Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Hindi "To" And Relevance, Virginia Crowell Phillips

Theses and Dissertations

The morpheme to occurs in the Hindi language frequently, but is difficult to define and difficult for speakers of Hindi as a second language to use correctly. The purpose of this study is to provide insight into how to contributes to the understanding of the utterance that contains it. Relevance Theory, developed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986, is the framework for this study. Relevance Theory makes a distinction between the implicit and explicit content of utterances and between words that encode conceptual representations and words that encode processing instructions. I will consider whether to contributes to implicit or explicit …

Parents' Perceptions Of Children's Attitude Of The Heritage Language Through Intergenerational Reading In The L1, Ruth A. Aldrich

Theses and Dissertations

Cultural diversity is not a new concept for the United States. In recent years a demographic shift has taken place so that the "language minority" has become the majority in many urban schools. Educational researchers actively seek innovative ways to acculturate new arrivals into North America. They observed that one way to strengthen acculturation is by affirming the heritage languages and cultures. This study involved three educated Afghan-Minnesotan parents reading heritage storybooks to their children at home. Through promoting heritage literacy, I hypothesized that an intergenerational reading program would enhance children's attitude and behavior toward heritage language and culture while …

Multilingual Phoneme Models For Rapid Speech Processing System Development, Eric G. Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

Current speech recognition systems tend to be developed only for commercially viable languages. The resources needed for a typical speech recognition system include hundreds of hours of transcribed speech for acoustic models and 10 to 100 million words of text for language models; both of these requirements can be costly in time and money. The goal of this research is to facilitate rapid development of speech systems to new languages by using multilingual phoneme models to alleviate requirements for large amounts of transcribed speech. The Global Phone database, winch contains transcribed speech from 15 languages, is used as source data …

Writing System Development And Reform: A Process, Elke Karan

Theses and Dissertations

Orthography issues are complex. Although literature about writing systems has flourished in recent years, issues which preoccupy practitioners involved in orthography design or reform are rarely addressed.

This thesis provides an overview of theory relating to establishing orthographies for unwritten languages and modifying existing systems. It presents principles and recommendations which favor popular acceptance and successful implementation. Introductory chapters explain the recent increased interest in orthography, define terms, introduce pertinent literature, and give an overview of writing system typology. Remaining chapters present linguistic and non-linguistic factors which influence orthography decisions, examine writing system adaptation options, discuss orthography testing, consider motivations …

Holistic Scoring Of Esl Essays Using Linguistic Maturity Attributes, Ronald Millett

Theses and Dissertations

Automated scoring of essays has been a research topic for some time in computational linguistics studies. Only recently have the particular challenges of automatic holistic scoring of ESL essays with their high grammatical, spelling and other error rates been a topic of research. This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of using statistical measures of linguistic maturity to predict holistic scores for ESL essays using several techniques. Selected linguistic attributes include parts of speech, part-of-speech patterns, vocabulary density, and sentence and essay lengths. Using customized algorithms based on multivariable regression analysis as well as memory-based machine learning, holistic scores were predicted on …

Teaching Writing Through Peer Revising And Reviewing, Kristi Lundstrom

Theses and Dissertations

Although peer review, in which students evaluate each others' papers, has been shown to be beneficial in many writing classrooms, the benefits of peer review to the reviewer, or the student giving the feedback, has not been thoroughly investigated in the field of second language (L2) writing. The purpose of this study is to determine which is more beneficial to improving student writing: receiving or giving peer feedback. The study was conducted at the English Language Center (ELC) at Brigham Young University (BYU). Ninety-one students in nine writing classes at two different proficiency levels, high beginning and high intermediate, participated …

Crossing Dependencies In Persian, Jonathan M. Dehdari

Theses and Dissertations

Languages occasionally have syntactic constructions that are difficult, if not impossible, to describe using a context-free grammar. One such construction is a crossing dependency. Crossing dependencies have been well studied for Dutch and Swiss German (Huybregts, 1976; Shieber, 1985), and recently for Tagalog (Maclachlan and Rambow, 2003). In this paper I propose that Persian exhibits crossing dependencies. In this SOV language, a light verb construction in the future tense becomes interrupted by a future auxiliary verb, which agrees with its subject in person and number. The future auxiliary also splits passive constructions in a similar manner. These forms present interesting …

An English For Specific Purposes Curriculum To Prepare English Learners To Become Nursing Assistants, Abel Javier Romo

Theses and Dissertations

This project details the designing and implementation of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Curriculum to prepare English learners to become Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA) at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (UVRMC) in Provo, Utah. UVRMC, which is owned by Intermountain Health Care (IHC), employs a group of about 40 non-native speakers of English. They work as housekeepers and have interest in learning English and consequently acquiring new skills they could use in better jobs to improve the quality of their lives. UVRMC would like these employees to obtain additional education in order to provide them with better employment opportunities. …

Validating The Rating Process Of An English As A Second Language Writing Portfolio Exam, Robb Mark Mccollum

Theses and Dissertations

A validity study can be used to investigate the effectiveness of an exam and reveal both its strengths and weaknesses. This study concerns an investigation of the writing portfolio Level Achievement Test (LAT) at the English Language Center (ELC) of Brigham Young University (BYU). The writing portfolios of 251 students at five proficiency levels were rated by 11 raters. Writing portfolios consisted of two coursework essays, a self-reflection assignment, and a 30-minute timed essay. Quantitative methods included an analysis with Many-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM) software, called FACETS, which looked for anomalies in levels, classes, examinees, raters, writing criteria, and the …

A Grammatical Description Of The Early Classic Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Daniel A. Law

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to describe the grammatical system of Classical Ch'olti', the language of the Classic Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, as attested in inscriptions of the Early Classic (approximately AD 200-600). Around 300 Lowland Maya Hieroglyphic inscriptions have been dated to the Early Classic or before, nearly one third of these remain unpublished. Previous work on the monumental inscriptions of the Early Classic (Mathews 1985; Proskouriakoff 1950) has examined Early Classic monuments primarily as works of art. Mora-Marin (2001) examined the language of inscriptions found on early portable texts, a small subset of the corpus here examined. In …

A Computer-Based Course To Teach Speech Acts: Prototype For The Technology Assisted Language Learning Program, Laura Morales Dorlando

Theses and Dissertations

The following report discusses the design and formative evaluation of a prototype for a computer-based course to teach speech acts as part of the Technology Assisted Language Learning (TALL) program. The report includes a literature review on speech acts and current methods and strategies for language teaching and instructional design. Next, there is a description of the lessons and the design process, as well as a summary of the formative evaluation. Following is the prototype of the lesson on apologies. The report concludes with a discussion of the project's limitations and suggestions for future research.

Speech Recognition Using The Mellin Transform, Jesse R. Hornback

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to improve performance in speech recognition. Specifically, a new approach was investigating by applying an integral transform known as the Mellin transform (MT) on the output of an auditory model to improve the recognition rate of phonemes through the scale-invariance property of the Mellin transform. Scale-invariance means that as a time-domain signal is subjected to dilations, the distribution of the signal in the MT domain remains unaffected. An auditory model was used to transform speech waveforms into images representing how the brain "sees" a sound. The MT was applied and features were extracted. The …