Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

He Spoke, I Spoke: A Usage-Based Examination Of Homophony In The Navajo Verb Complex, Michael Peter Drinkwater

Linguistics ETDs

This study examines homophony between first and third person verbs and between second and third person verbs in Navajo. The typical paradigm for person-marking in Navajo has a sh- prefix for first person, a ni- prefix in second person, and a zero-marked third person. In some phonological environments, however, the first and second person pronouns are elided, producing cases of homophony between first and third and between second and third persons.

I examine all cases of this in Navajo and also provide data from Jicarilla Apache, Hupa (a Pacific Coast Athabaskan language), and three Northern Athabaskan languages: Chilcotin, Koyukon, and …

Information Literacy In The Phonology Classroom, Jonathan Howell, Catherine Baird

Jonathan Howell

An Acoustic Phonetic Account Of The Confusion Between [L] And [N] By Some Chinese Speakers, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

Richards (2012) and Zhang (n.d.) report that some Chinese L2 speakers of English confuse /l/ and /n/. Koffi (2019:249-50) indicates that some acoustic correlates of /l/ and /n/ produced by Mandarin 6F, 8M, 9M, and 17M mask each other. Preliminary evidence suggests that this pronunciation is confined to speakers from Hubei, Sichuan, and Shangai. The goal of this investigation is to undertake a comprehensive study involving 27 Chinese speakers and their pronunciations of [l]s in the nouns and and of the [n] in the verb . The first part of the investigation is a confusion study. The second deals with …

Orthographic And Phonological Processing In Beginning Readers, Emily Fisher

Senior Theses

In order to learn to “sound out” new words, children must have phonological awareness, the ability to reflect on and manipulate the sounds in words. However, in skilled readers, performance on phonological awareness tasks is influenced by orthographic awareness, the awareness of spelling patterns and constraints. Both orthographic and phonological awareness are essential to reading, however, until recently the role of orthographic knowledge in phonological awareness has not been thoroughly investigated in beginning readers. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between orthographic and phonological knowledge in beginning readers and established a proof of concept for the use of …

L2 Learners And The Intelligiblity Of The Bostonian And Californian Accents, Russell Paul Kapryn

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis investigates issues of intelligibility through the lens and focus of prosody when the Bostonian and Los Angeles-based accents are heard in casually occurring conversation by native and non-native speakers. Over the spring and summer of 2017, six native speakers and 11 non-native speakers of English were interviewed from having listened to two 2.5 minute audio sample clips of speakers who have these accents. Respondents were asked questions such as what was difficult or easy or whether they could summarize the recordings for me. Findings indicate that while the native speakers often had difficulty with vocabulary due to context, …

Effects Of Phonomotor Treatment On Discourse Production, Joann P. Silkes, Gerasimos Fergadiotis, Rebecca Hunting Pompon, Janaki Torrence, Diane L. Kendall

Speech and Hearing Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that makes it difficult for people to produce and comprehend language, with all people with aphasia (PWA) demonstrating difficulty accessing and selecting words (anomia). While aphasia treatments typically focus on a single aspect of language, such as word retrieval, the ultimate goal of aphasia therapy is to improve communication, which is best seen at the level of discourse.

Aims: This retrospective study investigated the effects of one effective anomia therapy, Phonomotor Treatment (PMT), on discourse production.

Methods & Procedures: Twenty-six PWA participated in 60 h of PMT, which focuses on …

Final Vowel Devoicing In Blackfoot, Samantha Leigh Prins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a study of final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot, an indigenous language of Montana and Alberta. Previous research on final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot variously suggests word-final, phrase-final, and utterance-final vowel devoicing processes (e.g. Taylor 1965, Bliss & Gick 2009, Frantz 2017), though, the conditioning environment for this phenomenon had not been a research focus prior to this study. The present study investigates intonation units (IUs) as the conditioning domain for final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot.

Final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot is investigated here by examining the common word-final suffixes –wa (3SG.AN) and –yi (4SG) in two recordings …