Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Pragmatic Deficits In Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis, Paige Kessler

Honors Theses

Background: Most studies have found pragmatic language skills to be poorer in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) populations, but there is no conclusive evidence.

Aim: Our aim was to conduct a meta-analysis of pragmatic language abilities in ADHD populations to more definitively demonstrate the extent of pragmatic language deficits in these populations as compared to typically developing (TD) populations.

Methods and procedures: Journal articles were identified using the search terms ((attention deficit) OR (adhd)) AND (pragmatics). Identified studies were screened and reviewed for inclusion criteria, descriptive information, and outcome variables. A meta-analysis was conducted, and individual effect sizes and overall effect size …

A Strategy For Correcting Errors In Automated Formant Extraction, Lisa M. Johnson

Faculty Publications

Sociophonetic vowel analysis relies heavily on measurements of resonant frequencies, particularly of the first and second formants. Automated formant estimation using linear predictive coding (LPC) algorithms in software like Praat greatly increases efficiency compared to hand measurements and allows researchers to analyze more data than was possible before this technological advancement. However, many authors have noted LPC analysis is prone to certain types of errors (e.g., Di Paolo, Yaeger-Dror, & Wassink, 2011; Harrison, 2013; Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006; Strelluf, 2019; Styler, 2017). In one common error, which I call “faulty low F2” (FLF2), LPC identifies a spectral peak between …

The Iconicity And Non-Arbitrariness Of Body Locations In Four Unrelated Sign Languages, John Samson

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I show that universally, there is a strong tendency for signs located on the body to have an iconic or non-arbitrary motivation, especially in their original form. I analyze sign language dictionaries from four unrelated sign languages and establish an iconic or non-arbitrary link between the form of the signs and their meaning, and classify those links according to 8 categories of body location iconicity and 3 categories of non-arbitrariness. The strength of this tendency depends on the percentage of signs that are shown to have an iconic or non-arbitrary link. For the data analyzed here this …

Complex Predicates In Southern Turkmen: A Role And Reference Grammar Analysis, Nathaniel Andrew Shaver

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the concepts of nexus and juncture, as articulated by Role and Reference Grammar, to examine complex verbal constructions found in four collected texts. These texts were collected from four Southern Turkmen (or Turkmen of Afghanistan) speakers. Through transcribing, glossing, and analyzing these texts, a number of complex predicates were identified. These were then described according to their various nexus juncture types. Three nexus juncture varieties were represented in the collected texts. These include clausal coordination, clausal subordination, and core cosubordination. Although not represented in the texts, it was possible to elicit three other provisional nexus juncture varieties. …

The French-English Bilingual Mind, Quinlan Bovee Dulaney

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

أسباب حدوث الاكتساب، ملاحظات حول تعلم اللغة العربية, يوسف باش

Dirassat

Reasons for Acquisition: Notes on Learning Arabic

The research deals with the issue of acquisition and learning theory from multiple angles such as linguistics, philosophy, psychology, biology, issues of acquisition and instinct, characteristics of acquisition in modern theories, and generative grammar.

My Experience As A Phonetics Research Assistant, Damaris Holmes

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

When my exchange was shortened due to COVID-19, I had the opportunity to undertake a part-time research assistant position with Dr. Jeff Tennant in the French and Linguistics departments at Western. Our project studied the rhythm and intonation of the speech of Franco-Ontarians. This paper serves as a description and reflection of this experiential learning opportunity. Specifically, it explores the challenges of operating within a multi-year project timeline as well as dealing with imposter syndrome as a student new to true research.

This project examined the spoken language of bilingual Ontarians to determine if the classically distinct rhythm patterns of …

Nadshedu: Constructing A Fictional Language, Anna Steinhilber

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

My purpose for this project was to create my own conlang. Conlang stands for ‘constructed language’ and refers to any language that has been purposefully designed rather than evolving naturally. Conlangs can be created for communicative purposes, like the international auxiliary language, Esperanto, for fictional or artistic purposes like Klingon or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish, or for linguistic purposes, like Kēlen, a language without verbs. Conlangs are much older than you might think. There are examples of artificial languages dating back to the 12th century, like the Lingua Ignota created by St. Hildegard of Bingen, although most artistic languages began to …

What Is The Relationship Between Language And Thought?: Linguistic Relativity And Its Implications For Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

To date, copyright scholarship has almost completely overlooked the linguistics and cognitive psychology literature exploring the connection between language and thought. An exploration of the two major strains of this literature, known as universal grammar (associated with Noam Chomsky) and linguistic relativity (centered around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), offers insights into the copyrightability of constructed languages and of the type of software packages at issue in Google v. Oracle recently decided by the Supreme Court. It turns to modularity theory as the key idea unifying the analysis of both languages and software in ways that suggest that the information filtering associated …

Stages Of Legal Discourse Development In Linguistics, Nuriya Jumaniyozova

Philology Matters

Although the term ‘discourse’ has been defined by many researchers in linguistics, it still remains an abstract concept. This is because there are different views on discourse and text, discourse and language, and discourse and speech oppositions, and the study of this problem in linguistics is of a particular importance. Besides linguistics, ‘discourse’ is also studied in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and other fields as the primary research object of social theories. And this requires an interdisciplinary study of this issue. Today discourse is considered in the framework of Forensic linguistics, which connects jurisprudence and linguistics, and the disclosure of the …

Evaluating The Role Of Gender In Dementia-Related Language Deficiencies, Kelsey Bourque

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Typically, about 60% of dementia patients are women. Researchers have historically dismissed this imbalance as a result of the life expectancy for women being longer, and since age is the primary risk factor associated with dementia, and women’s longer lifespan equates to a higher percentage of the dementia patient population (Mielke, 2018). While the exact cause of dementia is unknown, researchers and clinicians have historically treated male and female populations the same, asserting that there is no significant difference between the two sexes in regards to detecting dementia. The present study aims to address this potential gap in dementia research, …

The Allocation Of Particles In Translation Dictionaries And Ways To Express Them In Translation, Gulrukh Shavkatovna Kakhkhorova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Introduction. In the languages of the peoples of the world, particles with their own logical-grammatical, semantic-stylistic features and functions, historical development and pragmatic features have an independent place as one of the auxiliary words. Although they do not have a separate lexical meaning, they are among the categories that provide a linguistic and speech relationship in terms of their ability to connect equally to each other by adding different meanings to words and sentences at the syntactic levels. The comparative study of particles within different systematic languages plays an important role in understanding and expressing objective reality through language tools. …

Fable In Action: A Discourse Analysis Approach To The Life Of Aesop, Martha Hamilton Mccafferty

Honors Theses

In this essay, I examine instances of fable-telling throughout the Life of Aesop in a new light by using linguistic theories from the subfield of Pragmatics in my analysis. I suggest that the author’s purpose in composing the Life of Aesop is to instruct his audience on how to use fable effectively, and that Aesop serves as both the positive and negative example for this lesson. I begin by considering the nature of fable and demonstrate why it is necessary to define fable in reference to the social action which it performs. I then address the complex position of fable …

The Effect Of Dialect On Lexical Recall, Chandler Douglas

Honors Theses

Investigating the performance of listeners as they attempt to recall words in both a familiar and unfamiliar dialect could likely lend some insight to the cognitive processes concerning speech perception. Specifically, the current study investigates whether speech spoken in an unfamiliar accent in a listener’s language influences comprehension and, therefore, memory recall of content. To test this, a group of speakers of General American English speakers and a group of speakers of Southern American English listened to two sets of words: one in General American and one in Southern American English. Participants were then asked to write down or type …

Information Structure In Mangghuer: A Narrative Text Analysis Of Topic And Focus In A Mongolic Language Of Northwestern China, Cory Christopher Coogan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes information structure in Mangghuer, a Mongolic language spoken in northwestern China. My analysis relies on a set of twenty-three narrative texts published in the 2005 volume, Folktales of China's Minhe Mangghuer (Chen et al. 2005), and I also draw from the text "Lu Buping," published in the 2001 Mangghuer Folktale Reader (Stuart & Zhu 2001). I rely on Lambrecht's (1994) approach to information structure as a theoretical framework to analyze these texts. I also apply methods from Levinsohn's (2015) "Self Instruction-Materials on Narrative Discourse Analysis." Default information structure in Mangghuer is the topic-comment sentence. The default form …

The State Of Language, Endangerment, And Policy In India: A Forking Path, Samantha Immidisetti

Honors College Theses

The Indian subcontinent is one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world. The 2011 Census of India reports over 1,950 languages and 720 dialects are spoken in India. Although India itself has speakers of four distinct language families, its people have a shared culture, genetics, and history that spans thousands of years. The languages spoken in India have grown, stymied, and influenced each other before reaching their current state. The multiplicity of languages led to implementation of institutionalized language protection measures during the Independence period. Despite these efforts, many languages remain at risk for endangerment and extinction. Language …

(Not) Speaking Spanish: Explicit Pronunciation Instruction In The Online High School Classroom, Brahm Vanwoerden

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Students in the language classroom often face a variety of challenges inherent to the process of learning a second language as an adult. These range from lack of sufficient motivation to structurally uninspired curriculum and are often amplified in the case of a drastic shift in environment. Such a shift took place rapidly over the course of 2020, transforming thousands of classrooms into virtual versions of themselves in a matter of weeks. Students began to receive vastly different quantities and types of language input and interacted with the language in substantially affected ways. Factors that previously played a large role …

The Concept Of Translation And Pragmatics, Nodira Nosirovna Tolibova, Shakhzoda Khaydarovna Pulatova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Background. Translation is a powerful tool that serves the interests of friendship, brotherhood and cooperation between peoples, the expansion of economic, political, scientific, cultural and literary ties between them [10, 29]. Translation accelerates the process of interaction and interaction between the literatures of different peoples. Thanks to the translated works, readers will enjoy the masterpieces of world literature, their aesthetic sense will increase, their tastes will grow, and they will have an idea about beautiful things. Translation, as a necessary tool for the development of languages, accelerates their development, increases and improves the richness of vocabulary. Translation enriches a person's …

Alchemical Word-Magic In 'The Winter’S Tale', Rana Banna

Accessus

Within alchemical writing there is both a religious and scientific register in simultaneous coexistence. The linguistic symbols of alchemy are themselves to be understood as chemical matter embedded in the world by divine providence: a principle manifest in the doctrine of signatures. The natural world offers a complex but ultimately resolvable hermeneutic challenge to the natural scientist, whose job it becomes to be a reader of the book of nature wherein the Creator has inscribed a legible, if often allusive, meaning and purpose. This paper will proceed to explore how early modern alchemical-thinking impacted attitudes towards language and meaning …

The Communicative Function Of Gender In Italian, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

An analysis of gender in modern literary Italianbased on attested examples from various genres. The evidence-based hypothesis, thoroughly noncanonical, proposes a system of morphologically signaled meanings, and these are not the traditional categories “feminine” and “masculine.” Even the familiar and misleading term “gender” is replaced. The analysis concerns primarily what is typically called “gram­matical gender,” although it stands to inform too the use of Italian in communication having to do with human cultural gender. The analysis concerns primarily what is called here “variable gender” (essentially, adjectives) although it stands to inform too the problem of “invariable gender” (essentially, nouns).

Innovation From Above, Below, And Behind: The Linguistics Of The Hebrew Revival, Aviv J. Porath

Senior Projects Spring 2021

This thesis seeks to investigate the unique example of Modern Hebrew’s linguistic revival and determine the historical and linguistic qualities that made it successful. I intend to challenge the common narrative of Hebrew revival as 'miraculous' and isolated from Jewish history. I will demonstrate the long legacy of Hebrew creativity, preservation, and reinvention that formed the foundations the Zionist movement was able to build upon. I also seek to expand the narrative of the revival process itself to more accurately account for the modern result that is Israeli Hebrew. The ‘planned’ element of the revival process, i.e. the well-documented top-down …

Monolingual And Bilingual Reading Processes In Russian: An Exploratory Scanpath Analysis, Olga Parshina, Irina A. Sekerina, Anastasiya Lopukhina, Titus Von Der Malsburg

Publications and Research

In the present study, we used a scanpath approach to investigate reading processes and factors that can shape them in monolingual Russian-speaking adults, 8-year- old children, and bilingual Russian-speaking readers. We found that monolingual adults’ eye movement patterns exhibited a fluent scanpath reading process, representing effortless processing of the written material: They read straight from left to right at a fast pace, skipped words, and regressed rarely. Both high-proficiency heritage-language speakers’ and second graders’ eye movement patterns exhibited an intermediate scanpath reading process, characterized by a slower pace, longer fixations, an absence of word skipping, and short regressive saccades. Second-language …

Person-Marking In Máku, Chris Rogers Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

In Máku (an extinct language isolate), person marking is encoded by pronominal elements that are attached to bound pronominal roots, possessed nouns, and as subject and object argument agreement reference on verbs. However, when the contrasts between the various person-markers and their behaviors in the language are considered the system does not fit easily into the traditional analysis of three persons and two numbers. Rather, the organization of and relationships between the pronominal elements in Máku reveals a system based on the distinction of three persons (first, second and third), a two-way quantitative distinction (singular and non-singular), and a two-way …