Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Global Impact Of A Business School Degree: International Alumni Voice, K. James Hartshorn, Maureen Snow Andrade, Norman W. Evans

Faculty Publications

Business schools in English-dominant countries host significant numbers of international students. In the U.S., where few students remain in the country to work, little is known about the role of English language proficiency and employer-valued outcomes on students’ professional success. This study reports survey findings from international alumni on the development and impact of learning outcomes, particularly English proficiency. Participants felt they had acquired outcomes valued by employers and reported using English in their work. The study indicates a need for more institution-specific studies to increase knowledge of a population with a significant presence in schools of business.

All About The American Flap, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

In this column, I am going to talk about the American flap, a phonological feature of the American English dialect. Those of us with backgrounds in ESL/EFL learn about this in our master’s programs, but I have found that even teachers who have taken a course in linguistics may not be aware of the flap and its important implications for listening, reading, and spelling in English (Lems, Miller, & Soro, 2017)

Gender Assignment To Spanish Pseudowords By Monolingual And Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children, Rocio Pérez-Tattam, Maria José Ezeizabarrena, Hans Stadthagen-González, Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole

Faculty Publications

This study examines gender marking in the Spanish of Basque-Spanish bilingual children. We analyze data collected via a production task designed to elicit 48 DPs, controlling for gender of referents and for number and types of morphological cues to grammatical gender. The goals were to determine the extent to which participants rely on biological cues (female referent =>FEM gender, male referent =>MASC gender) and morpho-phonological cues (-a ending =>FEM, -o ending =>MASC, others =>MASC or FEM) to assign gender to pseudowords/novel words; and whether bilinguals’ language dominance (Spanish strong/weak) has an effect. Data were collected …

An Analysis Of Esl Learner Preferences For Native Accent Retention And Reduction, K. James Hartshorn

Faculty Publications

Though most ESL learners desire a “native-like” pronunciation, researchers have observed that some may want to retain features of their L1accents as a means of maintaining identity. This raises important questions about the best ways to teach L2 pronunciation. Therefore, the aims of this study were to discover how pervasive a preference for accent retention may be and to identify possible reasons learners exhibit this preference. To accomplish this, a scale was designed to assess a preference for accent retention, and potential explanatory variables were identified. Analyses of 350 ESL learners identified varying levels of a preference for accent retention, …

Effects Of The Relationships Between Forms Within And Across Paradigms On Lexical Processing And Representation: An Experimental Investigation Of Russian Nouns, Jeffery R. Parker

Faculty Publications

The frequency and distribution of forms within a lexeme’s paradigm affect how quickly forms are accessed (e.g., Kostić, 1991; Milin, Filipović Đurđević, & Moscoso del Prado Martín, 2009; Moscoso del Prado Martı́n, Kostić, & Baayen, 2004). The distribution of forms across paradigms, in contrast, has received little experimental attention. Theoretical studies investigate the distribution of forms across paradigms because forms vary in how predictive they are of other (unknown) forms. Such investigations have uncovered typological tendencies (e.g., Ackerman & Malouf, 2013; Stump & Finkel, 2013) and contribute to explanations of language-specific phenomena (e.g., Sims, 2015; Parker & Sims, To appear). …

Ideophone-Gesture Composites: Depictive Type, Sensory Class, And Modality, Janis B. Nuckolls, Alexander Rice, Diana Sun, Sarah Hatton, Tod Swanson

Faculty Publications

Ideophones are a class of marked words that are often accompanied by gestures to depict sensory perceptions. Our paper seeks to clarify the interrelations between ideophones and the language-gesture complex through an analysis of a traditional flood story told by 5 different speakers of the Pastaza Quichua dialect spoken in Amazonian Ecuador. Using the typology of depictive gestures outlined by Streeck, we will determine whether there is any significant covariation between depictive gesture type, sensory class, whether visual, auditory, or haptic (involving touch), and a modality distinction we’ve recently identified between speaker internal and speaker external perspective.

Reconciling Perception With Production In Southern Speech, Joseph A. Stanley, Rachel M. Olsen, Michael L. Olsen, Lisa Lipani, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

• Weakening of canonical /aɪ ɔɪ aʊ/ occurs in Southern speech (Thomas 2003)
• /ai/ weakening
• Most prevalent • Triggering feature of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006) • /ɔɪ/ weakening • Most prevalent amongst African Americans, and older European Americans in the South • For everyone before laterals (Thomas 2008) • /aʊ/ weakening • Widespread in European American Southern English (Thomas 2008)

Verbs In Egyptian Arabic: A Case For Register Variation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael G. White

Faculty Publications

The limited availability of Egyptian Arabic (EA) corpus resources, especially speech corpora, has left open opportunity for research into such dialect phenomena as register. In this paper we introduce a new two-millionword EA corpus, CALM. We perform a register analysis on EA between two subcorpora of CALM (i.e. Movies and Blogs), showing several features that vary between the two. A discussion follows about how annotation was carried out automatically, how it was handcorrected, and what the prospects are for carrying out similar studies using CALM.

Expectations And Challenges Of Non-Native University Writers At The Outset Of Discipline-Specific Study, K. James Hartshorn, Norman W. Evans

Faculty Publications

Little is known about how best to prepare non-native students matriculated at universities in the United States to succeed in discipline-specific writing. Whilesome studies have suggested differences in the types and volumes of writing across disciplines, such studies have compared very few disciplines simultaneously and have not always examined the disciplines most commonly studied by international students. Thus, this study seeks to fill an important gap in the literature by examining the perspectives of university professors regarding their expectations and purposes for student writing as well as their observations about the greatest writing challenges their students face within five of …

Designing And Developing An Online Self-Regulated Learning Course, Grant Eckstein, Mariah Krauel-Nix, Norman W. Evans, Benjamin L. Mcmurry

Faculty Publications

The concept of self-regulated learning has been a prominent topic in education and has been researched and applied to various educational fields. In the field of TESOL, self-regulation has been categorized into dimensions and linked with possible application tools to help ESL/EFL students better apply and develop related skills (Andrade and Evans 2013, 2015). Although these applications have seen some success, the administration of one intensive English program felt that its center's self-regulated learning program was ineffective for teachers and students. Therefore, curriculum designers evaluated the center's program, compiled data, and formed design specifications for an improved program. Their specifications …

Increasing English Learners’ Positive Emotional Response To Learning Through Dance, Grant Eckstein, Elizabeth Hanks

Faculty Publications

This study investigates dance as an English Second Language (ESL) curriculum enhancement. The curriculum utilizes kinesthetic learning, which is a method seldom incorporated in formal academic classrooms (Pourhosein Gilakjani, 2011) despite evidence suggesting that it benefits all students, including those without kinesthetic learning preferences (Schumann, 1997). Supporters believe that the benefits of incorporating movement in the classroom include increased student enjoyment, motivation, and confidence in learning. However, these beliefs are merely anecdotal at present. This study analyzes quantitative questionnaires and qualitative feedback from 26 students who participated in a 4-week long Dance ESL curriculum to determine whether dance-based learning can …

Variation In Interrogative Abverbials: Cuán, Qué Tan, Cómo De, And Lo+ Adj./Adv.+ Que, David E. Eddington

Faculty Publications

Cuán, qué tan, and cómo de are used to modify adverbs and adjectives in interrogatives. They are also used in embedded clauses along with lo+adj./adv.+que. Instances of these expressions were extracted from the Corpus del Español. In interrogatives, qué tan was the most frequent. The idea that cuán is archaic or limited to literary usage is not supported by these data. Cómo de is extremely infrequent except in Peninsular Spanish. In embedded clauses the frequency of these expressions appear in this order of frequency: lo+adj./adv.+que > qué tan > cuán > cómo de. In an experiment, speakers from Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, …

Verbs In Egyptian Arabic: A Case For Register Variation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael G. White

Faculty Publications

The limited availability of Egyptian Arabic (EA) corpus resources, especially speech corpora, has left open opportunity for research into such dialect phenomena as register. In this paper we introduce a new two-millionword EA corpus, CALM. We perform a register analysis on EA between two subcorpora of CALM (i.e. Movies and Blogs), showing several features that vary between the two. A discussion follows about how annotation was carried out automatically, how it was handcorrected, and what the prospects are for carrying out similar studies using CALM.

Getting Your Business Communication Research Funded, Jacob D. Rawlins, Sara Doan, Jacqueline Ann Mayfield, Milton Mayfield, Gail Fann Thomas, Yunxia Zhu

Faculty Publications

Conducting original research in the discipline of business communication can be expensive. Travel to research locations, specialized software, tokens of appreciation for study participants, support staff, and transcription services can add up quickly. The C. R. Anderson Research Fund (CRARF) was established to promote excellent research on business communication topics by providing grants to members of the Association for Business Communication. In this presentation, members of the C. R. Anderson Research Fund Committee will introduce the fund and provide specific instructions and feedback on individual proposals in breakout rooms. The goal of this presentation is to help each attendee learn …

Examination Of Manner Of Motion Sound Symbolism For English Nonce Verbs, Janis B. Nuckolls, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

This paper offers cross-experimental verification of a previous study that found that English speakers considered velars, palatals, glides, and high vowels to be sound-symbolic of light and jerky movements. Heavy and smooth movements, by contrast, were associated with affricates, glottals, laterals, and non-high vowels. The present study sought to evaluate these findings through a novel experiment with English speaking subjects, who were asked to choose appropriate sound-symbolically constructed nonce verbs for sentences describing light, heavy, smooth, or jerky manners of motion. Our results support many of Saji et al.’s findings and also offer original insights. We find complex interactions between …