Digital Commons Network^™

Deaf In Her Own Way: The Role Of Identity In Social Justice Leadership, Judy Drescher

Student Coursework: Ed.D. program

The following fieldwork chronicles the personal and professional trajectory of Cindy Greenspun, a social justice leader at Yale University Library. At the age of eighteen months, Greenspun suffered an illness that resulted in the loss of her hearing and spent nearly the first half of her life fully immersed in the hearing world. Through significant self-reflection and perseverance, Greenspun evolved beyond the binary paradigm of oralism–the exclusive use of speech and lip reading–to ultimately embrace the essence of being both bilingual (speech and sign) and bicultural (hearing and non-hearing). These attributes not only enabled Greenspun to navigate between two distinctly …

Mentoring International Teaching Assistants: A Case Study Of Improving Teaching Practices, Ekaterina Arshavskaya

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

While there exists a considerable body of research focusing on international teaching assistants’ (ITAs’) linguistic, sociocultural, and instructional challenges, less is known about the successful developmental trajectories of this group of international educators of American students. This research aims to fulfill this research gap using a case study approach (Yin, 2003). The study involved ITAs from STEM majors in six collaborative mentoring sessions prior and upon video recording of three lessons taught by the ITAs to undergraduate students. The mentoring sessions were designed to facilitate ITAs’ reflections on their teaching with the use of structured protocols to help guide the …

Linguistic Imperialism In Post-Colonial Ghana: Access To Written News Media In The Local Languages, Rikki N. Bergen

Anthropology Presentations

No abstract provided.

Two Questions About Interpretive Effects, Robert Stainton, Christopher Viger

Philosophy Publications

We discuss central themes in Lepore and Stone's Imagination and Convention. We begin by laying out their view, and then pose both empirical and methodological criticisms.

Introduction To Discourse, Structure And Linguistic Choice By T. Price Caldwell, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Pedagogical Approaches To The Teaching And Learning Of Formulaic Language, Ana Pellicer-Sánchez, Frank Boers

Education Publications

No abstract provided.

Detecting Clickbait: Here’S How To Do It, Christopher Brogly, Victoria Rubin

Data and Test Instruments

Automatic clickbait detection is a relatively novel task in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). “Clickbait” is a hyperlink created primarily to attract attention to its target content. This article introduces a binary classifier, the Language and Information Technology Research Lab (LiT.RL, pronounced “literal”) Clickbait Detector, which automatically distinguishes clickbait from nonclickbait. We used NLP and ML for 38 textual features, contrasting clickbait with “headlinese.” When tested on 11,000 hyperlinks, it achieves 94 per cent accuracy using a support vector machine. Integrated with the LiT.RL News Verification Browser, a downloadable stand-alone research tool, the Clickbait Detector user interface …

Teaching Writing Through Transformation: Linguistically Diverse Writing Teachers’ Enactments Of Linguistic Diversity, Cristina Sanchez-Martin

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to recent calls for teacher education in a first-year writing context. Studies addressing the intersections between composition and applied linguistics have emphasized the dynamic and situated nature of writing and language practices (Pennycook, 2010; Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013b; Horner, Lu, Royster, Trimbur, 2011; Lorimer-Leonard, 2013; Seloni, 2014); however, it is urgent to investigate how linguistically diverse writing instructors negotiate their teaching strategies across settings to implement pedagogies that accurately reflect writers’ practices in and outside academic contexts and across Englishes. While scholars have proposed terms such as “dialogical pedagogies” (Canagarajah, 2013a) or teaching English as “translingual activism” (Pennycook, …

Analyzing And Interpreting Data From Piaac’S Problem Solving In Technology Rich Environments (Pstre) Assessment And Library Use Survey: Quantitative Results, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Data

This document contains an explanation of the quantitative analysis conducted using data from a researcher-designed library use survey and PIAAC's PSTRE survey accessed through OECD's Education and Skills Online portal. Data were collected in two phases and are presented using descriptive statistics and through a latent class analysis. The latent class analysis allowed for the examination of the relationship between library activities, library website use, and PSTRE scores. Results indicated that library website use is strong predictor of higher PSTRE scores and competency in digital problem solving.

Digital Problem Solving: Score Report, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Digital Problem Solving Toolkit

This test tries to measure how well you use technology to solve problems. The digital tools in the test might not look familiar. As you get more practice meeting different goals using technology, these tasks will become easier to do.

A Markedly Different Approach: Investigating Pie Stops Using Modern Empirical Methods, Phillip Barnett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis, I investigate a decades-old problem found in the stop system of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). More specifically, I will be investigating the paucity of */b/ in the forms reconstructed for the ancient, hypothetical language. As cross-linguistic evidence and phonological theory alone have fallen short of providing a satisfactory answer, herein will I employ modern empirical methods of linguistic investigation, namely laboratory phonology experiments and computational database analysis. Following Byrd 2015, I advocate for an examination of synchronic phenomena and behavior as a method for investigating diachronic change.

In Chapter 1, I present an overview of the various proposed phonological …

Bursting The Filter Bubble: Information Literacy And Questions Of Valuation, Navigation, And Control In A Digital Landscape, Komysha Hassan

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The evolution of social media platforms and other public forums in the digital realm has created an explosion of user-generated content and data as a component of the already content-saturated digital landscape. The distributed, horizontal nature of the internet as a platform makes it difficult to ascertain value and differentiate between texts of varying validity, bias, and purpose. In addition, the internet is not an inanimate interface. As Pariser (2011) argues, content aggregators, such as Google, actively filter, personalize, and therefore limit each individual's access to information, in both range and type. This has created a crisis of information valuation …

Going Gaga: Pop Fandom As Online Community Of Practice, John D. N. Carter

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Among various fan sites dedicated to pop stars, GagaDaily is one prominent online collective that centers around Lady Gaga. This study is a piece of ethnographic research focused on two claims – GagaDaily constitutes a Community of Practice (Eckert, 2006) in an online setting, and the regular use of humor by users fulfills social and pragmatic roles in the discourse. Communicative phenomena (both textual and graphic) that characterize the linguistic repertoire of GagaDaily members were catalogued from the first 100 pages of one thread within the forums. These data were grouped into categories corresponding to different dimensions of language use …

Constraints On Izāfa In Sorani Kurdish, Ali Salehi

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study examines the distribution and the status of the izāfa particle in Sorani Kurdish (Central Kurdish). It uses a corpus-based analysis to investigate the forms and the pattern of distribution of the izāfa particle in Sorani, a dominant dialect of Kurdish among the Western Iranian languages. The study details an investigation of the appearance of izāfa in various NPs using a variety of data mostly from the corpus but supplemented by the grammaticality judgments of native speakers. I show that next to parallel properties seen in other Western Iranian languages, Sorani Kurdish izāfa shows a form alternation. I examine …

Pedagogy Of Pitch In L2 Blackfoot, Naatosi I. Fish

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Pitch in Blackfoot is characterized by the raising of relative pitch on a syllable in a word. Pitch is not a consciously recognized piece of information among native speakers or teachers. However, pitch is important as it impacts the meaning of words. This study looks at the efficacy of visual guides for Blackfoot pronunciation of pitch by second language learners. I hypothesized that use of visual assistance would improve pitch pronunciation in second language learners.

Subjects were nine Blackfoot learners recruited on campus. Participants were shown 15 words with images and asked to pronounce them. Subjects were then given pitch …

Language Use In Totalistic Social Groups, Emily H. Allen

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

A totalistic social group is defined as a collection of individuals who share similar values and goals and who live together within intensive boundaries enforced by the group’s leadership and/or members themselves (Lifton 1969). The focus of this project is to better understand the effect of language on (I) a totalistic group’s social structure and (II) the ideologies and actions of members. The limited linguistic research on totalistic groups claims that leaders and members use language in order to enforce rules and beliefs, encourage conformity, and maintain as well as increase membership. By examining language practices in the US military, …

Kratylos: A Tool For Sharing Interlinearized And Lexical Data In Diverse Formats, Daniel Kaufman, Raphael Finkel

Publications and Research

In this paper we present Kratylos, at www.kratylos.org/, a web application that creates searchable multimedia corpora from data collections in diverse formats, including collections of interlinearized glossed text (IGT) and dictionaries. There exists a crucial lacuna in the electronic ecology that supports language documentation and linguistic research. Vast amounts of IGT are produced in stand-alone programs without an easy way to share them publicly as dynamic databases. Solving this problem will not only unlock an enormous amount of linguistic information that can be shared easily across the web, it will also improve accountability by allowing us to verify analyses across …

Perspectives On Truth: The Case Of Language And False Belief Reasoning, Jill De Villiers

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Many theorists take language – vocabulary, mental verbs, syntax, counterfactuals, discourse – to be a significant help in the development of explicit Theory of Mind. Does conversation, with all its point-of-view indicators, betray another’s perspective? By comparing how different linguistic markers behave across clausal environments, I demonstrate that they fall into distinct classes, only one of which – tense – patterns with the truth of the clause in terms of perspective. Sentences with embedded finite complements thus have a special role in representing the truth or falsity of others’ beliefs. Children who master embedded sentential complements can then more readily …

Constructing Two Phonological Systems: A Phonetic Analysis Of /P/, /T/, /K/ Among Early Spanish–English Bilingual Speakers, Earl K. Brown, Mary T. Copple

Faculty Publications

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: Many early Spanish-English bilingual speakers in the USA learn Spanish as their first language at home and English in school. This paper seeks to elucidate whether these speakers develop a separate phonological system for English and, if so, the role of primary and secondary cues in the development of the second language (L2) system.

Design/methodology/approach: The phonetic realization of the voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/ is analyzed among three groups: early Spanish-English bilinguals; L1 English speakers who are late learners of Spanish; and L1 Spanish speakers who are late learners of English. The participants (N = …

Evaluation In Moderation: Evaluative Adjectives In Student Academic Presentations, Alla Zareva

English Faculty Publications

Evaluation is inherent in academic discourse and fundamental to shaping college students’ critical thinking and ability to assess the status of discipline-specific information. The current study focused on the use of evaluative adjectives in native English speaking (L1) and English as a second language (L2) college student academic presentations (N = 40). The goal was to find out how the two groups of presenters compared on their frequency, referential choices, variability of evaluative adjectives, patterns of adjectival structures, and level of sophistication of the adjectives they used and also to identify common trends for both groups along the categories. The …

Language, Literacy, And Conscientização In American Public Schools, Julie Ward

Theses and Dissertations

Language, Literacy, and Conscientização in American Public Schools synthesizes poststructural language theory to critique literacy teaching and assessment norms in American public schools in order to theorize a pedagogy of racial and economic justice that embraces globalization and immigration. Chapter I creates a theoretical framework for language that rests firmly on both Lev Vygotsky’s and Jacques Lacan’s sociohistorical approach to language acquisition and language use. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work demonstrates the heteroglossic nature of discourse, while Antonio Gramsci politicizes this framework through an understanding of hegemony. Chapter II sketches ethnographic research on teaching practices of various American communities, focusing on ideology …

Linguistic Characteristics Of Censorable Language On Sinaweibo, Kei Yin Ng, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng, Christopher Leberknight

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper investigates censorship from a linguistic perspective. We collect a corpus of censored and uncensored posts on a number of topics, build a classifier that predicts censorship decisions independent of discussion topics. Our investigation reveals that the strongest linguistic indicator of censored content of our corpus is its readability.

Exploring The Functional And Geometric Bias Of Spatial Relations Using Neural Language Models, Simon Dobnik, Mehdi Ghanimifard, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The challenge for computational models of spatial descriptions for situated dialogue systems is the integration of information from different modalities. The semantics of spatial descriptions are grounded in at least two sources of information: (i) a geometric representation of space and (ii) the functional interaction of related objects that. We train several neural language models on descriptions of scenes from a dataset of image captions and examine whether the functional or geometric bias of spatial descriptions reported in the literature is reflected in the estimated perplexity of these models. The results of these experiments have implications for the creation of …

Coffee, Please?: Sociolinguistic Influences On Politeness Strategies In Making Requests, Amy Burbee

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

In this paper I look at the extent to which factors of gender and context influence linguistic features such as hedging and syntax in indirect requests. I analyzed different features of indirect speech used by participants. I selected a few scenarios that focused on different social aspects where requests would be needed. Responses from men and women were compared to see if the gender of the speaker had any effect on the linguistic features used.

Indus Kohistani Dictionary: People And Kinship Terms, Beate Lubberger

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

This paper contributes to the description of the Indus Kohistani language of Pakistan by presenting a list of terms referring to people, kinship and other relationships – along with their English glosses – that are used in this language. The list includes related verbs and adjectives.

An Exploratory Study Of Heritage Spanish Rhotics: Addressing Methodological Challenges Of Heritage Language Phonetics Research, Elizabeth M. Kissling

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

When speaking their heritage language, heritage speakers typically sound much like other “native speakers.” However, recent studies have found that heritage speakers (HSs) are highly variable and produce a range of more and less “native-like” phonetic features. In an effort to stimulate productive new research in this area, this article addresses some of the methodological challenges of heritage language phonetics research, namely dealing with high variability and identifying the best predictors of that variability. A study on heritage Spanish rhotics is presented to elucidate those methodological challenges. The study took an exploratory, bottom-up approach to analyzing the rhotics produced by …

Pronunciation Instruction Can Improve L2 Learners' Bottom-Up Processing For Listening, Elizabeth M. Kissling

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Listening is widely regarded as an important skill that is difficult and necessary to teach in L2 classrooms. Listening requires both top-down and bottom-up processing, yet pedagogical techniques for the latter are often lacking. This study explores the efficacy of pronunciation instruction (PI) for improving learners’ bottom-up processing. The study recruited 116 relatively novice learners of Spanish as a foreign language and provided the experimental groups with brief lessons in PI emphasizing segmental or suprasegmental features followed by production-focused or perception-focused practice. Learners’ bottom-up processing skill was assessed with a sentence-level dictation task. Learners given PI on suprasegmental features followed …

Japanese-English Bilinguals’ Competence Of Speech Acts In Politeness, Chikako Takehara

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The perceptions and norms of speech acts vary depending on the actor’s culture and language (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989; Rinnert & Kobayashi, 1999). Politeness also has diverse benchmarks depending on culture and language, as noted by Ide et al. (1992) who argue that the concept of politeness is different in Japanese and English. When considering the fact that it is challenging to possess bicultural competence and equal proficiency in both languages (Baker, 2011), how one retains this competence becomes a noteworthy question. Thus, this study investigated whether bilinguals who move to a L2 dominant country retain their communicative competence …

Acquisition Of Chinese Wh-Questions By English L2 Learners, Linfei Yi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current thesis investigates the acquisition of Chinese wh-questions by English l2 learners based on the syntactic differences between the two languages. I seek to find out how well do the l2 learners acquire the wh-questions, as measured by a grammaticality judgment task; what wh-words tend to pose difficulties for the acceptability of l2 learners; if l2 learners able to acquire the native-like word order of wh-questions in Chinese; if the results of the initial l2 learners in line with any hypotheses of the initial state. Through the analysis of the results, I will conclude that l1 English learners of …

The Differences Between And Within Beg And Bag: Phonological, Morphological, And Lexical Effects In Prevelar Raising, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Hypotheses

1. Based on my exceptions, BEG-raising is less common when it is followed by a sonorant.
2. BEG- and BAG-raising have different patterns.

Phonological Effects

• No difference between intervocalic /ɡ/ and word-final /ɡ/.
• For BEG only, significantly less raising before sonorants, particularly liquids.

Morphological Effects

• Adding –s was had a negligible effect for both vowels.
• There was more raising reported after adding –ing.
• For BAG only, there was more raising in words with –ed.

Conclusions

Many language-internal factors:

• Despite relatively few words with BEG and BAG, there are phonological, morphological, and lexical effects.
• A small word list may not have captured …