Digital Commons Network^™

“Home Is More Than Just A Place”: Oral Personal Narrative Storytelling In Central Appalachia, Brandon Jent

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This project seeks a linguistic understanding of oral personal narrative storytelling in Central Appalachia, particularly as it manifests in Eastern Kentucky, with aims of providing insight into the Appalachian storyteller trope (e.g., Montgomery 1998). Structural and discursive elements of oral personal narrative were identified and positioned within their sociocultural context through discourse analysis and narrative studies. Data were collected from story circles, a methodology first implemented in cultural and community organizing spaces in the South and throughout Appalachia (Roadside Theater 2014, Junebug Productions n.d.). The collected stories were transcribed and analyzed through a discourse analysis framework that combines discourse pragmatics, …

The Stained Glass Of Knowledge: On Understanding Novice Mental Models Of Computing, Briana Christina Bettin

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Learning to program can be a novel experience. The rigidity of programming can be at odds with beginning programmer's existing perceptions, and the concepts can feel entirely unfamiliar. These observations motivated this research, which explores two major questions: What factors influence how novices learn programming? and How can analogy by more appropriately leveraged in programming education?

This dissertation investigates the factors influencing novice programming through multiple methods. The CS1 classroom is observed as a "whole system", with consideration to the factors present in it that can influence the learning process. Learning's cognitive processes are elaborated to ground exploration into specifically …

A Convergence Of Conceptual Frameworks: Neurocognitive, Metacognitive And Social Cultural Techniques In Vocabulary Teaching And Learning, Malihe Eshghavi

Doctoral Dissertations

This mixed methods study investigated the effectiveness of neurocognitive, metacognitive and sociocultural techniques in vocabulary instruction at the high-intermediate level of English as a second language learners’ vocabulary learning and recall at a community college in Northern California. While previous studies offered and demonstrated different methods, those studies emphasized only one particular vocabulary learning modality. As a result, most ESL learners learn vocabulary passively but not actively. No study has proposed to explore the inclusion of the neurocognitive, metacognitive and sociocultural techniques on vocabulary learning and recall, in order to analyze the resulting effects of these proposed instruction techniques among …

“We’Re Here, We’Re Queer, We Will Not Live In Fear!”: A Content Analysis Exploring Gender Disparity In The Public Reappropriation Of Lgbtq+ Slurs, Nicolas Hall

Capstone Showcase

As minorities, members of the LGBTQ+ community have faced many hardships throughout history, such as the use of language as a weapon against them. However, this research explores the public display of linguistic reappropriation of LGBTQ+ derogatory language and terms within the community. Throughout history, the use of slurs (e.g. faggot and dyke) and their social definitions have shifted from having no connection to the community to directly affected these individuals. These terms have been used to demonize members of the LGBTQ+ community for decades. Despite this reality, there are some scholars who suggest that these terms are being reappropriated, …

The Absence Of A Religiolect Among Latter-Day Saints In Southwest Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

The term religiolect was coined by Benjamin Hary (1992, xiii) to describe a variety of language used by a distinct religious community, originally within the context of the Jewish linguistic spectrum. Religion has been shown to play an important role in various aspects of language, such as Arabic loanword adoption among Telugu speakers (Salami 2010), Persian loanwords and greetings among English-speaking Bahá’is (Masumian 2015), fluency in Sanskrit (Christian 1976), language choice among Hindus in the United States (Pandharipande 2010), maintenance of Hakka in East Malaysia (Ding and Goh 2020), and prevalence of linguistic fossils in Jewish Malayalam (Gamliel 2017). “Christianese,” …

Back Vowel Distinctions And Dynamics In Southern Us English, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

We investigate low/back vowels /u, oʊ, ʊ, ɔ, ɑ/ in Southern American English (SAE).

Research on SAE has analyzed changes in position over generational time.

Most work on trajectories is limited to impressionistic coding (“loss of upgliding”) or reduces trajectories to summary statistics (vector length, rate of change).

We analyze both the position and the shape of back vowels’ formant trajectories in apparent time, using new data from the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS).

Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback Among Graduate Students: The Effects Of Feedback Timing, Grant Eckstein, Maureen Estelle Sims, Lisa Rohm

Faculty Publications

Dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF) is a pedagogical approach that offers meaningful, manageable, constant, and timely corrective feedback on student writing (Hartshorn et al., 2010). It emphasizes indirect and comprehensive written error correction on short, daily writing assignments. Numerous studies have demonstrated that its use can lead to fewer language errors among undergraduate and pre-matriculated college writers (see Kurzer, 2018). However, the benefits of DWCF among second language (L2) graduate writers and the role of feedback timing have not been well examined. We analyzed timed writing samples over a 12-week intervention from 22 L2 graduate students who either received biweekly …

Contextual Information In Social How-To Questions That Initiate Documentation, Matt Baker

Faculty Publications

This study introduces social question-and-answer (SQA) documentation to technical and professional communication scholarship. It conceptualizes SQA as interactive, user-generated documentation and describes contextual information types within social how-to questions that initiate documentation. It also explores whether contextual information associates with answers that complete the interactive documentation. Results reliably describe 15 information types based on content analysis of 3,529 contextual information types from 500 questions. Exploratory statistical analysis suggests that askers may increase answerability by including less speculative thought, more error messages, and less general situation information. To facilitate complete SQA documentation, the study calls for additional research into question content …

Rubric Rating With Mfrm Versus Randomly Distributed Comparative Judgment: A Comparison Of Two Approaches To Second-Language Writing Assessment, Maureen E. Sims, Troy L. Cox, Grant T. Eckstein, K. James Hartshorn, Matthew P. Wilcox, Judson M. Hart

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to explore the reliability of a potentially more practical approach to direct writing assessment in the context of ESL writing. Traditional rubric rating (RR) is a common yet resource-intensive evaluation practice when performed reliably. This study compared the traditional rubric model of ESL writing assessment and many-facet Rasch modeling (MFRM) to comparative judgment (CJ), the new approach, which shows promising results in terms of reliability. We employed two groups of raters—novice and experienced—and used essays that had been previously double-rated, analyzed with MFRM, and selected with fit statistics. We compared the results of the …

The Power Of Language: An Analysis Of Language Use And Attitudes In Moroccan Universities, Mikaela K. Thomas

Honors Theses

This study examines the connections between language use and attitudes in Moroccan universities. Morocco is a North African country that is historically multilingual, with communities speaking Moroccan Arabic (Darija), indigenous Amazigh, French, and English, in addition to the Standard Arabic used in government and by the Muslim community. The French Protectorate from 1912 to 1956 ushered in colonial language policies and imposed the French education system that enforced linguistic hierarchies. While the subsequent Arabization period attempted to reestablish the importance of Standard Arabic in Morocco, the policies failed to promote true multilingualism by ignoring the Amazigh and Darija languages. Today, …

The Effects Of Chinese And Spanish Writing Systems On L2 English Learners’ Vocabulary Acquisition, John Mitchell

All Master's Theses

Writing systems vary in how they relate graphemes to phonology and meaning. Consequently, each writing system makes unique demands on native speakers, resulting in different cognitive processes. This research examines the visual and phonological processes used by native Spanish and Chinese speakers and how these processes affect their acquisition of English vocabulary and spelling. Experiments 1 and 2 investigate how native Chinese and Spanish speakers associate graphemes to phonology. Experiments 3 seeks to differentiate visual processing from phonological processing when acquiring vocabulary. Experiment 4 assesses the efficacy of those processes. Six native Chinese speakers (NCS) and six native Spanish speakers …

Investigating The Relationship Between Individual Differences And Island Sensitivity, Catherine Pham, Lauren Covey, Alison Gabriele, Saad Aldosari, Robert Fiorentino

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

It is well-attested that native speakers tend to give low acceptability ratings to sentences that involve movement from within islands, yet the source of island effects remains an active debate. The grammatical account posits that island effects result from syntactic constraints on wh-movement, whereas the resource-limitation view posits that low ratings emerge due to processing-related constraints on the parser, such that islands themselves present processing bottlenecks. The current study addresses this debate by investigating the relationship between island sensitivity and individual differences in cognitive abilities, as it has been argued that the two views make distinct predictions regarding whether a …

Murdoch Murdoch: A Case Study In Threats To Ontological Security In Far-Right Propaganda, Julian Morein

Capstone Showcase

Adapting the Ethnographic Discourse Analysis method developed by Stanton Wortham and Angela Reyes this thesis traces the language employed in the ethno-nationalist web series Murdoch Murdoch. While not as widely known as other examples of the burgeoning landscape of far-right internet content such as news sites like InfoWars or Brietbart, Murdoch Murdoch can still reveal crucial details about how far right propaganda seeks to radicalize its viewers. This thesis argues that Murdoch Murdoch uses its visual and discursive indexicals to present a near absolute dichotomy between a Positive Self that consists of white ethno-nationalism, and a Negative Other that …

Language Transfer Between English And German: A Phonetics-Based Study Of Interactions Between Speakers' Native And Second-Language Vowel Systems, Emelia Bensonmeyer

Scripps Senior Theses

The present study addresses language contact processes in which the phonetic systems of the languages that bilinguals speak interact. Specifically, language transfer with respect to English and German was examined, focusing on native German speakers (L1) who learned English as a second language (L2). It employed as its central method an analysis of their vowel systems, both language-specifically and cross-linguistically. Extralinguistic variables were also considered, ranging from speakers’ age of acquisition (AOA) of English to their length of residence in an English-speaking environment to their consideration of home. Results indicated statistically significant differences between speakers’ production of /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ …

Word-Final /T/-Release And Linguistic Style: An Investigation Of The Speech Of Two Jewish Women From Metro Detroit, Janet Leppala

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Variationist sociolinguistics is more complex than meets the eye. There are many possible explanations as to why a person uses some linguistic form over another. This paper will compare the use of the word-final /t/-release variant in the speech of two Jewish women from metro Detroit who were born two years apart and who have similar socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Despite superficial similarities between the speakers, their use of the variant differs considerably—with one speaker using the variant over 15 times more than the other. Building on existing literature on Jewish American speech and on /t/-release, this study will compare …

The Relationship Between Cognitive And Linguistic Abilities In Bilingual Children, Ines Elena Martin

Online Theses and Dissertations

We examined the relationship between cognitive and linguistic abilities in bilingual children (English – Spanish). In particular, we measured the effect of attentional control (the ability to maintain an operative goal, and goal-relevant information, in the face of distraction) and educational experience (amount of time reading) on reading ability (the ability to recognize words and discard misspelled non-words). The sample included 82 developing bilingual children from an immersion school in the United States. Participants were presented with two tasks: the Flanker task as the measure of attentional control (resistance to distractor interference) and the Lexical decision task as the measure …

Dialect Divisions In The Treasure State, Noah I. Rummel-Lindig

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Sociolinguistic research claims that there is a common dialect of English shared by all states between the Great Plains and Pacific coast. This dialect area is referred to as the West and is defined by a lack of easily discernable speech characteristics. (Labov et al. 2006). Researchers, especially those residing or hailing from the West, have objected to this presumed homogeneity and have sought to document variation in the dialects of English on a state or regional scale. Research on dialects within Montana is limited. Bar-el et al.’s (2017) perceptual dialect map tasks revealed that many Montanans believe that there …

Understanding Diversity – Perspectives From University Departments Hosting Large Percentages Of International Students, K. James Hartshorn, Maureen Snow Andrade, Norman W. Evans, Gwyneth Gates

Faculty Publications

The international student enrollment in some university departments has grown to the point that these students are the majority. This study sought to determine the extent to which departments hosting large numbers of international English as a second language (ESL) students demonstrate awareness and planning to address these learners’ needs. Analyses were conducted in reference to a framework designed to aid institutions in meeting international ESL students’ needs. Findings indicate some awareness of students’ needs and related strategies for linguistic and cultural development. They also demonstrate that the proposed framework could foster more intentional strategies to ensure international student success.

การเปลี่ยนแปลงความหมายเชิงการอ้างถึงของสรรพนาม “มัน” ในภาษาไทยสมัยรัตนโกสินทร์, จิณวัฒน์ แก่นเมือง

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์ในการศึกษาการเปลี่ยนแปลงความหมายเชิงการอ้างถึงของสรรพนาม มัน ในภาษาไทยสมัยรัตนโกสินทร์ และศึกษากลไกที่ทำให้สรรพนาม มัน เปลี่ยนแปลงความหมายเชิงการอ้างถึงเป็นอบุรุษสรรพนาม ผู้วิจัยแบ่งสมัยของข้อมูลออกเป็น 5 สมัย สมัยละ 50 ปี โดยเริ่มตั้งแต่ พ.ศ. 2301 – 2550 สำหรับสมัยที่ 1 – 4 ผู้วิจัยใช้ข้อมูลตัวบทร้อยแก้วจำนวน 40 ตัวบทจากรายการตัวบทของคลังข้อมูลภาษาไทยเชิงประวัติแห่งชาติ ส่วนสมัยที่ 5 ผู้วิจัยใช้ข้อมูลจากคลังข้อมูลภาษาไทยแห่งชาติ ผู้วิจัยมีสมมติฐาน 2 ข้อ กล่าวคือ 1) สรรพนาม มัน เริ่มแสดงความหมายเชิงวัจนปฏิบัติในช่วงที่ 3 (พ.ศ. 2401 – 2450) และเริ่มไม่แสดงความหมายเชิงการอ้างถึงในสมัยที่ 4 (ตั้งแต่ พ.ศ. 2451เป็นต้นมา) และ 2) การกลายเป็นอัตวิสัยเป็นกลไกที่ทำให้สรรพนาม มัน เกิดการขยายความหมายเชิงการอ้างถึงจนเปลี่ยนจากสรรพนามอ้างถึงไปเป็นอบุรุษสรรพนาม ผลการศึกษาปฏิเสธสมมติฐานข้อแรก ผู้วิจัยพบว่าสรรพนาม มัน แสดงความหมายหมายเชิงการอ้างถึงในทุกตำแหน่งการปรากฏ ผลการศึกษาพบว่าความหมายเชิงการอ้างถึงของสรรพนามมันแบ่งออกเป็น 2 ประเภท ได้แก่ ความหมายอ้างถึงเชิงอรรถศาสตร์ และความหมายอ้างถึงเชิงวัจนปฏิบัติ ความหมายอ้างถึงเชิงอรรถศาสตร์จะเกิดเมื่อสรรพนาม มัน ปรากฏร่วมกับรูปอ้างอิงนำแสดงรูป รูปอ้างอิงนำแสดงรูปแบ่งออกเป็น 4 ประเภท ได้แก่ นามวลี กริยาวลี อนุพากย์ และข้อความ รูปอ้างอิงนำแต่ละประเภทจะแสดงสิ่งอ้างถึงแตกต่างกันไป กล่าวคือ สรรพสิ่ง การกระทำ เหตุการณ์เดี่ยว และเหตุการณ์ซับซ้อนตามลำดับ ส่วนความหมายอ้างถึงเชิงวัจนปฏิบัติจะเกิดเมื่อสรรพนาม มัน ปรากฏร่วมกับรูปอ้างอิงนำโดยนัย ผู้ฟังต้องทำความเข้าใจสิ่งอ้างถึงด้วยการอนุมานจากปริบท สิ่งอ้างถึงที่ปรากฏในความหมายแสดงการอ้างถึงเชิงวัจนปฏิบัติแบ่งเป็น 3 ประเภท ได้แก่ สิ่งอ้างถึงจากปริบท ประธานผู้กล่าวถ้อย และความรู้ร่วมระหว่างผู้พูดและผู้ฟัง อย่างไรก็ตาม ผลการศึกษายืนยันสมมติฐานข้อที่สอง ผู้วิจัยพบว่ากลไกที่มีอิทธิพลต่อการเปลี่ยนแปลงประกอบด้วย 3 กลไก ได้แก่ การวางนัยยะทั่วไป การกลายเป็นอัตวิสัย และการกลายเป็นสหวิสัย การวางนัยยะทั่วไปเป็นกลไกที่ทำให้ความหมายเชิงการอ้างถึงของสรรพนาม มัน เกิดการขยายขอบเขตของรูปอ้างอิงนำ …

The Modern Formulation Of Chinese Art History And The Building Of A Nation In Early Twentieth-Century China, Chennie Huang

Dissertations and Theses

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Chinese formulation of art history underwent dramatic changes. It moved away from the traditional narratives that did not follow a strict chronology to adopt the Western linear model which emphasizes progress and national identity. Based on the premodern tradition, the modern formulations of Chinese art history began as a political strategy for nation building amid the political upheavals, including military attacks on China that led to the end of Qing imperial rule and the beginning of the Republican era (1912-1949).

In the early 1900s, while exiled in Japan, Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873-1929), …

Improving Nmt Quality Using Terminology Injection, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Duane K. Dougal

Faculty Publications

Many organizations use domain- or organization-specific words and phrases. This paper explores the use of vetted terminology as an input to neural machine translation (NMT) for improved results: ensuring that the translation of individual terms is consistent with an approved multilingual terminology collection. We discuss, implement, and evaluate a method for injecting terminology and for evaluating terminology injection. Our use of the long short-term memory (LSTM) attention mechanism prevalent in state-of-the-art NMT systems involves attention vectors for correctly identifying semantic entities and aligning the tokens that represent them, both in the source and the target languages. Appropriate terminology is then …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of The Training And Supervision Provided To Spanish/English Bilingual Graduate Students, Sonia Venegas Mezquita

Theses and Dissertations

Spanish/English bilingual graduate students (n = 7) completed interviews evaluating language variables, training variables, and supervision related experiences. Experiences were gathered through the use of open-ended questions which focused on participants' linguistics abilities, program coursework, training experiences, and supervision experiences. A phenomenological research design was applied to analyze the collected data from the qualitative interviews. A phenomenological research design uses the collection of qualitative (open-ended) data in response to the research question (Mruk, 2010). Results indicated that the most common areas in the program which graduate students identified as most helpful in preparation for working with Spanish-speaking Latinx clients were …

Reading Academic Citations: How Professors And Graduate Students Read For Different Purposes, Grant Eckstein, Sarah Miner, Katie Watkins, Judy James, Mornie Sims, Allison Wallace Baker, Larissa Grahl

Faculty Publications

Citations provide truncated yet socially complex information about sources in academic texts which students are obliged to read, comprehend, and then ultimately produce as part of an academic discourse community. While researchers have observed a developmental process whereby students produce citations during source-based writing, little work has investigated the reading stage when students visually encounter citations. In this study, we explored academic reading behaviors by examining eye movements of 27 graduate students and 18 professors as they read 6 authentic research texts for various purposes (summary, analysis, synthesis). Results of factorial ANOVAs showed no differences between students and professors but …

Measuring Language Development Through Self-Assessment, Troy L. Cox, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

Talk to any cyclist or runner, and they can name instances when the universe seems to conspire against them with headwinds that hinder their progress. It is easy to identify and often blame external forces for causing us to fail. Conversely, we often attribute success to our own ability, being blissfully unaware of the tailwinds that assist us. This blindness to headwind/tailwind asymmetry (Davidai & Gilovich, 2016) in viewing one’s own performance is not limited solely to endurance athletes but can be found in other areas of self-assessment. Performance rarely occurs in a vacuum. There are typically external forces that …

Learners’ Perceptions Of Wiillingness To Communicate In Myanmar, Maw Maw Tun

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Willingness to communicate, defined as “readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons using second language” (MacIntyre, 1998), plays a key role in second and foreign language instruction, as greater willingness to communicate (WTC) is believed to facilitate more L2 communication. In a foreign language learning context, classroom WTC is highly influenced by classroom environment factors as well as international posture, which is hypothesized to capture a general attitude to the international community and foreign language learning. Given the importance of willingness to communicate in language learning, this study examines Myanmar EFL learners’ …

Gesture Production And Theory Of Mind: Effective Disambiguation In Communication Through Gesture, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

People design their speech acts with their listeners in mind,accounting for their knowledge and other mental states. Is this ability specific to spoken language and co-speech gesture, or does it appear in pantomimic gestures as well? We ask whether adults flexibly shift their silent gestures to emphasize relevant information, representing different features of the target indifferent contexts. In a two-item reference game, adults gestured to a partner to indicate which object was the target.Item pairs differed in one of three features (size, shape,pattern). We found that adults were more likely to gesture a feature when it was relevant to distinguishing …

Vowel Dynamics Of The Low Vowels In Cowlitz County, Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Q1: Does Cowlitz County participate in the Elsewhere Shift?

BOT/BOUGHT:

• Not 100% merged.
• Have been in a stable near-merger since the 1930s.
• Hypothesis: Started when area was being settled (1850s–1920s) because of the demographic shift.

/æ/ BAT:

• Slowly lowering over 4 generations (since at least the 1930s)
• Women consistently ahead of the men - change in progress for over 60 years.
• Hypothesis: Began in earnest when Longview was founded (mid 1920s), in addition to language-internal pressure.

De Vos A Tú: Acomodación Lingüística Y Actitudes Lingüísticas En Estudiantes Internacionales De Centroamérica En Los Estados Unidos = De Vos A Tú: Linguistic Accommodation And Language Attitudes Among Central American International Students In The United States, Jose Salinas Herrera

Graduate Research Papers

While usted is considered the formal second person singular pronoun in most Spanish dialects, vos and tú can have similar connotations as intimate or familiar second person pronouns. Even though tú is used in vernacular language in many countries such as Mexico and Spain, in most Central American dialects, only vos and usted are used in most domains. However, research has shown that, in intercultural environments, voseante speakers adjust this aspect of their language according to the speech style of Spanish speaking individuals who use tú. Yet, there is a gap in this field since most of the research …

Kasus Ujaran Kebencian Dalam Berita Surat Kabar Di Hindia Belanda, Fajar Muhammad Nugraha, Reynaldo De Archellie, Cresentia Carra Nethania Clement

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This article is a preliminary study that explores past events of the Dutch East Indies colonial government, specifically describing criminal cases of hate speech or haatzaai depicted in newspaper news between 1879 and 1942. The Dutch East Indies colonial government controlled freedom of thought, expression, and politics of the native population by using the legal instruments Wetboek van Strafrecht voor Nederlandsch Indie, especially articles 154, 155, 156, and 157. These four articles are known as haatzaai artikelen. This regulation was published and enforced in the Dutch East Indies in 1918. This article uses twenty-eight newspaper news articles published in ten …

Teachers And Research Practices: Perspectives From English Language Educators In A Philippine University, Veronico N. Tarrayo, Philippe Jose S. Hernandez, Judith Ma. Angelica S. Claustro

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Given the paucity of studies regarding research practices of teachers, particularly English language teaching (ELT) practitioners in the ASEAN region and in the Philippines, this study explores the research practices of English language teachers in the Philippines. Using purposive-convenience sampling, a total of 49 teachers of English from a Philippine university were asked to answer a survey. To validate the data, pertinent public university documents were examined, and interviews with the university research heads were conducted. Findings suggest that the teachers were cognizant of the link between teaching and their own and their schools’ research practices. This research also reports …