Linguistics Commons^™

Language Ideology And Racial Inequality: Competing Functions Of Spanish In An Anglo-Owned Mexican Restaurant, Rusty Barrett

Linguistics Faculty Publications

This article examines the influence of language ideology on interactions between English-speaking Anglo and monolingual Spanish-speaking employees in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant in Texas. In directives to Spanish-speaking employees, Anglo managers typically use English with elements of Mock Spanish. Because the Anglo managers fail to question whether their limited use of Spanish is sufficient for communicative success, Spanish speakers are almost always held responsible for incidents resulting from miscommunication. For Latino workers, Spanish provides an alternative linguistic market in which Spanish operates as a form of solidarity and resistance. The competing functions of Spanish serve to reinforce racial segregation and …

Natural English In Speaking And Listening Activities, Dermot Campbell, Marty Meinardi, Bunny Richardson, Yi Wang

Conference papers

DIT Speech Research Cluster will present recommendations for materials development based on the technologies and methodologies they are developing in the area of listening skills and the use of natural English in learning situations. The first speaker will address features of native speech flow which cause difficulties for EFL students (Brown, Cauldwell) and establish the need for improvements in the teaching of listening skills. She will give examples of elision, assimilation and weak forms, and how these can be made accessible for study using DIT’s slow-down technology, which gives students more time to study native speech features, without tonal distortion. …

Future Foreign Language Teachers' Social And Cognitive Collaboration In An Online Environment, Nike Arnold, Lara Ducate

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Discussion boards provide an interactive venue where new and future language teachers can reflect, evaluate, solve problems or simply exchange ideas (e.g., Bonk, Hansen, Grabner-Hagen, Lazar, & Mirabelli, 1996; DeWert, Babinski, & Jones, 2003; Kumari, 2001; Pawan, Paulus, Yalcin, & Chang, 2003). In addition, encouraging future teachers to learn with technology before teaching with it allows them to become comfortable using various computer applications.

This article examines transcripts from a semester-long asynchronous discussion between foreign language methodology classes at two different universities. Social and cognitive presence in the discussions was analyzed using Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's Framework of a Community …

Study Abroad Social Networks, Motivation And Attitudes: Implications For Second Language Acquisition., Christina Isabelli

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Future Foreign Language Teachers' Social And Cognitive Collaboration In An Online Environment, Nike Arnold, Lara Ducate

Faculty Publications

Discussion boards provide an interactive venue where new and future language teachers can reflect, evaluate, solve problems or simply exchange ideas (e.g., Bonk, Hansen, Grabner-Hagen, Lazar, & Mirabelli, 1996; DeWert, Babinski, & Jones, 2003; Kumari, 2001; Pawan, Paulus, Yalcin, & Chang, 2003). In addition, encouraging future teachers to learn with technology before teaching with it allows them to become comfortable using various computer applications.

This article examines transcripts from a semester-long asynchronous discussion between foreign language methodology classes at two different universities. Social and cognitive presence in the discussions was analyzed using Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's Framework of a Community …

Development Of Spanish L2 Competence In A Synchronous Cmc (Chat Room) Environment: The Role Of Visually-Enhanced Recasts In Fostering Grammatical Knowledge And Changes In Communicative Language Use, Francisco Ramon Lluna-Mateu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Taking into consideration some gaps observed in SLA research –noticing, recasts, input enhancement (IE),…– and in CALL/CMC research, a study was conducted among 12 advanced FL Spanish learners to assess whether and how, by communicating with a Spanish native speaker in 5 chat-room sessions, their language competence would develop in the following areas: 1) communication strategies; 2) communicative acts; and 3) grammatical knowledge of verb tense-aspect-mood (TAM) assignation. Subjects were assigned to a specific feedback condition/group (A: +recast, -enhancement; B: +recast, +enhancement; and C: no feedback) under which their TAM errors were treated in the sessions. Few research studies have …

Verb Aquisition In Students Of English As A Second Language: Language Learning Background And Attitudes, Erin Kyles Rogers

LSU Master's Theses

In order to determine how learner background and learner attitudes affected English as a Second Language students’ verb production, eleven ESL learners participated in both oral and written tasks. They were given written surveys to determine what was emphasized more in learning English in their home countries: speaking or writing. Another survey was administered to determine which of these activities that they liked best. Next, the subjects watched a movie clip, wrote about it, and then spoke about it. Their written and spoken total amount of verbs produced and total amount of verbs used correctly were compared and analyzed to …

Language Classification And Manipulation In Romania And Moldova, Chase Faucheux

LSU Master's Theses

Linguistic classification is a scientific methodology for categorizing the languages of the world. However, the tools and methods of linguistic classification have been used to various degrees by political entities to further nationalistic agendas. This thesis assesses the role of linguistic classification in nationality and politics, and addresses the disjunct between true linguistic classification, based on genealogical, areal, and typological features, and language designation, based on political and nationalistic motives. This thesis uses the Romanian language as a vehicle for illustrating both linguistic classification methods as well as how these methods have been manipulated for non-linguistic reasons both internally by …

Currents And Eddies In The Discourse Of Assessment: A Learning-Focused Interpretation, Pauline Rea-Dickins

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

This article explores processes of classroom assessment, in particular ways in which learners using English as an additional language engage in formative assessment within a primary school setting. Transcript evidence of teacher and learner interactions during activities viewed by teachers as formative or summative assessment opportunities are presented as the basis for an analysis of teacher feedback, learner responses to this feedback, as well as learner-initiated talk. The analyses suggest that there are different teacher orientations within assessment and highlight the potential that assessment dialogues might offer for assessment as a resource for language learning, thus situating this work at …

A Cross-Language Approach To Rapid Creation Of New Morpho-Syntactically Annotated Resources, Anna Feldman, Jirka Hana, Chris Brew

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We take a novel approach to rapid, low-cost development of morpho-syntactically annotated resources without using parallel corpora or bilingual lexicons. The overall research question is how to exploit language resources and properties to facilitate and automate the creation of morphologically annotated corpora for new languages. This portability issue is especially relevant to minority languages, for which such resources are likely to remain unavailable in the foreseeable future. We compare the performance of our system on languages that belong to different language families (Romance vs. Slavic), as well as different language pairs within the same language family (Portuguese via Spanish vs. …

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.

A Computational Model Of The Referential Semantics Of Projective Prepositions, John D. Kelleher, Josef Van Genabith

Conference papers

In this paper we present a framework for interpreting locative expressions containing the prepositions in front of and behind. These prepositions have different semantics in the viewer-centred and intrinsic frames of reference (Vandeloise, 1991). We define a model of their semantics in each frame of reference. The basis of these models is a novel parameterized continuum function that creates a 3-D spatial template. In the intrinsic frame of reference the origin used by the continuum function is assumed to be known a priori and object occlusion does not impact on the applicability rating of a point in the spatial template. …

Geeks At Play: Doing Masculinity In An Online Gaming Site, Natasha Chen Christensen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper uses data taken from chat logs within a first person shooter game, Quake Online, in order to explore the performance of gender online. Previous research has shown how physicality is given a position of importance in institutions where masculinity is developed and reproduced such as sports and war; cyberspace offers the opportunity of divorcing the performance of masculinity from the body. Researchers of gender in cyberspace are divided into two perspectives about the effect of the absence of a physical body on the performance of gender: One camp believes that without the constraints of the body, gender in …

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 …

Automatic Creation Of Web Services From Extraction Ontologies, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Cui Tao, Yihong Ding

Faculty Publications

The Semantic Web promises to provide timely, targeted access to user-specified information online. Though standardized services exist for performing this work, specifying these services is too complex for most people. Annotating these services is also problematic. A similar situation exists for traditional information extraction, where ontologies are increasingly used to specify information used by various extraction methods. The approach we introduce in this paper involves converting such ontologies into executable Java code. These APIs act individually or compositionally as services for Semantic Web extraction.

Pronunciation Matters: English Consonant Production By Auap Students, K. James Hartshorn

Faculty Publications

Most Asia University students study English for at least six and a half years by the time they come to the United States to participate in the Asian University America Program (AUAP). For many, the AUAP experience is the realization of a dream to be able to forge new friendships and communicate successfully with Americans. However, despite their enthusiasm for learning, those participating in AUAP are not immune to the struggles experienced by most Japanese students as they endeavor to master English pronunciation (Purcell and Suter, 1980; Wells, 2000, Aoyama, K. Flege, J., Guion, S., Akahane-Yamada, R., Yamada, T., 2003). …

Proximity In Context: An Empirically Grounded Computational Model Of Proximity For Processing Topological Spatial Expression., John D. Kelleher, Geert-Jan Kruijff, Fintan Costello

Conference papers

The paper presents a new model for context-dependent interpretation of linguistic expressions about spatial proximity between objects in a natural scene. The paper discusses novel psycholinguistic experimental data that tests and verifies the model. The model has been implemented, and enables a conversational robot to identify objects in a scene through topological spatial relations (e.g. ''X near Y''). The model can help motivate the choice between topological and projective prepositions.

Incremental Generation Of Spatial Referring Expressions In Situated Dialogue, John D. Kelleher, Geert-Jan Kruijff

Conference papers

This paper presents an approach to incrementally generating locative expressions. It addresses the issue of combinatorial explosion inherent in the construction of relational context models by: (a) contextually defining the set of objects in the context that may function as a landmark, and (b) sequencing the order in which spatial relations are considered using a cognitively motivated hierarchy of relations, and visual and discourse salience.

Modeling Russian Verbs Of Motion: An Analogical Account, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Inna Danielyan Dodge

Faculty Publications

This paper presents research into verb of motion (VOM) constructions in Russian. These constructions are difficult since they involve (i) selection of an appropriate verb (with possible prefixation); (ii) selection of an appropriate preposition; and (iii) selection of an appropriate case for marking the prepositional object. A brief sketch of relevant literature frames the problem. We then discuss how a few thousand instances of VOM usage were extracted from an online tagged corpus of Russian literature. The usage instances were then vectorized using a combination of lexical and semantic class features via automatic, semiautomatic, and hand-coded methods. The instance base …

The Acquisition Of Japanese As A Second Language And Processability Theory: A Longitudinal Study Of A Naturalistic Child Learner, Junko Iwasaki

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The aim of this study was to investigate longitudinally how a child learner acquired verbal morpho-syntax in Japanese in a naturalistic second language (L2) context. Specifically the points of emergence for three verbal morpho-syntactic structures, namely verbal inflection, the V-te V structure and the passive/causative structure, were investigated within a framework of Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998b). The subsequent development of these structures was also examined. Unlike earlier research about morpheme orders and developmental sequences in language acquisition which was criticised because of its apparent lack of theoretical underpinnings, Pienemann’s Processability Theory (PT)(1998b) connects the processability of morpho-syntactic structure to …

An Operator-Based Account Of Semantic Processing, Deryle W. Lonsdale, C. Anton Rytting

Faculty Publications

This paper explores issues of psychological plausibility in modeling natural language understanding within Soar, a symbolic cognitive model. It focuses on constructing syntactic and semantic representations in simulated real time, with particular emphasis on word sense disambiguation (WSD). We discuss (i) what level of WSD should be modeled and (ii) how to use resources such as WordNet to inform these models. A preliminary model of coarse-grained WSD is included to show how syntactic, semantic, and other knowledge sources interact in Soar. Finally, we explore issues of interleaving, learning, and integrating other WSD approaches with Soar's native model of learning.

Assessing Geo-Location And Gender Information In Han Chinese Personal Names, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Bruce Brown

Faculty Publications

Brigham Young University is a particularly optimal academic institution for comparative cross-cultural onomastic research. There are over 65 nations represented by five or more students at BYU, and in fall semester of 2004, 10252 of the 29729 students had lived for two years in a foreign country.

Unifying Language Modeling Capabilities For Flexible Interaction, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Rebecca Diane Madsen

Faculty Publications

Dialogue processing has taken several different forms in recent years; in this paper we address a cognitive modeling approach to the problem. We begin by sketching some of our work in this area and how it derives from prior research in cognition, modeling, natural language processing, and discourse recipe compilation. We then note that, whereas the complexities of natural language— especially spoken language—have been primarily addressed by technologies that target lower-level linguistic processing, higherlevel processing has been less well studied. We introduce our approach, which is to use an agent-based cognitive modeling architecture for dialogue processing. We mention some of …