Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Publishing In The Teaching Linguistics Section Of Language, Kazuko Hiramatsu, Michal Temkin Martinez

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The mission of the Teaching Linguistics section of Language is to publish high-quality peer-reviewed articles in the area of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Publications in the section focus on issues that relate not only to the direct teaching of linguistics, but also to the application of linguistic concepts and theories and the insight it provides about teaching and education more broadly.

Towards Unifying Grounded And Distributional Semantics Using The Words-As-Classifiers Model Of Lexical Semantics, Stacy Black

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Automated systems that make use of language, such as personal assistants, need some means of representing words such that 1) the representation is computable and 2) captures form and meaning. Recent advancements in the field of natural language processing have resulted in useful approaches to representing computable word meanings. In this thesis, I consider two such approaches: distributional embeddings and grounded models. Distributional embeddings are represented as high-dimensional vectors; words with similar meanings tend to cluster together in embedding space. Embeddings are easily learned using large amounts of text data. However, embeddings suffer from a lack of "real world" knowledge; …

Duck Valley Reservation (Owyhee, Nevada), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Shoshone-Paiute community of Duck Valley includes reservation territory that straddles the Idaho-Nevada border. Recordings of the Duck Valley communolect were made at the home of the speaker’s niece in the presence of several extended family members, including speakers, passive bilinguals and non-speakers alike, as well as children. The speaker was 60 years old at the time and clearly enjoyed recounting Coyote stories. That said, a few of the stories were considered by her family to be a bit too lurid to include here.

Northern Paiute Texts: Introduction, Tim Thornes, Maziar Toosarvandani

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This volume of Northern Paiute texts is the result of continued collaborative relationships between members of several Northern Paiute (Western Numic; Uto-Aztecan) speech communities and two linguists who have nearly 30 years of combined experience working on the language. The resulting documentary resource provides varied samples of naturally occurring speech—narratives recorded and analyzed by the editors as part of their own fieldwork as well as materials recorded of earlier generations of speakers. In one case, materials from three generations of speakers from the same speech community are provided. By providing access in a single volume to previously inaccessible texts from …

Bannock (Fort Hall, Idaho), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Bannock, whose precontact territory centered around the Snake River plain of southwestern Idaho and the Boise River valley, speak the variety of Northern Paiute most influenced by its close linguistic relative, Shoshoni. This influence may be due to a combination of factors, including the overlapping nature of aboriginal territories, the acquisition of the horse and buffalo-hunting culture, and the later impact of a one-way bilingualism that was present on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, whereby nearly all Bannock speakers also spoke (and speak) Shoshoni, but not the reverse. The number of Bannock speakers, currently, may be no more than …

Wadadɨka’A (Burns Paiute Reservation, Oregon), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Harney Valley, or tibidzi yipɨ (the True Valley), region of southeastern Oregon is a rich and varied landscape consisting of all the extremes one expects to find in the Great Basin—vast marshlands, high-elevation grasslands, alkali basins, pine forest, and ephemeral lakebeds and rivers. This high desert area attracts hundreds of thousands of water and other fowl (as well as birdwatchers) on their seasonal migration. Water has been, and remains, a source of tension in the region, as does the management of federal land more generally, including, in particular, the allocation of grazing rights. The occupation of the headquarters of …

Fort Mcdermitt Reservation (Mcdermitt, Nevada), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

The McDermitt reservation straddles the Oregon-Nevada border and is the home of the majority of all remaining first language Northern Paiute speakers. Like the Duck Valley Reservation, it is quite isolated, lying approximately 90 miles northeast of the town of Winnemucca, Nevada (population > 7,000). The following stories are two of the many texts collected in the early 1960s by Sven Liljeblad from Pete Snapp, a fluent speaker from McDermitt. Mr. Snapp was in his early nineties at the time of this recording, which was made on reel-to-reel tape and archived as part of the Sven Liljeblad Collection in the Special …

Yahooskin (Beatty, Oregon), Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although it is clear that the term “Yahooskin” is not a native term (likely originating from the Sahaptin (Ichiskiin) language), it has been in general use as a reference to disparate Northern Paiute bands (e.g., YapatɨkaɁa, ‘wild carrot-eaters’) around any of several lake basins of south-central Oregon, including the Silver, Summer, and Abert lakes, and the Warner Valley region. These bands were brought together after the formation of the Klamath Reservation and the signing of the treaty at Yainax in 1864. The “Yahooskin Band of Snake Indians,” as they had come to be called, were most closely tied to the …

A Perception Study Of Rioplatense Spanish, Cecelia Staggs

McNair Scholars Research Journal

Rioplatense Spanish (RPS; Argentina and Uruguay) is known for its distinctive pronunciation features. In Standard American Spanish, the sound associated with the letters ‘y’ or ‘ll’ is [j] (as in ‘yellow’), but in RPS the sound is [ʒ] (as in ‘measure’) or, more recently, [ʃ] (as in ‘shoe’). Previous studies found this sound change (from [ʒ] to [ʃ]) is almost complete in speakers from Uruguay and Argentina, but the change in Uruguay is more recent. In this study, RPS speakers from both countries were presented with audio recordings of words containing all possible variants of the sounds [j], [ʒ], and …

Towards Multipurpose Readability Assessment, Ion Madrazo

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Readability refers to the ease with which a reader can understand a text. Automatic readability assessment has been widely studied over the past 50 years. However, most of the studies focus on the development of tools that apply either to a single language, domain, or document type. This supposes duplicate efforts for both developers, who need to integrate multiple tools in their systems, and final users, who have to deal with incompatibilities among the readability scales of different tools. In this manuscript, we present MultiRead, a multipurpose readability assessment tool capable of predicting the reading difficulty of texts of varied …

Cest: City Event Summarization Using Twitter, Deepa Mallela

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

Twitter, with 288 million active users, has become the most popular platform for continuous real-time discussions. This leads to huge amounts of information related to the real-world, which has attracted researchers from both academia and industry. Event detection on Twitter has gained attention as one of the most popular domains of interest within the research community. Unfortunately, existing event detection methodologies have yet to fully explore Twitter metadata and instead rely solely on identifying events based on prior information or focus on events that belong to specific categories. Given the heavy volume of tweets that discuss events, summarization techniques can …

There’S An Identity Label For Me?: Perceptions By First-Generation College Students Of An Institutional Label, Curtis A. Green-Eneix

McNair Scholars Research Journal

Although first-generation college students (FGCS) have been entering universities in large numbers, and even with past quantitative studies to understand this demographic, a major percentage continue to drop out of college within their first two years. Past research has resulted in an overall picture of this demographic. This qualitative study explores: (1) how FGCS perceive their social identity in relation to a college community, and (2) how interacting with support programs, such as Boise State’s Student Success Program (SSP), shapes their understanding of support. In interviews with nine FGCS students, most of them did not know this first-generation label applied …

Specific Exceptions Driving Variation: The Case Of Spirantization In Modern Hebrew, Michal Temkin Martinez, Ivana Müllner

Michal Temkin Martinez

Spirantization in Modern Hebrew has high levels of variation in its acquisition and production largely due to the high frequency of exceptions (Adam 2002). In this paper, we report the results of an experiment examining variation in the production of Modern Hebrew Spirantization (MHS) in real and nonce verb paradigms, linking the patterns of variation to specific exceptions that are encoded in the orthography. Spirantization in Modern Hebrew is characterized by the alternation of the stops [p], [b], and [k] with [f], [v], and [χ], respectively. Fricatives generally occur in post-vocalic position and stops occur elsewhere. This alternation is especially …

First-Generation College Students, Identity, & Empowerment Labels, Curtis Green-Eneix, Dr.Gail Shuck (Mentor)

Idaho Conference on Undergraduate Research

First-generation college students (FGCS) have been the primary focus of college retention research due to more FGCS entering universities, and FGCS’s low retention rates. Recent research has focused on quantitative studies of FGCS from comparing education and social backgrounds to non-FGCS, to outside constraints FGCS face while in college. These findings result in general understandings of FGCS dealing with additional hardship to moments of severe loneliness. This study explores (1) how FGCS—from Boise State University’s Student Success Program (SSP)—perceive their identity in a college community, (2) how they have or have not experienced identity conflicts while pursuing a degree, and …

The Linguistic Features Of Deceptive Speech, Jared Albrecht, Michal Temkin Martinez (Mentor)

Idaho Conference on Undergraduate Research

Research on deception within the field of linguistics has been largely focused upon the lexical aspect of lies. However, while the words a liar uses may reveal the lie in some cases, there are certain prosodic features of speech (e.g. pitch or tempo) that may be correlated to lying. This study focuses on these features in an attempt to decode deception. In an experiment with a representative sample of a university campus population, participants were asked to lie for science in a game of ‘Two Truths and a Lie’. Each participant’s speech was recorded while they constructed spontaneous truths and …

Tshiluba Language Structures, Vanessa Rosenbaum, Kelli Billings, Janessa Gohn, Libby Holcomb, Jessica Lahey, Jessica Milanez, Kelly Nuttall, Tyler Scoggins, Kristen Smith, Stephanie Todd, Jake Young, Albert Romain Bantumbakulu Mukuna, Daniel Miko-Mikyene

College of Arts and Sciences Presentations

This poster provides a preliminary description of the linguistic features of Tshiluba (also known as Luba-Kasai), a major language spoken in the south-central, Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and by several refugee families in the Boise area. Tshiluba is characterized as an Atlantic-Congo, Narrow Bantu, Central language (L31) within the Niger-Congo language family and, although it is spoken by over 6 million people and enjoys national language status in DRC, it has not received extensive recent attention in the linguistic literature. Over the course of a semester, our group has met with native speakers of Tshiluba …

Linguistic Advocacy As A Bridge Between Disciplines, David Bowie, Clare Dannenberg

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

Linguistics involves, at its core, advocacy for a key part of human existence: No matter our linguistic specialty, we advocate for human language on a variety of different levels from the social and political to the scientific. Certainly, as educators, our position as advocates leaks into our pedagogy as we try to instill in our students both the rote knowledge of our discipline and also the responsibility of utilizing that knowledge in the “real world.” Many of us even create assignments that engage our students to become real-world advocates, and yet these assignments may remain within the silos of our …

Linguistic Foundations For L2 Pronunciation Teaching, Kathy L. Sands

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

In this session I present a course I am proposing (and will pilot in short form this summer in Mongolia) entitled “Linguistic Foundations for L2 Pronunciation Teaching.” This course is designed to provide language-teaching majors with key linguistic foundation in phonetics and phonology to be able to analyze the linguistic source of pronunciation errors accurately and provide students with clear explanations and effective, individualized coaching. For non-native speakers of the language they will be teaching, the course is designed as well to strengthen their own pronunciation. A major component of the course will be hands-on working with L2 speakers, chosen …

Language, Gender, And Culture, Janie Rees-Miller

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

At a small college with no linguistics department and no major or minor, all linguistics courses must satisfy some general education requirements or major/minor requirements in another discipline. The course Language, Gender, and Culture was designed to satisfy the GE requirement for a course in diversity and/or global perspectives and may also be used for the Gender Studies minor. In order to satisfy these various requirements and to appeal to the broadest spectrum of students, the course has been constructed so that course content and readings include data from a variety of languages and cultures, concepts of gender and the …

Teaching To The Teachers: Secondary Education English Students In The Introductory Linguistics Course, Julie S. Amberg, Deborah J. Vause

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

Non-linguistic majors can benefit from well-designed lessons in the introductory linguistics course that raise issues students will need to know about in their future careers. At our institution, the introductory linguistics course is populated by students majoring in English Literary Studies, Secondary Education English, and Professional Writing. Secondary Education English (SEE) majors take Language and Linguistics because they must fulfill requirements mandated by the state: knowledge of morphology, phonology, syntax, history of the English language, and so on. In addition to these required subjects, we introduce other issues as well that we feel are essential to developing these particular students’ …

Linguistics And Tesol At Suny Oswego, Jean Ann, Bruce Long Peng

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

We are linguists with tenure homes in a School of Education (SOE). We were charged with (i) reviving a languishing undergraduate Linguistics major, and (ii) creating a new TESOL Program for undergraduate students destined for NYS certification to teach English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) in K-12 settings. We argued for a subset of courses in the linguistics major to serve as the arts and sciences concentration for the TESOL major. We advise and teach both the TESOL and Linguistics majors. Our teaching loads are about half in the School of Education (SOE) and half in the College of …

Language In Human Life: A Ge Course Targeting English Language Learners, Gail Shuck

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

The presenter will describe a cross-cultural course, Language in Human Life, designed to meet several university needs: 1) To provide a course for non-majors that fulfills a long-standing gap in general education courses at the presenter’s institution that introduce students to linguistic thought, 2) to be a magnet course for speakers of English as an additional language in order to allow all students to learn about each others’ languages, and 3) to offer a linguistically accessible course for lower-proficiency users of English that is taught by an instructor with ESL expertise but that fulfills a university requirement for all students. …

Linguistic Weeds: Popping Up Everywhere, Lynn Burley

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

The study of language is a part of a dozen other disciplines on any average sized campus, and should be a part of every general education program precisely because it is a part of so many other disciplines. Our job is to not only provide students with exceptional undergraduate and graduate linguistics degrees, but to ensure that students are exposed to linguistics in their general studies and that students have the opportunity to take linguistics courses as appropriate for their other majors and minors. The University of Central Arkansas (UCA) linguistics faculty is doing this by offering interdisciplinary programs, creating …

Transitioning From Serving Others’ Students To Serving Our Own, Julie Roberts

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

The current study focuses on a linguistics program in the unusual situation of having emerged from another department. Therefore, the program began by creating classes that would be of interest and relevance to other fields, and, only after the formation of the stand-alone major (2008) and minor (2006), began to fill in with classes that are important to linguists but less “marketable” outside that program. The presentation will focus on the following strategies for maintaining and expanding our relevance to other majors and to the university as a whole and the success and challenges of each:

1. Use of cases/examples …

Weaving Linguistics Into A Range Of Fabrics, Sharon Klein

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

No linguist is ever at a loss to understand how attention to any aspect of language as an object of inquiry can contribute to the context where the piece might be found. But linguists rarely get consulted, because what is also true is that virtually no one beyond the landscape of linguistic study is likely even to know that such a perspective on language exists, much less that it might truly be useful. Waiting for this state of affairs to change is fruitless—surely frustrating—and many of us choose to ignore the views “out there” keeping our individual and collective focus …

Language And The Law, Tineke Scholten

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

This is an upper division course that has been certified as a General Education Course in the area of “Lifelong Learning”. The course also is part of a “Social Justice” GE Path, which encourages students to select their GE courses around a particular theme. The course draws students from a variety of undergraduate majors, including Psychology, Business Law, Political Science, History and Sociology.

The course investigates the role that language and linguistics play in the legal written and oral discourse. In doing so, it hopes to serve two purposes: (1) to illustrate and explicate essential qualities of natural languages and …

Development Of A New Experiment Demonstrating Categorical Perception, Kelsey Montzka

Student Research Initiative

In this project, we have created an online portal containing a multi-faceted demonstration of categorical perception. We utilized the 2I2AFC (two-interval, two alternative forced choice) stimulus presentation method which should elicit more categorical results from students, helping to better demonstrate the phenomenon (Gerrits & Schouten, 2004), and provided different acoustic cues illustrating CP. In addition to illustrations of CP for F2 formant transition, the new online portal is used to illustrate voice onset timing (VOT; the cue that distinguishes between the sounds [b] and [p]), as well as how contextual factors and participants’ linguistic backgrounds affect CP. The contextual factors …

Variation And Preferences In Modern Hebrew Nonce Verbs, Michal Martinez

Michal Temkin Martinez

This paper reports a production experiment examining variation in Modern Hebrew spirantization. Modern Hebrew spirantization is characterized by the alternation of the stops [p], [b], and [k] with their fricative counterparts [f], [v], and [χ], respectively. Typically, fricatives occur post-vocalically, and stops elsewhere, as in (1). (1) Root Infinitive Uninflected Gloss /p/~[f] /pgʃ/ [lifgoʃ] [pagaʃ] ‘to meet’ /b/~[v] /bgd/ [livgod] [bagad] ‘to betray’ /k/~[χ] /ktb/ [liχtov] [katav] ‘to write’ Due to historical mergers and recent borrowings, there are segments that are acoustically identical to those in (1) but that do not alternate, thus potentially forming exceptions (i.e. post-vocalic stops or …

Technology In The Linguistics Classroom: Instructor And Student Perspective, Michal Martinez, Kelli Jones, Jessica Milanez, Danielle Yarbrough

Michal Temkin Martinez

This poster will highlight best practices for incorporating technology into the linguistics classroom. From facilitating real-time feedback in large lecture-style introductory classes to the use of mobile technology and document sharing in field methods courses, this presentation will highlight the benefits and downfalls of the incorporation of technology into undergraduate courses. It will also demonstrate the importance of using technology as a tool to better meet and assess learning objectives. Both instructor and student perspectives will be outlined and discussed.

Phonology, Optimality Theory: Modern Hebrew, Michal Temkin Martinez

Michal Temkin Martinez

This encyclopedia entry shows how Optimality Theory (OT hereafter; Prince and Smolensky 1993) may be applied to the phonology of Modern Hebrew, treating the spirantization of the 'bgdkpt' consonants as a case study.