Linguistics Commons^™

Effects Of The Relationships Between Forms Within And Across Paradigms On Lexical Processing And Representation: An Experimental Investigation Of Russian Nouns, Jeffery R. Parker

Faculty Publications

The frequency and distribution of forms within a lexeme’s paradigm affect how quickly forms are accessed (e.g., Kostić, 1991; Milin, Filipović Đurđević, & Moscoso del Prado Martín, 2009; Moscoso del Prado Martı́n, Kostić, & Baayen, 2004). The distribution of forms across paradigms, in contrast, has received little experimental attention. Theoretical studies investigate the distribution of forms across paradigms because forms vary in how predictive they are of other (unknown) forms. Such investigations have uncovered typological tendencies (e.g., Ackerman & Malouf, 2013; Stump & Finkel, 2013) and contribute to explanations of language-specific phenomena (e.g., Sims, 2015; Parker & Sims, To appear). …

More Than Frequency? Exploring Predictors Of Word Difficulty For Second Language Learners, Brett James Hashimoto, Jesse Egbert

Faculty Publications

Frequency is often the only variable considered when researchers or teachers develop vocabulary materials for second language (L2) learners. However, researchers have also found that many other variables affect vocabulary acquisition. In this study, we explored the relationship between L2 vocabulary acquisition and a variety of lexical characteristics using vocabulary recognition test data from L2 English learners. Conducting best subsets multiple regression analysis to explore all possible combinations of variables, we produced a best-fitting model of vocabulary difficulty consisting of six variables (R2 = .37). The fact that many variables significantly contributed to the regression model and that a large …

Implementing Mental Contrasting To Improve English Language Learner Social Networks, Hannah Trimble Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The present study looks at how utilizing mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII), a form of self-regulation, impacts the social networks of English language learners’ in a study abroad (SA) setting. Over 100 English language learners (ELLs) form the treatment and control groups for this study. This research compares the social network measures between students who used MCII and those who did not over the course of one 14-week semester in an intensive English program in the United States. It also examines students' perception of this self-regulation strategy. Additionally, the impact of MCII on students who are in their first …

Sociocultural Identification With The United States And English Pronunciation Comprehensibility And Accent Among International Esl Students, Christinah Paige Mulder

Theses and Dissertations

Sociocultural identity is defined for this study as the element of identity affixed to a social or cultural group. Previous research on sociocultural identity has recognized the need for further study of its effect on second language performance, particularly pronunciation. Previous studies have found contradictory results when studying the relationships between sociocultural identity and various measures of second language pronunciation. This thesis takes a quantitative correlational approach to the study of sociocultural identification with the United States and English pronunciation comprehensibility and accent in a group of 68 international students learning English in the United States. Participants completed a survey …

The Effects Of Repeated Reading On The Fluency Of Intermediate-Level English-As-A-Second-Language Learners: An Eye-Tracking Study, Krista Carlene Rich

Theses and Dissertations

Most would agree that reading fluency is a concern of every L2 teacher. Repeated reading (RR) positively affects fluency development, supported by much research with L1 children. However, relatively little focus has been given to L2 RR. Most research on RR in L2 settings has focused on audio-assisted RR, used insufficient data collection methods prone to human error, and taken place in an EFL setting. In our experiment, we used eye–tracking as a direct mode of measurement of the effects that RR has on early and late reading measures. In this study, 30 intermediate-level English language learners studying in an …

Ideophone-Gesture Composites: Depictive Type, Sensory Class, And Modality, Janis B. Nuckolls, Alexander Rice, Diana Sun, Sarah Hatton, Tod Swanson

Faculty Publications

Ideophones are a class of marked words that are often accompanied by gestures to depict sensory perceptions. Our paper seeks to clarify the interrelations between ideophones and the language-gesture complex through an analysis of a traditional flood story told by 5 different speakers of the Pastaza Quichua dialect spoken in Amazonian Ecuador. Using the typology of depictive gestures outlined by Streeck, we will determine whether there is any significant covariation between depictive gesture type, sensory class, whether visual, auditory, or haptic (involving touch), and a modality distinction we’ve recently identified between speaker internal and speaker external perspective.

Reconciling Perception With Production In Southern Speech, Joseph A. Stanley, Rachel M. Olsen, Michael L. Olsen, Lisa Lipani, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

• Weakening of canonical /aɪ ɔɪ aʊ/ occurs in Southern speech (Thomas 2003)
• /ai/ weakening
• Most prevalent • Triggering feature of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006) • /ɔɪ/ weakening • Most prevalent amongst African Americans, and older European Americans in the South • For everyone before laterals (Thomas 2008) • /aʊ/ weakening • Widespread in European American Southern English (Thomas 2008)

Variation In Interrogative Abverbials: Cuán, Qué Tan, Cómo De, And Lo+ Adj./Adv.+ Que, David E. Eddington

Faculty Publications

Cuán, qué tan, and cómo de are used to modify adverbs and adjectives in interrogatives. They are also used in embedded clauses along with lo+adj./adv.+que. Instances of these expressions were extracted from the Corpus del Español. In interrogatives, qué tan was the most frequent. The idea that cuán is archaic or limited to literary usage is not supported by these data. Cómo de is extremely infrequent except in Peninsular Spanish. In embedded clauses the frequency of these expressions appear in this order of frequency: lo+adj./adv.+que > qué tan > cuán > cómo de. In an experiment, speakers from Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, …

Designing And Developing An Online Self-Regulated Learning Course, Grant Eckstein, Mariah Krauel-Nix, Norman W. Evans, Benjamin L. Mcmurry

Faculty Publications

The concept of self-regulated learning has been a prominent topic in education and has been researched and applied to various educational fields. In the field of TESOL, self-regulation has been categorized into dimensions and linked with possible application tools to help ESL/EFL students better apply and develop related skills (Andrade and Evans 2013, 2015). Although these applications have seen some success, the administration of one intensive English program felt that its center's self-regulated learning program was ineffective for teachers and students. Therefore, curriculum designers evaluated the center's program, compiled data, and formed design specifications for an improved program. Their specifications …

Pain Or Gain? How Business Communication Students Perceive The Outlining Process, Matt Baker

Faculty Publications

This study investigates how students perceive the outlining process. Students in two business communication sections completed a survey regarding outlining perceptions and reasons for outlining or not. Using qualitative content analysis and qualitative coding, the researcher and an independent coder analyzed 34 students’ responses regarding outlining process, use, and reasons for outlining or not. Results indicate that students perceive outlining as more useful if their outlining process includes both organization and content exploration and less useful if it excludes organization or content exploration. Notable reasons for not outlining include concern for outlining time and difficulty generating content for the outline.

Vowel Dynamics Of The Elsewhere Shift: A Sociophonetic Analysis Of The English In Cowlitz County, Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

The Elsewhere Shift is in Washington (and has been for a while).

In Cowlitz County, the Elsewhere Shift is a pull chain, beginning with the (near) merger of LOT and THOUGHT, ultimately triggered and aided by:

• major events and their subsequent demographic shifts
• place reorientation from inward to outward

It didn’t (straightforwardly) spread from California or Canada

• possibly independently developed
• possibly from the same source as California and Canada
• its spread northward helped though

Methodologically, GAMMs illuminated variation and change in trajectories in the Elsewhere Shift.

Increasing English Learners’ Positive Emotional Response To Learning Through Dance, Grant Eckstein, Elizabeth Hanks

Faculty Publications

This study investigates dance as an English Second Language (ESL) curriculum enhancement. The curriculum utilizes kinesthetic learning, which is a method seldom incorporated in formal academic classrooms (Pourhosein Gilakjani, 2011) despite evidence suggesting that it benefits all students, including those without kinesthetic learning preferences (Schumann, 1997). Supporters believe that the benefits of incorporating movement in the classroom include increased student enjoyment, motivation, and confidence in learning. However, these beliefs are merely anecdotal at present. This study analyzes quantitative questionnaires and qualitative feedback from 26 students who participated in a 4-week long Dance ESL curriculum to determine whether dance-based learning can …

Verbs In Egyptian Arabic: A Case For Register Variation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael G. White

Faculty Publications

The limited availability of Egyptian Arabic (EA) corpus resources, especially speech corpora, has left open opportunity for research into such dialect phenomena as register. In this paper we introduce a new two-millionword EA corpus, CALM. We perform a register analysis on EA between two subcorpora of CALM (i.e. Movies and Blogs), showing several features that vary between the two. A discussion follows about how annotation was carried out automatically, how it was handcorrected, and what the prospects are for carrying out similar studies using CALM.

Investigating The Use Of The Actfl Can-Do Statements In A Self-Assessment For Student Placement In An Intensive English Program, Maria M. Summers, Troy L. Cox, Benjamin L. Mcmurry, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

In this study, the authors use a validation framework to evaluate the usefulness of a self-assessment instrument based on the ACTFL Can-Do Statements for student placement in an Intensive English Program. The authors evaluated (a) the design of the instrument by investigating how well the intended item difficulties aligned with the actual item difficulties (ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines) and how well the scale functioned; (b) the assessment instrument itself through evaluating how reliably it distinguished between students with different levels of self-perception, and (c) the interpretation of scores that examined how well the results could be used as a proxy measure …

Real Time Vowel Shifts In Georgia English, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Lab recordings

• 20 UGA undergraduate students (10 female, born 1994–1998)
• Read 300 sentences from COCA.
• ~30 minutes each, 12.5 hours total
• Recorded in 2017 • 24,325 tokens

Is it inappropriate to say the SVS is “receding”?

• What are they reverting back to? 1850s English?

Better interpretation: Young Georgians are adopting the Elsewhere Shift

• The low back merger is (nearly) complete.
• The front lax vowels have retracted.

How has Georgia English changed since the 1890s? All vowels have changed.

What is the trajectory of that change? In the direction of the Elsewhere Shift.

Social Factors In Southern Us Speech: Acoustic Analysis Of A Large-Scale Legacy Corpus, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

Conclusions

Vowels’ acoustics vary by race, sex and age:

• European American speakers have greater /eɪ ɛ/ swapping than African Americans, supporting Thomas’ (2007) characterization of the African American Vowel Shift
• Women have a more diphthongal realization of front /ɛ æ/ than men

Active divergence of Southern speech from other varieties:

• In this historical dataset, younger speakers lead Southern shifting: they have more “swapping” of /i ɪ/and /eɪ ɛ/, more back-vowel fronting, and more dynamic /æ/ and /ɔ/ vowels
• Older speakers are more conservative both in vowels’ relative positioning, and their dynamics

/eɪ ɛ/ are the nexus of shifting in DASS …

Examination Of Manner Of Motion Sound Symbolism For English Nonce Verbs, Janis B. Nuckolls, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

This paper offers cross-experimental verification of a previous study that found that English speakers considered velars, palatals, glides, and high vowels to be sound-symbolic of light and jerky movements. Heavy and smooth movements, by contrast, were associated with affricates, glottals, laterals, and non-high vowels. The present study sought to evaluate these findings through a novel experiment with English speaking subjects, who were asked to choose appropriate sound-symbolically constructed nonce verbs for sentences describing light, heavy, smooth, or jerky manners of motion. Our results support many of Saji et al.’s findings and also offer original insights. We find complex interactions between …

Getting Your Business Communication Research Funded, Jacob D. Rawlins, Sara Doan, Jacqueline Ann Mayfield, Milton Mayfield, Gail Fann Thomas, Yunxia Zhu

Faculty Publications

Conducting original research in the discipline of business communication can be expensive. Travel to research locations, specialized software, tokens of appreciation for study participants, support staff, and transcription services can add up quickly. The C. R. Anderson Research Fund (CRARF) was established to promote excellent research on business communication topics by providing grants to members of the Association for Business Communication. In this presentation, members of the C. R. Anderson Research Fund Committee will introduce the fund and provide specific instructions and feedback on individual proposals in breakout rooms. The goal of this presentation is to help each attendee learn …

Are Beg And Bag-Raising Distinct? Regional Patterns In Prevelar Raising In North American English, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Conditioned raising of TRAP and DRESS before /g/.

BAG (~84 lexemes*)

flag, magnet, rag, flag, coagulate, antagonist, snag, tag, fragment, jagged, lag, shaggy, brag, scraggy, wag, stagnant, nag, gag, wagon, drag, dragon, agony, sag, zigzag, aggregate, scallywag, magnificent, haggle, octagonal, straggle, pragmatic, haggard, Pythagorean, Baghdad, aggravate…

BEG (~60 lexemes*) Regulate, leg, negative, egg, megaphone, pregnant, negligent, segregate, Greg, peg, segment, renege, tegument, keg, regnant, legate, stegosaur, interregnum, dregs, Megan, segue, JPEG, legacy, nutmeg, regolith, Regulus, omega, oregano, integrity, allegro, Pegasus, eglantine, telegraphy…

VAGUE (~16 lexemes*) bagel, fragrant, flagrant, plague, vague, vagrant, rutabaga, bodega, Prego, the Hague, Copenhagen, Reagen, San Diego, …

Reconciling Perception With Production In Southern Speech, Rachel M. Olsen, Joseph A. Stanley, Michael L. Olsen, Lisa Lipani, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

Research question: How does perception compare to production in southern speech in Linguistic Atlas data?

Hypothesis: We expect impressionistic glide weakening to correlate with less dynamic vowels.

Acoustic and perceptual data also tell different stories.

Perceptual data suggest:

• Social factors are not significant
• Pre-rhotic glides are the most weakened

Production data suggest:

• Ethnicity is significant
• Pre-lateral glides are the most weakened

As percentage of monophthongal perception goes up, Trajectory Length goes down, as expected, but the correlation is VERY weak.

Trajectory Length is not necessarily reflective of impressionistic transcriptions of glides in DASS.

The acoustic correlates to perception are not …

Expectations And Challenges Of Non-Native University Writers At The Outset Of Discipline-Specific Study, K. James Hartshorn, Norman W. Evans

Faculty Publications

Little is known about how best to prepare non-native students matriculated at universities in the United States to succeed in discipline-specific writing. Whilesome studies have suggested differences in the types and volumes of writing across disciplines, such studies have compared very few disciplines simultaneously and have not always examined the disciplines most commonly studied by international students. Thus, this study seeks to fill an important gap in the literature by examining the perspectives of university professors regarding their expectations and purposes for student writing as well as their observations about the greatest writing challenges their students face within five of …

Verbs In Egyptian Arabic: A Case For Register Variation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael G. White

Faculty Publications

The limited availability of Egyptian Arabic (EA) corpus resources, especially speech corpora, has left open opportunity for research into such dialect phenomena as register. In this paper we introduce a new two-millionword EA corpus, CALM. We perform a register analysis on EA between two subcorpora of CALM (i.e. Movies and Blogs), showing several features that vary between the two. A discussion follows about how annotation was carried out automatically, how it was handcorrected, and what the prospects are for carrying out similar studies using CALM.

Extended Abstract: Comparison Of Peer And Instructor Qualitative Feedback On Presentations, Matthew J. Baker, William H. Baker

Faculty Publications

New presentation-feedback technologies enable peers and instructors to provide real-time qualitative feedback on oral presentations. Previous research suggests that summative quantitative ratings of peers and instructors tend to be moderately reliable, but no research exists on how substantive qualitative ratings compare. Analyzing the substantive qualitative feedback from 10 students and 10 instructors on two professional presentations, this study analyzes differences in the message- and messenger-related comments of peers and instructors. Findings suggest that instructors provide proportionally more messenger-related feedback.

Using Case-Method Pedagogy To Facilitate Audience Awareness, Vincent D. Robles

Faculty Publications

Introduction: Technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors value audience awareness, using peer- and client-based projects to facilitate it. We explore how students’ audience awareness is facilitated by the case method, which presents students with a professional communication task within a workplace scenario.

Situating the case: Case-method research suggests including a detailed audience and situation, multiple genres, and multimedia. Few studies have explored how case materials facilitate students’ audience awareness.

About the case: A 12-week case that was consistent with case-method research asked students to respond to an engineering firm’s internal problem with a proposal and report. How the case was …

The Effects Of Teacher Background On How Teachers Assess Native-Like And Nonnative-Like Grammar Errors: An Eye-Tracking Study, Wesley Makoto Schramm

Theses and Dissertations

Studies have shown that composition and L2 writing teachers give different scores (Golombek, Weigle, Boldt, & Valsecchi, 2003) and focus on different features (Brown, 1991) when assessing student writing, which is assumed to be due to the differences in their background and training (Santos, 1992; Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995). Error gravity is thought to be one reason why composition and L2 writing teachers give different scores (Rifkin & Roberts, 1995). Common methods for examining error gravity were to analyze scores and responses given by the raters and to have raters reflect on the rating process and analyze their responses. Only …

The Cognitive Effects Of Late Bilingualism On Executive Functions: Lifelong Benefits, Rachel Casper

Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology

Late bilinguals, those who learn a language past the critical period, are often thought to not receive much benefits from their language learning in comparison to their early bilingual counterparts. A large of body of recent research suggests otherwise. Late bilinguals receive the same cognitive benefits as early bilinguals; these benefits are in higher levels of executive functions, specifically in inhibitory control and attentional switching. Higher levels of executive functions assist learners in improving their mental processing and cognitive health over the course of their lifetime. Aging bilinguals have greater cognitive health due to more white and gray matter density. …

Second Language Semantic Retrieval In The Bilingual Mind: The Case Of Korean-English Expert Bilinguals, Janice Si-Man Lam

Theses and Dissertations

The present study aims to explore the relationship between proficiency level and semantic retrieval in the second language. A group of Korean bilinguals who speak English with high proficiency performed semantic relatedness judgement tasks of two hundred English word pairs. Unbeknownst to the participants, half of the words in both the related and the unrelated categories contained a "hidden prime"—a common first syllable shared by the two words, if translated into Korean. Each participant's event-related potential (ERP) was recorded while reading the words. While a former study by Thierry and Wu (2007) found that Chinese-English bilinguals were affected by the …

Approaching Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition With Usage, James Longstaff, Deryle Lonsdale

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project is to improve Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) by distinguishing between different dialects with the use of machine learning. Machine learning is the teaching of computers to recognize and distinguish between categories by themselves. Machine learning works off of statistical and mathematical algorithms implemented with computer programming.

How Teachers Grade Native And Non-Native Writing: Exposing Biases And Grading Discrepancies, Jenna Snyder, Dr. Grant Eckstein

Journal of Undergraduate Research

With Dr. Grant Eckstein leading our research team, we gathered TESOL writing teachers together to start our data collection. Using an eye-tracker, we monitored the different grading tendencies of 10 different writing teachers. Using this data, we made important observations and applications to writing teachers who teach mixed classrooms of both native English speakers and non-native English speakers.

English As A Second Language Speakers’ Ability To Replicate Native Speaker Speech Forms When Engaged In Imitative Interaction, Ariana Avila, Dr. Mark Tanner

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this study was to gather acoustic data aimed at empirically assessing the degree to which non-native English speakers can approximate the linguistic features of native speech when engaged in imitative interaction. The focus of my study was to investigate the degree to which ESL learners living in an English speaking environment can produce linguistic features (variation in intonation, appropriate word and sentence stress, and appropriate use of pausing to delineate meaning units in discourse) in their speech similar to those produced by native English speakers when the ESL learner is trying to imitate what a native speaker …