Linguistics Commons^™

The Relationship Between Reported Out-Of-Class English Use And Proficiency Gains In English, Denisa Krizanova Cundick

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the relationship of out-of-class English use and proficiency gains. It also explored the relationship of gender, proficiency level and native language and the possible effect of these demographics on out-of-class English use and language gains in English. Though some studies have shown that those who spend more out-of-class time using the target language have higher language gain (Seliger, 1977), other studies have not found this to be true (Day, 1985; Freed 1990; Spada, 1986). Some reasons for the discrepancy in findings may be differences in the length of the time data is collected, samples of study participants …

A Family Literacy Curriculum For Community Esl Courses, George William Clair Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

This project describes the piloting of a family literacy curriculum developed for use in a community ESL course. The purpose of this curriculum was to teach family-literacy-oriented English to students in the community ESL courses that are part of Brigham Young University's TESOL Teacher Training Course (TTTC) held at the University Parkway Center on BYU's campus. Students in BYU's TESOL Graduate Certificate program are required to complete a one-semester teaching practicum in the TTTC program. This program regularly offers English courses that enroll approximately 100 ESL students from the local community who are non-native speakers of English. These ESL students …

An Evaluation Of Brigham Young University's Local Tesol Internship Program, Laura Kathleen Steeby

Theses and Dissertations

An evaluation of BYU's Local TESOL Minor Internship program shows the strengths and weaknesses of this academic internship program. Students are required to complete 150 hours of TESOL-related work outside of their courses. The interns volunteer in different English-teaching programs in the area. Internship hours include the time in the classroom, preparation, materials development, as well as the time in the Linguistics 496R course. The interns are required to have most of their minor classes finished before they complete their internship so that their internship can be a capstone to and an application of what they have learned thus far. …

A Correlation Of Pronunciation Learning Strategies With Spontaneous English Pronunciation Of Adult Esl Learners, Grant Taylor Eckstein

Theses and Dissertations

In the last thirty years, language learning strategies have been used in the field of English as a Second Language (ESL) to help learners autonomously improve their English listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, language learning strategies have not been applied to pronunciation learning in a large scale manner. This study attempted to bridge this gap by investigating the usage of pronunciation learning strategies among adult ESL learners. A strategic pronunciation learning scale (SPLS) was administered to 183 adult ESL learners in an Intensive English Program. Their scores on the SPLS were compared with their scores of spontaneous pronunciation on …

A Web-Based Tool For Oral Practice And Assessment Of Grammatical Structures, Heather Colleen Torrie

Theses and Dissertations

The grammar course objectives at Brigham Young University's English Language Center (ELC) are a list of grammar structures for each level that students are expected to be able to master. These objectives currently are only measured by pencil-paper grammar tests, providing information regarding receptive grammar ability only. Therefore, there is a need for an oral grammar assessment to measure productive grammar ability, providing diagnostic and achievement information about the specific grammar objectives. This project is a web-based oral grammar assessment tool that enables teachers to assess students' mastery of the structures covered in the ELC grammar classes. The core of …

The Development Of A Literacy Curriculum For Adult Liberian Refugees, Kristen Marie Kohler

Theses and Dissertations

From 2003 to 2006, Tucson, Arizona became the new home of many Liberian refugees. Because of civil war in their homeland and ensuing years spent in refugee camps, these refugees had not had many opportunities for literacy development. Tucson had several literacy and ESL programs available; however, none of these programs was meeting the Liberians' particular needs. For my project, I designed and implemented a literacy curriculum for the Liberian refugees in Tucson. In preparation for developing my curriculum, I not only took coursework but also thoroughly reviewed the literature on literacy learning and instruction for first language learners, second …

Intrasentential Vs. Intersentential Code Switching In Early And Late Bilinguals, Kelly Ann Hill Zirker

Theses and Dissertations

Significant research has been done regarding the influence of age of acquisition (i.e., the age at which one is exposed to a second language (L2)) on L2 learning (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1989; Bialystock & Hakuta, 1999). Some researchers have shown that bilinguals who have learned their second language early in life may differ in their fluency from bilinguals who learned their second language later in life (White & Genesee, 1996; Flege, 1999). Specifically, studies have suggested that bilinguals who have not acquired their L2 by puberty will never acquire native-like proficiency (Lenneberg, 1967); however, others claim that there is …

From Alps To Alpnet (And Beyond), Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Nestled in the Wasatch range of the Rocky Mountains in northern Utah lies scenic Utah Valley. Home to Brigham Young University (BYU) and a host of foreign-speaking residents, the setting also served as a hotbed throughout the 1980's for the machine translation (MT) industry. To fully appreciate this narrative the chronologically prior story of BYU's Translation Sciences Institute (TSI)—which has not yet been written— would need to be consulted. When the Church1 withdrew funding for the project, the TSI team disbanded. Some former participants remained at BYU, others left the university to work for industrial corporations, and the majority remained …

Structural Ambiguity Collecting As A Tool For Teaching Grammar, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

Structural ambiguities can be a valuable resource for grammar students. Because structural ambiguities present more than one possible grammatical interpretation, authentic examples of such ambiguities lend themselves well to meaningful grammatical discussions. One particularly useful way for involving students in the recognition and analysis of structural ambiguities is to assign them to find designated ambiguity types. This paper will consider some benefits of structural ambiguity study and will provide some ideas and suggestions related to a specific type of assignment that involves students in collecting structural ambiguities.

Supporting Technology Instruction Through Peer Tutoring, Discussion Boards And Electronic Journals, Dan Dewey, Anne E. Cannon

Faculty Publications

Given the diverse backgrounds and technical expertise that language teachers can possess, it is challenging for technology instructors to meet the needs of individuals during workshops or classes. In this study, we explored the effectiveness of three interventions implemented to help a technology instructor better meet the needs of individuals in his class: peer tutoring, asynchronous discussion board and electronic journal entries. Through the three interventions, the instructor's role changed from being the provider of solutions to every problem (firefighter) to being an available coach, able to focus his attention on matters that required it most. The instructor became well …

Active Learning For Part-Of-Speech Tagging: Accelerating Corpus Annotation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Eric K. Ringger, Peter J. Mcclanahan, Robbie A. Haertel, George Busby, Marc A. Carmen, James Carroll, Kevin Seppi

Faculty Publications

In the construction of a part-of-speech annotated corpus, we are constrained by a fixed budget. A fully annotated corpus is required, but we can afford to label only a subset. We train a Maximum Entropy Markov Model tagger from a labeled subset and automatically tag the remainder. This paper addresses the question of where to focus our manual tagging efforts in order to deliver an annotation of highest quality. In this context, we find that active learning is always helpful. We focus on Query by Uncertainty (QBU) and Query by Committee (QBC) and report on experiments with several baselines and …

A Cognitive Robotics Approach To Comprehending Human Language And Behaviors, Deryle W. Lonsdale, D. Paul Benjamin, Damian Lyons

Faculty Publications

The ADAPT project is a collaboration of researchers in linguistics, robotics and artificial intelligence at three universities. We are building a complete robotic cognitive architecture for a mobile robot designed to interact with humans in a range of environments, and which uses natural language and models human behavior. This paper concentrates on the HRI aspects of ADAPT, and especially on how ADAPT models and interacts with humans.

Generating Ontologies Via Language Components And Ontology Reuse, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Yihong Ding, David W. Embley, Martin Hepp, Li Xu

Faculty Publications

Realizing the Semantic Web involves creating ontologies, a tedious and costly challenge. Reuse can reduce the cost of ontology engineering. Semantic Web ontologies can provide useful input for ontology reuse. However, the automated reuse of such ontologies remains underexplored. This paper presents a generic architecture for automated ontology reuse. With our implementation of this architecture, we show the practicality of automating ontology generation through ontology reuse. We experimented with a large generic ontology as a basis for automatically generating domain ontologies that fit the scope of sample natural-language web pages. The results were encouraging, resulting in five lessons pertinent to …

Analogical Modeling: An Update, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Analogical modeling is a supervised exemplar-based approach that has been widely applied to predict linguistic behavior. The paradigm has been well documented in the linguistics and cognition literature, but is less well known to the machine learning community. This paper sets out some of the basics of the approach, including a simplified example of the fundamental algorithm’s operation. It then surveys some of the recent analogical modeling language applications, and sketches how the computational system has been enhanced lately to offer users increased flexibility and processing power. Some comparisons and contrasts are drawn between analogical modeling and other language modeling …

Turning Away, Jacob D. Rawlins

Faculty Publications

From the time of Joseph Smith’s first vision, the concepts of general apostasy and divine restoration have been central to the Latter-day Saint movement. In the Prophet’s account of his vision, he records that after he asked which church he should join, “I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines …

Holistic Scoring Of Esl Essays Using Linguistic Maturity Attributes, Ronald Millett

Theses and Dissertations

Automated scoring of essays has been a research topic for some time in computational linguistics studies. Only recently have the particular challenges of automatic holistic scoring of ESL essays with their high grammatical, spelling and other error rates been a topic of research. This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of using statistical measures of linguistic maturity to predict holistic scores for ESL essays using several techniques. Selected linguistic attributes include parts of speech, part-of-speech patterns, vocabulary density, and sentence and essay lengths. Using customized algorithms based on multivariable regression analysis as well as memory-based machine learning, holistic scores were predicted on …

Crossing Dependencies In Persian, Jonathan M. Dehdari

Theses and Dissertations

Languages occasionally have syntactic constructions that are difficult, if not impossible, to describe using a context-free grammar. One such construction is a crossing dependency. Crossing dependencies have been well studied for Dutch and Swiss German (Huybregts, 1976; Shieber, 1985), and recently for Tagalog (Maclachlan and Rambow, 2003). In this paper I propose that Persian exhibits crossing dependencies. In this SOV language, a light verb construction in the future tense becomes interrupted by a future auxiliary verb, which agrees with its subject in person and number. The future auxiliary also splits passive constructions in a similar manner. These forms present interesting …

Teaching Writing Through Peer Revising And Reviewing, Kristi Lundstrom

Theses and Dissertations

Although peer review, in which students evaluate each others' papers, has been shown to be beneficial in many writing classrooms, the benefits of peer review to the reviewer, or the student giving the feedback, has not been thoroughly investigated in the field of second language (L2) writing. The purpose of this study is to determine which is more beneficial to improving student writing: receiving or giving peer feedback. The study was conducted at the English Language Center (ELC) at Brigham Young University (BYU). Ninety-one students in nine writing classes at two different proficiency levels, high beginning and high intermediate, participated …

An English For Specific Purposes Curriculum To Prepare English Learners To Become Nursing Assistants, Abel Javier Romo

Theses and Dissertations

This project details the designing and implementation of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Curriculum to prepare English learners to become Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA) at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (UVRMC) in Provo, Utah. UVRMC, which is owned by Intermountain Health Care (IHC), employs a group of about 40 non-native speakers of English. They work as housekeepers and have interest in learning English and consequently acquiring new skills they could use in better jobs to improve the quality of their lives. UVRMC would like these employees to obtain additional education in order to provide them with better employment opportunities. …

Learning In Minimalism-Based Language Modeling, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

The natural language version of the Soar cognitive modeling system (Newell, 1990) has enabled a number of language modeling applications from on-line parsing behavior (Lewis, 1993) to simultaneous interpretation (Lonsdale, 1997, 1998) to robotic control (Benjamin, Lonsdale, & Lyons, 2004). The system supports an integrated approach to incremental comprehension and generation. Learning mechanisms account for processes in language performance from deliberate, explicit reasoning to automatic, recognitional expertise.

Syntactic processing in prior versions of the system followed the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax.

Validating The Rating Process Of An English As A Second Language Writing Portfolio Exam, Robb Mark Mccollum

Theses and Dissertations

A validity study can be used to investigate the effectiveness of an exam and reveal both its strengths and weaknesses. This study concerns an investigation of the writing portfolio Level Achievement Test (LAT) at the English Language Center (ELC) of Brigham Young University (BYU). The writing portfolios of 251 students at five proficiency levels were rated by 11 raters. Writing portfolios consisted of two coursework essays, a self-reflection assignment, and a 30-minute timed essay. Quantitative methods included an analysis with Many-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM) software, called FACETS, which looked for anomalies in levels, classes, examinees, raters, writing criteria, and the …

Update On Soar-Based Language Processing, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Discourse/robotic dialogue

Running on Soar 8.5.2

Having trouble getting to 8.6.1 Fresh start with 8.6.2...

A Grammatical Description Of The Early Classic Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Daniel A. Law

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to describe the grammatical system of Classical Ch'olti', the language of the Classic Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, as attested in inscriptions of the Early Classic (approximately AD 200-600). Around 300 Lowland Maya Hieroglyphic inscriptions have been dated to the Early Classic or before, nearly one third of these remain unpublished. Previous work on the monumental inscriptions of the Early Classic (Mathews 1985; Proskouriakoff 1950) has examined Early Classic monuments primarily as works of art. Mora-Marin (2001) examined the language of inscriptions found on early portable texts, a small subset of the corpus here examined. In …

A Computer-Based Course To Teach Speech Acts: Prototype For The Technology Assisted Language Learning Program, Laura Morales Dorlando

Theses and Dissertations

The following report discusses the design and formative evaluation of a prototype for a computer-based course to teach speech acts as part of the Technology Assisted Language Learning (TALL) program. The report includes a literature review on speech acts and current methods and strategies for language teaching and instructional design. Next, there is a description of the lessons and the design process, as well as a summary of the formative evaluation. Following is the prototype of the lesson on apologies. The report concludes with a discussion of the project's limitations and suggestions for future research.

Xnl-Soar, Incremental Parsing, And The Minimalist Program, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Lareina Hingson, Jamison Cooper-Leavitt, David W. Casbeer, Rebecca Madsen

Faculty Publications

Minimalist Principles (Chomsky 1995)

Hierarchy of Projections (Adger 2003)

Features play a central role

NP, VP symmetry including shells

Learning In Minimalism-Based Language Modeling, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

The natural language version of the Soar cognitive modeling system (Newell, 1990) has enabled a number of language modeling applications from on-line parsing behavior (Lewis, 1993) to simultaneous interpretation (Lonsdale, 1997, 1998) to robotic control (Benjamin, Lonsdale, & Lyons, 2004). The system supports an integrated approach to incremental comprehension and generation. Learning mechanisms account for processes in language performance from deliberate, explicit reasoning to automatic, recognitional expertise.

Syntactic processing in prior versions of the system followed the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax.

English Adjective Comparison And Analogy, Dirk Elzinga

Faculty Publications

There are two strategies for forming the comparative degree of adjectives in English; a synthetic strategy which suffixes -er to the adjective stem, and an analytical strategy which uses more in composition with the adjective. Many analyses of the choice between analytical and synthetic comparison have been proposed, but all face difficulties. In this paper I show that analogy can not only account for the distribution of analytical and synthetic comparison as well as traditional rule-based approaches, but can also provide a psychologically plausible model for the choice which speakers make.

A Computational Analysis Of Navajo Verb Stems, David Eddington, Jordan Lachler

Faculty Publications

One of the principal goals of linguistics is to find, classify, and describe relationships between words. Many formal mechanisms such as rules and constraints have been devised in order to show systematic relationships. Inflectional paradigms are a crucial component of a linguistic analysis that has applications for pedagogical grammars. For example, over the past 20 years there have been numerous Navajo textbooks produced that are aimed at beginning learners of the language. These include works such as Diné Bizaad Bóhoo'aah (Navajo Language Institute 1986), Diné Bizaad: Speak, Read, Write Navajo (Goossen 1995), and The Navajo Verb: A Grammar for Students …

Negative Prestige And Sound Change: A Sociolinguistic Study Of The Assibilation Of /Χ/ In Piauí Portuguese, David Eddington, Michael Taylor

Faculty Publications

In standard Brazilian Portuguese (BP), when the phoneme /χ/ appears post-vocalically in coda position it is realized with a variety of allophones [r, h, x, χ, ʁ, ʁ̥, ɣ] (Parkinson 1988). On the surface there appears to be free variation between the pronunciations although the variation is affected by regional and social factors (Netto 2001). Our study focuses on the Brazilian Portuguese of Piripiri (BPP), which is spoken in a small town in the rural state of Piauí in the northeast part of the country. Perhaps the most salient regional characteristic of BPP is that when /χ/ appears in coda …

Paradigm Uniformity And Analogy: The Capitalistic Versus Militaristic Debate, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

In American English, /t/ in capitalistic is generally flapped while in militaristic it is not due to the influence of capi[ɾ]al and mili[tʰ]ary. This is called Paradigm Uniformity or PU (Steriade, 2000). Riehl (2003) presents evidence to refute PU which when reanalyzed supports PU. PU is thought to work in tandem with a rule of allophonic distribution, the nature of which is debated. An approach is suggested that eliminates the need for the rule versus PU dichotomy; allophonic distribution is carried out by analogy to stored items in the mental lexicon. Therefore, the influence of the pronunciation of capital …