Digital Commons Network^™

Home Of The Brave Book Study Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

Individuals lead storied lives, and everyone has a story to tell. Our stories can be shared orally and documented in print. Often, learners are exposed to stories through novels and other trade books. Teacher educators may benefit from using the stories in novels and trade books as case studies in preservice teacher preparation course. This assignment description outlines how to use the novel, Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate, as a case study to contextualize and understand the lived story of an individual learning a second language and living in a new country. Through the novel, preservice teachers experience …

Fish In A Tree Book Study Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

Individuals lead storied lives, and everyone has a story to tell. Our stories can be shared orally and documented in print. Often, learners are exposed to stories through novels and other trade books. Teacher educators may benefit from using the stories in novels and trade books as case studies in preservice teacher preparation course. This assignment description outlines how to use the novel, Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt, as a case study to contextualize and understand the lived story of an individual living and learning with dyslexia. Through the novel, preservice teachers experience the dilemmas faced and …

Linguistic Inquiry And Word Count (Liwc) For Text Analysis, Isabella Lenzini, Destiny Fore Msw, Anna W. Wright Phd

IRBEH/Spit for Science Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

What’S In A Threat: A Corpus-Based, Speech Act And Lexicogrammatical Approach To Threats In English, Natalie Raun Carter

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Threats can be made without using language at all, but previous research on the language of threats is limited and primarily examines threats with a small amount of constructed data. Building on Austin (1962) and Searle (1965; 1969)’s speech act theory and using a corpus of naturally occurring data consisting of 827 threatening texts from publicly available websites and law enforcement, this dissertation determines what constitutes a threat, as well as the interdependence between words and grammar.

Pragmatically, this dissertation identifies four required felicity conditions that must be met to constitute a threat—building on those set by John Searle, Bruce …

A Perceptual Investigation Of Speech Rhythm Based On A Continuum Of Durational Change, Matthew Benton

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Speech rhythm is a complicated prosodic feature of spoken languages. Being a suprasegmental feature, it is not a clear cut difference between tonal (Chinese) and non-tonal (English) languages. The popularization of defining languages in terms of their speech rhythms was popularized in the mid 1900’s. Terms like syllable-timed and stress-timed were coined and ever since then there has been much debate on what is a speech rhythm and why particular languages have different rhythms. While speech rhythm was initially a study based on how a listener perceived a spoken language, it became much more focused on measurements and attempts to …

Attention-Language Interface In Multilingual Assessment Instrument For Narratives (Main), Irina A. Sekerina, Olga Parshina, Vladislava Staroverova, Natalia Gagarina

Publications and Research

The current study employed the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to test comprehension of narrative macrostructure in Russian in a visual world eye-tracking paradigm. The four MAIN visual narratives are structurally similar and question referents’ goals and internal states (IS). Previous research revealed that children’s MAIN comprehension differed among the four narratives in German, Swedish, Russian, and Turkish, but it is not clear why. We tested whether the difference in comprehension was (a) present, (b) caused by complicated inferences in understanding IS compared with goals, and (c) ameliorated by orienting visual attention to the referents whose IS was critical …

Bulgarian Clitics Are Sensitive To Number Attraction, Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, Irina A. Sekerina, Sol Lago

Publications and Research

Previous research has shown that the computation of subject-verb number agreement can be derailed by the presence of syntactically illicit nouns, a phenomenon called agreement attraction. By contrast, the incidence of agreement attraction with anaphoric dependencies is less clear: Previous work has mostly focused on reflexives and strong pronouns, which sometimes show attraction and other times do not. Meanwhile, research on clitics – a different class of pronominal anaphora – is scarcer. To expand the empirical record, we examined clitic pronouns in an under-researched language, Bulgarian. The results of a large sample eye-tracking study showed clear agreement attraction effects in …

The Contracts Word List: Integral Vocabulary For Reading And Writing English Contracts, Elizabeth Hanks, Brett James Hashimoto, Jesse Egbert

Faculty Publications

Both Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) and Legal English as a Lingua Franca (LELF) users engage with legal contracts regularly. However, contractual language is notoriously complex, due in part to the vocabulary it contains. To help mitigate the challenges related to learning the vocabulary of contracts, this paper introduces a word list of American English contracts called the ContractsWord List (CWL).We describe the compilation of the Corpus of English Business Contracts (CEBC) that represents six major contract types in 48 million words. The extraction of prevalent and specialized words from the CEBC is described, following validation procedures in …

“Your Legs Don’T Look All That Good” An Analysis Of Impoliteness And Politeness In Individuals With Traumatic Brain Injuries In The Workplace, Grace Kozal

Theses and Dissertations--Communication Sciences and Disorders

Background: Social communication disorders are a common outcome from traumatic brain injury (TBI). This social communication disorder can be seen through impolite speech acts during conversation. While politeness is a social norm for workplace discourse, instances of impoliteness may have poor consequences. This research explores the use of impoliteness in persons with TBI within computer generated work-based conditions.

Methods: Language samples from the Voicemail Elicitation Task (VET) and Feedback/Advice Spoken Task (FAST) were transcribed word-for-word. Transcripts from all 62 participants were coded for impoliteness using a developed Impoliteness Codebook and were analyzed to identify significant differences in the number of …

Spanish On Bulletin Boards In Baltimore Public Libraries, Francisco Martínez Ibarra

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

Public libraries provide not only a safe space to access information but to interact with other members of the local community as well. The purpose of my paper is to study communication practices derived from posting messages on analog bulletin boards in Baltimore, Maryland. A few of the questions that guide my exploration are: who uses the bulletin board and how is it structured linguistically? Are Spanish and English used any differently regarding the author and the topic of the message? Does language use align with the demographics of the community?

I collected 488 texts from a total of 36 …

"And I / Am The Arrow": The Narrative, Personae Construction, And Language Ideology Of Confessional Poets' Identity Performance, Madison Fuchs

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis argues for consideration of linguistic features in service of raising the postmodern confessionalist poet identity as an utterance and an act of loyalty to performance. The embodiment of the confessionalist identity, attributed to the features used to adhere to the confessional mode, is realized through the invention of confessional personae. These confessional personae merge the responsibilities of the speaker and the narrator to convey a pseudo-autobiographical utterance to a designated audience. In this thesis, I analyze a sequence of poems that either possess taboo subjects or utilize linguistic functions, like indexicality and audience design, that mark its mode. …

Gaps And Overlaps In Conversation: Analyses Of Differentiating Factors, David W. Edwards

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Human social behavior relies on communication, and much of that communication occurs in conversation. A crucial feature of conversation is turn-taking, the (usually) orderly pattern of listening and speaking that humans employ in conversation. In analyzing details of actual conversations, Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) launched the field of Conversation Analysis by outlining a set of observations of turn-taking behavior and by proposing a list of rules to explain that behavior. They noted that the vast majority of transitions from one speaker to another happen with very little gap or overlap (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974: 700–701). More recently, researchers …

Attraction Effects In Referential Dependencies, Emily Graham

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation explores the differences in the real-time processing of long-distance dependencies and how the processing of these dependencies functions within a cue-based retrieval model. During subject-verb agreement (SVA) comprehension, the processing of the verb is influenced by attractor noun phrases (NPs) that cannot control agreement. Referential dependencies, however, are less susceptible to such attraction effects. Many studies examining ungrammatical sentences in which a reflexive or pronoun mismatches with its antecedent in number/gender have indicated that the processing of these referentially dependent elements is largely uninfluenced by grammatically unavailable attractor NPs. These disparities have been taken to indicate that SVA …

Getting /Srs About Tone Tags, Sierra Morrissey

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In digital modes of communication, speakers may struggle to convey their tone and emotions to their readers and interlocutors. This complication leads to questions surrounding the state of the conventions for conveying tone in digital utterances (e.g., tweets). This thesis explores one such way that speakers overcome this struggle, tone tags. Tone tags are linguistic items consisting of a forward slash and an alphabetic character or characters that serve to represent some word or phrase, generally used to indicate the intended spirit of the utterance. This thesis serves as an analysis of these items, including necessary context, an explanation of …

Entrevista A Carmen Silva-Corvalán, Antonio Medina-Rivera

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

No abstract provided.

Streamlining Public Engagement In Transportation Projects Using Text Analytics, Alireza Shamshiri

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Infrastructure projects impact a broad range of stakeholders, particularly local communities, whose engagement is critical for successful outcomes. Despite the importance of public engagement in these projects, traditional methods of capturing and analyzing public opinion often fail to fully represent the diverse, genuine perspectives involved. This has led to conflicts between community members and project sponsors. On the other hand, despite advancements in text analytics, including natural language processing (NLP) and its subfields such as topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and neural networks, their functionalities and effectiveness in analyzing public opinion in the domain of infrastructure projects have not been fully …

Recent Trends In Corpus Design And Reporting: A Methodological Synthesis, Brett James Hashimoto, Kyra Nelson

Faculty Publications

Methodological design is a central issue for researchers in corpus linguistics. To understand trends in the reporting of important aspects of corpus design and the type of corpora being used in corpus linguistics research articles better, this study analyzes 709 descriptions of corpora from research published in corpus journals between 2010–2019. Each article was manually coded by two trained coders for aspects of corpus design, such as the population definition, sampling method, and sample size. Additionally, the study identifies missing information in corpus reporting. Our results show trends in corpus design, such as an increased use of spoken corpora. We …

Language, Hip Hop, And Identity Work On Youtube, Matt Garley, Cecelia Cutler

Publications and Research

As hip hop has evolved into the dominant form of global popular music, YouTube has become a locus of fan-artist interaction. This chapter examines how hip hop artists and fans produce their identities and engage with hip hop culture on YouTube. This identity work centers around establishing credibility, glocal and ethnic positioning, and signaling stances of resistance and simultaneous alignment with ultralocal and global hip hop personae. Building on a background of research about language and identity in hip hop, particularly in the Internet sphere, the chapter summarizes the state of the art and then highlights the authors’ own explorations …

A Computational Investigation Of English Spelling, John Winstead

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis examines the predictability and regularity of English orthography through computational methods. The primary objective is to use n-gram models to predict missing letters in English words by exploiting contextual information from adjacent letters. The study evaluates the impact of dataset size, word length, letter position, and vowel presence on the predictive accuracy of these models, uncovering patterns and structures inherent to English spelling.

The research utilizes a range of datasets, including the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary, the Brown Corpus, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, and the Open …

A Human-In-The-Loop Approach: Designing An Ai-Assisted Workflow, Abram Anders, Emily Dux Speltz

Teaching Repository of AI-Infused Learning

This teaching case presents an AI-assisted workflow design activity that challenges students to integrate AI tools into solving real-world communication problems. Students engage in a structured process of problem identification, solution sketching, and prototype development, culminating in the creation and testing of an AI-human collaborative workflow. The activity fosters critical thinking about AI capabilities and limitations while encouraging students to apply AI tools to personally relevant scenarios.

The Perceptual Origin Of Added Glottals In Spanish Loans In Modern Nahuan, Hugo Salgado, Justin Pinta

CAS Publications

Spanish vowel-final loans are consistently adopted in modern Nahuan languages with an added glottal phoneme: Spanish mesa > Nahuan mesah ‘table’. This adaptation is puzzling because there is no obvious aspect of the phonological or morphological grammar of Nahuan that motivates it. We present evidence that, due to the weakened voicing of Spanish utterance-final vowels, Nahuan speakers perceive Spanish vowel-final words in utterance-final position as ending in the Nahuan glottal phoneme and adopt the word with it. Our proposal bears on the growing body of literature showing that first- and second-language learners are more sensitive to the phonetic characteristics of sounds …

Foreign Language Instruction: Commonalities From Kindergarten To College, Bethany A. Tafoya

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Kindergartners learn much differently than high schoolers or college students. Yet, when it comes to foreign language (FL) instruction, adult learners are often back at square one, like kindergarteners. Though learning capacity and maturity differ greatly between kindergarten and college, are there any common threads in the method of instruction across all these levels? This project was carried out by observing foreign language classrooms from kindergarten to college, identifying the main means of instruction in each class, and analyzing whether any commonalities exist between all the levels. Language is universal, and in an increasingly global world, contact with other languages …

Language Acquisition, Mental Health, And Acculturation Among Migrants In Canada, Ali Jasemi

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines the integration of first-generation migrants in Canada, focusing on the constructs of acculturation, language proficiency, and mental health. With nearly a quarter of Canada's population comprising migrants (Statistics Canada, 2022), understanding their adjustment is critical. Acculturation, language proficiency, and mental health can all have an impact on the success of migrants in their new country (Balidemaj et al. 2019; Brance et al. 2023; Iversen et al. 2014; Rousseau et al. 2019; Rashtchi et al. 2012; Salami et al. 2019). There are a limited number of studies examining these variables in relation to certain migrant groups, such as …

You Shall Know A Forum By The Words They Keep: Analyzing Language Use In Accessibility Forums For Blind Users, Nithiya Venkatraman, Anand Aiyer, Yash Prakash, Vikas Ashok

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Discussion forums are one of the favored platforms for knowledge sharing. Given their popularity, copious research exists on understanding linguistic and behavioral characteristics of forum conversations. However, prior investigations have mainly focused on general forums designed primarily for sighted users, and as such the applicability of their findings to the dedicated accessibility discussion forums frequented by blind individuals remains unanswered. To bridge this knowledge gap, and facilitate the development of better-informed assistive technologies for blind people, we investigated language use and identified the key semantic and cognitive characteristics of online accessibility forums. To aid our investigation, we collected a dataset …

Unveiling Spanish Language Attitudes In A Los Angeles School And A Third-Generation Multigenerational Mexican-American Family, Eric Alvarez

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

This chapter unearths some of the diverse attitudes towards Spanish of a third-generation child in Los Angeles (L.A.), California, her family members, and school personnel. L.A. is a tension-ridden contact zone (Pratt, 1991) where Spanish has traditionally been subjugated and is still a lesser-taught language (LTL) despite decades of research showing that bilingual education positively impacts student attitudes (Potowski & Muñoz-Basols, 2020). Lack of continuity (Caloi & Torregrossa, 2021) in formal instruction and inconsistent heritage Spanish use in the home may entail divergent attitudes towards Spanish, possibly hindering multigenerational transmission. Decades-long turbulent California language policies (CLP) (Macias, 2001) have consistently …

Discourses That Undermine Union Movements: A Multimodal Analysis Of Union-Busting Videos, Theresa A. Catalano, Julia Schleck

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Labor unions in the United States have experienced decades of decline, but recent years have seen a rebirth of union campaigns and successes. Because unions are once again becoming a threat to large companies, it is reasonable to assume that efforts to discourage organizing efforts will increase and become even more robust in the near future. Although traditionally, companies have worked to suspend union organizing through captive audience meetings in which unions were discussed via verbal or written modes, more recent means of reaching workers with anti-union messages incorporate a variety of communication strategies to get the message across. As …

The Past As A Colonialist Resource, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Originalism’s critics have failed to block its rise. For many jurists and legal scholars, the question is no longer whether to espouse originalism but how to espouse it. This Article argues that critics have ceded too much ground by focusing on discrediting originalism as either bad history or shoddy linguistics. To disrupt the cycle of endless “methodological” refinements and effectively address originalism’s continued popularity, critics must do two things: identify a better disciplinary analogue for originalist interpretation and advance an argument that moves beyond methods.

Anthropology can assist with both tasks. Both anthropological analysis and originalist interpretation are premised on …

Filled Pauses As A Parameter For Forensic Voice Comparison In Thai, Chanakan Wittayasakpan

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

This study investigated the potential of filled pauses as a parameter for forensic voice comparison in Thai by analyzing within-speaker and between-speaker acoustic variation. Spontaneous speech from 20 female Bangkok Thai speakers was examined, focusing on the filled pauses ‘uh’ [(ʔ)ɤ̀ː] and ‘em’ [(ʔ)ɤ̀ːm]. Acoustic features extracted included the first three formant frequencies (F1, F2, F3), dynamic formant trajectories, and durations. The analysis consistently showed that Thai filled pauses carry significant speaker-specific information, demonstrated by several measures showing significant between-speaker variation that outweighed within-speaker variation and their ability to discriminate speakers above chance levels. The systems were found to be …

The Discursive Construction Of Thai Tom's Identities Via Interview: A Case Of Betty's Story Youtube Channel, Krongkwan Siri

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The representation of Thai toms—individuals assigned female at birth who embrace a masculine identity and sexually attracted to women—become more visible in new media since it provides space for them to share their identity and desire. This research investigates the discursive construction of Thai toms’ identities in the “Talk with Betty” interview-based show broadcasted on YouTube, using Conversation Analysis as a framework. It aims to examine the discursive construction of Thai tom’s identities in interview show and gender ideologies that underpin this construction. The data were drawn from selected 14 video clips of “Talk with Betty” interview show from 2020 …

บทบาทของการกลมกลืนการรับรู้เสียงวรรณยุกต์ต่อการเข้าถึงคลังศัพท์ภาษาที่สองของผู้เรียนภาษาจีนกลางชาวไทย, พิมหทัย สอนสุภาพ

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อศึกษารูปแบบการกลมกลืนการรับรู้เสียงวรรณยุกต์ภาษาจีนกลางของผู้เรียนชาวไทยที่มีความสามารถทางภาษาระดับสูง และอิทธิพลของการกลมกลืนการรับรู้เสียงวรรณยุกต์ต่อการเข้าถึงคลังศัพท์ภาษาที่สอง ซึ่งมีสมมติฐานว่าเมื่อได้ยินคำพ้องเสียงที่มีเสียงวรรณยุกต์ที่ผู้เรียนภาษาจีนกลางชาวไทยรับรู้ว่าคล้ายคลึงกับเสียงวรรณยุกต์ภาษาไทยจะส่งผลให้เกิดการเข้าถึงคลังศัพท์แบบไม่เลือกภาษา โดยศึกษากับผู้เรียนภาษาจีนกลางชาวไทยที่มีความสามารถทางภาษาระดับสูงจำนวน 30 คน ที่ไม่มีประสบการณ์เกี่ยวกับภาษาที่มีเสียงวรรณยุกต์อื่น ในการทดลองที่หนึ่ง ผู้เข้าร่วมการทดลองต้องฟังและให้คะแนนความเหมือนมากน้อยของคู่เสียงภาษาจีนกลาง-ไทยซึ่งมีเสียงเรียงที่เหมือนกัน ผลพบว่าคู่เสียงที่ได้รับคะแนนมากที่สุดคือคู่เสียงวรรณยุกต์หนึ่ง-สามัญ คู่เสียงวรรณยุกต์สอง-ตรี คู่เสียงวรรณยุกต์สาม-จัตวา และคู่เสียงวรรณยุกต์สี่-โท ซึ่งรูปแบบการกลมกลืนการรับรู้ข้างต้นเป็นไปตามความคล้ายคลึงของลักษณะการขึ้นลงของระดับเสียงหรือเป็นการกลมกลืนการรับรู้ในระดับสัทศาสตร์ ในการทดลองที่สอง ผู้เข้าร่วมการทดลองกลุ่มเดียวกันได้ทำแบบทดสอบการตัดสินคำภาษาจีนกลางผ่านเสียง โดยมีการเตรียมการรับรู้ด้วยเสียงคำภาษาไทย ผลพบว่าผู้เข้าร่วมการทดลองตอบสนองต่อคู่คำที่คำเตรียมและคำเป้าหมายเป็นคำพ้องเสียงระหว่างภาษาและมีเสียงวรรณยุกต์ที่การขึ้นลงของระดับเสียงคล้ายคลึงกันเร็วกว่าคำพ้องเสียงที่เสียงวรรณยุกต์ไม่มีความคล้ายคลึงกันและคู่คำที่ไม่ใช่คำพ้องเสียงอย่างมีนัยสำคัญ แสดงให้เห็นถึงผลของการเตรียมการรับรู้ข้ามภาษา ซึ่งสนับสนุนแนวคิดการเข้าถึงคลังศัพท์แบบไม่เลือกภาษา นอกจากนี้ยังไม่พบความแตกต่างของค่าระยะเวลาการตอบสนองต่อคำพ้องเสียงที่เสียงวรรณยุกต์ไม่มีความคล้ายคลึงกันและคู่คำที่ไม่ใช่คำพ้องเสียง ซึ่งเน้นให้เห็นถึงความสำคัญของข้อมูลเสียงวรรณยุกต์ต่อการเข้าถึงคลังศัพท์ขณะประมวลผลภาษาที่สอง