Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Dialect Variation And Lexical Stress: An Idiolectal Inquiry, Ettien Koffi, Megan C. Dell' Acqua

Linguistic Portfolios

Ever since Fry (1958) ranked the acoustic correlates of lexical stress as F0 > Duration > Intensity, a controversy has ensued. Some replication studies have agreed with Fry’s ranking, but others have not. It is quite possible that the divergent rankings of correlates may have something to do with dialect variation among the participants in various studies. The evidence for this claim comes from an in-depth study of Author 2’s pronunciation of 14 disyllabic words produced in running speech. Her ranking of the acoustic correlates of lexical stress as F0 > Duration > Intensity agrees with Fry but stands in contrast with the ranking …

Verb Tense Agreement Issues In Somali L2 English Composition, Luis Lopez, Galyna Arabadzhy

Linguistic Portfolios

Creating a piece of writing is an arduous task that presents challenges to both native and non-native speakers of English. Although there is enough material to help learners structure and organize their essays, English language learners (ELL) face surface level and sentence level issues. The purpose of this paper is to investigate two such issues, specifically orthographic and tense agreement mistakes produced by college-bound Somali students. The analyses reveal that phonological L1 transfers can affect orthography, while L1 syntactic structures interfere with tense agreements in complex sentences.

Infant Cry Annoyance Scale And Indexes, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

Noise-induced annoyance methodology is applied to infant cry to gauge which of the three acoustic determinants of cries frequency in Hz, intensity in dBA, and duration in hours, minutes, or milliseconds is/are the most annoying to parents and caregivers. The main finding is that in cries, as in many other annoying noises, intensity in dBA is the most aversive correlate. The path leading to this finding is not linear, but rather a tortuous one because many issues and definitions had to be discussed first. In so doing, the smallest unit of a cry had to be established. This led subsequently …

A Comprehensive Review Of Intonation: Psychoacoustics Modeling Of Prosodic Prominence, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

Bolinger (1978:475), one of the foremost authorities on prosody of a generation ago, said that “Intonation is a half-tamed savage. To understand the tamed or linguistically harnessed half of him, one has to make friends with the wild half.” This review provides a brief explanation for the tamed and untamed halves of intonation. It is argued here that the pitch-centered approach that has been used for several decades is responsible for why one half of intonation remains untamed. To tame intonation completely, a holistic acoustic approach is required that takes intensity and duration as seriously as it does …

Prologue, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

No abstract provided.

Narcissism's Beguiling Social Facade, Hunter G. Tholkes

SCSU Journal of Student Scholarship

Narcissistic behavior, characterized by a persistent need for attention, admiration, and a feeling of superiority, presents various social problems for an individual. Back et al. (2013) have given a dynamic processing model of the narcissist's social behavior that stems from their underlying need to maintain a grandiose, unrealistic self-image. This underlying intention manifests through maladaptive interpersonal interaction tendencies: manipulation, devaluation, and other Machiavellian behaviors to stabilize or enhance their perceived social relevance. Using the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept (Back et al., 2013) and Platt's (1973) social trap theories, we can explain the lure for acting in this damaging self-serving …

School Of Public Affairs 2022 Annual Report, Danae Swanson

School of Public Affairs Annual Reports

Onwards to our second decade!

The School of Public Affairs’ annual report presents a magazine-style look back at the school’s year. Contents include the stories and accomplishments of current students, alumni, faculty, and other community partnerships. It also celebrates the generous giving of donors. A limited amount of print copies are produced and mailed to constituents. Support and collaboration of the annual report is regularly given by University Communications, the St. Cloud State University Foundation, St. Cloud State University Alumni Relations, University Archives, and the Departments of Criminal Justice, Economics, Geography & Planning, and Political Science.

Note: The School of …

On Pop-Up Poetry, Old School Typewriters And Feeling Valued, Janet Tilstra

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Publications

This piece is a creative reflection on my experience with pop-up poetry at the 2022 Mokakiiks SoTL Symposium in Banff.

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 24, No. 3, King Banaian, Mana Komai

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

Drs. King Banaian and Mana Komai Molle discussed the strong employment situation in the St. Cloud MSA, led by the construction sector. The St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Survey showed weaker business activity in the last three months, and business leaders expect less growth in the next six months. There was a sharp difference of opinion among them about whether we were in a recession or soon entering on. In response to higher input prices, a majority believe those can be passed onto consumers, but a significant number reported smaller profit margins.

Embedding Rational Expectations In A Structural Var: Internal And External Instruments For Set Identification, Zhengyang Chen, Victor Valcarcel

Economics Faculty Working Papers

We propose a novel approach that embeds Rational Expectations (RE) into a low-dimensional structural vector autoregression (SVAR). We establish an instrumental variable procedure internal to the SVAR founded on a purely theoretical framework, which does not rely on any mapping strategy to a reduced form. Alternatively, a separate strategy considers data external to the SVAR to aid in the identification of structural shocks on a purely empirical basis. We report clouds of responses from a RE-consistent theoretical model as well as regions of plausible responses from the empirical approach. We conclude that a Taylor Rule characterization of monetary policy shocks …

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 24, No. 2, King Banaian, Mana Komai

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

St. Cloud area unemployment reached its lowest point since measurement began in 1990, registering at 1.8% in April 2022. Area economic growth was very strong in the months leading out of the Omicron wave of the pandemic, with a majority of survey respondents reporting higher business activity in the February to April period. Over 70% reported paying higher wages and charging higher prices for their goods and services. 5 of 6 leading indicators were positive. In special questions, more than 70% of surveyed businesses did not lay off workers but of those that did a majority did not return many …

Improved Attending In An 8-Year-Old Boy Diagnosed With Down Syndrome Through Teaching With Acoustical Guidance, Jessica Bracken, Cara Holtz, Benjamin Witts

SCSU Journal of Student Scholarship

Skill acquisition can be particularly difficult when prerequisites are lacking (e.g., attending to learning materials) that are necessary to expand academic abilities. However, behavioral technologies exist that can help individuals overcome, or at least improve their quality of life despite these difficulties. The current case study used a quasi-changing-criterions-design to examine the effectiveness of a Teaching with Acoustical Guidance (TAGteach) technique to increase attending to learning materials in an eight-year-old participant with Down syndrome. The TAGteach technique was effective in increasing the percentage of trials in which the participant looked at materials and the duration of looking at presented materials …

Healthcare Access, Satisfaction, And Health‑Related Quality Of Life Among Children And Adults With Rare Diseases, Amanda Hemmesch, Kathleen Bogart, Erica Barnes, Thomas Blissenbach, Arthur Beisang, Patti Engel, Chloe Barnes Advisory Council On Rare Diseases

Psychology Faculty Publications

Background: Research in a variety of countries indicates that healthcare access and health-related quality of life are challenged among people with a variety of rare diseases (RDs). However, there has been little systematic research on the experiences of children and adults with RDs in the American healthcare system that identifies commonalities across RDs. This research aimed to: (1) Describe demographics, disease characteristics, diagnostic experiences, access to healthcare, knowledge about RDs, support from healthcare professionals, and patient satisfaction among people with RDs and their caregivers; (2) examine predictors of patient satisfaction among adults with RDs; (3) compare health-related quality of life …

Cultural Resources Management Plan: Black Mesa Ranger Station, Heather Maurer

Culminating Projects in Cultural Resource Management

The Black Mesa Ranger Station on the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests in northern Arizona, serves as the administrative site for the Black Mesa Ranger District. The station was established in 1949 after Forest Service personnel determined that the current ranger station located in Black Canyon was no longer suitable as an administrative site. The Black Mesa Ranger Station was developed over a period of several years spanning from the 1950s to the 1960s to form the administrative site that it is today.

Due to the station’s construction and development over 50 years ago, many of the buildings and features now represent …

Putin And The Czar: Autocracy And Dissent, Tim Lux, Loren Sohler, Quinn Radeke

Huskies Showcase

This project will explore the analogies between Russian foreign and domestic policies from contemporary times and from the late Russian Empire of the early 20th century. Both Czar Nicholas II and Vladimir Putin are leaders committed to autocratic rule and repression of internal dissent. Both leaders have a track record of intensifying repression as their time in power progresses. A further link is the impact that foreign policy plays on the internal politics of Russia, with success or failure in foreign conflict providing either solidification of power or the spark for popular unrest. We will explore topics such as the …

Let’S Stress It! Investigations Of Saudi Efl Teachers’ Lexical Stress Patterns, Mahdi Duris, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

Koffi (2019) investigated the acoustic correlates that Arabic L2 speakers of English use to encode lexical stress. This study replicates the same methodology and uses the same acoustic correlates and the same Just Noticeable Difference (JND) thresholds. Whereas Koffi (2019) focused on a general population of Arabic speakers of English, the current study investigates how 10 females Saudi L2 speakers of English who are college professors encode lexical stress. Do they encode lexical stress similarly or differently from the group that Koffi (2019) investigated? What does this entail for the acquisition of suprasegmentals in L2 English?

Do Acoustic Phonetic Correlates Vary In Relation To Grammatical Functions? Exemplification With "Her", Ettien Koffi, Matthew Beckstrand

Linguistic Portfolios

Do speakers produce the same word differently if its grammatical function changes? The word is used to provide some answers. This word is optimal because it is one of a few English words whose orthography and pronunciation remain the same across three grammatical functions. is spelled and pronounced the same when it functions as a direct object, an indirect object, or a possessive adjective. This makes it ideal for investigating any putative correlation between grammatical functions and acoustic phonetic correlates. Twenty (10 females and 10 males) speakers of American English from 10 different states recorded themselves reading the Speech Accent …

Acoustic Phonetic Analysis Of Vietnamese-Accented English Vowels In Running Speech, Ettien Koffi, Cassandra Young

Linguistic Portfolios

McCrum (2010:285) claims that English has now attained the status of a global language. He therefore coined the term “Globish” to describe the vast reach of English around the globe. He also notes that “Globish will remain the means by which an educated minority of the planet communicates.” On page 232, he attributes the expanding influence of English to capitalism, “The more global capitalism boomed, the more English developed as its preferred medium of communication: contagious, adaptable, populist and subversive. … A global information network, and a global market, require a global language, but one that is not, overtly, the …

Speech Digitalization, Coding, And Nasal(Ized) Vowel Synthesis: Demonstration With Beti, A Critically Endangered Language, Scarlet Dusosky

Linguistic Portfolios

It is estimated that 40% of world languages are endangered and that some will go extinct in the near future. There is not enough funding nor interest to preserve all of them. In response to this crisis, experts are experimenting with speech synthesis in the hope of reviving some of them. Their goal is to digitalize these languages and use processing methods similar to those used for Siri and Alexa. This paper highlights the challenges and opportunities in doing so. Beti, (ISO: 639-3-eot), a critically endangered language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, is used in this demonstration. The topics …

The Chinks In The Prosodic Classification Of Languages: What Kind Of A Tone Language Is Anyi?, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

Delafosse (1900:15-18) remarked more than one hundred twenty years ago that Anyi was not a full-fledged tone language like Yoruba, nor was it an accent language like English or French. Quaireau (1978:217-8) came to the same conclusion regarding the suprasegmental status of Anyi. I concur with them that Anyi is hard to classify suprasegmentally because it straddles the three prosodic types into which world languages are currently classified, namely: tone languages, pitch-accent languages, and accent languages. Six parameters are used to shed some light on why Anyi defies prosodic typologies.

Somali Ell Students’ Compositions: Explorations Into Developmental Syntax, Megan C. Dell' Acqua

Linguistic Portfolios

Regardless of whether a student is a native English speaker or an English Language Learner (ELL), high school graduates are expected to be able to write in a clear, proficient manner. However, the productive skill of writing can be particularly challenging for second language (L2) learners. The purpose of this paper is to examine issues relevant to L2 writing as diagnosed from the sample text, “Essay #9: Unreported world – Somalia,” which was written by a college-bound Somali student. Aspects of the paper focus on orthographic errors, syntactic issues, and pedagogical implications. The analysis reveals that both insufficient L2 grammatical …

A Tutorial On Formant-Based Speech Synthesis For The Documentation Of Critically Endangered Languages, Ettien Koffi, Mark Petzold

Linguistic Portfolios

Smaller languages, that is, those spoken by 5,000 people or less are dying at an alarming rate (Krauss 1992). Many are disappearing without having been studied acoustically. The methodology discussed in this paper can help build formant-based speech synthesis systems for the documentation and revitalization of these languages. Developing Text-to-Speech (TTS) functionalities for use in smart devices can breathe a new life into dying languages (Crystal 2000). In the first tutorial on this topic, Koffi (2020) explained how the Arpabet transcription system can be expanded for use in African languages and beyond. In the present tutorial, Author 1 and Author …

Is Intensity (Decibel Levels) The Most Aversive Correlate In Infant Cry?: Preliminary And Exploratory Results, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

Scholarly accounts of infant cry began in earnest in the late 1960s. Subsequent studies have focused on creating a typology of cries in order to correlate them with specific pediatric behaviors or ailments. Instrumental acoustic phonetic tools have often been summoned to validate impressionistic assessments. However, because most pediatric scientists lack adequate preparation in acoustic phonetics, they often failed to measure the features that are acoustically salient. This paper examines past practices and proposes a new methodology that can set infant cry research on a solid acoustic phonetic footing. The findings reported here are preliminary and exploratory because the corpus …

Prologue, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

No abstract provided.

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 24, No. 1, Richard A. Macdonald, King Banaian

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

As the pandemic subsides, the new year has ushered in a long awaited broad-based area economic expansion. Virtually all sectors of the area economy experienced employment growth as the area added more than 3,600 jobs over the year ending January 2022. Firms’ future outlook remains very strong, but is clouded by accelerating inflation (and accompanying wage pressures) and persistent labor shortages.

Data released by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) indicate St. Cloud area employment increased 3.6% over the twelve months ending January 2022 (but is still 3,144 below its pre-pandemic level two years ago). Local job …

School Of Public Affairs 2021 Annual Report, Danae Swanson

School of Public Affairs Annual Reports

We are celebrating our first 10 years!

The School of Public Affairs’ annual report presents a magazine-style look back at the school’s year. Contents include the stories and accomplishments of current students, alumni, faculty, and other community partnerships. It also celebrates the generous giving of donors. A limited amount of print copies are produced and mailed to constituents. Support and collaboration of the annual report is regularly given by University Communications, the St. Cloud State University Foundation, St. Cloud State University Alumni Relations, University Archives, and the Departments of Criminal Justice, Economics, Geography & Planning, and Political Science.

Note: The …

Toward Metaliteracy And Transliteracy In The History Classroom: A Case Study Among Underserved Students, Alston Brake Cobourn, Jen Corrine Brown, Edward Warga, Lisa Louis

Library Staff and Administration Scholarship

In the last twenty years, scholars have reimagined information literacy to better address an overly saturated world of information and the growing participatory culture of Web 2.0. Outside of library and information science (LIS), researchers have promoted transliteracy—the intersection between information, visual, digital, and other literacies—to help students find and assess information. Within the LIS discipline, metaliteracy has provided a foundation to rethink information literacy frameworks, redefining students as creators who produce and share information. Relatively few studies exist, however, on how to leverage literacies in support of student digital scholarship projects. Likewise, digital humanities professors promote metaliteracy in the …

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 23, No. 4, King Banaian, Richard A. Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

The economic recovery from the unrelenting COVID shock continues in the St. Cloud area as firms report an optimistic future outlook and employment grows. However, underlying this optimism are increases in wages, prices, capital expenditures, and worker shortages that may prove unsustainable in a post-COVID economy. Strong future optimism by surveyed firms is restrained by the reality that monetary and fiscal stimulus is abating perhaps faster than the pandemic.

Data released by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) indicate St. Cloud area employment increased 2% over the twelve months ending October 2021, but still 4,493 (4%) below …

Primed To Fire: An Archaeological Study Of The Percussion Caps At Historic Fort Snelling (21he99), Spencer Fehr

Culminating Projects in Cultural Resource Management

The goal in undertaking this thesis project was to examine percussion caps recovered from Historic Fort Snelling to try and better understand weapon utilization, their association with structures and activity areas at the fort, and potential availability. Located at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers near St. Paul, Minnesota the fort was built in the early 1800s to assert the United States’ political and economic objectives in the region. Over its tenure the fort has had a long history of service, with mission objectives constantly changing over the years. The fort was key to the foundation of Minnesota …

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 23, No. 3, King Banaian, Richard A. Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

St. Cloud area economic recovery has begun as year-over-year regional employment has grown and surveyed local firms project strong business activity. While the pandemic appears to have created scars in the local economy that plague some of our local service sectors, many area firms continue to report challenges that are typically associated with rapid expansion—labor shortages, price increases, accelerating wage growth, etc. Data released by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) indicate St. Cloud area employment increased 4.3 percent over the twelve months ending July 2021. However, employment in the Stearns-Benton Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is still …