Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Sound-Symbolic Expression Of Animacy In Amazonian Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

Several anthropologists of Amazonian societies in Ecuador have claimed that for Achuar [1] and Quichua speaking Runa [2,3,4] there is no fundamental distinction between humans on the one hand, and plants and animals on the other. A related observation is that Runa and Achuar people share an animistic cosmology whereby animals, plants, and even seemingly inert entities such as rocks and stones are believed to have a life force or essence with a subjectivity that can be expressed. This paper will focus on Quichua speaking Runa to seek linguistic evidence for animacy by examining the sound-symbolic properties of a class …

Update On Soar 9 And Sentence Processing, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Jeremiah Lane Mcghee, Ross Hendrickson

Faculty Publications

NLSOAR is in active development

NLSOAR can process several key types of sentences

NLSOAR updated to SOAR 9 as a prototype

T-Glottalization In American English, David Eddington, Michael Taylor

Faculty Publications

In word-final prevocalic position (e.g., right ankle), there are various possible phonetic realizations of /t/ in American English: [t], [r], [?]. The present study focuses on the linguistic and social factors associated with the use of the glottal stop. Datat were gathered by having participants repeat sentences they were presented auditorily (e.g, She twisted her right ankle). The particular pronunciation of /t/ in the presented sentences was masked with a tone. Logistic regression analysis identified three significant factors: (1) glottal stops were favored by following front vowels; (2) younger female speakers were most likely to use glottal stops, which …

The Relative Importance Of Lexical Frequency In Syllable- And Word-Final /S/ Reduction In Cali, Colombia, Earl K. Brown

Faculty Publications

The literature on phonological variation and change abounds with studies about syllable- and word-final /s/ reduction in Spanish. In fact, “the aspiration and deletion of /s/ in dialects of Spanish may be the most extensively treated of all sound changes being investigated from an empirical, variationist perspective” (Ferguson, 1990, p. 64). Many factors have been shown to significantly affect this linguistic phenomenon. Terrell (1979) finds word length to be a significant factor in his Cuban data, with more deletion in polysyllabic words than in monosyllabic ones. Additionally, Terrell shows that redundant plural markers in noun phrases (that is, all but …

Incremental Processing And Resource Usage, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Jeremiah Lane Mcghee, Ross Hendrickson, Carl Christensen

Faculty Publications

Within the community engaged in Soar-based cognitive modeling (Newell, 1990), some work has focused on parsing natural language input text. An early version of the system (Lewis, 1993) performed syntactic analysis based largely on the Government & Binding (aka Principles & Parameters) framework, including X-bar theory for constituency.

Variability In L2 Acquisition Across L1 Backgrounds, Dan P. Dewey, Malena Weitze, Jeremiah Mcghee, C. Ray Graham, Dennis Eggett

Faculty Publications

For a number of decades now, a widely accepted belief of language acquisition researchers is the so called natural order hypothesis (Dulay, Burt, & Krashen, 1982; Ellis, 1994; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991). According to this hypothesis, certain grammatical morphemes emerge in a universal order in learners of English as a second language. Most of the data collection in this line of research was done in the 1970’s against a backdrop of theory which espoused the notion of L1 transfer to L2 acquisition on the one hand and a universal grammar perspective on the other. Most dealt with oral language production …

Domain-Independent Data Extraction: Person Names, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Christensen

Faculty Publications

Extraction software and techniques yield good results with domain specific data extraction

Person names and information rarely domain specific

Identification and extraction difficult because of noisy data, lack of formatting

Methods Of Scoring Elicited Imitation Items: An Empirical Study, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Dan P. Dewey, Jeremiah Lane Mcghee, Aaron Johnson, Ross Hendrickson

Faculty Publications

NNS oral proficiency test for English

NNS listen to, repeat back isolated English sentences (60/test)

Responses are recorded and scored later by human evaluators

Rationale: subjects can’t process linguistic vocabulary, structures they don’t know yet