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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Legislative Language For Success, Sanjana Gundala
Legislative Language For Success, Sanjana Gundala
Master's Theses
Legislative committee meetings are an integral part of the lawmaking process for local and state bills. The testimony presented during these meetings is a large factor in the outcome of the proposed bill. This research uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to analyze testimonies from California Legislative committee meetings from 2015-2016 in order to identify what aspects of a testimony makes it successful. A testimony is considered successful if the alignment of the testimony matches the bill outcome (alignment is "For" and the bill passes or alignment is "Against" and the bill fails). The process of finding what …
Collateral Damage: How Expanding Public Charge Policy Influences Adult Esl Enrollment, Allison M. Eckert
Collateral Damage: How Expanding Public Charge Policy Influences Adult Esl Enrollment, Allison M. Eckert
Master's Theses
This study used statistical analysis of enrollment records for ESL programs at community colleges throughout California from 2015-2019 to determine whether adult immigrants’ participation in public ESL programs was reduced under President Donald Trump. Immigrant families’ lesser use of public education services and means-tested federal benefits has been widely documented in the wake of Trump’s expansion of the public charge rule, which counted immigrants’ use of a wider array of public benefits against their case for residency in the United States than had any previous iteration of the rule. Failing the public charge test can block an immigrant’s entry into …
More Than Just A Myth: How Shapeshifter Rhetoric Relates To Esl Students 2019, Amber Kent
More Than Just A Myth: How Shapeshifter Rhetoric Relates To Esl Students 2019, Amber Kent
Master's Theses
The academic analysis surrounding the shapeshifter, or shapeshifter mythologies has, so far, been related to modern issues of violence, militarization, feminism, gender studies, or studies simply focusing on the compilation of shapeshifter myths themselves. This essay will map out the current discussion surrounding shapeshifter mythology to illustrate that it has often fallen into two forms of analysis: that of an anthropological or sociological analysis, where shapeshifter myths were analyzed as a method for understanding different cultures and their development, and that of a poststructural analysis, where shapeshifter myths are analyzed as a means of deconstructing binaries such as good/bad and …
Brechas En La Enseñanza De La Cultura Del Español Como Segunda Lengua, Elizabeth Mary Maldonado
Brechas En La Enseñanza De La Cultura Del Español Como Segunda Lengua, Elizabeth Mary Maldonado
Master's Theses
Esta investigación analiza el contenido cultural de cuatro libros de texto de español como L2 (segunda lengua) a nivel principiante publicados en los últimos siete años. La cultura suele estar presentada con poca profundidad por dos razones: hay más enfoque en conceptos de gramática y vocabulario y es un reto encontrar recursos auténticos a nivel principiante. Para investigar este problema, uso como guía las directrices del Método Comunicativo (MC) de Lee y VanPatten (2003) de la enseñanza de cultura. Además investigo si los libros presentan actividades con la cultura integrada, si es material que enseña "Cultura" o "cultura" y si …
'The Letter Killeth': The Obscurity Of Language And Communication In Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure 2016, Victoria T. Corning
'The Letter Killeth': The Obscurity Of Language And Communication In Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure 2016, Victoria T. Corning
Master's Theses
While the epistolary novel is a genre closely associated with 18th century England, 19th century Victorian literature also incorporates letter writing as a significant form of communication. Written messages convey what can often not be said out loud, as it is easier to hide behind a pen and paper, write in solitude, and be absent when the letter is read by the recipient. Impulsive and emotional thoughts and feelings can be written down immediately and then later edited, which makes writing an unstable form of communication. Is the author conveying true feelings or concealing true feelings? Layering multiple modes of …
Predicting Music Genre Preferences Based On Online Comments, Andrew J. Sinclair
Predicting Music Genre Preferences Based On Online Comments, Andrew J. Sinclair
Master's Theses
Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) states that individuals adapt to each other’s communicative behaviors. This adaptation is called “convergence.” In this work we explore the convergence of writing styles of users of the online music distribution plat- form SoundCloud.com. In order to evaluate our system we created a corpus of over 38,000 comments retrieved from SoundCloud in April 2014. The corpus represents comments from 8 distinct musical genres: Classical, Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Country, Metal, Folk, and World. Our corpus contains: short comments, frequent misspellings, little sentence struc- ture, hashtags, emoticons, and URLs. We adapt techniques used by researchers analyzing other …
Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes
Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes
Master's Theses
In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.
Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …
Mothers Do Not Drive The Development Of Adult Homesign Systems: Evidence From Comprehension, Emily Carrigan
Mothers Do Not Drive The Development Of Adult Homesign Systems: Evidence From Comprehension, Emily Carrigan
Master's Theses
Studying the communication systems that arise in spontaneously occurring cases of degraded linguistic input can help clarify human predispositions for language. Some deaf individuals born into hearing families, who do not receive conventional linguistic input, develop gestures, called “homesign,” to communicate. We examined homesign systems used by four deaf Nicaraguan adults (ages 15-27), and evaluated whether homesigners’ hearing mothers are potential sources for these systems. Study One measured mothers’ comprehension of descriptions of events (e.g., “A man taps a woman”) produced in homesign and spoken Spanish. Mothers comprehended spoken Spanish descriptions (produced by one of their hearing children) better than …
Language Typology And Sentence Frame Effects On Motion Verb Interpretation In Grade Schoolers, Emma C. Kelty
Language Typology And Sentence Frame Effects On Motion Verb Interpretation In Grade Schoolers, Emma C. Kelty
Master's Theses
Most English descriptions of motion events express manner in the main verb and path in a prepositional phrase, as in “She skips out of the house”. However, the same event can be described differently if a different syntactic frame is used: “She exits the house”. While young children have been found to interpret novel motion verbs according to the syntactic frame information, adults have been found to rely somewhat more on the overall language pattern, or typology (Hohenstein et al., 2004; Naigles & Terrazas, 1998). Grade schoolers have not been examined in this paradigm, and their linguistic abilities suggest that …