Digital Commons Network^™

Examining Effects Of Arousal And Valence Across The Adult Lifespan In An Emotional Stroop Task, Samantha E. Tuft

ETD Archive

As age increases, there is evidence that people tend to pay less attention to negative information, pay more attention to positive information, or both. There are many theoretical accounts that attempt to explain this positivity bias. In the current study, I examined positivity effects across the adult lifespan by evaluating competing predictions of two theories: Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, which is based in motivation, and Dynamic Integration Theory, which is based in capacity. Computer mouse tracking was used to examine effects across levels of Valence (negative, neutral, and positive) and Arousal (low, medium, and high) in an emotional Stroop task. Participants …

The Evaluation Of Non-Standard Accented English: An Intergroup Perspective On Language Attitudes, Doris Acheme

ETD Archive

The present study used social identity theory as a framework in examining the evaluation of non-standard accented speakers from India and Nigeria and whose first language is English. Social identity theory explains one’s awareness that he/she is a member of a certain social group and that such group membership is of value to the individual. Accordingly, the study investigated how social identity influences listeners’ perceptions of non-standard accented speakers’ status, solidarity, and dynamism. And also, if Standard American English (SAE), Indian and Nigerian accents are perceived differently by listeners. A 3 (SAE, Indian accented English, and Nigerian accented English) ¿ …

Polish-French Bilingualism And Bicultural Identity: Cross-Cultural Studies On Immigrants In France And Belgium, And French Language Students In Poland, Łukasz K. Kmiotek, Joanna M. Kwiatowska, Paweł Boski

Papers from the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology Conferences

In the present study, the authors applied the Cultural Values and Script Questionnaire, together with language measures (bidirectional translation, listening comprehension tasks), to explore the relationship between Polish-French bilinguality and bicultural identity among Polish migrants in France and Belgium and students learning French at a Polish University. We hypothesized that the Francophone acculturative context will lead to (i) integrated bicultural identity, as well as (ii) a balanced bilingual profile. Thirdly, we assumed there is a link between an individual’s bicultural identity and his or her bilinguality. The data partially confirm the two first hypotheses. An unexpected contrast effect revealed that …

Dialogic Reading With Adolescent Mothers, Diana L. Abarca

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching dialogic reading (DR) strategies to adolescent mothers as measured by DR strategy use during shared book reading with their children. The secondary purpose was to determine the impact of adolescent mothers' implementation of DR strategies on their preschool children’s single word vocabulary. A single subject multiple baseline across behaviors research design was implemented with one adolescent mother and her twin boys. Based on visual analysis of graphical representation of the data, it was determined there was a moderate to strong functional relation between educating an adolescent mother on …

Legal Education En Español: A Pedagogical Model, Jayesh Rathod

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Law schools in the United States are pursuing various strategies to prepare their graduates to compete in a global marketplace for jobs. One such strategy is the development of courses and programs designed to equip law graduates with the knowledge and skills needed to serve as effective bilingual advocates. As part of this effort, in recent years, teachers and scholars have engaged in curricular experimentation and ongoing theorizing about the optimal methods and approaches for bilingual legal education. This essay builds upon existing theoretical work and outlines a unique, bilingual instructional model that involves adding an optional credit hour – …

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, …

“The Problem With The Haitians Is Their Language”: Language As Color-Blind Racism, Ruthie Wienk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project explores the mechanisms of exclusion and oppression of a Haitian population in a rural community in South West Florida. The analytical approach taken is an analysis of the social field and habitus as dispositions and embodied culture. Language has been identified as a tool to marginalize the population in the general social order. Through this process, language operates as a form of color-blind racism which justifies the exclusion of the Haitian community but is insufficient in explaining their overall social outcomes. Qualitative data were collected for this project in the form of unstructured interviews, focus groups, photographs of …

The “Americanization” Of Global Education: A Comparative Study Of American And Italian Students At John Cabot University In Rome, Italy, Chiara Evelti

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

With the turn of the century, the rise of globalization has greatly impacted, and continues to impact, the development of nation-states’ economies and native cultures. This international phenomenon generates the idea that countries are now on a similar playing field, whether that be culturally, economically, or politically. While it is hard to defend the latter, globalization has seemingly “flattened” the world by way of bringing individuals of different cultures, ethnicities, races, genders, and nationalities closer together. Moreover, as citizens of this internationalized community, we see a specific type of cultural globalization through increased opportunities in travel, the rise in number …

Auditory Distraction On Visual Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet A. Young

Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence

No abstract provided.

Effective Characteristics Of Rural English Learner Programs, Sarah Huseby

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine specific characteristics of English learner programs in a rural areas in order to determine possible factors that promoted higher English language proficiency growth for English learners. The subjects in this study were English learner teachers and administrators from five micropolitan school districts in a rural Midwestern state. The school districts in this study were identified and recruited based on two specific criteria: a mircopolitan community and a student population of English language learners. The study utilized both survey and archival data. The survey was administered to all EL teachers and administrators …

Cross-Modal Distraction On Simultaneous Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet A. Young

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Bilingualism has been studied extensively in multiple disciplines, yet we are still trying to figure out how exactly bilinguals think. A bilingual advantage has been observed in various experimental studies, but also has not been observed in many other studies. A bilingual advantage has been shown in tasks using selective attention. These tasks study the effects of language interference, where two types of interference are observed: interlingual (between-languages) and intralingual (within one language). This study examined language interference in Spanish-English bilinguals, using an auditory-visual simultaneous translation experimental setup. 16 college English monolinguals and 17 college Spanish-English bilinguals were tested. The …

The Humanities: Our Human Journey, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Life. The miracle of human life. Scientists believe that our incarnation as anatomically modern humans–homo sapiens–began on African soil about 200,000 years ago, as we started walking erect on two legs instead of four. We wandered upon our planet, a tiny, beautiful, blueish speck almost literally in the middle of nowhere, traveling elliptically around our sun within the cold, dark immensity of the universe.

Exploring The Resting State Neural Activity Of Monolinguals And Late And Early Bilinguals, Carrie Elizabeth Gold

Theses and Dissertations

Individuals who speak more than one language have been found to enjoy a number of benefits not directly associated with the use of the languages themselves. One of these benefits is that bilingual individuals appear to develop symptoms of dementia 4-5 years later than comparable individuals who speak just one language. Studies on this topic, however, do not consistently account for factors including if the individual learned their second language as a child or later in life, or their language proficiency. In an attempt to more carefully examine these variables, this study looks at structural and resting-state functional MRI scans …

Localizational Evidence For The Restoration Of Rigvedic *Mimihí ‘Measure’.” In Vina Diem Celebrent: Studies In Linguistics And Philology In Honor Of Brent Vine, Dieter Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to provide new evidence for the existence of the 2 sg present active imperative *mimihí ‘measure’ in the Rigveda. Controlling to an extent for the effects of morphosyntax, I show that the poets do not localize the forms transmitted as mimihí in the meter similarly to the way that they localize forms of the same metrical/phonological shape, e.g. did¯ıhí ‘shine’, ´si´s¯ıhí ‘sharpen’, gr.n. ¯ıhí ‘sing’. Instead, they localize them like forms of the shape *mimihí , e.g. kr.n. uhí ‘make’, ´sr.n.uhí ‘hear’, tanuhi ‘stretch’. Thus we should restore *mimihí . I then …

Electrophysiological Study Of Action-Affordance Priming Between Object Names., Isabel M. Feven-Parsons, Jeremy Goslin

School of Psychology

If our central representation of an object is defined through embodied experience, we might expect access to action affordances to be privileged over more abstract concepts. We used event-related potentials to examine the relative time course of access to affordances. Written object names were primed with the name of an object sharing the same affordance as the target (e.g. precision-grip: "grape" primed by "tweezers") or the same taxonomic category (e.g. fruit: "grape" primed by "apple"). N200 latencies, related to go/nogo semantic category decisions on target words, revealed no difference in facilitation provided by affordance and semantic priming. However, separate analyses …

Language, Literacy And Project Based Learning: An Ethnographic Case Study Of A New Tech Classroom In A High School On The Us/Mexico Border, Nora Lee Paugh

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This ethnographic case study sought to understand how English Language Learners used their language and literacy practices within a project based learning (PBL) classroom to complete their PBL tasks. Studies revealed the impact of how English language learners within a PBL learning environment were able to use their language and literacy as a social practices that led to successful student engagement (Call & Sotillo, 1995; Campbell, 2012). This study was conducted at Wilson High School, located along the US/Mexico border. The focus of the case study was a 9th grade combination English/World Geography class of the school's inaugural New Tech …

Relationship Between English Proficiency And Academic Achievement Of Nigerian Secondary School Students, Goldlyn Ugonna Ozowuba

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Nigerian stakeholders are concerned with the continuous low scores of final-year senior secondary school students (FYSSS) in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE). Studies have shown that limited proficiency in English among FYSSS is the cause of low scores on the WASSCE. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to investigate the relationship between English proficiency and academic achievement among FYSSS as measured by the WASSCE. The theoretical framework for the study was Cummins's theory of second language acquisition to address the distinction between conversational language and academic language. Archival data from 225 FYSSS were collected from …

Shaping The Image Builders: The Birth And Rise Of The American Association Of College News Bureaus And A New Rhetorical Arena In Higher Education, Gregory D. Cook

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing on a qualitative review of historical artifacts, the author explores the birth and rise of the American Association of College News Bureaus and its successive organizations. The author performs a historical study, interlacing an interpretive biographical lens and rhetorical theory. The study seeks to determine what formative events and narratives shaped the Associations progression from 1915 until 1950 and to what extent, if any, the Association and its successor organizations established a new rhetorical arena in Americas higher Education landscape. The expansive horizontal network launched by the group better served colleges and universities with more robust dialogue and public …

Autographic And Allographic Imitation: Revisiting Counterfeit In Linguistic And Musical Arts, Jeremy Orosz

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Imitation within sonic arts, linguistic, musical, or otherwise, broadly defined, is a heterogeneous set of practices ranging from comical impersonation to outright counterfeit or forgery. This paper provides a taxonomy of imitation and mimicry within both language and music, dividing each into two respective categories, autographic imitation and allographic imitation, the terms for which are repurposed from Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art.

Talking About Patients: Nurses' Language Use During Hand-Offs, Yvonne Barthel Ford

Dissertations

Miscommunication during end of shift hand-offs between hospital nurses has been implicated as a source of errors in patient care, yet little research evaluates the structure of language during communication in an attempt to understand potential communication errors. Although the functions and meaning of hand-offs for nurses has previously been examined, there is little information about the current state of the structure and language of hand-offs. This research begins to fill that gap in by using genre analysis of transcripts of 43 end-of-shift hand-offs between nurses at four hospitals in the Midwestern United States.

Two analytic techniques common in linguistics …

Constructing A Grammatically Enriched Children's Book, Rebecca Ebert

Honors Projects

The intended purpose of this book is to serve as a grammatically rich resource of the grammatical structure: third person singular present tense. It is targets preschool age children with or at risk for a specific language impairment (SLI). More specifically, this book can be used as a clinical tool by speech-language pathologists in order to assist those with language delays in acquiring this difficult structure. Third person singular present tense is a morpheme that is acquired later in child language development due to its complexity, rarity and acoustic factors. Creating a clinical resource with an abundance of third person …

Exploring The Vocabulary Teaching Strategies Used In Children’S Educational Television, Rebecca Wettstein

Honors Projects

The present study explored the extent to which vocabulary instructional strategies are used in the children’s educational television show Word Girl, and whether or not the occurrences of vocabulary instructional strategies changed over the time the show was aired. Instructional strategies included repetition of target words, labeling, defining/mislabeling, and onscreen print. A total of eighteen episodes between 2007 and 2015 were analyzed. The early time period included episodes aired from 2007-2009, the middle time period included episodes aired from 2010-2012, and the late time period included episodes aired from 2013-2015. Results revealed within episode variability for all vocabulary instructional …

'Parallel Universe' Or 'Proven Future'? The Language Of Dependent Means T-Test Interpretations, Anthony M. Gould, Jean-Etienne Joullié

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Of the three kinds of two-mean comparisons which judge a test statistic against a critical value taken from a Student t-distribution, one – the repeated measures or dependent-means application – is distinctive because it is meant to assess the value of a parameter which is not part of the natural order. This absence forces a choice between two interpretations of a significant test result and the meaning of the test hypothesis. The parallel universe view advances a conditional, backward-looking conclusion. The more practical proven future interpretation is a non-conditional proposition about what will happen if an intervention is (now) applied …

Working Sex Words, Anita Bernstein

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Imagine yourself tasked to speak for a few minutes about legal controls on sex-selling in the United States, or any other country you choose. You need not have thought about the particulars. As someone willing to read a law review article, you have enough to say because sex-selling overlaps with the subject knowledge you already have. Criminal law, contracts, employment law, immigration law, tort law, zoning, commercial law, and intellectual property, among other legal categories, all intersect with this topic. In your brief remarks on how law attempts to mediate the sale and purchase of sex, you have only one …

In His Wake: Applying Life's Truths In Fiction, Joseph M. Balderas

Theses and Dissertations

The culmination of the creative work and its introduction attempt to delve into the psyche of what it means to lose someone you love. The screenplay explores the grieving process and the coping mechanisms that accompanies it, with an examination on how far some people are willing to go for closure.

To reach my conclusions, I draw from my own life experience, the experiences of others, and a fine amount of research. It also means to shed light on the impermanent mental strain that chaperon’s grief.

Coding The Discourse And Translingual Strategies Of Collaborative Writing Of Secondary Education Students, Zane Lee Arredondo

Theses and Dissertations

Kenneth Bruffee used collaborative writing pedagogy to help reacculturate students’ discoursal identities to help them adhere to the expectations of the academic community. Although studies have shown that reacculturation may not exactly happen, Collaborative writing pedagogy still has maintained its presence within Composition studies since then and has been adapted into being implemented into digitally shared spaces. However, one aspect has been overlooked about physical shared spaces, the conversations themselves being studied. This study explores Kenneth Bruffee’s constructive conversations among secondary students within collaborative writing pedagogy. The collaborative sessions are recorded and viewed with a translingual lens applying Johnny Saldana’s …

Norwegian Missionary Linguistic Mishap, Ben Bowen

USU Student Folklore Fieldwork

[Interviewer introduces the topic of a family legend about the informant’s religious, LDS mission to Norway, and some of the linguistic troubles some of the American missionaries had while learning Norwegian.]

Well the fun part about learning a new language is that you get to learn that they have, different words for, to mean different things. So a good example of that in English is change, and, in English you can have change on a dollar and so you have coins, or you can have, um, a, change your clothes, from you know, change your clothes, you can change you …

The Globalized Classroom: Integrating Technology To Improve Communicative And Cultural Proficiency, Nicholas Frank

International ResearchScape Journal

The purpose of this project was to explore how the integration of technology affects students’ communicative and cultural proficiency in a second language when connecting two world language classrooms from across the globe. Through a series of weekly emails between partner schools, students practiced their interpretive reading and presentational writing skills while gaining knowledge of their partners’ cultures and colloquial language in a meaningful and individualized manner. The participants were U.S. high school students learning Spanish and Spanish high school students learning English. This created an authentic and organic environment for language acquisition, showing improvement in both communicative and cultural …

Corpus Linguistics: Misfire Or More Ammo For The Ordinary - Meaning Canon?, John D. Ramer

Michigan Law Review

Scholars and judges have heralded corpus linguistics—the study of language through collections of spoken or written texts—as a novel tool for statutory interpretation that will help provide an answer in the occasionally ambiguous search for “ordinary meaning” using dictionaries. In the spring of 2016, the Michigan Supreme Court became the first to use corpus linguistics in a majority opinion. The dissent also used it, however, and the two opinions reached different conclusions. In the first true test for corpus linguistics, the answer seemed to be just as ambiguous as before.

This result calls into question the utility of corpus linguistics. …

Exploring Gender In First-Year Composition, Ross Alan Bradley

Theses and Dissertations

Recently scholars in Creative Writing have begun researching gender and how gender relates to student success composition classes. This thesis uses critical discourse analysis and linguistic markers associated with different genders to examine student interaction with emphasis on gender domination and power inequalities between students of different genders. Data was collected from both face-to-face and online first-year composition classes. The first chapter gives a brief overview of relevant literature and outlines the other chapters, the second chapter describes literature that was researched for the study, and the third chapter lays critical discourse analysis, which was used to analyze the data. …