Digital Commons Network^™

How Do Heritage Children Acquire Spanish In Dual Language Schools? Charting The Acquisition Of The Subjunctive Mood, Patrick Thane, Stephanie Rodriguez, Michele Goldin, Jennifer Austin

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

Despite the growth of dual-language immersion programs in the United States as a method of equitable bilingual education, few studies have examined how children acquire Spanish through immersion (e.g., Herschensohn et al, 2005; Goldin, 2020a, 2020b; Thane, 2023). This project compares English-fluent heritage speakers (HSs) and L2 learners (L2Ls) of Spanish in their productive and receptive knowledge of the subjunctive mood, an area of Spanish grammar prone to variability in bilingual populations (e.g. Giancaspro et al, 2022; Montrul & Perpiñán, 2011; Potowski, 2007). 56 children participated, including 10 HSs in the 4th/5th grades, 8 HSs in the 7th/8th grades, 20 …

Language Use And Heritage Language Acquisition - The Case Of Portuguese-Speaking Pupils In Finland, Patricia Carvalho Ribeiro

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

No abstract provided.

Heritage And Second Language Acquisition – Differences And Similarities In Written Productions Of Young Learners, Ana Espirito Santo, Nelia Alexandre

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

This presentation aims to explore the linguistic features evident in the written productions of young Portuguese heritage speakers (YHS) residing in France and young French speakers acquiring Portuguese as their second language (YL2) in an immersion setting in Portugal. Specifically, the investigation seeks to determine whether exposure to Portuguese since birth, even under reduced input conditions for YHS, results in more native-like language proficiency compared to the Portuguese L2 exposure encountered by YL2 learners.

While the outcomes of the Heritage Language (HL) and L2 acquisition processes may share some similarities (Au et al., 2002; Knightly et al., 2003, a.o.), the …

Reevaluating Assessment Criteria For Heritage Language Speakers: A Focus On Brazilian Portuguese., Jaqueline Ionson

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

No abstract provided.

Voices In The Shadows: Reflections On The Portuguese-Azorean American Linguistic Heritage, Giuseppe Formato, Graça Indias Cordeiro

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

This study calls attention to the diversity of Portuguese as a heritage language label in southern New England, focusing on the vanishing Azorean-American sociolinguistic heritage in the Greater Boston area. The researchers critically reflect on the attitudes regarding Azorean-American speech and ways in which such attitudes contribute, or not, to the survival of this local way of expression. Through a collaborative sociolinguistic and ethnographic research, this paper is based on the first author’s experience as a Portuguese teacher with young heritage learners of Azorean ancestry in one of the last high schools to offer Portuguese language study in the Boston …

The Status Of Sakurabiat Teaching: Heritage Language And Second Language, Carla Costa, Ana Vilacy Galucio, Rosalina Da Silva Guaratira, Silvana Da Silva Cunha Guaratira, Matheus Augusto Ribeiro Soares

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

No abstract provided.

Portuguese As Heritage Language In Macau, Ana Margarida Silva

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

Portuguese language holds a dual status in Macau: it is not only an official language but also a heritage language.

The arrival of Portuguese to this territory in the beginning of the XV century and its consequent foundation of an important trading harbor center between the Far East and Europe (Newit, 2005: 145), has also contributed to the dissemination of the Portuguese language, as well of other languages from the different parts of the maritime Empire (e.g. Africa, India, or Melaka). Thus, a new multilingual and pluricultural society arises from this confluence of people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds …

Shifting Gears: Language Practices, Attitudes, And Shift In Austin, Tx Among Heritage Language Speakers Of Spanish, Patrick Lawrence

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

The current work presents a mixed-methods study examining the intersection between language usage, attitudes, and intergenerational language shift among heritage language speakers in Austin, TX, an understudied community for language shift research. Only one study, Laosa (1975), has examined this topic here, a city where 34% of the population identifies as Hispanic, and one that has experienced unprecedented growth in the last fifteen years (U.S. Census Bureau 2022). Participants consisted of four generations of 20 heritage language speakers, whom I define as those who: a) have a personal and ethnic connection to Spanish; b) grew up in a Spanish-speaking home; …

Phonetic Variation In The Reawakening Language Tunica, Meg A. Harvey

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

No abstract provided.

Tone Sandhi In A Heritage Speaker Of Dinka, Mirella L. Blum

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

Dinka, a Nilo-Saharan language from South Sudan, is known for its unusual and highly complex suprasegmental system. The language has independently contrastive tone, voice quality, and three-level vowel length, all of which are both lexical and morphological, and via which almost all of the language’s morphology is expressed (Andersen 1987, 1993, Remijsen & Ladd 2008, Remijsen & Gilley 2008, Blum 2020). Tone has a very high functional load in the language, and tone systems can differ considerably across the more than twenty dialects. In fact, one of the primary way in which varieties of Dinka can be differentiated from one …

Heritage Language And Second Language Processing Of Referential Structures In Russian, Angelina Rubina

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

Most studies on second language (L2) and heritage language (HL) acquisition of Russian have focused on one population group (either L2 or, more rarely, HL learners) and one linguistic structure at a time (i.e., Laleko, 2010; Sekerina et al., 2019). However, a comparative analysis of L2 and HL learners on a variety of language structures has greater representativity, offering a more fine-grained picture of bilingual language development. Addressing the representativity limitation of existing research, this study focuses on the grammar feature of specificity (referentiality) in Russian. Specificity in Russian presents an interesting case study, because it is expressed through different …

Plurall By Bem, Felicia Jennings-Winterle

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

Plurall by BEM (formerly known as Brasil em Mente) is a cultural organization committed to the teaching, promotion, and nurture of Portuguese as Heritage Language (PHL). It started working in the metropolitan area of New York City, in 2009, offering afterschool programs in which the Portuguese Language was experienced through music/movement classes, capoeira, preschool activities, and literacy.

Through the years, Plurall has developed many other proposals, including the creation of a library that sent books to all 50 American states over the mail; a publisher dedicated to producing didactic material for the teaching of this specialty of Language Education; and …

Does Syntactic Complexity Correlate To Functional Proficiency And Writing Genre? The Case Of Heritage Spanish, Alberta Gatti, Daniela Castillo, Syelle Graves

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

No abstract provided.

Age And Education In The Acquisition Of Inflectional Morphology In Heritage Spanish, Patrick Thane

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

The study of how bilingual education shapes heritage language development is an underexplored avenue for research on heritage speakers (HSs). This line of inquiry has simultaneous implications for theories concerning bilingual development and for linguistic justice for bilingual children. By studying multiple age ranges of bilingual children who differ in their exposure to Spanish at school, it is possible to address the “missing link” (Montrul, 2018, p. 534) in heritage language research: acquisition during the school period. However, dual-language immersion schools are celebrated in the United States for facilitating HSs’ development of Spanish without comparing children’s language acquisition in different …

Language Attitudes And Linguistic Interferences: A Case Study On Italian Heritage Speakers In The Flanders Region Of Belgium, Elisa De Cristofaro, Irene Cenni

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

No abstract provided.

Correlations Between Positive And Negative Attitudes And Oral Proficiency In Brazilian Portuguese Heritage Speakers, Flavia Terra Cunha

Heritage Languages Around the World 2

Some studies carried out with heritage speakers suggest that negative language attitudes can have a detrimental impact on language maintenance (Cho 2000, Tse 2000; Zhang & Slaughter-Defoe 2009), while other studies found that positive language attitudes favorably impact language maintenance (Mejías & Anderson 1988, Mejías, Anderson-Mejías & Carlson 2003; Gubitosi & de Oliveira 2020). However, very few studies have analyzed possible effects of positive and negative attitudes into heritage speakers’ level of proficiency in their heritage language, and fewer still have classified attitudes statements into different topic areas and analyzed their impact separately. Another important point is that many studies …

Buffering Effects Of Negative Intergroup Contact Through Complex Social Identities, Liora Morhayim

Masters Theses

Although negative intergroup contact occurs less frequently than positive contact, negative contact can more strongly influence outgroup attitudes and behaviors due to the effect of category salience in the generalization process. The present study (N =306) tests whether being aware of an outgroup member’s complex social identity will serve as a buffer against the adverse impact of a negative intergroup contact experience on outgroup attitudes. In a 3X2 between-subjects design, social identity complexity (SIC) of an outgroup confederate (high versus low versus control) and the valence of contact (neutral versus negative) were manipulated. Participants interacted with an outgroup confederate …

Interrelationship Among Students’ Ict Usage, Attitude, And Academic Performance In Nordic Countries: Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling On Pisa 2018 And Timss 2019, Dukjae Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

The usage of digital devices has been an interest in the field of education as one of the useful instructional methods for students’ better learning. Although the usage seemed to be related to their academic performance (e.g., Pekto et al., 2017; Skryabin et al., 2015), it was still unclear if the usage itself directly affected better academic results. Therefore, this dissertation explored an interrelationship between students’ usage of digital devices and academic performance with a mediation effect of their attitude toward using digital devices. The study analyzed the datasets of five Nordic countries collected from PISA 2018 and TIMSS 2019, …

Free Choice And Presuppositional Exhaustification, Guillermo Del Pinal, Itai Bassi, Uli Sauerland

Philosophy Department Faculty Publication Series

Sentences such as Olivia can take Logic or Algebra (‘♢∨-sentences’) are typically interpreted as entailing that Olivia can take Logic and can take Algebra. Given a standard semantics for modals and disjunction, those ‘Free choice’ (FC) readings are not predicted from the surface form of ♢∨-sentences. Yet the standard semantics is appropriate for the ‘double prohibition’ reading typically assigned to ¬♢∨-sentences like Olivia can’t take Logic or Algebra. Several extant approaches to FC can account for those two cases, but face challenges when ♢∨, ¬♢∨ and related sentences appear embedded in certain environments. In this paper, we present a …

The Evolution Of A Myth: Romulus & Remus, Laura Haskell

University of Massachusetts Undergraduate History Journal

Myths offer an explanation of something unknown, as is the case with Rome’s founding myth of Romulus and Remus. The first known record was written four hundred years afterward and survives only as a reference in later material. In each subsequent account from the first, authors contribute the influence of their time to grasp the imaginations of their audience and renew interest in days long past. In 2019, director Matteo Rovere molded the Romulus and Remus myth to suit a modern audience in his film Il Primo Re, using reconstructed Proto-Latin to create an immersive 8th-century experience. Comparing early accounts …

A Step Ahead Of Other Nations: The First American Ethnography And Implicit Biases, Charlotte Mills

University of Massachusetts Undergraduate History Journal

The publication of Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex in 1576 has been considered the first American ethnography and an authoritative text compiled from Aztec survivors of the Spanish conquest. However, the period in which source research was conducted potentially allowed for cultural misinterpretation. By examining European histories, colonial agendas, early drafts, and the final manuscript itself, this publication takes on an increasingly biased and Europeanized perspective. While the Florentine Codex originated Western ethnography in the Americas, because of its inherent prejudices and assumptions, it should not be considered the sole authentic source of primary knowledge of pre-Conquest Mexico.

Anita Brenner’S Vision: A Transnational Search For Mexican Jewish Identity, Gina Malagold

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation traces U.S.-Mexico cross-border networks during the cultural Renaissance of early 20^th century influenced by artistic and intellectual encounters in post-revolutionary Mexico. I explore from a transnational perspective the representation of Mexican-Jewish identity in post-revolutionary Mexico through the lens of Mexican-American Jewish anthropologist, artist, and journalist Anita Brenner (1905-1974). In my dissertation, Anita Brenner’s Vision: A Transnational Search for Mexican Jewish Identity, I expand on the notion of mexicanidad and reframe the cosmopolitanism of the time and its manifestation in the United States, arguing that Brenner’s contributions were instrumental in linking Mexico to the larger map of …

Counterdirectionality In The Grammar: Reversals And Restitutions, Jyoti Iyer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration of counterdirectionality, a semantic notion encompassing various sorts of reversals, involving either movement along a path, or---more abstractly---the restoring of an object or a state of affairs to a prior condition. Counterdirectionality is a relationship between an asserted event and a presupposed event in a strict temporal ordering. Across languages, it is frequently expressed by presuppositional adverbs that mean BACK (as in English Ali flew back from New York, Bina hugged Ali back, The door swung back open). The distribution of BACK-adverbs tends to overlap in a systematic way with that of …

Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to present an analysis of associative plurals in Japanese, Turkish, and Armenian that captures their associative interpretation along with a series of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that do not seem to stem directly from these special meanings. For associative plurals, group affiliation is established through spatio-temporal or conceptual contiguity rather than a shared description (Moravcsik 2003). Approaches to English-like additive plurality are unable to capture associative plurals because they predict a plurality based on similarity, where every element of a plural noun is either an element of the corresponding singular or a concatenation of those …

Crisis Y Paradojas: Subjetividades Femeninas En La Literatura De Autoayuda Para Latinas, Aida Roldan-Garcia

Doctoral Dissertations

"Crisis y Paradojas" examines the construction of modern Hispanic femininity in self-help literature aimed at U.S. Latinx women. The work is divided into three thematic sections and begins with an analysis of two texts belonging to this ethnic niche: The Maria Paradox: How Latinas Can Merge Old World Traditions With New World Self-Esteem by Rosa María Gil and Carmen Inoa; and The Latina’s Bible by Sandra Guzmán. The first part explores the origins of the new Latinx woman of the 1990s and 2000s within contemporary Latinx literature and introduces the main characteristics of Latinx women's self-help literature. The second section …

In Search Of Middle Paths: Buddhism, Fiction, And The Secular In Twentieth-Century South Asia, Crystal Baines

Doctoral Dissertations

This study analyzes the centrality of South Asian Buddhist heritages in the articulation of multiple iterations of “the secular” in post-independent Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. As contradictory as such a proposition might seem, this project demonstrates that literature was a forum where the category and language of Buddhism were reoriented to fashion new ideas of “the secular” for modern South Asian polities. With this in mind, I turn to the quintessential genres of secularity in South Asia: the twentieth-century novel and short story. These genres reveal how the category of Buddhism, Buddhist ethics and literature were received and used …

Memories And Trauma Of An Absent Past- Women Filmmakers In Argentina, Nicholas P. Pezzote

Doctoral Dissertations

This work analyzes the relationship between personal and historical memory in five Argentine films made after the end of the country's last dictatorship. All are directed by, and feature, women. Besides approaching the topic of memory, this work examines how patriarchy influences narratives of both personal histories and, more broadly, of history in: Camila (María Luisa Bemberg, 1984), Un muro de silencio (Lita Stantic, 1993), Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003) and La mujer sin cabeza (Lucrecia Martel, 2008). Trauma and the handing down of memory—issues that appear in all of the chosen films—are approached from a critical feminist perspective. At …

The Near-Synonymous Classifiers In Mandarin Chinese: Etymology, Modern Usage, And Possible Problems In L2 Classroom, Irina Kavokina

Masters Theses

Many Chinese classifiers are nearly synonymic – they can be used with the same head nouns without changing the meaning of the sentence, in other words, such classifiers can be used interchangeably or almost interchangeably. This poses a challenge for Chinese language learners, especially those who lack such a grammatical category in their own native language. Another complication arises from the ambiguous English translations of many classifiers.

In this paper we investigate the collocation behavior of near-synonymous Chinese classifiers, focusing on their semantic nuances and interchangeability. Analyzing 6 pairs of classifiers — 栋 and 幢, 匹 and 头, 批 and …

The Dialectical Virtue Of Ideological Reduction, Keehyuk Nahm

Doctoral Dissertations

Many would agree that there is something generally appealing and attractive about reduction. By this, I do not mean that reductive theories are accepted across the board, nor do I mean that they should be. All I mean is that there is something recognizably “good” about the reductive method that may be outweighed by other considerations. For instance, it is extremely rare for one to reject the reductionist position of a given domain while conceding that the proposed reductive procedure is successful. Typically, the opposition consists in denying that the subject matter can be reduced. This suggests an unspoken rule …

Effective And Efficient Transfer Learning In The Era Of Large Language Models, Tu Vu

Doctoral Dissertations

Substantial progress has been made in the field of natural language processing (NLP) due to the advent of large language models (LLMs)—deep neural networks with millions or billions of parameters pre-trained on large amounts of unlabeled data. However, these models have common weaknesses, including degenerate performance in data-scarce scenarios, and substantial computational resource requirements. This thesis aims to develop methods to address these limitations for improved applicability and performance of LLMs in resource-constrained settings with limited data and/or computational resources. To address the need for labeled data in data-scarce scenarios, I present two methods, in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, …