Linguistics Commons^™

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 …

Language Counts: Early Language Mediates The Relationship Between Parent Education And Children's Math Ability, Emily Slusser, Andrew Ribner, Anna Shusterman

Faculty Publications

Children's early math skills have been hailed as a powerful predictor of academic success. Disparities in socioeconomic context, however, also have dramatic consequences on children's learning. It is therefore critical to investigate both of these distinct contributors in order to better understand the early foundations of children's academic outcomes. This study tests an integrated model of children's developing math ability so as to (1) identify the specific skills and abilities most clearly linked to early math achievement and (2) measure the influence of children's socioeconomic context on each of these skills. We first evaluated the early vocabulary, number word knowledge …

Agency In Action: Exploring User Responses And Rhetorical Choices In Interactive Data Displays, Jacob D. Rawlins, Gregory D. Wilson, Kate Crane

Faculty Publications

n 2014, Rawlins and Wilson proposed a typology of agential interactions between users and designers of interactive data displays. This article tests that typology by studying 20 users working with three different types of interactive data displays and answering questions, which were coded by verb and actor and analyzed for themes. The authors show that rhetorical agency is marked by thoughts, actions, and language. Affordances by the designer open a shared rhetorical space where user and designer are coparticipants. As interactivity increases, participants see themselves as rhetorical agents in a community of rhetorical agents rather than as conduits of information.

Context Of Learning And Second Language Development Of Spanish Vowels, Avizia Long, Megan Solon, Silvina Bongiovanni

Faculty Publications

The present study explored development in Spanish vowel production during a short-term study abroad program. The production patterns of a group of learners studying abroad in a 4-week program in the Dominican Republic were compared in terms of overall vowel quality, tendency to diphthongize /e/ and /o/, and vowel duration to those of a similar group of learners studying in the at-home context. Results revealed no significant changes or differences between groups in vowel quality or diphthongization, but a significant improvement (i.e., reduction) in vowel duration for /a/, /o/, and /u/ for the at-home group only. Findings are discussed in …

The Interactional And Cultural Pragmatics Of Evidentiality In Pastaza Quichua, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

This paper analyses the interactional and pragmatic effects of two evidential enclitics in the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonian Ecuador. Attention is also given to represented discourse in a variety of genres. The overall goal is a better understanding of the perspectival encoding of experience through evidential enclitics and represented discourse, and the role of these devices in articulating concepts of sociability and politeness principles. A broader aim is to clarify how discourse practices making use of evidentiality and represented discourse may clarify Quichua peoples’ understandings of their relationships with each other and with non-human nature. Finally, this paper points …

En Busca Del Diamante: Using Tasks To Mitigate Word Reduction In Spoken Learner Spanish, Sergio Ruiz-Pérez, Lorena Alarcón, Avizia Long

Faculty Publications

A common feature of second language Spanish, particularly in the case of native English-speaking learners, is to shorten or reduce segments within words (Schwegler & Kempff, 2007). This is particularly noticeable with multi-syllabic words (e.g., ingeniería, floristería, cafetería), and mispronunciations during second language interaction influence speech intelligibility. To address this pronunciation challenge and provide learners with opportunities for practice of words that demonstrate this reduction, we designed a two-way information gap task to draw learners' attention to these words in second language Spanish interaction. We specifically used principles of task-based language teaching and learning (e.g., Ellis, 2009; M. H. Long, …

Korean Learners' Acquisition Of Intervocalic /B D G/ In Spanish, Avizia Long

Faculty Publications

Research on the second language (L2) acquisition of the voiced intervocalic stops /b d g/ in Spanish (e.g., lobo “wolf,” lado “side,” lago “lake”) has been instrumental in analyzing and describing the process by which learners acquire aspects of a L2 sound system. However, this particular strand of research has been conducted nearly exclusively on native English-speaking learners (e.g., Bongiovanni et al., 2015; Cabrelli Amaro, 2017; Díaz-Campos, 2004; Face & Menke, 2009; Lord, 2010; Zampini, 1994, 1997), limiting the generalizability of attested findings to learners of distinct first language (L1) backgrounds. This study examined 66 native Korean-speaking learners’ acquisition of …

Does The Test Work? Evaluating A Web-Based Language Placement Test, Avizia Long, Sun-Young Shin, Kimberly Geeslin, Erik Willis

Faculty Publications

In response to the need for examples of test validation from which everyday language programs can benefit, this paper reports on a study that used Bachman’s (2005) assessment use argument (AUA) framework to examine evidence to support claims made about the intended interpretations and uses of scores based on a new web-based Spanish language placement test. The test, which consisted of 100 items distributed across five item types (sound discrimination, grammar, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and vocabulary), was tested with 2,201 incoming first-year and transfer students at a large, Midwestern public university. Analyses of internal consistency and validity revealed the …

Stories They Tell: The Rhetoric Of Recruiting Independent Consultants, Jacob D. Rawlins, Sarah E. Martin

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the themes that drive persuasive recruiting appeals, or stories, designed to attract new, entrepreneurial workers in the direct selling industry. It offers a rhetorical perspective informed by fantasy theme analysis on the themes present in the recruiting content on the corporate Web sites of three direct selling companies (Mary Kay, Stella & Dot, and Scentsy). The analysis indicates that rhetorical agency is a core theme in the persuasive recruiting stories for these companies. Offering a means for business and technical communication scholars to explore agency or other persuasive story themes in context, this study addresses how a …

Constructing Two Phonological Systems: A Phonetic Analysis Of /P/, /T/, /K/ Among Early Spanish–English Bilingual Speakers, Earl K. Brown, Mary T. Copple

Faculty Publications

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: Many early Spanish-English bilingual speakers in the USA learn Spanish as their first language at home and English in school. This paper seeks to elucidate whether these speakers develop a separate phonological system for English and, if so, the role of primary and secondary cues in the development of the second language (L2) system.

Design/methodology/approach: The phonetic realization of the voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/ is analyzed among three groups: early Spanish-English bilinguals; L1 English speakers who are late learners of Spanish; and L1 Spanish speakers who are late learners of English. The participants (N = …

Assessment Of L2 Student Writing: Does Teacher Disciplinary Background Matter?, Grant Eckstein, Rachel Casper, Jacob Chan, Logan Kyle Blackwell

Faculty Publications

This preliminary study examines the rating behavior of five composition and five ESL writing teachers while evaluating a text from a university-level non-native (L2) English speaking student. Using an eye tracker, we measured raters’ dwell times and reading behaviors across four areas of interest—rhetoric, organization, vocabulary, and grammar. Results indicate that raters with differing disciplinary backgrounds read the text differently. L2 writing teachers tended to spend more time on and re-read the rhetorical, lexical, and grammatical features of the text while skipping over more of the grammar errors, while composition teachers read the text more deliberately. The findings suggest L2 …

The Gazetteer Of Southern Vowels, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick, William A. Kretzschmar Jr., Rachel M. Olsen, Michael Olsen

Faculty Publications

The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) is a collection of archival recordings of interviews with 1121 speakers across the southern United States (Pederson, McDaniel & Adams 1986) which has been digitized by the Linguistic Atlas Project at the University of Georgia. The Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) is a 64-speaker subset of LAGS, compiled by Lee Pedersen, that was designed to be socially balanced across 16 sectors of the South (Kretzschmar Jr. et al. 2013). DASS is currently being transcribed, processed, and analyzed at the University of Georgia (Olsen et al. forthcoming), and vowel formant measurements from …

Ontological Document Reading An Experience Report, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Scott N. Woodfield

Faculty Publications

Ontological document reading is defined as automatically and appropriately populating a conceptual model representing an ontological conceptualization of some fragment of the real world. Appropriately populating the conceptualization involves not only extracting the information with respect to the declared object and relationship sets of the conceptual model but also involves checking the extracted information for real-world constraint violations, standardizing the data, and inferring the unwritten information that a document author intended convey. Appropriately populating an ontology may, in addition, require adjustments to the ontology itself. This approach to document reading is presented in terms of an effort to build a …

Connections Between Teacher And Student Attitudes Regarding Script Choice In First-Year Japanese Language Classrooms, Dan Dewey, Vashti Lee, Hannah Trimble, R. Kirk Belnap

Faculty Publications

Mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII) is a self-regulatory strategy for accomplishing one’s future goals (Oettingen & Reininger, 2016). It is often re-labelled WOOP, which stands for making a goal or wish (W), envisioning and elaborating on the outcomes (O) of achieving that wish, identifying obstacles (O) that might prevent achievement, and making a plan (P) to cope with those obstacles.

A Bayesian Investigation Of Factors Shaping The Network Structure Of Inflection Class Systems, Jeffery R. Parker, Robert Reynolds, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

In this paper we use a Bayesian, agent-based model to explore the emergence of allomorph distributions in inflection class (IC) systems. It has long been understood that irregular inflection occurs mainly among high token frequency lexemes because high frequency leads to word-specific learning, allowing certain lexemes to resist analogical pressure. Over time, these lexemes become ‘stranded’ in low type frequency classes as less frequent lexemes shift class membership. Crucially, these classes partly overlap but do not collapse with high type frequency classes, and as a result detract from speakers’ ability to predict a word’s inflection class membership. Stump and Finkel …

Sense Relations And Sensory Clustering In Pastaza Quichua Ideophones, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

Ideophones are sound-imitative words that simulate senses, perceptions, and emotions. Using archived, audiovisual data consisiting of over 500 ideophones utterances from the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonia Ecuador acquired over the last 6 years of fieldwork, I argue that although ideophone semantics have been charatierized as highly specific, semantic generalization and structred semantic realtions such as a synonymy, antonymy and homonymy may be found when a sizable corpus is available. Semantic regualrity and stucture are hypothesized to be linked with a senory clustering effect whereby more sensory modalities encoded within an ideophone generate more possibilited for sense relations and semantic …

Language Learning And Study Abroad, Christina Isabelli-Garcia, Jennifer Brown, John L. Plews, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Anxiety: Stress, Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety, And Enjoyment During Study Abroad In Amman, Jordan, Dan Dewey, R. Kirk Belnap, Patrick Steffen

Faculty Publications

Anxiety is among the most frequently studied emotions in second language acquisition (SLA). Study abroad (SA) researchers have examined its effects on SLA in that setting in a number of studies. The current study goes beyond previous SA research by examining how anxiety develops and connects with language proficiency development over SA. Specifically, it uses anxiety-related measures of foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), foreign language enjoyment (FLE), and a physiological manifestation of anxiety (hair cortisol). As far as the classroom is concerned, learners grew more comfortable, experiencing less anxiety and more enjoyment over the period of SA. However, learners showed …