Linguistics Commons^™

The Relation Of Linguistic Awareness Skills To Reading And Spelling In School-Age Children With And Without Autism Spectrum Disorder, Victoria Suzanne Henbest

Theses and Dissertations

Linguistic awareness is the ability to consciously consider and manipulate language. Multiple linguistic awareness skills relate to and predict the word-level reading, spelling, and reading comprehension skills of children who are developing typically and those with language impairments. However, few researchers have investigated the literacy skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and even fewer have investigated their linguistic awareness skills. This is problematic given the large number of children with ASD who are educated in the public schools and the importance of literacy skills for life success. Therefore, this dissertation aimed to begin to close the gap in …

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 …

The Southern American Belle: History, Evolution, And Perceptions In Contemporary Culture, Hannah B. Vickery

Senior Theses

This research study seeks to examine the concept of the southern belle and to provide greater insight into how the southern belle is perceived by those today as a means of describing contemporary southern womanhood and culture. Chapter 1 traces the history of the southern belle from its pre-Civil War roots, through the turmoil of the Civil War, and up through post-war Reconstruction and beyond, thereby situating the concept of the southern belle within the context of southern history. Utilizing a socio-linguistic approach, Chapter 2 explains the research methodology of this study where two group interviews were conducted and where …

The Distribution Of [ʍ]: An Acoustic Analysis Of Sociophonetic Factors Governing The Wine-Whine Merger In Southern American English, Keiko Bridwell

Theses and Dissertations

In US English, the merging of the voiceless labiovelar glide [ʍ] and its voiced counterpart [w] has been an ongoing process over the past century, originating in central port cities on the Atlantic seaboard and gradually spreading to include the bulk of the continental US. While described by many sources as still present in Southern American English, the so-called wine-whine merger shows evidence of nearing its completion as its usage becomes increasingly rare even within the Southeast, even as the segment [ʍ] is interpreted as a feature of Southern speech. Despite this fact, very little research has been conducted on …

The Interaction Of Individual Working Memory Capacity With Cognitive Linguistics-Based And Translation-Based Instructional Treatments During The Acquisition Of Polysemous L2 Spanish Spatial Prepositions, Joseph F. Letexier

Theses and Dissertations

The present study investigated three areas in SLA related to the acquisition of polysemous L2 Spanish spatial prepositions. These three areas were (1) the effect of instructional method on the acquisition of productive knowledge of polysemous L2 Spanish spatial prepositions, (2) the effect of working memory capacity on the acquisition of productive knowledge of polysemous L2 Spanish spatial prepositions, and (3) the effects resulting from the interaction of working memory capacity with instructional method on the acquisition of productive knowledge of polysemous L2 Spanish spatial prepositions. The target learners were adult L1 English speakers 18 years of age or over …

Acquisition Of The English Copula By Arabic Speaking Esl Learners: Evidence For Feature Reassembly, Jenna Steiner

Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to identify whether the acquisition of the English copula by Arabic- speaking learners of English provides evidence for a performance or representational- based account of errors. The representational theory tested in this study is the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2007) which proposes that language learners have only partial access to Universal Grammar (UG), making some language structures unacquirable for second language learners. The performance theory tested in this study is Feature Reassembly (Lardiere, 2008), which proposes that the source of errors lies with the mapping of features onto morphology rather inside the core computational component of …

Towards A Typographical Linguistics: The Semantics-Pragmatics Of Typographic Emphasis In Discourse, Jefferson Maia

Theses and Dissertations

The standard view of the effects of typographic emphasis in English is that type styles (e.g., capitals, italics) enhance memory for emphasized information to the detriment of reading speed and without contributing semantically or pragmatically meaningful information to the text. Fewer emphasis studies that have concerned themselves with reference questions offer off-line evidence that typography interacts with linguistic variables and, more specifically, that it adds a modulatory or a contrastive layer of meaning to the interpretation of referential expressions. No study to date has investigated, however, whether typographic emphasis can bring a referent into discourse focus and consequently affect the …

The Role Of Cohesion In Second Language Reading Comprehension, Alisha Biler

Theses and Dissertations

Reading in a second language (L2) is a critical aspect of language acquisition, yet gaps remain in the literature regarding the extent to which textual factors impact reading difficulty. There is consensus that complex vocabulary and grammar affect L2 comprehension (Koda, 2005), and this is evidenced through the numerous traditional readability formulas, such as Flesch-Kincaid (FKGL). However, critics argue that discourse-level features, such as cohesion, also impact reading difficulty and must be included in difficulty analyses (Carrell, 1987).

One aspect of cohesion is content word overlap, or the number of content words repeated in a text; this measure is included …

Processing Differences In Reading Alliteration And Rhyme: An Eye-Movement Study, Keiko Bridwell

Senior Theses

In studies of silent reading, it is well-attested that the phonological content of a word, and not only its visual shape, contributes to the reading process. One of the most widely-observed phenomena in this field is the “tongue twister effect”: the tendency for words with repeated initial phonemes to be read more slowly and comprehended more poorly than words without phonological repetition. This effect has been welldocumented over decades of research; however, it has overwhelmingly dealt with wordinitial overlap, or alliteration. Very few studies have looked at the impact that word-final overlap, or rhyme, might have on reading. In the …

Speaking Of Qualia: Examining A Craft Beer Microcommunity's Membership Identity Through Speech, Anna Hamer

Theses and Dissertations

This ethnography examines a locally owned craft beer store in South Carolina, where craft beer connoisseurs and enthusiasts come together to elevate their beer drinking experience. Many members of this microcommunity use ‘beer talk’, a technical register of speech (Agha 2007; Manning 2008; Silverstein 2006, 2016), to point to, or index, a part of their beer connoisseur identity. The ‘beer talk’ register used to describe craft beer is enacted at various scales of speech (Carr and Lempert 2016), ranging from Cicerone Certification and mobile applications, to online forums, beer festivals, beer magazines, brewery visits, and face-to-face interaction. The CofP model …

Adult L2 Processing And Acquisition Of The English Present Perfect, Christopher J. Farina

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the second language (L2) processing and acquisition of the English present perfect via two features: boundedness and current relevance. Boundedness indicates whether an action reaches an endpoint (Smith 1997; Verkuyl 1972); it divides the functions of the present perfect into sets that denote completed situations or ongoing/iterative ones (Bybee et al. 1994; Housen 2002). Current relevance indicates the present importance of a past situation (Siemund 2004); it differentiates the present perfect from the simple past (Bardovi-Harlig 2002). Previous research has relied on offline methods (that evaluate metalinguistic knowledge); no research in SLA has investigated the acquisition of …

Attention Control And The Effects Of Online Training In Improving Connected Speech Perception By Learners Of English As A Second Language, Burcu Gokgoz-Kurt

Theses and Dissertations

One of the aspects of L2 English phonology which poses a challenge for L2 learners is learning how to decode the language, especially as spoken by native speakers. This difficulty may be due to the way the native speakers speak by ‘draw[ing] [the sounds] together’ (Clarey & Dixson, 1963), which results in realization of consonants and vowels differently than when uttered in isolation. This process is referred to as connected speech (e.g., pronouncing ‘want to’ as [wɑnə], and ‘going to’ as [ɡʌnə]). The challenge in teaching and learning these forms is that they lack perceptual saliency, requiring extra attentional resources …

The Repeated Name Penalty And The Overt Pronoun Penalty In Japanese, Shinichi Shoji

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigated the Repeated Name Penalty (RNP) and the Overt Pronoun Penalty (OPP) in Japanese. The RNP was first reported by Gordon, Grosz and Gilliom (1993), who observed that English sentences with repeated-name subject anaphors were read slower than sentences with overt-pronoun subjects when the antecedents were either the grammatical subject or the first-mentioned surface-initial noun phrase of the previous sentence. The OPP has been reported in studies of Spanish (Gelormini-Lezama & Almor, 2011) in which sentences with overt-pronoun subject anaphors were read slower than sentences with null-pronoun subject anaphors for subject antecedents.

A concern with the RNP and …

Aging, Discourse, And Ideology, Julia Mckinney

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the language practices of members of the Andrus Center, a recreational senior center located in the southeastern United States. It specifically examines how “young-old” members, or those who had relatively recently made the transition to older identity, invoked and contested widely circulating ideologies of aging in the course of constructing their local age identities. Rather than treating age as an objective, individual characteristic, as commonly presumed in sociolinguistics, this study highlights the ways in which age identities were relationally and emergently coconstructed. Through analyses of interactional and ethnographic data collected over 18 months, I argue that mainstream …

Implicit Causality And Consequentiality In Native And Non-Native Coreference Processing, Wei Cheng

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of two studies that examined the role of implicit causality and consequentiality in coreference processing. Implicit causality (IC) refers to the phenomenon that certain interpersonal verbs bias the causation of the events described by the verbs towards either its subject (the first noun phrase NP1) or its object (the second noun phrase NP2). Implicit consequentiality (IR) refers to the phenomenon that certain verbs bias the consequence towards either NP1 or NP2. These IC and IR biases have been found to influence language comprehenders’ establishment of coreference.

The first study examined whether intentionality of an event affects …

Sounding Appalachian: /Ai/ Monophthongization, Rising Pitch Accents, And Rootedness, Paul E. Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Appalachia, the mountainous region that stretches from northern Georgia to Pennsylvania (ARC, 2015), is a region that has been considered culturally and linguistically unique in the United States. There is a small but growing body of literature that has demonstrated that the language varieties of this region, collapsed under the broad heading of Appalachian English (AE), diverge from Mainstream American English and other Southern American English varieties (Wolfram & Christian, 1976, Montgomery & Hall, 2004, Labov et al., 2006, among others). Much of this literature has focused on vowels and morpho-syntax, but other linguistic aspects have not received much attention, …

Processing Of Garden-Path Sentences Containing Silent And Filled Pauses In Stuttered Speech: Evidence From A Comprehensive Study, Elena Galkina

Theses and Dissertations

Disfluency is common in spontaneous speech. Self-correction is a type of disfluency that consists of reparandum, filler, and repair (Levelt, 1989). Little is known about the processing of self-corrections in a normally disfluent speech, and even less is known about its processing in atypically disfluent speech (e.g. speech in patients with autism spectrum disorder, hearing impaired, patients with brain damage, and stuttered speech; see: Lake, Humphreys, & Cardy, 2011; Lind, Hickson, & Erber, 2004; Plexico et al., 2010; Rossi et al., 2011; Yairi, Gintautas, & Avent, 1981). This study focuses on self-correction disfluencies in garden-path sentences and employs a behavioral …

Southern Language, Ideology, And Identity In A High School Sorority, Sara Lide

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the language practices of high school sorority members in a mid-sized city in the U.S. South. Specifically, it describes how economically privileged, white, female youth in the Young Ladies’ Society of Midway (YLSM) used Southern language to position themselves and others in relation to widely and locally circulating ideologies of language, region, gender, and class. Drawing on sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological methods, this study addresses the issues of how Southern language practices and language ideologies relate and how indexical meanings and social identities emerge through linguistic interaction. As a study that examines the language of a group …

Non-Native Speaker Attentional Capacity And The Processing Of English Phrasal Verb Constructions, Aubrey Dillard

Theses and Dissertations

The effect of syntactic and semantic complexity on attention and processing in second language acquisition (SLA) has long been of interest to both practitioners and researchers of SLA. Theoretical models of attention in SLA (Schmidt 1990, Tomlin and Villa 1994, Robinson 1995) have spurred a great deal of empirical research in the field, and VanPatten's (1994, 2004, 2007) work on the effect of attention to form and meaning on comprehension of input has been very influential in the field. From a language processing viewpoint, Clahsen and Felser (2006, 2009) have hypothesized that the different ways in which native and nonnative …

Old English And Old Norse: An Inquiry Into Intelligibility And Categorization Methodology, Eric Martin Gay

Theses and Dissertations

To say that the Old English and Old Norse languages have an interesting history with one another is a declaration of utter understatement. So intertwined were these languages and their people that we, some 1,000 years later, are still attempting to discern the extent of their relationship with one another. As new evidence and the reevaluation of old evidence emerges, research in the historical Germanic languages continues to paint a clearer picture. However, the study of possible Old English and Old Norse mutual intelligibility is a subject that is comparatively new within the field, and as such is still exploring …

On Vernacular Scottishness And Its Limits: Devolution And The Spectacle Of "Voice", Scott Hames

Studies in Scottish Literature

This essay asks why vernacular cultural expression has been so central to discussion of Scottish national autonomy, traces the literary and political contours of vernacular discourse in the period of Scottish devolution, and concludes with a provisional sketch of three "vernacularities" (democratic, romantic and identitarian) and with reflections on how literary criticism might move beyond the "representative” paradigms of vernacular voice to engage with voice as a principle of agency and action.

Second Language Learnerhood Among Cross-Cultural Field Workers, Thor Andrew Sawin

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies second language learnerhood (ideologies about why and how to acquire a target language) among American field workers of a multinational, faith-based development organization, "Love the World". This organizational ethnography is longitudinal, tracking how learnerhood changes across the first years of field service. It is also multi-sited, tracing learnerhood across an assemblage of interconnected nodes. Field workers' learnerhoods are shaped by two larger ideologies of language learning which interact across the nodes of and individual trajectories through Love the World. One ideology, rooted in academic tradition, developmental second language acquisition and modernist missiological theory, valorizes the individual learner …

Up To D[Eb]Ate On Raising And Control, Part 2: The Empirical Range Of The Constructions And Research On Their Acquistion, Susannah Kirby, William D. Davies, Stanley William Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

This is the second part of a two-part article that reviews a number of the current debates regarding raising and control constructions. The issues addressed in this part include the spectrum of related raising (e.g. possessor raising, further raising) and control (partial, split, generic, super-equi) phenomena; cross-linguistic typology, including backward and copy constructions; and their acquisition in child language.

Up To D[Eb]Ate On Raising And Control, Part 1: Properties And Analyses Of The Constructions, Susannah Kirby, William D. Davies, Stanley William Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

This is the first part of a two-part article that reviews a number of the current debates regarding raising and control constructions. The issues addressed in this part include the syntactic attributes governing their distribution; the characterization of the relevant silent elements; the empirical properties which may distinguish/unify two classes of constructions (on either syntactic or semantic grounds).

On The Existence (And Distribution) Of Sentential Subjects, William D. Davies, Stanley Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Podcasting: An Effective Tool For Honing Language Students' Pronunciation?, Lara Ducate, Lara Lomicka

Faculty Publications

This paper reports on an investigation of podcasting as a tool for honing pronunciation skills in intermediate language learning. We examined the effects of using podcasts to improve pronunciation in second language learning and how students' attitudes changed toward pronunciation over the semester. A total of 22 students in intermediate German and French courses made five scripted pronunciation recordings throughout the semester. After the pronunciation recordings, students produced three extemporaneous podcasts. Students also completed a pre- and post-survey based on Elliott's (1995) Pronunciation Attitude Inventory to assess their perspectives regarding pronunciation. Students' pronunciation, extemporaneous recordings, and surveys were analyzed to …

Review Of "Methods Of Language Teaching", By Blair Bateman And Baldomero Lago, Lara Ducate

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Distribution Of Subjects And Predicates In Bulgarian: An (Eep) V-Feature Account, Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva, Stanley William Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Metaphorical Singular Reference: The Role Of Enriched Composition In Reference Resolution, Anne L. Bezuidenhout

Faculty Publications

It is widely accepted that, in the course of interpreting a metaphorical utterance, both literal and metaphorical interpretations of the utterance are available to the interpreter, although there may be disagreement about the order in which these interpretations are accessed. I call this the dual availability assumption. I argue that it does not apply in cases of metaphorical singular reference. These are cases in which proper names, complex demonstratives or definite descriptions are used metaphorically; e.g., ‘That festering sore must go’, referring to a derelict house. We are forced to give up dual availability in these cases because a process …

The Place, Range, And Taxonomy Of Control And Raising, Willaim D. Davies, Stanley William Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.