Digital Commons Network^™

Maximizing Learning Of L2 Adult Learners In Higher Education, Gabriela Olivares-Cuhat

Faculty Publications

In the fall of 2019, the age of 33.5% of students enrolled in US institutions of higher education was 25 and above. However, research in the fields of adult learning, developmental, cognitive, and socio-cognitive theories suggests that this group of students presents L2 instructors with a set of strengths and challenges. One specific concern is that empirical studies have indicated a steady decline in L2 success along with the age of the adult learners (Hakuta et al., 2003). The aim of this article is to examine how teaching practices may be derived from research findings, with a view to better …

Employment Status For "Essential Workers": The Case For Gig Worker Parity, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

The continuing misclassification of gig workers as independent contractors has been problematic for over a decade. Several misconceptions have contributed to this marginalization of on-demand workers: technology that often obscures the work that is being performed; the view that platform work is a side hustle; or that platform work exists only for customer convenience or frivolous requests. During the coronavirus pandemic these myths about gig work were turned upside down as on-demand workers were recognized for their efforts and labeled essential workers. With that recognition came newly-awarded benefits, like pandemic unemployment assistance and paid sick leave. As such, the events …

Courts As Auditors Of Legislation?, Daniel Pi, Giampaolo Frezza, Francesco Parisi

Faculty Publications

Sources of law vary greatly across geography and human history. Some legal systems identify democratic lawmaking with political deliberation, while others rely on judicial process and judge-made law. This Essay argues that the normative problem of determining a hierarchy of legal sources may be usefully understood in terms of mechanism design, and that legislation and judicial precedent operate complementarily. If the ultimate policy objective is to create legal rules that reflect the "will of the people," judge-made law can function as an audit on the rules promulgated by elected legislatures. The two sources of law, working in conjunction, thereby correct …

Asynchronous Video Interviews And Artificial Intelligence: A Multi-Study Exploration, Tanner Skousen, Jacob Steffen, Cherileigh Chandler, Warren Rosengren, James Gaskin, Thomas O. Meservy

Faculty Publications

Asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) provide scalable, low-cost opportunities for matching interviewees and organizations. However, the implications of a shift from synchronous interviews aren’t fully understood, especially when design choices such as AI evaluations are employed. To better understand the impact of AVIs, we undertook an exploratory qualitative study in addition to an experiment. The first study involves 100 qualitative responses and exploratory quantitative tests on the relationships between coded values and demographic and trait variables of the respondents. Our second study tests the impact of AI feedback using a large online AVI service while accounting for various disadvantaged groups that …

Band Gap Information Extraction From Materials Science Literature – A Pilot Study, Satanu Ghosh, Kun Lu

Faculty Publications

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary work on extracting band gap information of materials from academic papers. With increasing demand for renewable energy, band gap information will help material scientists design and implement novel photovoltaic (PV) cells.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected 1.44 million titles and abstracts of scholarly articles related to materials science, and then filtered the collection to 11,939 articles that potentially contain relevant information about materials and their band gap values. ChemDataExtractor was extended to extract information about PV materials and their band gap information. Evaluation was performed on randomly sampled information records …

“Wilfrid Sellars And Liberal Naturalism”, Willem A. Devries

Faculty Publications

An examination of Wilfrid Sellars' somewhat problematic relation to liberal naturalism

Reading Rate Gain In A Second Language: The Effect Of Unassisted Repeated Reading And Intensity On Word-Level Reading Measures, Grant Eckstein, Krista Rich, Ethan Lynn

Faculty Publications

Repeated reading is a popular intervention used to help struggling readers by exposing them to the same text multiple times. While the approach has been effective in L1 and some EFL settings, little research has explored its effectiveness compared against a control group or among ESL learners. Our study examined reading rate gains using words per minute and four eye-tracking measures with 46 mid-intermediate ESL learners grouped into three 14-week treatment groups: a control group that read 26 text passages (about two per week) just once through, another that read the same passages twice in each sitting, and a third …

Perspectives On Georgia Vowels: From Legacy To Synchony, Joseph A. Stanley, Jon Forrest, Leila Glass, Margaret Renwick

Faculty Publications

Nexuses of change in Georgia English

Mid vowels

• How are FACE and DRESS distinguished over time?
• Which speakers show DRESS raising/fronting (SVS, AAVS)?
• When does DRESS lowering/backing begin (LBMS)?
• Which speakers show GOAT fronting (SVS, LBMS vs. AAVS)?

Low vowels

• Which speakers show TRAP raising/fronting (SVS, AAVS)?
• When does TRAP lowering/backing begin (LBMS)?
• Which speakers have the LOT/THOUGHT merger (LBMS)?

Temporal Fluency And Floor/Ceiling Scoring Of Intermediate And Advanced Speech On The Actfl Spanish Oral Proficiency Interview–Computer, Troy L. Cox, Alan V. Brown, Gregory L. Thompson

Faculty Publications

The rating of proficiency tests that use the Inter-agency Roundtable (ILR) and American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines claims that each major level is based on hierarchal linguistic functions that require mastery of multidimensional traits in such a way that each level subsumes the levels beneath it. These characteristics are part of what is commonly referred to as floor and ceiling scoring. In this binary approach to scoring that differentiates between sustained performance and linguistic breakdown, raters evaluate many features including vocabulary use, grammatical accuracy, pronunciation, and pragmatics, yet there has been very little empirical validation …

Trademark Law And Consumer Constraints, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

Trademark law’s focus is on the consumer. Both the trademark literature and the marketing literature, however, tend to assume a consumer with few constraints on economic or cognitive processing resources. For example, scholars have argued that some confusion in the marketplace is not only inevitable but is also an overall positive in that encountering confusion trains consumers to be more resourceful and to learn how to interpret marketing communications more carefully. But not all consumers have the same level of cognitive and economic resources. Disadvantaged consumers—such as those not literate in the English language, those with lower socioeconomic status, and …

The Problems, And Positives, Of Passives: Exploring Why Controlling Passive Voice And Nominalizations Is About More Than Preference And Style, Jacob M. Carpenter

Faculty Publications

As professional writers, attorneys should understand and have command of two of “the worst writing weaknesses”—passive voice and nominalizations. Studies show that compared to active voice, passive voice and nominalizations can make writing slower to read, harder to read, harder to comprehend, harder to remember, less concise, less familiar feeling, and less engaging. However, passive voice isn’t always bad. Expert writers can use passive voice to create cohesion, shift emphasis, imply objectivity, and make readers feel more distant and less emotional about an event. The problem is that attorneys commonly use passive voice indiscriminately, unknowingly, and excessively, amplifying its negative …

The Last Breakfast With Aunt Jemima And Its Impact On Trademark Theory, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

The generally-accepted law and economics theory of trademarks fails to explain why a brand owner would ever walk away from a trademark that generates financially lucrative returns. In 2020, that is exactly what happened again and again as brand owners pledged to abandon racially explicit marks in the weeks following George Floyd’s murder. As citizens became more attuned to the experiences of those depicted in racial marks, the owners of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s, the Cleveland Indians, the Redskins, the Dixie Chicks, Lady Antebellum and others announced these brands’ days were numbered. By evoking racist stereotypes, they became a moral …

Amar’S The Words That Made Us, Michael J. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

Our generation’s preeminent constitutional scholar, Professor Akhil Amar of the Yale Law School, is, like the Constitution itself, a national treasure. His most recent book, The Words that Made Us, is another masterpiece of constitutional and historical exegesis, the first of three volumes that illuminate in what ways the American Constitution has defined, energized, united, and divided the nation and its people through constitutional conversations and engagements over its meaning throughout our history. The book is awash with stories about the incremental broadening of “We the People,” the hero, authority, casualty, and beneficiary of the words that made us. …

Using Eeg To Measure L2 Word Learning, Jeffrey Jack Green, Ellen Knell, Rachel Yu Liu

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Regional Patterns In Prevelar Raising, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Prevelar raising is the raising of trap and dress vowels before voiced velars. While bag and beg raising have been described in Canada, the Upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, an in-depth investigation of their distribution across North America is lacking, especially for beg. Using an online survey distributed to over 5,000 participants via Reddit (which skews toward younger, White males) and ordinary kriging for spatial interpolation, this study finds that prevelar raising is more widespread than previously reported: bag raising is found in much of the North and the Upper Midwest, and beg raising is far more variable and …

Vowels Can Merge Because Of Changes In Trajectory: Prelaterals In Rural Utah English, Joseph A. Stanley, Lisa Morgan Johnson

Faculty Publications

Overview

• Front vowels: tense-lax pairs getting closer in apparent time.
• Back vowels: three-way convergence of WOLF, JOLT, and MULCH.
• This data suggests a merger by approximation.

Expanding to trajectories gives greater insight into this type of merger.

• Kinda like a zipper.

Greater detail in this merger by approximation.

• The nuclei don’t appear to trigger the shift
• The lateral gradually increases its influence, and the nucleus follows.

Trajectories are potentially important for discovering how vowels shift.

• More recent techniques can allow us to answer these questions.

Homogeneity And Heterogeneity In Western American English, Joseph A. Stanley, Jessica Sheperd, Auna Nygaard

Faculty Publications

The Low-Back-Merger Shift (Becker 2019)

Description:

• BAT, BET, BIT lower and retract
• Arguably a chain shift
• Triggered by BOT-retraction
• Typically BAT shifts the most
• BET and especially BIT less shifted

Previous accounts are based on isolated, independent studies.

“Clearly, collecting the same type of data from all sites would be optimal in allowing us the most reliable cross-region assessment.” (Fridland et al. 2017:172)

This study is a direct response to that call.

Methods:

Speakers:

• Recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk (“MTurk”; cf. Kim et al 2019)
• 85 speakers

Procedure:

• Read 132 sentences and a 300-item wordlist
• Submitted audio 10 sentences at …

Generational Change In Formant Trajectories: The Low-Back-Merger Shift In Longview, Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

How have vowel formant trajectories changed as part of the LBMS?

As the front lax vowels lower and centralize, their formant dynamics change

• Specifically, F2 is less dynamic, resulting in a “bounce” shape in F1-F2 plots.
• More evident for lower vowels than higher ones.

Formant dynamics may change as global position changes (but not always).

• Especially true with BAT and BET here.
• BIT mostly unclear.
• BAN did not have substantial changes in vowel dynamics.

"The Working World Is A Minefield": Counterstories Of Job Loss, Rachel Collier Murdock, Matt Baker, Stacy Tye-Williams

Faculty Publications

This study examines narratives told by employees who experienced involuntary job loss. Results expand on previous narrative research investigating the American Dream master narrative and job loss as related to the neoliberal claim that those who work hard will be successful. The study investigated the master narrative’s implications for job loss that if someone loses their job, they must be either flawed or a bad worker. Contributions include a new redeemed-resolved identity construction by individuals who narrated job loss as an opportunity to correct some flaw in either their character or work life and to emerge a better, changed worker. …

Psycholinguistic Profiling Of Children With Sluggish Cognitive Tempo, Kirsten M. Russell, Sean M. Redmond, Andrea C. Ash

Faculty Publications

Language disorders are frequently comorbid with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT),a second attention disorder, may potentially explain some of the links between language disorders and ADHD. In this study we examined the psycholinguistic abilities of 207 children (mean age 7;10) with and without clinically significant levels of SCT symptoms to determine the degree to which symptoms of language disorder co-occur in cases of SCT. Analyses of children’s tense-marking, nonword repetition, and sentence recall indicated that deficits in these areas were not associated with SCT. Instead, SCT appears to be more closely aligned with features of social (pragmatic) …

A Textual Analysis Of Logograms In Chinese Ipo Roadshows: How Agreement Between Investors And Management Relates To Pricing And Performance, James C. Brau, James Cicon, Stephen R. Owen

Faculty Publications

We analyze the interaction between management and investors during Chinese IPO roadshows through Jaccard Similarity analysis of written Chinese logograms. We provide evidence that when agreement is high, investor optimism increases, leading to relatively large first-day underpricing. We further show that high agreement biases investors to systematically overestimate IPO prospects leading to poor long-run abnormal performance. Jaccard Similarity is different from current content analysis methodologies because it is language and culture agnostic, requiring no a priori construction of thematic dictionaries. Elimination of such dictionaries removes the danger that the researcher has imposed predispositions upon the study.

Standardizing Assessment Of Spoken Discourse In Aphasia: A Working Group With Deliverables, Tyson G. Harmon, Brielle C. Stark, Manaswita Dutta, Laura L. Murray, Lucy Bryant, Davida Fromm, Brian Macwhinney, Amy E. Ramage, Angela Roberts, Dirk B Den Ouden, Kris Brock, Katy Mckinney-Bock, Eun Jin Paek, Si On Yoon, Charalambos Themistocleous, Hyunsoo Yoo, Katharine Aveni, Stephanie Gutierrez, Saryu Sharma

Faculty Publications

Purpose: The heterogeneous nature of measures, methods, and analyses reported in the aphasia spoken discourse literature precludes comparison of outcomes across studies (e.g., meta-analyses) and inhibits replication. Furthermore, funding and time constraints significantly hinder collecting test-retest data on spoken discourse outcomes. This research note describes the development and structure of a working group, designed to address major gaps in the spoken discourse aphasia literature, including a lack of standardization in methodology, analysis, and reporting, as well as nominal data regarding the psychometric properties of spoken discourse outcomes. Method: The initial initiatives for this working group are to (a) propose recommendations …

Hinterlands To Cities: The Archaeology Of Northwest Mexico And Its Vecinos, Matthew C. Pailes, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

Tis approachable book is a comprehensive synthesis of Northwest Mexico from the US border to the Mesoamerican frontier. Filling a vital gap in the regional literature, it serves as an essential reference not only for those interested in the specific history of this area of Mexico but western North America writ large. A period-by-period review of approximately14,000 years reveals the dynamic connections that knitted together societies inhabiting the Sea of Cortez coast, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, and the Sierra Madre Occidental. Networks of interaction spanned these diverse ecological, topographical, and cultural terrains in the millennia following the demise of …

Increase Student Engagement In Online Writing Environments, Jonathan Balzotti, Jason K. Mcdonald, Kevin Haws, Amy Allen Rogers, Matthew J. Baker

Faculty Publications

This case study explores a type of educational simulation, an alternative reality game we call a playable case study (PCS), and how its use influenced student engagement in an online writing classroom. The goal of the simulation was to help students create professional communication artifacts and experience real-world professional communication situations. This article reports the effectiveness of the playable case study as a tool specifically for online writing instruction (OWI). The context of our research was a PCS called Microcore. Acting as interns for a company, students are asked to investigate a serious problem that occurs and present a solution …

Do People With Apraxia Of Speech And Aphasia Improve Or Worsen Across Repeated Sequential Word Trials?, Tyson G. Harmon, Adam Jacks, Katarina L. Haley, Jessica D. Richardson, Elizabeth H. Lacey, Peter Turkeltaub

Faculty Publications

Purpose:

During motor speech examinations for suspected apraxia of speech (AOS), clients are routinely asked to repeat words several times sequentially. The purpose of this study was to understand the task in terms of the relationship among consecutive attempts. We asked to what extent phonemic accuracy changes across trials and whether the change is predicted by AOS diagnosis and sound production severity.

Method:

One hundred thirty-three participants were assigned to four diagnostic groups based on quantitative metrics (aphasia plus AOS, aphasia-only, and aphasia with two borderline speech profiles). Each participant produced four multisyllabic words 5 times consecutively. These productions were …

Mazes In Spanish-English Dual Language Learners After Language Enrichment: A Case Study, Casey L. Taliancich-Klinger, Connie Summers, Kai J. Greene

Faculty Publications

ABSTRACTThe number of Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) in the United States continues toincrease every year. In the absence of developmental language norms for DLLs it is importantto learn more about typical language production characteristics to distinguish typical fromatypical language characteristics. An area of language production with conflicting results inthe literature is the production of mazes. Mazes are interruptions in the forward flow oflanguage in the form of interjections, repairs or revisions of words and phrases. At elevatedrates, mazes may interrupt the communication process. A common practice in classroomsettings is to provide support for DLLs through small group activities such …

Representation Of Race And Ethnicity In Counseling And Counseling Psychology Journals, Jared M. Hawkins, Roy A. Bean, Timothy B. Smith, Jonathan G. Sandberg

Faculty Publications

Whereas previous literature reviews have concluded that people of color are underrepresented in psychological literature, the fields of counseling and counseling psychology have taken a clear affirmative stance with respect to human diversity. This study sought to evaluate the representation of people of color in four key journals across the 2000-2019 timespan: The Counseling Psychologist, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Counseling & Development, and Counselling Psychology Quarterly. Journal articles were coded for several variables, including focus on racial/ethnic minority (REM) groups and article content topics. Results indicated that 757 (26.3%) of the articles were coded REM-focused. Of …

An Fmri Investigation Of The Neurocognitive Processing Of Measures And Strategic Objectives, Paul Black, C. Brock Kirwan, Thomas Meservy, William B. Tayler, Jeffrey O. Williams

Faculty Publications

A central feature of most organizations is the use of measures to represent key elements of performance across multiple strategic objectives. Prior research has demonstrated a tendency for individuals to treat these measures as though they are the higher-order strategic objectives the measures were intended to represent, as opposed to imperfect representations of those strategic objectives—a phenomenon labeled surrogation. We employ an experiment to further understand this phenomenon. In this study, we capture neural activation when processing measures and when processing strategic objectives. We find that differences in brain activity when processing measures and strategic objectives are similar to the …

Trust In Science: The Crisis Of Expertise As An Ideological, And Not Only A Scientific Controversy, David S. Caudill

Faculty Publications

Within the so-called "culture wars" dividing our nation politically, there is a law-related division over the trustworthiness of consensus science-the so-called "crisis of expertise." When the science concerning climate change, mask-wearing, or vaccinations becomes politicized, it loses its mooring in scientific evidence and impacts the effectiveness of regulatory law. Perhaps counter-intuitively, however, the solution is likely not to wear "Because Science" t-shirts while insisting on "cold, hard facts" and diagnosing as stupid those who believe the scientific theories of marginalized, minority-view scientists. Indeed, a certain level of modesty-regarding the uncertainties and tentativeness of even the best science-is necessary for the …

Automated Video Interviewing As The New Phrenology, Ifeoma Ajunwa

Faculty Publications

This Article deploys the new business practice of automated video interviewing as a case study to illuminate the limitations of traditional employment antidiscrimination laws. Employment antidiscrimination laws are inadequate to address the unlawful discrimination attributable to emerging workplace technologies which gatekeep employment opportunities. The Article maintains that the practice of automated video interviewing is based on shaky or unproven social scientific principles that disproportionately impact racial minorities. In this way, the practice of automated video interviewing is analogous to the pseudoscience of phrenology, which enabled societal and economic exclusion through the legitimization of eugenicist and racist attitudes. After parsing the …