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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Why It Matters: The Tourist/Traveller Dichotomy In The Context Of Pandemic-Era Overtourism, Kelley A. Mcclinchey Sep 2023

Why It Matters: The Tourist/Traveller Dichotomy In The Context Of Pandemic-Era Overtourism, Kelley A. Mcclinchey

TTRA Canada 2023 Conference

This research investigates the traveller/tourist dichotomy through a discourse analysis of online blogs and travel writing in the context of pandemic-era overtourism. Results indicate that travellers/tourists are perceived in ways that validate one over the other, yet both are intricately weaved within the neocolonial structures of tourism, grounded in imperialism and the power dynamics visitors have on a place.

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Using A Bayesian Estimation To Examine Attribute Hierarchies Of The 2007 Timss Mathematics Test: A Demonstration Using R Packages, Chia-Ling Hsu, Yi-Hsin Chen, Yi-Jhen Wu Aug 2023

Using A Bayesian Estimation To Examine Attribute Hierarchies Of The 2007 Timss Mathematics Test: A Demonstration Using R Packages, Chia-Ling Hsu, Yi-Hsin Chen, Yi-Jhen Wu

Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation

Correct specifications of hierarchical attribute structures in analyses using diagnostic classification models (DCMs) are pivotal because misspecifications can lead to biased parameter estimations and inaccurate classification profiles. This research is aimed at demonstrating DCM analyses with various hierarchical attribute structures via Bayesian estimation using freely available R packages, including CDM and R2jags. We illustrated a step-by-step procedure in R with an eighth-grade mathematics test from the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).

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When Looking Up Leads To Feeling Down: Situational Moderators Of The Effects Of Social Comparisons On Social Media, Madison L. Eamiello Aug 2023

When Looking Up Leads To Feeling Down: Situational Moderators Of The Effects Of Social Comparisons On Social Media, Madison L. Eamiello

Masters Theses

Social media use is ubiquitous, especially among young adults. Negative consequences of social media use has been associated with engaging in upward social comparisons with others on social media. The current paper presents a series of two studies that seek to understand the nuances of social comparisons as they occur while browsing social media. In Study 1 (N = 161) we tested whether upward social comparisons would be less harmful when the comparer focuses on the similarities, rather than differences, with the comparison target. We observed a marginal interaction indicating that when thinking about similarities with the target, upward …

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Prioritizing Climate Equity: A Qualitative Analysis Of The Massachusetts Mvp Program, Noah H. Gordon Aug 2023

Prioritizing Climate Equity: A Qualitative Analysis Of The Massachusetts Mvp Program, Noah H. Gordon

Masters Theses

The Massachusetts Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program (MVP Program) has funded Community Resilience Building workshops in hundreds of communities over the past 6 years. The Planning Reports produced by these workshops offer valuable insight into the climate adaptation and climate justice priorities of Massachusetts municipalities. Climate justice literature holds that the impacts of climate change will be disproportionately felt by marginalized communities, and those addressing climate change should address the risks faced by those communities, referred to as Environmental Justice (EJ) Communities in Massachusetts. Using an inductive qualitative coding approach, this study analyzes 30 Planning Reports from towns with High, Medium …

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Moving Beyond The Gender Binary: A Critical Analysis And Review Of Contemporary Scholarship On Nonbinary Gender Identities, Rie Harding Aug 2023

Moving Beyond The Gender Binary: A Critical Analysis And Review Of Contemporary Scholarship On Nonbinary Gender Identities, Rie Harding

Masters Theses

For decades gender scholars have recognized the importance of gender to subjectivity, lived experiences, and life chances. Nonbinary gender identities are becoming more recognized by social, legal, and government institutions. However, currently there is a lack of research and scholarship that focuses on nonbinary gender identities. I demonstrate that the sociology of gender must move beyond the constraints of the hegemonic gender binary system in order to have a full and holistic conceptualization of gender. This paper reviews and critically analyzes contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship on nonbinary gender identities, then sets out a research agenda for moving forward. Within this scholarship …

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Reconfiguring Digital Citizenship: Civic Hacking, Data Activism, And Democracy Platforms In South Korea, Danbi Yoo Aug 2023

Reconfiguring Digital Citizenship: Civic Hacking, Data Activism, And Democracy Platforms In South Korea, Danbi Yoo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on ‘civic tech’, the global phenomenon of tech-based voluntary action of citizens emerging with the rise of the culture of openness and sharing and initiatives of open government data. What does the ‘civic’ of civic tech mean? And what makes civic tech democratic and democratizing? These questions have been rarely asked or conveniently understood with Western-based theories and cases of tech-oriented civic actions. Combining critical studies of technology and civic engagement with the emerging scholarship of digital citizenship, I use the concept of digital citizenship as a heuristic tool to examine how digital and data technologies intervene …

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"The Land That Feminism Forgot": Birthzillas, Madwives, And The Politics Of Chilbirth, Amber Vayo Aug 2023

"The Land That Feminism Forgot": Birthzillas, Madwives, And The Politics Of Chilbirth, Amber Vayo

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Land that Feminism Forgot” is an in-depth exploration of the politics of childbirth that draws together qualitative and quantitative evidence to theorize the connections between treatment in childbirth and maternal mortality. Situating the qualitative research in the larger national context, the second chapter offers a State Reproductive Autonomy Index that provides an overview of the reproductive policy landscape at the national level. The dissertation then explores the role of institutionalized childbirth, medical mistrust, and obstetric violence in the U.S.’s longstanding maternal mortality crisis and offers policy suggestions in key public health areas. Through 120 qualitative interviews with people who …

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The Evaluation Of "The Wrong Answer Project" As Validity Evidence For The Social Consequences Of Testing, Darius D. Taylor Aug 2023

The Evaluation Of "The Wrong Answer Project" As Validity Evidence For The Social Consequences Of Testing, Darius D. Taylor

Doctoral Dissertations

The use of educational tests for making high stakes decisions has had societal consequences for decades. Parents, teachers, and administrators have been willing to pay off, lie, cheat, and steal so that their children, students, and they themselves would not fall prey to the negative consequences of subpar performance on educational assessments. Respected psychometric scholars have supported Samuel Messick’s claim over the years, but their advocacy has caught minimal traction. I founded an initiative in 2019 – The Wrong Answer Project – that shows promise as a vehicle for collecting validity evidence based on the social consequences of testing and …

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For The Love Of Teaching: Pre-Service Teachers’ Experience Of Moral Education, Anne Marie Foley Ruiz Aug 2023

For The Love Of Teaching: Pre-Service Teachers’ Experience Of Moral Education, Anne Marie Foley Ruiz

Doctoral Dissertations

Moral aspects of teaching arise each and every day, yet we lack information about how prepared teachers feel about this critical aspect of teaching. This multi-case study explores perceptions of five pre-service teachers in an elementary teacher education program in Western Massachusetts. A series of interviews explore their histories prior to the program and their experiences in the program as related to the pre-service teachers’ orientations to the moral work of teaching. Research questions address the awareness and self-efficacy of student teachers in implementing the moral aspects of teaching. Using Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006), this study explores beliefs …

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Increasing Teacher-Student Relationships And Classroom Engagement: The Effects Of Modifying Existing Tier Two Intervention On Adolescent Students And Their Teachers, Julia Doherty Aug 2023

Increasing Teacher-Student Relationships And Classroom Engagement: The Effects Of Modifying Existing Tier Two Intervention On Adolescent Students And Their Teachers, Julia Doherty

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of a Tier II behavior intervention, Check-in/Check-out (CiCo), on student engagement, and if a modification to the intervention that includes teacher use of microaffirmations improves the teacher-student relationship (T-SR) and thus, increases student engagement in class. It utilized multiple baseline design, and the study sample consisted of three fifth grade students from an urban school district in Southeastern Virginia. All three students were paired with one of their teachers to serve as the mentor for the intervention. Student engagement was measured directly using the Behavioral Observation System for Students (BOSS; …

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2022 Secretary General's Report, Elizabeth Brabec Jul 2023

2022 Secretary General's Report, Elizabeth Brabec

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

2022 Annual Report and 2023 Work Plan

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Corpus-Based Investigation Of The Markedness And Frequency Of Japanese Passives In Contemporary Written Japanese, Tatsuya Aoyama Jun 2023

Corpus-Based Investigation Of The Markedness And Frequency Of Japanese Passives In Contemporary Written Japanese, Tatsuya Aoyama

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Japanese passives are traditionally considered to have two types: direct and indirect passives. However, more recent studies, such as Ishizuka (2012), suggest the two types can be unified under the same syntactic movement analysis. Utilizing the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ; Maekawa, 2008; Maekawa et al., 2014), this study aims to investigate how likely different types of passives appear in the naturally occurring texts, especially in relation to markedness-based hierarchy called Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan and Comrie, 1977), and to investigate if true indirect passives occur in contemporary written Japanese.

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Processing French Rcs With Postverbal Subjects In A Minimalist Parser, Daniel Del Valle, Aniello De Santo Jun 2023

Processing French Rcs With Postverbal Subjects In A Minimalist Parser, Daniel Del Valle, Aniello De Santo

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Computational models with explicit assumptions about the connection between syntactic representations and processing difficulty can help strengthen bridges between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. In this sense, a model based on Stabler’s parser for Minimalist grammars (MGs; Stabler 2013) has been shown to predict a variety of off-line processing pref- erences, by exploiting complexity metrics tracking how syntactic structure affects memory load (Graf et al. 2017:a.o.). This model provides an interpretable linking theory between fine-grained syntactic structure in the generative tradition and precise sentence processing results, through transparently specified notions of cognitive cost. Here, we build on recent work on the …

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An Algebraic Characterization Of Total Input Strictly Local Functions, Dakotah Lambert, Jeffrey Heinz Jun 2023

An Algebraic Characterization Of Total Input Strictly Local Functions, Dakotah Lambert, Jeffrey Heinz

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

This paper provides an algebraic characteriza- tion of the total input strictly local functions. Simultaneous, noniterative rules of the form A→B/C D, common in phonology, are defin- able as functions in this class whenever CAD represents a finite set of strings. The algebraic characterization highlights a fundamental con- nection between input strictly local functions and the simple class of definite string languages, as well as connections to string functions stud- ied in the computer science literature, the def- inite functions and local functions. No effec- tive decision procedure for the input strictly local maps was previously available, but one arises …

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Learning Phonotactics Of Any Span And Distance, Ignas Rudaitis Jun 2023

Learning Phonotactics Of Any Span And Distance, Ignas Rudaitis

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

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Noise-Tolerant Learning As Selection Among Deterministic Grammatical Hypotheses, Laurel Perkins, Tim Hunter Jun 2023

Noise-Tolerant Learning As Selection Among Deterministic Grammatical Hypotheses, Laurel Perkins, Tim Hunter

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Children acquire their language's canonical word order from data that contains a messy mixture of canonical and non-canonical clause types. We model this as noise-tolerant learning of grammars that deterministically produce a single word order. In simulations on English and French, our model successfully separates signal from the noise introduced by non-canonical clause types, in order to identify that both languages are SVO. No such preference for the target word order emerges from a comparison model which operates with a fully-gradient hypothesis space and an explicit numerical regularization bias. This provides an alternative general mechanism for regularization in various learning …

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Towards A Learning-Based Account Of Underlying Forms: A Case Study In Turkish, Caleb Belth Jun 2023

Towards A Learning-Based Account Of Underlying Forms: A Case Study In Turkish, Caleb Belth

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

A traditional concept in phonological theory is that of the underlying form. However, the history of phonology has witnessed a debate about how abstract underlying representations ought to be allowed to be, and a number of arguments have been given that phonology should abandon such representations altogether. In this paper, we consider a learning-based approach to the question. We propose a model that, by default, constructs concrete representations of morphemes. When and only when such concrete representations make it challenging to generalize in the face of the sparse statistical profile of language, our proposed model constructs abstract underlying forms that …

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Processing Advantages Of End-Weight, Lei Liu Jun 2023

Processing Advantages Of End-Weight, Lei Liu

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Previous research has established that English end-weight configurations, where sentence components of greater grammatical complexity appear at the ends of sentences, demonstrate processing advantages over alternative word orders. To evaluate these processing advantages, I analyze how a Minimalist Grammar (MG) parser generates syntactic structures for different word orders. The parser's behavior suggests that end-weight configurations require fewer memory resources for parsing than alternative structures. This memory load difference accounts for the end-weight advantage in processing. The results highlight the validity of the MG processing approach as a linking theory connecting syntactic structures to behavioral observations. Additionally, the results have implications …

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Morpheme Combinatorics Of Compound Words Through Box Embeddings, Eric R. Rosen Jun 2023

Morpheme Combinatorics Of Compound Words Through Box Embeddings, Eric R. Rosen

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

In this study I probe the combinatoric properties of Japanese morphemes that participate in compounding. By representing morphemes through box embeddings (Vilnis et al., 2018; Patel et al., 2020; Li et al., 2019), a model learns preferences for one morpheme to combine with another in two-member compounds. These learned preferences are represented by the degree to which the box-hyperrectangles for two morphemes overlap in representational space. After learning, these representations are applied to test how well they encode a speaker’s knowledge of the properties of each morpheme that predict the plausibility of novel compounds in which they could occur.

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Phonological Processes With Intersecting Tier Alphabets, Daniel Gleim, Johannes Schneider Jun 2023

Phonological Processes With Intersecting Tier Alphabets, Daniel Gleim, Johannes Schneider

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Aksënova and Deshmukh (2018) conjecture that if the phonology of a language requires projection to multiple tiers, the tier alphabets of those tiers are either disjoint or stand in a subset/superset relation, but never form a nontrivial intersection. We provide three counterexamples to this claim.

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On The Spectra Of Syntactic Structures, Isabella Senturia, Robert Frank Jun 2023

On The Spectra Of Syntactic Structures, Isabella Senturia, Robert Frank

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

This paper explores the application of spectral graph theory to the problem of characterizing linguistically significant classes of tree structures. As a case study, we focus on three classes of trees, binary, X-bar, and asymmetric c-command extensional, and show that the spectral properties of different matrix representations of these classes of trees provide insight into the properties that characterize these classes. More generally, our goal is to provide another route to understanding the structure of natural language, one that does not come from extensive definitions and rules taken by extrapolating from the syntactic structure, but instead is extracted directly from …

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Modeling Substitution Errors In Spanish Morphology Learning, Libby Barak, Nathalie Fernandez Echeverri, Naomi H. Feldman, Patrick Shafto Jun 2023

Modeling Substitution Errors In Spanish Morphology Learning, Libby Barak, Nathalie Fernandez Echeverri, Naomi H. Feldman, Patrick Shafto

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

In early stages of language acquisition, children often make inflectional errors on regular verbs, e.g., Spanish-speaking children produce –a (present-tense 3rd person singular) when other inflections are expected. Most previous models of morphology learning have focused on later stages of learning relating to production
of irregular verbs. We propose a computational model of Spanish inflection learning to examine the earlier stages of learning and present a novel data set of gold-standard inflectional annotations for Spanish verbs. Our model replicates
data from Spanish-learning children, capturing the acquisition order of different inflections and correctly predicting the substitution errors they make. Analyses show …

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Parsing "Early English Books Online" For Linguistic Search, Seth Kulick, Neville Ryant, Beatrice Santorini Jun 2023

Parsing "Early English Books Online" For Linguistic Search, Seth Kulick, Neville Ryant, Beatrice Santorini

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

This work addresses the question of how to evaluate a state-of-the-art parser on Early English Books Online (EEBO), a 1.5-billion-word collection of unannotated text, for utility in linguistic research. Earlier work has trained and evaluated a parser on the 1.7-million-word Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME) and defined a query-based evaluation to score the retrieval of 6 specific sentence types of interest. However, significant differences between EEBO and the manually-annotated PPCEME make it inappropriate to assume that these results will generalize to EEBO. Fortunately, an overlap of source material in PPCEME and EEBO allows us to establish a …

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Extracting Binary Features From Speech Production Errors And Perceptual Confusions Using Redundancy-Corrected Transmission, Zhanao Fu, Ewan Dunbar Jun 2023

Extracting Binary Features From Speech Production Errors And Perceptual Confusions Using Redundancy-Corrected Transmission, Zhanao Fu, Ewan Dunbar

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

We develop a mutual information-based feature extraction method and apply it to English speech production and perception error data. The extracted features show different phoneme groupings than conventional phonological features, especially in the place features. We evaluate how well the extracted features can define natural classes to account for English phonological patterns. The features extracted from production errors had performance close to conventional phonological features, while the features extracted from perception errors performed worse. The study shows that featural information can be extracted from underused sources of data such as confusion matrices of production and perception errors, and the results …

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Bridging Production And Comprehension: Toward An Integrated Computational Model Of Error Correction, Shiva Upadhye, Jiaxuan Li, Richard Futrell Jun 2023

Bridging Production And Comprehension: Toward An Integrated Computational Model Of Error Correction, Shiva Upadhye, Jiaxuan Li, Richard Futrell

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Error correction in production and comprehension has traditionally been studied sepa- rately. In real-time communication, however, correction may not only depend on speaker or comprehender-internal preferences, but also the interlocutors’ knowledge of each other’s strategies. We present an integrated computational framework for error correction in both production and comprehension systems. Modeling error correction as Bayesian inference, we propose that both speaker and comprehender’s correction strategies are influenced by their prior expectations about the intended message and their knowledge of a noise monitoring model. Our results indicate that speakers and comprehenders tend to weigh phonological and semantic cues differently, and these …

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Analogy In Contact: Modeling Maltese Plural Inflection, Sara Court, Andrea D. Sims, Micha Elsner Jun 2023

Analogy In Contact: Modeling Maltese Plural Inflection, Sara Court, Andrea D. Sims, Micha Elsner

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Maltese is often described as having a hybrid morphological system resulting from extensive contact between Semitic and Romance language varieties. Such a designation reflects an etymological divide as much as it does a larger tradition in the literature to consider concatenative and non-concatenative morphological patterns as distinct in the language architecture. Using a combination of computational modeling and information theoretic methods, we quantify the extent to which the phonology and etymology of a Maltese singular noun may predict the morphological process (affixal vs. templatic) as well as the specific plural allomorph (affix or template) relating a singular noun to its …

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L0-Regularization Induces Subregular Biases In Lstms, Charles J. Torres, Richard Futrell Jun 2023

L0-Regularization Induces Subregular Biases In Lstms, Charles J. Torres, Richard Futrell

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Ongoing work attempts to identify the formal language patterns in natural language. In phonology, recent work has identified the subregular languages as a good candidate (Heinz, 2018). However, there remain few explanations for the source of this bias. This abstract proposes a means of investigating formal language learnability. We propose using a variant of minimum description length (MDL) as defined on LSTMs with varying priors on LSTM size. We will show its utility on a test case from Heinz and Idsardi (2013) and Rawski et al. (2017).

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Unbounded Recursion In Two Dimensions, Where Syntax And Prosody Meet, Edward P. Stabler, Kristine M. Yu Jun 2023

Unbounded Recursion In Two Dimensions, Where Syntax And Prosody Meet, Edward P. Stabler, Kristine M. Yu

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Both syntax and prosody seem to require structures with unbounded branching, something that is not immediately provided by multiple context free grammars or other equivalently expressive formalisms. That extension is easy, and does not disrupt an appealing model of prosody/syntax interaction. Rather than computing prosodic and syntactic structures independently and then selecting optimally corresponding pairs, prosodic structures can be computed directly from the syntax, eliminating alignment issues and the need for bracket-insertion or other ad hoc devices. To illustrate, a simple model of prosodically-defined Irish pronoun displacement is briefly compared to previous proposals.

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Differentiable Tree Operations Promote Compositional Generalization, Paul Soulos, Edward Hu, Kate Mccurdy, Yunmo Chen, Roland Fernandez, Paul Smolensky, Jianfeng Gao Jun 2023

Differentiable Tree Operations Promote Compositional Generalization, Paul Soulos, Edward Hu, Kate Mccurdy, Yunmo Chen, Roland Fernandez, Paul Smolensky, Jianfeng Gao

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

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Language Models Can Learn Exceptions To Syntactic Rules, Cara Su-Yi Leong, Tal Linzen Jun 2023

Language Models Can Learn Exceptions To Syntactic Rules, Cara Su-Yi Leong, Tal Linzen

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Artificial neural networks can generalize productively to novel contexts. Can they also learn exceptions to those productive rules? We explore this question using the case of restrictions on English passivization (e.g., the fact that ''The vacation lasted five days'' is grammatical, but ''*Five days was lasted by the vacation'' is not). We collect human acceptability judgments for passive sentences with a range of verbs, and show that the probability distribution defined by GPT-2, a language model, matches the human judgments with high correlation. We also show that the relative acceptability of a verb in the active vs. passive voice is …

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