Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

La Adquisición De Los Verbos Posicionales En Niños Bilingües De Zapoteco-Español En Un Contexto De Pérdida Lingüística, Ana D. Alonso Ortiz

Doctoral Dissertations

The present study investigates the acquisition of positional verbs on bilingual children of Zapotec and Spanish in the indigenous community of Hidalgo Yalalag in Oaxaca, Mexico. The main research question is how bilingual children of Zapotec-Spanish acquire positional verbs in a language shift and language displacement context. Ninety-four young scholars between the ages of five to ten years old took part in this study. They participated in three tasks, a vocabulary task, an acceptability task, and a production task. A sociolinguistic questionnaire was also employed. The vocabulary task goal was to recruit and identify participants for the study. The acceptability …

The Production And Perception Of Subject Focus Prosody In L2 Spanish, Covadonga Sanchez

Doctoral Dissertations

New information can be introduced in discourse through different strategies, including syntactic and prosodic ones. This project provides an account of the syntactic and intonational strategies used for focus-marking in Peninsular Spanish, Mainstream American English and L2 Spanish using parallel experimental designs and a unitary method of analysis within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework for the study of intonation. It provides a comprehensive description of specific phonological categories and their phonetic implementation not only in monolingual speech, but also as they develop in the L2 grammar of Spanish learners with different experiences with the target language, following the premises of the L2 …

The Impact Of Ancestral Language Maintenance On Cultural Identity Among White Immigrant Descendants: A Phenomenological Qualitative Study, Micaella Elizabeth Colla

Doctoral Dissertations

There is insufficient research on the cultural identity formation of White immigrant descendants who have experienced ancestral language loss. This phenomenological qualitative study conducted in San Francisco, California explored the experiences and perceptions of seven White immigrant descendants in response to these questions: (1) What is the role of L1 (mother tongue) maintenance on identity maintenance among White immigrant descendants? (2) How do immigrant descendants view their cultural identities in the absence of their ancestral languages? And (3) How might educators encourage second language and culture acquisition, while protecting students’ first languages and cultures? Research data included narratives from in-depth, …

The Form And Acquisition Of Free Relatives, Michael Clauss

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the syntax of Free Relatives (FRs) in English at different stages of first language acquisition. The goal is to provide a theory of Free Relatives that explains phenomena in adult and child FRs, is feasibly learnable by a child, and reflects principles expressed in theories of Universal Grammar based on the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2005). The central empirical concern is the difference between the distribution of Wh expressions in FRs vs. Wh questions in English, the difference in grammaticality between Charles wondered dish what Sebastian made and *Charles ate what dish Sebastian made (*Wh-NP). To …

Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton

Doctoral Dissertations

Researchers in speech-language pathology and ethnolinguistics have worked to gain knowledge about typical and atypical language patterns of African American children who are identified as African American English (AAE) dialect speakers. Much progress had been made, but limitations in this field of knowledge have persisted, especially for AA children who demonstrate variable use of AAE, presumably through the process of assimilation in the school setting. Therefore, more information is needed to provide diagnostic markers for deviations in typical language development for variable AAE-MAE speakers. Prior empirical research has found that third- and fourth-grade AAE-speaking children with typical language development overtly …

Assigning Grammatical Gender To Novel Nouns In L1 And L2 Spanish, Andie Faber

Doctoral Dissertations

Grammatical gender is an inherent lexical property of nouns that categorizes them into two or more classes. Spanish and Portuguese have a binary gender system in which all nouns are masculine or feminine; this, along with number produces morphosyntactic agreement relationships between nouns, determiners, and adjectives. Conversely, when it comes to morphosyntactic agreement, English only produces agreement for number. The feature distinctions between Spanish and Portuguese on the one hand and English on the other can be illustrated using type hierarchies in HPSG, where the gender feature in Spanish and Portuguese has the same distribution in the hierarchy; however, the …

First And Second Language Acquisition Of Recursive Operations: Two Studies, Jon S. Nelson

Doctoral Dissertations

Linguistic theory has increasingly revolved around the notion of recursion. Most recently, many have advocated a view wherein it forms the essence of the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) purportedly contained in the human mind, while others have argued that it remains a separate and not necessarily related component of language processing. L1 Acquisition theory has suggested that appropriate recursive input is required to activate the LAD’s recursive faculties; nonetheless, L1 recursive structures may resist instruction and cause initial confusion among children. The effect that any of this may have on L2 has only begun to be studied. This dissertation attempts …

Therapy Dogs In The College Classroom: The Effect Of Dogs On Stress, Anxiety, And Spanish L2 Phonological Learning And Performance, Elaine Maralee Henry

Doctoral Dissertations

Anxiety and stress invoked by the second language classroom setting has the ability to cause numerous detrimental physiological changes which impair the learning process. A more natural, “immersion” type atmosphere is often desired when teaching a second language; however, this is not typically possible with college classes. Therefore, the addition of therapy dogs to college second language classes may be a beneficial solution since therapy dogs are frequently cited as having the ability to lower stress and anxiety in many different settings. Stroking and interacting with a dog may reduce many markers of stress, including blood pressure, heart rate, and …

The Discursive Construction Of Language Teaching And Learning In Multiuser Virtual Environments, Douglas W. Canfield

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to broaden how researchers within computer-assisted language learning (CALL) make sense of and examine psychological and power constructs at play in language courses conducted in 3D multiuser virtual environments. 18 students and 2 teachers in 8 formal English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in the 3D multiuser virtual environment of Second Life participated in a discourse analysis study to explore the theoretical and analytic ways in which critical discursive psychology could function to explore how teaching and learning are performed as interactional events in a community of language teachers and learners in Second Life by investigating …

Building Communicative Competence: An Evaluation Of The Effectiveness Of An Intensive Japanese-Language Program, Yukiko Konishi

Doctoral Dissertations

Even though language-program evaluations provide educators with various types of information on teaching practices and the programs in which they work, insufficient literature discusses issues related to language-program evaluation. This mixed-methods study examined the effectiveness of a Japanese-language program offered at a government-sponsored Institute located in northern California on language-program evaluation and developing communicative competence at postsecondary schools.

Data comprised two sets of surveys, six individual interviews, and one group interview. Survey respondents were 35 former students of the institute and 12 Japanese instructors who are currently teaching Japanese or have taught Japanese at the Institute. Of the 35 students, …

Linguistic Cognition And Bimodalism: A Study Of Motion And Location In The Confluence Of Spanish And Spain’S Sign Language, Francisco Meizoso

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to study the intrapersonal and symbolic function of gesture by a very specific type of population: hearing speakers of Spanish who, having been born to deaf parents, grew up developing a bimodal (Spanish and Spain’s Sign Language) linguistic interface, which borrows elements from the manual and spoken modalities. In the ordering of gestures devised by Kendon (1988) and cited by McNeill (1992), gesticulation and sign languages are placed at opposite ends of a continuum. At one end, gesticulation is formed by idiosyncratic spontaneous gestures lacking any conventional linguistic proprieties, which are produced in combination …

Investigating English Teachers' Perceptions Of Intercultural Communicative Competence In The Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, Hazem Ahmed Osman

Doctoral Dissertations

This mixed-method study examines the perceptions of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) by English teachers in the Preparatory Year (PY) program at King Saudi University. Studies that aim to investigate teachers’ perception of ICC and its implementation in a foreign language classroom are relatively scarce. Additionally, the majority of the studies that generally targeted the concept of ICC in a foreign-language learning context were studies that either relied on online blogs, discussion forums, and chat rooms to allow students to communicate cross-culturally, or examined ICC development during sojourns or study abroad periods in the target country. Relatively fewer studies have addressed …

The Effects Of Explicit Listening Strategy Instruction On The Listening Comprehension Of English As Second Language (Esl) Community College Students, Yi Guan

Doctoral Dissertations

This mixed methods study explored the effects of explicit listening strategy instruction on the beginning-level ESL learner's listening comprehension at a community college in Northern California. Most previous studies measured the effectiveness of listening strategy instruction by comparing students' test scores, but little research explored the students' listening strategy development and their perceptions of the strategy instruction. Furthermore, no prior research exists on the effects of listening strategy instruction among community college students.

The researcher employed the concurrent triangulation approach, collecting and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data simultaneously. Data sources included interviews, a listening test, background surveys, and classroom …