Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Experiential Learning In Language Revitalization, Anthony Tran

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

Language revitalization plays a crucial role in preserving cultural diversity and identity. It serves as a conduit to reconnect communities with their ancestral roots, promoting cultural continuity and helping create a sense of belonging. Furthermore, it offers a stand against the often destructive impacts of colonization and globalization, which frequently result in language loss. In this report, I narrate my enriching journey as a student researcher, working on language revitalization alongside Dr. Tania Granadillo during an my summer internship. This unique experience extensively involved language study, understanding colonialism, and significant personal growth in self-management skills, epitomized by a challenging yet …

My Experience As A Phonetics Research Assistant, Damaris Holmes

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

When my exchange was shortened due to COVID-19, I had the opportunity to undertake a part-time research assistant position with Dr. Jeff Tennant in the French and Linguistics departments at Western. Our project studied the rhythm and intonation of the speech of Franco-Ontarians. This paper serves as a description and reflection of this experiential learning opportunity. Specifically, it explores the challenges of operating within a multi-year project timeline as well as dealing with imposter syndrome as a student new to true research.

This project examined the spoken language of bilingual Ontarians to determine if the classically distinct rhythm patterns of …

Incidental Acquisition Of Multiword Expressions Through Audiovisual Input: The Role Of Repetition And Typographic Enhancement, Elvenna Majuddin, Anna Siyanova-Chanturia, Frank Boers

Education Publications

There has been limited research on the efficacy of captioned second language (L2) television in facilitating the incidental acquisition of multiword expressions (MWEs). The present study aims to fill this gap. Additionally, this study examined the role of typographic enhancement and repetition. One-hundred and twenty-two L2 learners were assigned to one of six conditions which differed in terms of caption condition (no captions, normal captions, enhanced captions) and the number of times they watched the same video (once, twice). The participants took a cued MWE form recall test before watching the video, and immediately and two weeks after watching it. …

Using Literal Underpinnings To Help Learners Remember Figurative Idioms: Does The Connection Need To Be Crystal-Clear?, Xinqing Wang, Frank Boers, Paul Warren

Education Publications

No abstract provided.

Weighing Up Exercises On Phrasal Verbs: Retrieval Versus Trial-And-Error Practices, Brian Strong, Frank Boers

Education Publications

EFL textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to four treatment groups. Two groups were presented first with phrasal verbs and their meaning before they were prompted to retrieve the particles from memory. The difference between these two retrieval groups was that one group studied and then retrieved items one at a time, while the other group studied and retrieved them in sets. The two other groups …

Language Imperialism In Post-Colonial Ghana: Linguistic Recovery And Change, Rikki Bergen

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

In this paper, Bergen explores the affects of colonialism on language rights in Ghana. With approximately eighty languages spoken, Ghana is a linguistically rich and diverse country with a colonially-imposed language as the only state-sponsored language. By examining the linguistic, political, economic, educational, and cultural context of what was once the Gold Coast the paper discusses the factors that keep a system of linguistic imperialism in place. Secondary research is used to provide an introduction to the genealogical language families present in post-colonial Ghana and the customs and laws that govern their usage. By identifying the nuances that keep this …

The Statistics Of Subtypes: A Proposed Study Investigating Statistical Learning Across Subtypes Of Dyslexia, Ashlee N. Quinn-Hogan

2019 Undergraduate Awards

Current research regarding dyslexia and its subtypes is inconsistent. There are discrepancies in the literature surrounding the causes and manifestations of dyslexia. Furthermore, there is very little research concerning the role of statistical learning in differentiating between subtypes of dyslexia. The purpose of the proposed study is to quantify the differences in statistical learning ability across three subtypes of dyslexia (i.e., phonological dyslexia, surface dyslexia, and deep dyslexia). It is predicted that participants with a dyslexia diagnosis of any subtype will be worse at using statistics to find word boundaries than control participants. Additionally, it is hypothesized that participants with …

Representing Opacity In Kinyarwanda Coronal Harmony, Abigail Edwards

2019 Undergraduate Awards

As of 2017, only four of the world’s languages are known to present opacity effects in coronal harmony: Sanskrit, Slovenian, Imdlawn Tashlhiyt and the Bantu language Kinyarwanda which is the focus of this paper (Hansson, to appear). In Kinyarwanda, coronal harmony is triggered by the retroflex fricatives [ʂ] [ʐ] and targets the alveolar fricatives [s] and [z]. The process operates regressively and is blocked by coronal stops [t] [d], palatal consonants [ɲ] [j] and the alveolar affricate [ts]. The harmony is obligatory in adjacent syllables but optional across non-adjacent syllables. The rarity and complexity of this phenomenon presents challenges to …

Acoustic Characteristics Used To Differentiate Speech From Song And Individual Factors That Impact Their Effectiveness, Xin Qi

2019 Undergraduate Awards

There are many acoustic differences between speech and song, such as frequency range, average fundamental frequency, pitch stability, and rhythmic regularity. Previous studies have shown that musical and linguistic knowledge are recruited differently, but no studies have addressed what specific acoustic features people use to differentiate between speech and song. Our study is designed to determine what acoustic characteristics are used to distinguish speech from song, and to elucidate whether individual factors, such as musical training and tonal language experience, have an effect on these characteristics. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rank 15 acoustic characteristics according to their …

Differential Responses To Constraints On Naming Agency Among Indigenous Peoples And Immigrants In Canada, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

This article illuminates the social structures and relations that shape agency for members of two marginalized groups in Canada and examines how individuals respond differently to constraints on their power to name themselves and their children. Constraints on spelling, structure and choice of name are framed according to the particular positions of indigenous peoples and immigrants in relation to European settler society as either ‘original inhabitants’ or ‘recent arrivals’. These historically unequal power relations are manifest in intertwined ideologies of language, identity and nation, evident in ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary. Differential responses include resistance, endurance and assimilation.

Universal Features In Phonological Neighbor Networks, Kevin S. Brown, Paul D. Allopenna, William R. Hunt, Rachael Steiner, Elliot Saltzman, Ken Mcrae, James S. Magnuson

Psychology Publications

Human speech perception involves transforming a countinuous acoustic signal into discrete linguistically meaningful units (phonemes) while simultaneously causing a listener to activate words that are similar to the spoken utterance and to each other. The Neighborhood Activation Model posits that phonological neighbors (two forms [words] that differ by one phoneme) compete significantly for recognition as a spoken word is heard. This definition of phonological similarity can be extended to an entire corpus of forms to produce a phonological neighbor network (PNN). We study PNNs for five languages: English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and German. Consistent with previous work, we find that …

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

Anthropology Presentations

No abstract provided.

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

Education Publications

No abstract provided.

Adult Statistical Word Segmentation Across Two Speakers, Hosung Kang

2017 Undergraduate Awards

A finding reliably demonstrated in past research is that statistical learning mechanism facilitates the process of learning language. What remain poorly understood are the effects of multiple speakers in infants and adults learning a statistical artificial language. This study sought to examine the effects of two different speakers in adults because previous literature has suggested that infants lack the ability to segment words when the speech stream consists of two different speakers. Therefore, our experiment sought to understand if 1) adults could successfully segment words across two different speakers and 2) if they can generalize segmentation to a novel voice. …

Universal Design For Belonging: Living And Working With Diverse Personal Names, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

There is great diversity in the names and naming practices of Canada’s population due to the multiple languages and cultures from which names and name-givers originate. While this diversity means that everyone encounters unfamiliar names, institutional agents who work with the public are continually challenged when attempting to determine a name’s correct pronunciation, spelling, structure and gender. Drawing from over a hundred interviews in London (Ontario) and Montréal (Québec), as well as other published accounts, I outline strategies used by institutional agents to manage name diversity within the constraints of their work tasks. I explain how concern with saving face …

Speech Equality: A Gendered Analysis Of Children’S Television Shows, Rikki N. Bergen

Anthropology Presentations

Childhood is an exciting time and kids are just learning who they are and who they are expected to be. The role television plays in their understanding of gender, racial, cultural, economic and social identity cannot be denied and it is therefore important for scholars to examine the types of ideas that are being presented. The gendered attitudes portrayed both explicitly and implicitly in children’s television shows can have a negative effect on childhood development and a child’s perceptions of self and the world around them.

Reduced Structure In Malagasy Headlines, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

This paper examines the register associated with headlines in Malagasy. While in manylanguages headlines appear to have reduced structure as evidenced by the absence of certaingrammatical markers (determiners, copulas, tense), Malagasy headlines show a change in wordorder from VOS to SVO. It is argued that like English, Malagasy headlines involve a truncatedsyntactic structure and that the absence of certain functional projections accounts for the changein word order.

Culminating And Non-Culminating Accomplishments In Malagasy, Ileana Paul, Baholisoa Simone Ralalaoherivony, Henriëtte De Swart

French Studies Publications

Malagasy is a language with non-culminating accomplishments. There is, however, a specific prefix (maha-), which appears to entail culmination. Moreover, verbs prefixed with maha- display a range of interpretations: causative, abilitive, ‘manage to’, and unintentionality. This paper accounts for these two aspects of this prefix with a unified semantic analysis. In particular, maha- encodes double prevention, as proposed by Wolff (2007, 2014) for English predicates like enable. The double prevention configuration is associated with a circumstantial modal base, which leads to culminating readings in the past and future. As such, this paper supports a more fine-grained theory of causation.

Does Developmental Social Pragmatic Intervention For Children With Autism Influence Parent Language Use?, Mary K. M. Wang

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Parents and primary caregivers provide a key source of linguistic input for children early in the developmental process. The Milton and Ethel Harris Research Initiative Treatment (MEHRIT) is a developmental social pragmatic intervention that trains parents on supporting their child’s communication development. This study investigated whether MEHRIT training was associated with changes in parent language use following treatment. Preschool-aged children with ASD and their parents participated in a randomized controlled trial. Twenty-five minute parent-child interactions were videotaped pre-treatment and post-treatment, twelve months apart, and each parent utterance was assigned a code indicating its main communicative function. Parents in the MEHRIT …

Towards News Verification: Deception Detection Methods For News Discourse, Yimin Chen, Victoria L. Rubin, Niall Conroy

FIMS Presentations

News verification is a process of determining whether a particular news report is truthful or deceptive. Deliberately deceptive (fabricated) news creates false conclusions in the readers’ minds. Truthful (authentic) news matches the writer’s knowledge. How do you tell the difference between the two in an automated way? To investigate this question, we analyzed rhetorical structures, discourse constituent parts and their coherence relations in deceptive and truthful news sample from NPR’s “Bluff the Listener”. Subsequently, we applied a vector space model to cluster the news by discourse feature similarity, achieving 63% accuracy. Our predictive model is not significantly better than chance …

The Logogenesis Of Writing To Learn: A Systemic Functional Perspective., Perry Klein, Len Unsworth

Education Publications

Writing to learn has become an important practice in science education. How is scientific knowledge constructed during writing? To investigate this question, we examined the process through which four university students constructed written explanations of either projectile motion or buoyancy. The analysis, informed by systemic functional linguistics, focused on the mapping of semantic elements to grammatical choices, and the way in which this mapping unfolded throughout the course of each text. The texts began largely congruently; grammar mapped closely to experience. Gradually, each text shifted toward greater use of grammatical metaphor. Nominalization allowed propositions and sequences of events to serve …

Effect Of Dialect On Identification And Severity Of Speech Impairment In Indigenous Australian Children, Bethany J. Toohill, Sharynne Mcleod, Jane Mccormack

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

This study investigated the effect of dialectal difference on identification and rating of severity of speech impairment in children from Indigenous Australian backgrounds. The speech of 15 Indigenous Australian children identified by their parents/caregivers and teachers as having ‘difficulty talking and making speech sounds’ was assessed using the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology. Fourteen children were identified with speech impairment on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology using Standard Australian English (AusE) as the target pronunciation; whereas 13 were identified using Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) as the target. There was a statistically significant decrease in seven children’s severity …

Specification And Inversion: Evidence From Malagasy, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

This paper analyzes specificational sentences in Malagasy and shows that such sentences involve obligatory inversion, marked by the topic particle dia. I argue that the topicalized element is a small clause predicate that inverts with its subject. Two competing analyses of this inversion are compared and contrasted. I conclude with a brief comparison of Malagasy and Tagalog.

External Possession Meets Bare Nouns In Malagasy, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

This paper examines apparent noun incorporation in Malagasy that is the result of external possession (possessor raising). It is shown that such incorporation is not derived via head movement or via compounding. Instead, it is argued that this is an instance of pseudo noun incorporation (Massam, 2001): the possessum is merged as an NP sister to the predicate. As for the structure of external possession, a non-movement analysis is proposed: the apparent possessor is generated as the specifier of a null possessive head and binds an empty argument position within the possessum. The resulting structure and meaning are shown to …

On The Presence Versus Absence Of Determiners In Malagasy, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

No abstract provided.

On The Topic Of Pseudoclefts, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

This paper presents arguments in favor of a pseudocleft analysis of a certain class of sentences in Malagasy, despite the lack of an overt wh-element. It is shown that voice morphology on the verb creates an operator-variable relationship much like the one created by wh-movement in free relatives in English and other languages. The bulk of the paper argues in favor of an inversion analysis of specificational pseudoclefts in Malagasy: a predicate DP is fronted to a topic position from within a small clause constituent. Moreover, it is shown that the same inversion occurs in equative and specificational sentences in …

La Syntaxe, La Morphologie Et La Phonologie De La Réduction Dans Les Titres, Ivan Chow, Volha Kharytonava, Mikalai Kliashchuk, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

Le présent article examine le cas de la réduction dans les titres de journaux avec les données de plusieurs langues. Nous constatons qu’il existe plusieurs types de réduction: la réduction syntaxique, morphophonologique, et la réduction phonétique. Nous faisons un survol des différents types et nous laissons pour la recherche future une analyse plus détaillée des structures.

Missing Topics In Malagasy Headlines, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

No abstract provided.

Really Intriguing, That Pred Np!, Ileana Paul, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Terminological Reflections Of An Enlightened Contextualist, Robert J. Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.