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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Effect Of Pause Duration On Intelligibility Of Non-Native Spontaneous Oral Discourse, Ryan Frederick Lege
The Effect Of Pause Duration On Intelligibility Of Non-Native Spontaneous Oral Discourse, Ryan Frederick Lege
Theses and Dissertations
Pausing is a natural part of human speech. Pausing is used to segment speech, negotiate meaning, and allow for breathing. In oral speech, pausing, along with other suprasegmental features, plays a critical role in creating meaning as comprehensible speech is seen as a goal for language learners around the world. In order to be comprehensible, language learners need to learn to pause correctly in their speaking. Though this notion is widely accepted by applied linguists and many language teachers, the effect of pausing on intelligibility of spontaneous oral discourse has not been established by empirical data. This study isolates pause …
Topicalization In Malagasy: Effects Of Teaching Malagasy As A Topic Language, Jeremy D. Workman
Topicalization In Malagasy: Effects Of Teaching Malagasy As A Topic Language, Jeremy D. Workman
Theses and Dissertations
This study discusses teaching Malagasy as a second language. Malagasy is the native language spoken on the island of Madagascar. Traditionally, Malagasy has been taught as a language that is similar to English in the way that it uses active and passive voice constructions. However, most native-English students struggle to produce native-like utterances using non-active voice constructions in Malagasy. Recent studies have suggested that Malagasy more closely relates to Germanic V2 languages than it does to English (Pearson 2005, Hyams et al. 2006). This might explain why students taught Malagasy as an English-like language struggle. This study compares the relative …
Mayanwiki: An Online, Consensus-Based Linguistic Corpus Of The Mayan Hieroglyphs, Robbie A. Haertel
Mayanwiki: An Online, Consensus-Based Linguistic Corpus Of The Mayan Hieroglyphs, Robbie A. Haertel
Theses and Dissertations
The writing system used by the ancient Maya civilization has intrigued researchers and aficionados for centuries. Now that it has mostly been deciphered, the emphasis in the field of Mayan epigraphy has shifted to a study of the system of phonological, morphological, and grammatical rules that once governed the language that the hieroglyphs encode. One of the most important resources for linguistic study of this type is a comprehensive, electronic corpus of texts to investigate phraseology, frequency information, and collocations. Because Mayan linguistic epigraphy is in the early stages, a publicly available, editable corpus would be an invaluable resource in …
Crossing Dependencies In Persian, Jonathan M. Dehdari
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 …
Memory-Based Tone Recognition Of Cantonese Syllables, Michael William Emonts
Memory-Based Tone Recognition Of Cantonese Syllables, Michael William Emonts
Theses and Dissertations
Speech recognition has only recently been applied to Cantonese. Considerable effort, however, has been spent in recognizing Mandarin, the standard dialect of Chinese. Prior to this thesis, the only published work on monosyllabic Cantonese tone recognition is from Tan Lee et al. (1993,1995). This thesis is the first of its kind in that it explores memory-based learning as a viable approach for Cantonese tone recognition. The memory-based learning algorithm employed in this thesis outperforms the highly respected and widely used neural network approach. Various numbers of tones and features are modeled to find the best method for feature selection and …