002), and Oya, Manalo, and …

Pedagogical Discourse Styles Of Native And Non-Native Language Teachers, Stacy Anne Reynolds-Case

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study seeks to uncover the characteristics of foreign language instructors’ discourse styles implemented in the classroom when teaching students the target language. Foreign language classrooms are unique to academia because the teachers of the language, depending on whether they are native or non-native speakers of the target language, learned it in different environments and for distinct purposes. Many of the previous studies examining the effect a teacher’s ability in the target language will have on his/her instruction have focused on native and non-native speakers’ teaching styles and/or methodologies. Rather than the effect on the teacher’s style, the central question …

The Acquisition Of Pragmatic Competence: Compliment Response Strategies In Learners Of Spanish, James Bryant Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The areas of Pragmatics and Second Language Acquisition have existed separately in the field of Linguistics for some time. Their connection, however, has more recently seen a great deal of study by researchers like Scarcella and Brunak (1981), Rintell (1981), Brown and Levinson (1987), Koike (1992, 1996), Saito, Beecken (1997), Félix-Brasdefer (2003, 2006) and Huth (2006). A common thread in these studies is the effect of language transfer or cross-linguistic influence that the first language has while learners are attempting to acquire the pragmatic and politeness principles that are central to the target language and culture. One speech act that …

Descriptive Study Of Korean E-Mail Discourse, Jaegu Kim

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study is an examination of a corpus of computer mediated Korean discourse (i.e., e-mail), based on a folk-cultural category, nunch’i. Nunch’i is actively involved in linguistic feature use in terms of [+age] and [+distance] of human relationships. Many Koreans think that the world has an inherent hierarchy according to age. This idea has been reflected through nunch’i, a culture-specific system for maintaining harmonious social relationships especially between [+age] and [–age] people. Nunch’i has a function of foresight, in that it is part of the way that people read the situations and the faces of addressers and addressees. Like oral …

Participant Positioning And The Positioning Of Participatory Pronouns In The Academic Lecture, Robert Thomas Connor

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Through a research approach of emergence applied to a corpus of academic letures, I developed a theory to explicate the referents of a class of frequently used pronouns (I, you, and we), which I term the Participatory Pronouns. My theory of the Positioning of Participatory Pronouns resolves the main practical concern of the research participants, which is to place their utterances in contexts for authoritative, intellectually sound, and socially relevant interpretation. At the theoretical level, my theory is a specification of Relevance Theory and resolves disparate previous analyses of pronouns. Overall, my work provides a new paradigm for how referents …