Digital Commons Network^™

Piloting A Dynamic Assessment Model: Russian Nominal Morphology As A Building Block For L2 Listening Development, Rimma Ableeva, Olga Thomason

Russian Language Journal

Second language (L2) Russian research identifies listening comprehension as the least developed language ability among university students and points to the importance of listening instruction in Russian programs (e.g., Rifkin 2005; Comer 2012a; Isurin 2013). For example, Rifkin (2005, 11) states that students typically exhibit an “intermediate-low level of L2 listening proficiency” after completion of a 4-year Russian program. According to Isurin (2013, 39), the survey conducted among L2 Russian learners and instructors acknowledged “listening comprehension as the most problematic area in students’ language proficiency in general.” Comer (2012a) attributes poor listening ability to insufficient teaching materials and activities as …

Businessmen And Ballerinas Take Different Forms: A Strategic Resource For Acquiring Russian Vocabulary And Morphology, Laura A. Janda

Russian Language Journal

Included in the tasks facing a language learner is the acquisition of a lexicon and a grammar. However, when the target language has inflectional morphology, these two parts of the language-learning task intersect in the paradigms of grammatical word forms because each open-class lexeme has a number of forms that allow it to express various combinations of grammatical categories. Among major world languages, Russian is relatively highly inflected, meaning that the challenges of acquiring vocabulary are compounded by the need to master the inflectional morphology. Even a modest basic vocabulary of a few thousand inflected lexemes has over a hundred …

An Intensive Book Camp Approach To The Remediation Of Speech Sound Disorders: A Case Report, Shawn L. Nissen, Melanie E. Peris, Kristine Tanner

Faculty Publications

Background: Understanding treatment dose is essential to optimizing therapeutic frequency and intensity for speech sound disorders. Intensive therapies, known as boot camp approaches, have proven efficacious in certain speech therapy contexts such as voice disorder treatment. However, few data exist regarding intervention intensity for developmental speech sound disorders. Method: This investigation examined the effects of an intensive boot camp speech therapy approach to remediate interdental /s/ production over two consecutive days. Treatment occurred in morning and afternoon blocks for a total of 5.5 h per day. Auditory-perceptual ratings were used to evaluate /s/ productions pre-treatment, immediately post-treatment, and one week …

Verbs In Egyptian Arabic: A Case For Register Variation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael G. White

Faculty Publications

The limited availability of Egyptian Arabic (EA) corpus resources, especially speech corpora, has left open opportunity for research into such dialect phenomena as register. In this paper we introduce a new two-millionword EA corpus, CALM. We perform a register analysis on EA between two subcorpora of CALM (i.e. Movies and Blogs), showing several features that vary between the two. A discussion follows about how annotation was carried out automatically, how it was handcorrected, and what the prospects are for carrying out similar studies using CALM.

Automated Speech Recognition In Adult Stroke Survivors: Comparing Human And Computer Transcriptions, Tyson G. Harmon, Adam Jacks, Katarina L. Haley, Gary Bishop

Faculty Publications

Objective: Speech sound errors are common in people with a variety of communication disorders and can result in impaired message transmission to listeners. Valid and reliable metrics exist to quantify this problem, but they are rarely used in clinical settings due to the time-intensive nature of speech transcription by humans. Automated speech recognition (ASR) technologies have advanced substantially in recent years, enabling them to serve as realistic proxies for human listeners. This study aimed to determine how closely transcription scores from human listeners correspond to scores from an ASR system. Patients and Methods: Sentence recordings from 10 stroke survivors with …

Bidirectional Interference Between Simulated Driving And Speaking, Christopher Dromey, Kelsey Simmons

Faculty Publications

Purpose: This study relied on acoustic measures of connected speech and several indices of driving performance to quantify interference between speaking and simulated driving. Method: Three groups of 20 younger (ages 20–30 years), middle-age (ages 40–50 years), and older (ages 60–71 years) adults produced monologues and completed a simulated driving task, which involved maintaining a constant speed and lane position on a freeway. Both tasks were completed separately and concurrently. Results: There were significant divided attention effects, with a reduced speaking time ratio, and increases in vocal intensity, speed variability, and steering wheel adjustments. There was a significant between-subjects age …

Listeners’ Ability To Identify The Gender Of Preadolescent Children In Different Linguistic Contexts, Christopher Dromey, Shawn Nissen, Sharalee Blunck, Anita Dromey

Faculty Publications

This study evaluated listeners’ ability to identify the gender of preadolescent children from speech samples of varying length and linguistic context. The listeners were presented with a total of 190 speech samples in four different categories of linguistic context: segments, words, sentences, and discourse. The listeners were instructed to evaluate each speech sample and decide whether the speaker was a male or female and rate their level of confidence in their decision. Results showed listeners identified the gender of the speakers with a high degree of accuracy, ranging from 86% to 95%. Significant differences in listener judgments were found across …

Real Time Vowel Shifts In Georgia English, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

How has Georgia English changed since the 1890s? All vowels have changed. What is the trajectory of that change? In the direction of the Elsewhere Shift.

Examination Of Manner Of Motion Sound Symbolism For English Nonce Verbs, Janis B. Nuckolls, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

This paper offers cross-experimental verification of a previous study that found that English speakers considered velars, palatals, glides, and high vowels to be sound-symbolic of light and jerky movements. Heavy and smooth movements, by contrast, were associated with affricates, glottals, laterals, and non-high vowels. The present study sought to evaluate these findings through a novel experiment with English speaking subjects, who were asked to choose appropriate sound-symbolically constructed nonce verbs for sentences describing light, heavy, smooth, or jerky manners of motion. Our results support many of Saji et al.’s findings and also offer original insights. We find complex interactions between …

Expectations And Challenges Of Non-Native University Writers At The Outset Of Discipline-Specific Study, K. James Hartshorn, Norman W. Evans

Faculty Publications

Little is known about how best to prepare non-native students matriculated at universities in the United States to succeed in discipline-specific writing. Whilesome studies have suggested differences in the types and volumes of writing across disciplines, such studies have compared very few disciplines simultaneously and have not always examined the disciplines most commonly studied by international students. Thus, this study seeks to fill an important gap in the literature by examining the perspectives of university professors regarding their expectations and purposes for student writing as well as their observations about the greatest writing challenges their students face within five of …

Increasing English Learners’ Positive Emotional Response To Learning Through Dance, Grant Eckstein, Elizabeth Hanks

Faculty Publications

This study investigates dance as an English Second Language (ESL) curriculum enhancement. The curriculum utilizes kinesthetic learning, which is a method seldom incorporated in formal academic classrooms (Pourhosein Gilakjani, 2011) despite evidence suggesting that it benefits all students, including those without kinesthetic learning preferences (Schumann, 1997). Supporters believe that the benefits of incorporating movement in the classroom include increased student enjoyment, motivation, and confidence in learning. However, these beliefs are merely anecdotal at present. This study analyzes quantitative questionnaires and qualitative feedback from 26 students who participated in a 4-week long Dance ESL curriculum to determine whether dance-based learning can …

Real Time Vowel Shifts In Georgia English, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Lab recordings

• 20 UGA undergraduate students (10 female, born 1994–1998)
• Read 300 sentences from COCA.
• ~30 minutes each, 12.5 hours total
• Recorded in 2017 • 24,325 tokens

Is it inappropriate to say the SVS is “receding”?

• What are they reverting back to? 1850s English?

Better interpretation: Young Georgians are adopting the Elsewhere Shift

• The low back merger is (nearly) complete.
• The front lax vowels have retracted.

How has Georgia English changed since the 1890s? All vowels have changed.

What is the trajectory of that change? In the direction of the Elsewhere Shift.

Reconciling Perception With Production In Southern Speech, Rachel M. Olsen, Joseph A. Stanley, Michael L. Olsen, Lisa Lipani, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

Research question: How does perception compare to production in southern speech in Linguistic Atlas data?

Hypothesis: We expect impressionistic glide weakening to correlate with less dynamic vowels.

Acoustic and perceptual data also tell different stories.

Perceptual data suggest:

• Social factors are not significant
• Pre-rhotic glides are the most weakened

Production data suggest:

• Ethnicity is significant
• Pre-lateral glides are the most weakened

As percentage of monophthongal perception goes up, Trajectory Length goes down, as expected, but the correlation is VERY weak.

Trajectory Length is not necessarily reflective of impressionistic transcriptions of glides in DASS.

The acoustic correlates to perception are not …

Social Factors In Southern Us Speech: Acoustic Analysis Of A Large-Scale Legacy Corpus, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

Conclusions

Vowels’ acoustics vary by race, sex and age:

• European American speakers have greater /eɪ ɛ/ swapping than African Americans, supporting Thomas’ (2007) characterization of the African American Vowel Shift
• Women have a more diphthongal realization of front /ɛ æ/ than men

Active divergence of Southern speech from other varieties:

• In this historical dataset, younger speakers lead Southern shifting: they have more “swapping” of /i ɪ/and /eɪ ɛ/, more back-vowel fronting, and more dynamic /æ/ and /ɔ/ vowels
• Older speakers are more conservative both in vowels’ relative positioning, and their dynamics

/eɪ ɛ/ are the nexus of shifting in DASS …

Vowel Dynamics Of The Elsewhere Shift: A Sociophonetic Analysis Of The English In Cowlitz County, Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

The Elsewhere Shift is in Washington (and has been for a while).

In Cowlitz County, the Elsewhere Shift is a pull chain, beginning with the (near) merger of LOT and THOUGHT, ultimately triggered and aided by:

• major events and their subsequent demographic shifts
• place reorientation from inward to outward

It didn’t (straightforwardly) spread from California or Canada

• possibly independently developed
• possibly from the same source as California and Canada
• its spread northward helped though

Methodologically, GAMMs illuminated variation and change in trajectories in the Elsewhere Shift.

Pain Or Gain? How Business Communication Students Perceive The Outlining Process, Matt Baker

Faculty Publications

This study investigates how students perceive the outlining process. Students in two business communication sections completed a survey regarding outlining perceptions and reasons for outlining or not. Using qualitative content analysis and qualitative coding, the researcher and an independent coder analyzed 34 students’ responses regarding outlining process, use, and reasons for outlining or not. Results indicate that students perceive outlining as more useful if their outlining process includes both organization and content exploration and less useful if it excludes organization or content exploration. Notable reasons for not outlining include concern for outlining time and difficulty generating content for the outline.

Using Case-Method Pedagogy To Facilitate Audience Awareness, Vincent D. Robles

Faculty Publications

Introduction: Technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors value audience awareness, using peer- and client-based projects to facilitate it. We explore how students’ audience awareness is facilitated by the case method, which presents students with a professional communication task within a workplace scenario.

Situating the case: Case-method research suggests including a detailed audience and situation, multiple genres, and multimedia. Few studies have explored how case materials facilitate students’ audience awareness.

About the case: A 12-week case that was consistent with case-method research asked students to respond to an engineering firm’s internal problem with a proposal and report. How the case was …

Using Real-Time Visual Biofeedback For Second Language Instruction, Shawn L. Nissen, Rebecca Nissen

Faculty Publications

This demonstration will illustrate how using real-time visual biofeedback, through a relatively new type of electropalatographic (EPG) sensor, might facilitate improved pronunciation for learners of a second language (L2). The manner in which the EPG sensor is created and its use to track lingua-palatal articulation patterns will be described to individuals. This presentation will also include an explanation of how a student can visualize the contact patterns of their speech using the associated instructional software. A brief tutorial on the features of the instructional software will also be explained during the “show and tell” presentation.

Embracing Wobble: Exploring Novice Teachers’ Efforts To Enact Dialogic Literacy Instruction, Trevor Thomas Stewart, Dawan Coombs, Bob Fecho, Todd Hawley

Faculty Publications

By mid-January, Leah (all names are pseudonyms), a first-year high school English teacher, recognized the need to provide more support for students struggling to meet state reading and writing standards. In spite of her efforts to support students’ literacy development by working from a dialogical stance that brings English content into dialogue with students’ lives (Fecho, 2011), some of her students were still not passing the statewide assessments. Leah shared her concerns with a veteran teacher who told her that he employed a remediation practice common at their school, which required students earning Ds or Fs to participate in additional …

Beyond English Only: Addressing Language Interpretation In Professional Psychology Training, Timothy B. Smith, Clay A. Frandsen, Derek Griner, Domenech Rodriguez, Guillermo Bernal

Faculty Publications

Professional guidelines direct that psychologists working with clients with limited English proficiency should involve an interpreter if a mental health professional fluent in the client’s language is unavailable. However, complexities of interpreted therapy require training. We describe nine relevant areas of trainee skill acquisition and also surveyed 102 multicultural course instructors in APA-accredited psychology programs regarding current professional training. Only 55 (54%) instructors reported providing any training on working with language interpreters, with 16 (16%) providing more than 2 hours of training. Instructors ranked nine proposed skill areas and gave recommendations for over coming barriers and working with interpreters to …

The "Cursed Self": Anxiety And Unspoken Curses In Richard Iii, Hannah Laudermilch

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Speech Fluency In Acquired Apraxia Of Speech During Narrative Discourse: Group Comparisons And Dual Task Effects, Tyson G. Harmon, Adam Jacks, Katarina L. Haley

Faculty Publications

Purpose: Slowed speech and interruptions to the flow of connected speech are common in aphasia. These features are also observed during dual task performance for neurotypical adults. The purposes of this study were to determine (a) whether indices of fluency related to cognitive-linguistic versus motor processing would differ between speakers with aphasia plus AOS and speakers with aphasia only and (b) whether cognitive load reduces fluency in speakers with aphasia with and without AOS.

Method: Fourteen speakers with aphasia (seven with AOS) and seven neurotypical controls retold short stories alone (single task) and while simultaneously distinguishing between a high and …

Fine-Grained Topic Models Using Anchor Words, Jeffrey A. Lund

Theses and Dissertations

Topic modeling is an effective tool for analyzing the thematic content of large collections of text. However, traditional probabilistic topic modeling is limited to a small number of topics (typically no more than hundreds). We introduce fine-grained topic models, which have large numbers of nuanced and specific topics. We demonstrate that fine-grained topic models enable use cases not currently possible with current topic modeling techniques, including an automatic cross-referencing task in which short passages of text are linked to other topically related passages. We do so by leveraging anchor methods, a recent class of topic model based on non-negative matrix …

P300 Event-Related Potentials To A Phoneme Discrimination Task Requiring A Motor Response, Kaitlyn Chelsea Turner

Theses and Dissertations

Speech perception typically takes place within the auditory cortex as evidenced by data collected using quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG). The purpose of this study was to determine if motor responses influence speech perception. We examined P300 event-related potentials during oddball stimulus recognition tasks that either required or did not require a motor response. Based on a review of the literature, it was hypothesized that similar areas of the brain would be activated in both the motor response task and the same task without a motor response immediately following the button-push condition. Two syllables, /ba/ and /ga/, were presented to 20 native …

Fixed Constitutional Meaning And Other Implausible Originalisms, Frederick M. Gedicks

Theses and Dissertations

Public-meaning originalists contend that judges properly interpret the Constitution only when they discover and apply its “original public meaning”—how the public understood the Constitution at the time it was adopted. Public-meaning originalism is premised on the “fixation thesis”—the meaning of any constitutional text is fixed when it is adopted. Concerns of the present, therefore, cannot affect constitutional meaning. Public meaning originalists acknowledge that the search for the fixed original meaning is not always successful, but it is always ontologically “there” to be found, even if epistemologically we sometimes fail to find it. The fixation thesis underwrites the powerful rhetoric of …

Experiences In Professional Development Through Project-Based Language Learning, Florencia Westenskow

Theses and Dissertations

Project-based Language Learning (PBLL) provides students with opportunities to use the target language purposefully and to interact with culturally authentic materials. Because PBLL holds critical benefits for its students, it is important that teachers learn best practices for implementation and how to overcome the challenges that PBLL brings. This study focuses on the experiences of 15 world language teachers as they participated in a PBLL professional development series developed by the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Findings from this study are based on data gathered from surveys and interviews with a diverse …

Improving The Quality Of Neural Machine Translation Using Terminology Injection, Duane K. Dougal

Theses and Dissertations

Most organizations use an increasing number of domain- or organization-specific words and phrases. A translation process, whether human or automated, must also be able to accurately and efficiently use these specific multilingual terminology collections. However, comparatively little has been done to explore the use of vetted terminology as an input to machine translation (MT) for improved results. In fact, no single established process currently exists to integrate terminology into MT as a general practice, and especially no established process for neural machine translation (NMT) exists to ensure that the translation of individual terms is consistent with an approved terminology collection. …

The Effects Of Teacher Background On How Teachers Assess Native-Like And Nonnative-Like Grammar Errors: An Eye-Tracking Study, Wesley Makoto Schramm

Theses and Dissertations

Studies have shown that composition and L2 writing teachers give different scores (Golombek, Weigle, Boldt, & Valsecchi, 2003) and focus on different features (Brown, 1991) when assessing student writing, which is assumed to be due to the differences in their background and training (Santos, 1992; Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995). Error gravity is thought to be one reason why composition and L2 writing teachers give different scores (Rifkin & Roberts, 1995). Common methods for examining error gravity were to analyze scores and responses given by the raters and to have raters reflect on the rating process and analyze their responses. Only …

Predicting Speaking, Listening, And Reading Proficiency Gains During Study Abroad Using Social Network Metrics, Timothy James Hall

Theses and Dissertations

L2 proficiency gains during study abroad vary widely across individuals and programs, and much of the research in the study abroad literature attempts to identify the causes of this variance. Social network data has proven useful in explaining some of the variance in oral proficiency gains (Baker-Smemoe, Dewey, Bown, & Martinsen, 2014; Isabelli-García, 2006), and the current study builds on those findings by applying the same methodology to listening and reading proficiency in addition to speaking. Proficiency gains in listening, reading, and speaking were measured for 17 students from a US university studying abroad in Nanjing, China for one semester. …

Promoting Second Language Learning Through Oral Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication, Eric H. Young

Theses and Dissertations

Learning to speak a foreign language (L2) can be a challenging feat, made all the more challenging when done in only 50 minute, daily increments in class. Oral asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ACMC) provides learners with opportunities to practice spoken communication and evaluate their practice outside the classroom. In this dissertation, I explore methods for classroom integration of oral ACMC, linguistic traits developed in previous oral ACMC studies, methods for determining the effectiveness of oral ACMC, learner beliefs about the effectiveness of oral ACMC activities, and the effects of learners' deliberate practice in a series of oral ACMC activities on 3 …