Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Disentangling Fluency, Comprehensibility And Coherence: Toward A Better Understanding Of Oral Proficiency Profiles, Haiying Cao

Open Access Dissertations

This study is an empirical attempt to examine how removal of all possible disfluency markers can help disentangle proficiency components assessed by the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT) in order to help build empirical foundations for establishing OEPT profiles. Silent and filled pauses, false starts and repetitions were removed from 50 test recordings in WAVEPAD SOUND EDITOR. Five trained OEPT raters rated the original and edited speeches. Statistical analyses addressed three research questions: 1) do fluency, comprehensibility and coherence ratings significantly change after the disfluency manipulation; 2) do correlations between fluency, comprehensibility, coherence and coherence subcomponents change after the disfluency …

Chinese Undergraduate Students’ Preference For Chinese Tas And American Tas In The U.S. Context, Ruochen Li

Open Access Theses

This study researches and compares Chinese undergraduate students' (N=70) perceptions of and preferences for American TAs and Chinese TAs, and identifies factors that play significant roles in influencing Chinese students' perceptions and preferences. Multiple independent variables were measured, including age; gender; years at Purdue; years in the U.S.; GPA; overall TOEFL score; experiences with Chinese TAs; effectiveness of Chinese TAs; effectiveness of American TAs; English ability of Chinese TAs; and native speaker preference, ethnic identity, and level of acculturation, among which ethnic identity and level of acculturation are the major variables the current study aims to examine. Preference for Chinese …

Makers: Technical Communication In Post-Industrial Participatory Communities, John Timothy Sherrill

Open Access Theses

In the past few decades, web technologies and increasingly accessible digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printers and laser cutters have made it easier for individuals and communities to create complex material objects at home. As a result, communities of individuals who make things outside formal institutions, known as maker communities, have combined traditional crafts and technical knowledge with digital tools and web technologies in new ways. This thesis analyzes maker communities as post-industrial participatory design communities and examines them as participatory spaces where technical communication occurs between individuals with varying levels of expertise and sometimes drastically different knowledges. Ultimately, …

Relationships Between Lexical Proficiency And L2 Oral Proficiency, Yunjung You

Open Access Dissertations

Lexical proficiency is strongly correlated with L2 productive language ability (Crossley, Salsbury, & McNamara, 2011; Laufer & Nation, 1995). While many studies have investigated the relationship between lexical proficiency and L2 writing ability, not many studies have been conducted in terms of spoken language. Also, few studies have focused on how non-native English speakers with different L1 backgrounds differently or similarly develop lexical proficiency in L2 speaking. Based on this background, the present study is conducted with three purposes: 1) to compare the effectiveness of measures of lexical proficiency in terms of their ability to predict the quality of L2 …

Disrupting Infrastructure: Social Media And Accessing Digital Publics, Carolyn K. Grant

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates infrastructural barriers to effecting change through social media participation. Though social media is said to hold "democratic potential" by enabling open access to the digital public sphere, in reality it is often still the most privileged voices that get heard. Even in success cases of the power of social media like the Arab Spring, situational contexts lead to particular infrastructural access points that are not universally transferable, and still tend to favor mainstream perspectives. Barriers to amplifying marginalized voices include inadequate systems for digital memory and sharing algorithms that promote the visibility of the already visible. These …

Relationship Between Holistic Rating Of Chinese Esl Speakers' Monologue Responses To Question Prompts In Placement Testing And Their Lexical Frequency Profiles, Xiao Yang

Open Access Theses

The study examines the relation between the holistic scores of three groups of Chinese ESL speakers and their lexical frequency profiles, based on their monologue responses to testing prompts. The theoretical framework of vocabulary acquisition and word frequency in vocabulary testing are discussed, and several previous studies that use VocabProfile to assess second language vocabulary are analyzed. These serve as the theoretical and methodological basis for conducting the current study, which adopts two schema in VocabProfile to first profile the word frequency in the speakers' monologue responses, and then look into the offlist words that are not captured by the …

Attachment Representations And Mother-Child Dialogue, Baiba Barene

Open Access Theses

With the emerging linguistic competencies of the child, dialogue becomes a regular part of mother-child everyday interactions, and may serve as one of the mechanisms of transmission of attachment in early and middle childhood. The goal of this study was to investigate the hypothesis about the co-constructive nature of children's knowledge of secure base script. Formation of the secure base script is a result of child-caregiver interactions that have been consolidated into a unit of knowledge available for use in attachment related situations. Individual attachment narratives and mother-child co-constructed narratives were collected from 86 mother-child dyads when children were 3.7 …

Clausal Complements To Attitude Predicates Cross-Linguistically: Being Glad About What You Thought You Knew, Eric Anthony Follett

Open Access Theses

In this thesis I explore the syntactic structure of emotive factive predicates in Spanish, English, Tatar, and Mayangna. I analyze emotive factive predicates of the glad type, such as (1). (1) I'm glad you liked the cake.

First, I analyze the basic structural configuration of these predicates, claiming that the clausal Source of Experience argument is a complement to the lexical head glad. This is similar to the configuration of canonical transitive attitude predicates like semi-factive know and intensional think. Second, I claim, following Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1970) and Krapova (2010), that factive heads select complements headed by a (null) …

Event Structure Of Resultatives In Asl, Ashley Kentner

Open Access Theses

The relationship between the duration and telicity of the causing predicate and the gradability and standard of comparison of the resultant predicate in resultative constructions in American Sign Language (ASL) is investigated. Two homomorphic accounts of resultative constructions are considered, the feature-based approach of Beavers (2008), and the compositional approach of Ramchand (2008). The analysis utilizes morpho-phonological and semantics interface properties in ASL in order to discriminate between the two approaches. These properties are expressed by the Visibility Hypothesis (VH) in Wilbur, Malaia, and Shay (2012), which posits that the ends of semantic scales are phonologically marked in ASL in …

Effects Of Online Oral Practice On Japanese Pitch Accentuation Acquisition, Mayu Miyamoto

Open Access Theses

Even though there is a constant learners' need for pronunciation instruction in a Japanese language classroom, some teachers are hesitant to include pronunciation instruction due to time constrains or lack of knowledge on how to teach pronunciation. These problems occur due to the fact that pronunciation instructions were mostly conducted in classrooms. Computer-Assisted Language Learning is a great way to overcome these problems since learners can practice pronunciation through an online program outside of class. For this reason, this study was conducted outside of class using an online program. This research investigated the effectiveness of online oral practice on Japanese …

The Effect Of Visual Feedback On Voice Onset Time Productions By L2 Learners Of Spanish, Heather Michelle Offerman

Open Access Theses

Research suggests that pronunciation instruction should be developed and taught in the second language classroom (Derwing & Munro, 2005; Elliott, 1997; Simões, 1996) in order to facilitate intelligible and comprehensible utterances in the L2 (Derwing & Munro, 1997). Although accentedness does not always create intelligibility issues, it can be the catalyst to negative native speaker perceptions of second language learners' speech (Derwing & Munro, 2009). One distinctive marker of accent among native speakers of English and Spanish is the duration of aspiration values for the voiceless plosives /p/ /t/ /k/ (Lord, 2005). The present study proposes the use of visual …

Software Architecture And Development For Controlling A Hubo Humanoid Robot, Anne Giulia Pellicciotti

Open Access Theses

This study considers the level of involvement of participants viewing bilingual and English language TV commercials. It analyzes results from 295 non-Hispanic participants studying at a Midwestern university. In the study, participants were asked to view four commercials. Using Zaichkowsky's (1994) 10-item Personal Involvement Inventory (PII), participants scaled the advertisements on a 7-level scale. The scale evaluated participants' emotional and cognitive involvement with the ad. This between-subjects design required that participants be randomly separated into viewing all-English or all-bilingual advertisements. Findings showed no significant difference in involvement levels between bilingual or English commercials within this demographic group. Those with higher …

Patterns Of Language Use And Language Choice Among The Cuban Community In Russia, Maria Yakushkina

Open Access Theses

The multiculturalism of a modern society involves constant interrelations of minority and dominant linguistic communities, which are reflected in language. Within this context patterns of language use and choice, language attitudes and language and identity connection have received special attention from a sociolinguistic perspective to better understand the outcomes of such language contact

The aim of the present study is to analyze patterns of language use, language choice, and language identity issues of two groups of Cuban immigrants in Russian society: individuals born in Cuba with both parents of Cuban origin (CC group) and individuals born in Cuba from mixed …

Honorific Usage In Educational And Medical Institutions, Shohko Yanagisawa

Open Access Theses

Obana (2000) and Inoue (1979) state that professors/doctors receive exalting language from administrative staff members when they refer to professors/doctors with people from outside. Similarly, Kego no Shishin (2007) suggests that administrative staff members in educational/medical institutions can use an honorary title with professors/doctors. Obana's and Inoue's claims and Kego no Shishin's recommendation is not in line with the concept of relative honorifics. Considering the fact that Obana's and Inoue's claims have yet to be supported by an empirical study, this study attempted to investigate honorific usage in educational and medical institutions in order to 1) test Obana's and Inoue's …

The Case Of Capaz In Argentina: An Epistemic Adverb With Mood Variability, Boris Yelin

Open Access Theses

This thesis examines mood selection in Argentine Spanish with epistemic adverbs considering the independent variables of certainty, temporal reference, and epistemic adverb. It is the first known study to investigate mood selection with the epistemic adverb capaz . A sentence completion task included 24 written contexts, each followed by a sentence with an epistemic adverbial to be completed with a verb, either in the indicative or subjunctive. The contexts contained information that made participants Certain (N = 12) or Not Certain (N = 12). Within the Certain and Not Certain contexts, four contexts expressed events in the future, four in …