Linguistics Commons^™

Order Of Operations In Sociophonetic Data Analysis, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

It’s difficult to say objectively whether a vowel is shifted:

• Relationship to other vowels (which may also be shifting)
• Benchmarks don’t work because of normalization and dialect differences

Compare to ANAE Benchmarks:

More processing involved:

• remove stopwords
• remove outliers
• remove diphthongs
• remove presonorants
• isolating midpoints
• specific normalization procedure
• remove unstressed vowels

Seven steps = 5040 combinations

What Can Vowel Formant Trajectories Tell Us About Language Change?, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Recent Developments

Easier to extract trajectory data:

• FAVE is good, but only returns 5 points, English-only
• Fast Track has more gradience, cleaner, any language.

Easier to analyze trajectory data:

• Generalized additive mixed effects models
• "Difference smooths” can tells us where along the trajectory we see statistical significance between two curves.

We can analyze the trajectories themselves , rather than properties about them.

Overview

Vowel shifts may involve changes in trajectory:

• Data: sociolinguistic interviews in Cowlitz County
• Phenomenon: The “Elsewhere Shift”

Vowel shift might night involve changes in trajectory:

• Data: Legacy linguistic atlas interviews in the South
• Phenomenon: Southern Vowel Shift …

Beyond Midpoints: Vowel Dynamics Of The Low-Back-Merger Shift, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Conclusions

Summary:

• Here, as the vowels lowered/retracted, their trajectories changed too.
• This is not always the case! (cf. Stanley et al. forthcoming)
• Not an artifact of modeling! Each cohort had independent model fits.

Take-away:

• There is more to a vowel shift than its midpoints.
• More work needed on vowel trajectories to better describe change.

Sociolinguistics of vowel formant trajectories?

• What kind of sociolinguistic meanings are associated with trajectories?
• Yes, surrounding consonants affect trajectories
• They affect midpoints too but they still carry sociolinguistic meaning.
• Are we comfortable assuming trajectories are 100% phonetic?
• Are these trajectory differences perceptible?
• Stay tuned for experimental …

An Editing Process For Blind Or Visually Impaired Editors, Matt Baker, E.M. Nightingale, Suzy Bills

Faculty Publications

In the US, hundreds of thousands of individuals with visual disabilities work in occupations that typically entail editing text. Editing technologies for blind or visually impaired people have been analyzed by researchers for usability, accessibility, and feasibility. However, a tutorial is needed to provide blind or visually impaired workers with information on how to use these technologies. Key concepts: Technologies that blind or visually impaired individuals can use for editing text present challenges. Such challenges include the lack of usability in word processors’ text-editing features, navigational and sense-making issues with screen readers, limited text displayed by refreshable braille displays, and …

The Effect Of Prompt Accent On Elicited Imitation Assessments In English As A Second Language, Jacob G. Barrows, Troy L. Cox

Faculty Publications

Elicited imitation (EI) assessments have been shown to discriminate well between speakers across proficiency levels, but little has been reported on the effect L2 accent has on test-takers’ ability to understand and process the test items they hear. Furthermore, no study has investigated the effect of accent on test-taker perceptions of EI tests. This study examined the relationships among accent, accent familiarity, EI test item difficulty and test scores. To investigate, self-reports of students’ exposure to different varieties of English were obtained from a pre-assessment survey. An EI test (63 items) was then administered in which English language learners (n …

Mother Goose As A Resource In Teaching Historical Linguistics, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

Mother Goose and other nursery rhymes as authentic texts are valuable resources that can be used effectively to illustrate historical English language change. Even though these nursery rhymes contain some forms, structures, and word meanings that differ from the language of today, the texts are sufficiently recent that they are intelligible to modern audiences. This article will illustrate the relevance and usefulness of nursery rhymes in teaching about principles of language and language change, such as voicing, phonological processes, factors motivating phonological change, as well as actual changes in the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexicon of English.

Person-Marking In Máku, Chris Rogers Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

In Máku (an extinct language isolate), person marking is encoded by pronominal elements that are attached to bound pronominal roots, possessed nouns, and as subject and object argument agreement reference on verbs. However, when the contrasts between the various person-markers and their behaviors in the language are considered the system does not fit easily into the traditional analysis of three persons and two numbers. Rather, the organization of and relationships between the pronominal elements in Máku reveals a system based on the distinction of three persons (first, second and third), a two-way quantitative distinction (singular and non-singular), and a two-way …

Language Matters: Examining The Language-Related Needs And Wants Of Writers In A First-Year University Writing Course, Grant Eckstein, Dana Ferris

Faculty Publications

All writing involves complex linguistic knowledge and thoughtful decision-making. But where do students acquire the linguistic tools needed to write effectively? Many students come from diverse backgrounds and may need additional support and/or instruction in language and grammar. In order to better understand this situation, we conducted a qualitative multiple-case study to examine the experiences of 12 students in a first-year university-level composition course to understand the extent of their diverse learning backgrounds and language needs and expectations. We synthesized information from surveys, interviews, and written texts into narratives about each student’s attitudes toward language and writing and also examined …

Speech Exemplar And Evaluation Database (Seed) For Clinical Training In Articulatory Phonetics And Speech Science, Marisha Speights Atkins, Dallin J. Bailey, Suzanne E. Boyce

Faculty Publications

One challenge faced by teachers of phonetics, speech science, and clinical speech disorders courses is providing meaningful instruction that closes the theory to practice gap. One barrier to providing this type of deep learning experience is the lack of publicly available examples of speech recordings that illustrate comparisons between typical and disordered speech production across a broad range of disorder populations. Data of this type exist, but are typically collected for specific research projects under narrowly written IRB protocols that do not allow for release of even de-identified speech recordings to other investigators or teachers. As a partial corrective to …

Research In Progress: Applied Linguistics At Northern Arizona University, Usa, Brett James Hashimoto, Daniel Keller, Ekaterina Sudina, Katherine Yaw, Jesse Egbert, Luke Plonsky

Faculty Publications

Founded in 1990, the Applied Linguistics program at Northern Arizona University (NAU) represents a staple of scholarly activity and graduate training in the field. Indeed, the program, which consists of ten core faculty members and approximately 30 Ph.D. students has been and remains highly active and vibrant in terms of professional/societal involvement and, of course, research. This article highlights recent and current projects carried out by the students and faculty members in the program, divided into five focal areas: corpus linguistics, second language (L2) speech, research methods, second language acquisition (SLA), and psycholinguistics.

Understanding Diversity – Perspectives From University Departments Hosting Large Percentages Of International Students, K. James Hartshorn, Maureen Snow Andrade, Norman W. Evans, Gwyneth Gates

Faculty Publications

The international student enrollment in some university departments has grown to the point that these students are the majority. This study sought to determine the extent to which departments hosting large numbers of international English as a second language (ESL) students demonstrate awareness and planning to address these learners’ needs. Analyses were conducted in reference to a framework designed to aid institutions in meeting international ESL students’ needs. Findings indicate some awareness of students’ needs and related strategies for linguistic and cultural development. They also demonstrate that the proposed framework could foster more intentional strategies to ensure international student success.

Improving Nmt Quality Using Terminology Injection, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Duane K. Dougal

Faculty Publications

Many organizations use domain- or organization-specific words and phrases. This paper explores the use of vetted terminology as an input to neural machine translation (NMT) for improved results: ensuring that the translation of individual terms is consistent with an approved multilingual terminology collection. We discuss, implement, and evaluate a method for injecting terminology and for evaluating terminology injection. Our use of the long short-term memory (LSTM) attention mechanism prevalent in state-of-the-art NMT systems involves attention vectors for correctly identifying semantic entities and aligning the tokens that represent them, both in the source and the target languages. Appropriate terminology is then …

Chapter 7: Applied Rhetoric As Disciplinary Umbrella: Community, Connections, And Identity, Jacob D. Rawlins

Faculty Publications

: This chapter argues that many of the existing names and boundaries in use around professional communication create artificial separations among research, pedagogy, theory, and action related to the practice of rhetoric in contemporary society. Scholars working in this area teach and conduct research across a variety of disciplines, but we share a rhetorical foundation and a concern for the practical application of that theory. This combination of classical rhetoric and public action provides a way to move our work beyond the confines of the academy and actively engage in rhetorical work within the communities where we work, live, and …

Reading Academic Citations: How Professors And Graduate Students Read For Different Purposes, Grant Eckstein, Sarah Miner, Katie Watkins, Judy James, Mornie Sims, Allison Wallace Baker, Larissa Grahl

Faculty Publications

Citations provide truncated yet socially complex information about sources in academic texts which students are obliged to read, comprehend, and then ultimately produce as part of an academic discourse community. While researchers have observed a developmental process whereby students produce citations during source-based writing, little work has investigated the reading stage when students visually encounter citations. In this study, we explored academic reading behaviors by examining eye movements of 27 graduate students and 18 professors as they read 6 authentic research texts for various purposes (summary, analysis, synthesis). Results of factorial ANOVAs showed no differences between students and professors but …

Rubric Rating With Mfrm Versus Randomly Distributed Comparative Judgment: A Comparison Of Two Approaches To Second-Language Writing Assessment, Maureen E. Sims, Troy L. Cox, Grant T. Eckstein, K. James Hartshorn, Matthew P. Wilcox, Judson M. Hart

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to explore the reliability of a potentially more practical approach to direct writing assessment in the context of ESL writing. Traditional rubric rating (RR) is a common yet resource-intensive evaluation practice when performed reliably. This study compared the traditional rubric model of ESL writing assessment and many-facet Rasch modeling (MFRM) to comparative judgment (CJ), the new approach, which shows promising results in terms of reliability. We employed two groups of raters—novice and experienced—and used essays that had been previously double-rated, analyzed with MFRM, and selected with fit statistics. We compared the results of the …

Measuring Language Development Through Self-Assessment, Troy L. Cox, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

Talk to any cyclist or runner, and they can name instances when the universe seems to conspire against them with headwinds that hinder their progress. It is easy to identify and often blame external forces for causing us to fail. Conversely, we often attribute success to our own ability, being blissfully unaware of the tailwinds that assist us. This blindness to headwind/tailwind asymmetry (Davidai & Gilovich, 2016) in viewing one’s own performance is not limited solely to endurance athletes but can be found in other areas of self-assessment. Performance rarely occurs in a vacuum. There are typically external forces that …

Vowel Dynamics Of The Low Vowels In Cowlitz County, Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Q1: Does Cowlitz County participate in the Elsewhere Shift?

BOT/BOUGHT:

• Not 100% merged.
• Have been in a stable near-merger since the 1930s.
• Hypothesis: Started when area was being settled (1850s–1920s) because of the demographic shift.

/æ/ BAT:

• Slowly lowering over 4 generations (since at least the 1930s)
• Women consistently ahead of the men - change in progress for over 60 years.
• Hypothesis: Began in earnest when Longview was founded (mid 1920s), in addition to language-internal pressure.

Solving Russian Velars: Palatalization, The Lexicon And Gradient Contrast Utilization, Jeffrey R. Parker, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

The complexity of an inflection class system is the average extent to which elements in the system inhibit motivated inferences about the realization of lexemes’ paradigm cells. Research shows that systems tend to exhibit relatively low complexity in this sense. However, representations of inflectional systems tend to include only affixal and regular patterns, leaving questions about how irregular patterns and non-affixal ‘layers’ of inflectional exponence affect the complexity of a system. We address these questions by exploring four layers of inflectional exponence of Russian nouns, including irregular patterns within each layer. Our data show that the Russian noun system exhibits …

The View Of Southern Vowels From Large-Scale Data, William A. Kretzschmar Jr., Margaret E. L. Renwick, Katherine I. Kuiper, Lisa M. Lipani, Michael L. Olsen, Rachel M. Olsen, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Abstract:

We have extracted c. 2 million tokens of vowels from a rigorous sample of 63 speakers across the American South in an NSF-funded project for forced alignment and automatic formant extraction. We show how our vowel measurements across the whole region differ from national mean F1/F2 scores. We contrast men and women, and African Americans and non- African Americans, within the Southern region.

Locations, Programs, And Content Of Graduate Education In Business Communication, Stephen A. Carradini, Matt Baker, Matthew R. Sharp, Elise Davidson

Faculty Publications

This study explored locations, programs, and content of graduate education in business communication to provide guidance for prospective graduate students interested in becoming business communication faculty.

The researchers conducted a survey of business communication scholars, drawing on the backgrounds and knowledge of those who currently teach and research business communication.

Findings indicate that 93 universities offer programs supporting graduate business communication education. This number dwarfs the 12 previously documented programs. These 93 programs are rarely called “business communication.” More respondents received training in business communication practice in master’s programs than in doctoral programs, while more respondents received training in pedagogy …

Contextual Information In Social How-To Questions That Initiate Documentation, Matt Baker

Faculty Publications

This study introduces social question-and-answer (SQA) documentation to technical and professional communication scholarship. It conceptualizes SQA as interactive, user-generated documentation and describes contextual information types within social how-to questions that initiate documentation. It also explores whether contextual information associates with answers that complete the interactive documentation. Results reliably describe 15 information types based on content analysis of 3,529 contextual information types from 500 questions. Exploratory statistical analysis suggests that askers may increase answerability by including less speculative thought, more error messages, and less general situation information. To facilitate complete SQA documentation, the study calls for additional research into question content …

Systematizing The Use Of The Aspectual Distinction By Level Of Proficiency: A Case Of Spanish As A Heritage Language, Earl K. Brown, Laura Valentin-Rivera

Faculty Publications

The language of early bilingual Spanish-English speakers in the United States is often distinct from that of monolingually raised native speakers of Spanish. This study analyzes the usage of the aspectual distinction in the past tense among 23 early Spanish-English bilingual speakers and 9 monolingually raised native speakers of Mexican Spanish. The participants engaged in a role-play in order to elicit a past-tense verbal form, either preterite or imperfect, for 15 test items. The results show that as level of proficiency in Spanish increases, the level of consensus with the responses of the monolingually raised native speakers of Spanish increases. …

The Absence Of A Religiolect Among Latter-Day Saints In Southwest Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

The term religiolect was coined by Benjamin Hary (1992, xiii) to describe a variety of language used by a distinct religious community, originally within the context of the Jewish linguistic spectrum. Religion has been shown to play an important role in various aspects of language, such as Arabic loanword adoption among Telugu speakers (Salami 2010), Persian loanwords and greetings among English-speaking Bahá’is (Masumian 2015), fluency in Sanskrit (Christian 1976), language choice among Hindus in the United States (Pandharipande 2010), maintenance of Hakka in East Malaysia (Ding and Goh 2020), and prevalence of linguistic fossils in Jewish Malayalam (Gamliel 2017). “Christianese,” …

Back Vowel Distinctions And Dynamics In Southern Us English, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

We investigate low/back vowels /u, oʊ, ʊ, ɔ, ɑ/ in Southern American English (SAE).

Research on SAE has analyzed changes in position over generational time.

Most work on trajectories is limited to impressionistic coding (“loss of upgliding”) or reduces trajectories to summary statistics (vector length, rate of change).

We analyze both the position and the shape of back vowels’ formant trajectories in apparent time, using new data from the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS).

Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback Among Graduate Students: The Effects Of Feedback Timing, Grant Eckstein, Maureen Estelle Sims, Lisa Rohm

Faculty Publications

Dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF) is a pedagogical approach that offers meaningful, manageable, constant, and timely corrective feedback on student writing (Hartshorn et al., 2010). It emphasizes indirect and comprehensive written error correction on short, daily writing assignments. Numerous studies have demonstrated that its use can lead to fewer language errors among undergraduate and pre-matriculated college writers (see Kurzer, 2018). However, the benefits of DWCF among second language (L2) graduate writers and the role of feedback timing have not been well examined. We analyzed timed writing samples over a 12-week intervention from 22 L2 graduate students who either received biweekly …

Dialect And Employability: Human Resource Managers' Perceptions Of African American English, Kimberly Michelsen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis addresses the question of whether different dialects can change the probability of speakers being perceived as employable. It is one of the few that takes this question away from college campuses and directly to Human Resources Managers in the workforce. Using the Matched Guise Technique, recordings of Standard American English (SAE) and African American English (AAE) were presented to forty-two HR Managers from regions across the United States. Using a series of Likert scales, the HR Managers rated the recordings on eight characteristics of employability: four focused on professional skills and four focused on human-relation skills. The study …

Impact Of Intercultural Competence On Communicative Success In L2 Environments(With Reference To Missionaries Of The Church Ofjesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints), David Milford Lucero

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the impact of cultural competence on success in completing key missionary tasks. Qualitative survey results are supported by data from an intercultural effectiveness assessment and a Mandarin Chinese listening proficiency test to describe themes related to missionary communicative success and to explore correlations between intercultural effectiveness and listening proficiency. Missionary communicative tasks are clarified into themes:"obtaining referrals,"obtaining teaching opportunities," and"helping people make and keep commitments." Factors perceived as associating with communicative success include"feeling and communicating love" and receiving"spiritual guidance." The effect of training on intercultural competence is also described. The intercultural effectiveness subcategory of positive regard is …

Global Impact Of A Business School Degree: International Alumni Voice, K. James Hartshorn, Maureen Snow Andrade, Norman W. Evans

Faculty Publications

Business schools in English-dominant countries host significant numbers of international students. In the U.S., where few students remain in the country to work, little is known about the role of English language proficiency and employer-valued outcomes on students’ professional success. This study reports survey findings from international alumni on the development and impact of learning outcomes, particularly English proficiency. Participants felt they had acquired outcomes valued by employers and reported using English in their work. The study indicates a need for more institution-specific studies to increase knowledge of a population with a significant presence in schools of business.

An Analysis Of Esl Learner Preferences For Native Accent Retention And Reduction, K. James Hartshorn

Faculty Publications

Though most ESL learners desire a “native-like” pronunciation, researchers have observed that some may want to retain features of their L1accents as a means of maintaining identity. This raises important questions about the best ways to teach L2 pronunciation. Therefore, the aims of this study were to discover how pervasive a preference for accent retention may be and to identify possible reasons learners exhibit this preference. To accomplish this, a scale was designed to assess a preference for accent retention, and potential explanatory variables were identified. Analyses of 350 ESL learners identified varying levels of a preference for accent retention, …

L1 And L2 Reading Behaviors By Proficiency Level: An English-Portuguese Eye-Tracking Study, Larissa Grahl

Theses and Dissertations

The process of reading in a second language is an under-studied area of research on second language processing. Researchers have found similarities and differences between first- and second-language reading (Koda, 2007; Artieda, 2017; Walter, 2007), and many believe that readers’ successful reading behaviors in their L1 reflect their reading patterns in the L2 (Yamashita, 2007; Cummings, 1991; Sparks & Ganschow, 1995). Others claim that a certain threshold level of L2 language proficiency is necessary before L1 reading ability transfers to L2 reading (Clark, 1978; Cummings, 1991). Eye tracking technology has enabled researchers to investigate early and late reading measures, the …