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2007

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Articles 31 - 60 of 88

Full-Text Articles in Linguistics

Learner Perceptions Of Small Group And Pair Work In The Esl Classroom: Implications For Conditions In Second Language Acquisition, Elissa K. Polley Apr 2007

Learner Perceptions Of Small Group And Pair Work In The Esl Classroom: Implications For Conditions In Second Language Acquisition, Elissa K. Polley

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

Second language acquisition (SLA) research finds that small group (SG) and pair work (PW) are essential tools in language learning, specifically creating optimal conditions for negotiation of meaning (e.g., Long, 1985; Pica, et al., 1996). Limited research has focused on learner perceptions playing a part in establishing these conditions. This study examines learner perceptions of participation in SG/PW and the actual character of their participation in creating necessary conditions for SLA. This study involved 29 adult ESL learners enrolled in a private institute. Using focus group discussions, video-recorded SG/PW activities, and "stimulated recall" (Gass & Mackey, 2000), learner perceptions of …

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Childhood Obesity, Problem Or Pandemic?, Roxanne Baudry Apr 2007

Childhood Obesity, Problem Or Pandemic?, Roxanne Baudry

Whittier Scholars Program

This project is a close study of childhood obesity and finding a solution to unhealthy eating habits. This is a multiple-part project which includes an essay that features statistics and analysis of children's dietary habits as well as a specifically designed 6-week program to get kids actively involved with activities that are fun and promote health. Students would be engaged in activities, games, tutorials, work-shops, and lessons interwoven with opportunities for interaction with a trained canine. The program is designed to meet once a week for approximately one hour and 30 minutes a day over a six-week span. This study …

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Can Nature's Language Be Written, Spoken, And Heard? Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl" And Marlene Nourbese Philip's Looking For Livingstone, Lori Martindale Apr 2007

Can Nature's Language Be Written, Spoken, And Heard? Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl" And Marlene Nourbese Philip's Looking For Livingstone, Lori Martindale

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

How do traditional western epistemologies affect natures' subjectivity? This essay deconstructs the status of nature as silent Other. I argue Mahasweta Devi's The Pterodactyl and Marlene Nourbese Philip's epic Looking for Dr. Livingstone translate nature, or the radical Other, as subject. Scientific, xenophobic, and imperial behaviors have affected the status of natures' subjectivity in the naming, mapping, and exploitation of land, during colonial and commodity enterprise. As a result, nature’s language has become increasingly radical and is one to be translated for an awareness and avoidance of imposition; nature is a language yet to be understood.

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Statistical Machine Translation Of Japanese, Erik A. Chapla Mar 2007

Statistical Machine Translation Of Japanese, Erik A. Chapla

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to find ways to improve the performance of a statistical machine translation system that translates text from Japanese to English. Methods included altering the training and test data by adding a prior linguistic knowledge, altering sentence structures, and looking for better ways to statistically alter the way words align between the two languages. In addition, methods for properly segmenting words in Japanese text through statistical methods were examined. Finally, experiments were conducted on Japanese speech to produce the best text transcription of the speech. The best statistical machine translation methods implemented resulted in improvements …

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American Identity And Attitudes Toward English Language Policy Initiatives, Carlos Garcia, Loretta E. Bass Mar 2007

American Identity And Attitudes Toward English Language Policy Initiatives, Carlos Garcia, Loretta E. Bass

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Relatively little is known about what individual-level factors drive Americans' attitudes toward offering services to immigrants. Using national-level data and logistic regressions, we examine what factors co-vary with whether respondents agree or disagree with specific policy initiatives regarding support for English language use for immigrants. We then examine what factors are related to whether respondents agree that tax money should be used to fund English classes for immigrant children and adults. We find that age, race, and general warmth toward undocumented immigrants predict English-only attitudes, and that marital status, education, and warmth toward undocumented immigrants predict attitudes toward the use …

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From Alps To Alpnet (And Beyond), Deryle W. Lonsdale Jan 2007

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 …

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Second Language Acquisition From A Mcneillian Perspective, Gale Stam Jan 2007

Second Language Acquisition From A Mcneillian Perspective, Gale Stam

Faculty Publications

Most second language acquisition research has concentrated on learners’ speech. This paper argues that it is necessary to look at both learners’ speech and gesture in order to better understand second language acquisition. It provides a summary of the second language acquisition process and the types of studies that have been conducted in the field. It discusses how gesture can be used to investigate learners’ thinking for speaking.

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An Exploration Of Language Dominance, Michael Bishop Jan 2007

An Exploration Of Language Dominance, Michael Bishop

MA TESOL Collection

When two or more cultural groups make contact and interact over a period of time, language dominance often occurs. In this situation, one dominates the others both culturally and linguistically. This in turn, causes the weaker to start using the language of the more powerful until eventually it shifts its language and then its culture over to that of the more dominant group. Eventually its own language and culture dies. Language dominance, language shift and language death are social and linguistic phenomena that has been occurring for thousands of years. Historically, there were two great waves of language dominance, and …

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Fossilization In Japanese Adult Advanced English Learners And Linked Instruction As Intervention, Misuzu Shimabukuro Jan 2007

Fossilization In Japanese Adult Advanced English Learners And Linked Instruction As Intervention, Misuzu Shimabukuro

Theses Digitization Project

The objective of this project is to investigate the items and factors that may be prematurely stabilized in advanced adult second-language learners' interlanguage, in order to propose effective instructional interventions.

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A Liminal Examination Of Always Already Meaning Within Language, James Richard Starr Jan 2007

A Liminal Examination Of Always Already Meaning Within Language, James Richard Starr

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis juxtaposes Plato's allegory of the cave with Jacques Derrida's concept of the always already aspect of meaning, a concept derived from Ferdinand de Saussure's work. This theoretical investigation examines the implications of universal Signified forms of word meanings for postmodern composition theory.

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Reading Words In Spanish And English: Mapping Orthography To Phonology In Two Languages, Ana Schwartz, Judith Kroll, Michele Diaz Jan 2007

Reading Words In Spanish And English: Mapping Orthography To Phonology In Two Languages, Ana Schwartz, Judith Kroll, Michele Diaz

Selected Works Temporary Series

English-Spanish bilinguals named visually presented words aloud in each language. The words included cognates (e.g., fruit-fruta) and non-cognate translations, (e.g., pencil-lápiz). The cognates were selected so that the orthographic and phonological similarity of their lexical form in each language varied orthogonally. Cognate naming latencies were influenced by the cross-language match of the orthographic and phonological codes. When the orthographic forms were similar in the two languages, naming latencies were slowed by dissimilar phonology, providing evidence for feed-forward activation from orthography to phonology across languages. When the orthographic forms were dissimilar, the effects of the corresponding phonological match were not statistically …

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Language Comprehension In Bilingual Speakers, Ana Schwartz, Judith Kroll Jan 2007

Language Comprehension In Bilingual Speakers, Ana Schwartz, Judith Kroll

Selected Works Temporary Series

No abstract provided.

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Error Feedback In Second Language Writing, Carol Ann Miller-Cornell Jan 2007

Error Feedback In Second Language Writing, Carol Ann Miller-Cornell

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis follows five second language (L2) students in an introductory composition class at California State University, San Bernardino. The study investigates their perceptions and responses to grammatical coded feedback provided by their writing instructor. The results showed that students wanted, expected, appreciated and understood the coded feedback that was given to them.

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Sluicing In Slavic, Lydia Grebenyova Jan 2007

Sluicing In Slavic, Lydia Grebenyova

Linguistics

The goal of this paper is to explore the properties of sluicing (i.e., clausal ellipsis) in Slavic languages. In turn, we will see how the Slavic data shed light on the nature of general processes underlying sluicing. First, I determine what positions wh-remnants occupy in sluicing constructions in Slavic, given the properties of wh--movement in each language. Contrary to the standard analyses, where an interrogative +wh- complementizer licenses TP-ellipsis, I argue that it is actually the +focus feature that is responsible for licensing sluicing in Slavic. The proposal is further extended to languages other than Slavic. I also demonstrate how …

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Pragmatic Abilities In Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Study In Philosophy And The Empirical, Jessica De Villiers, Robert Stainton, Peter Szatmari Jan 2007

Pragmatic Abilities In Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Study In Philosophy And The Empirical, Jessica De Villiers, Robert Stainton, Peter Szatmari

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

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Missing Topics In Malagasy Headlines, Ileana Paul Jan 2007

Missing Topics In Malagasy Headlines, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

No abstract provided.

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A Classifier To Evaluate Language Specificity In Medical Documents, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy A. Leroy, Samir Chatterjee, Jie Fan, Brian Thoms '09 Jan 2007

A Classifier To Evaluate Language Specificity In Medical Documents, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy A. Leroy, Samir Chatterjee, Jie Fan, Brian Thoms '09

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Consumer health information written by health care professionals is often inaccessible to the consumers it is written for. Traditional readability formulas examine syntactic features like sentence length and number of syllables, ignoring the target audience's grasp of the words themselves. The use of specialized vocabulary disrupts the understanding of patients with low reading skills, causing a decrease in comprehension. A naive Bayes classifier for three levels of increasing medical terminology specificity (consumer/patient, novice health learner, medical professional) was created with a lexicon generated from a representative medical corpus. Ninety-six percent accuracy in classification was attained. The classifier was then applied …

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Language Comprehension In Bilingual Speakers, Ana Schwartz, Judith Kroll Jan 2007

Language Comprehension In Bilingual Speakers, Ana Schwartz, Judith Kroll

Departmental Papers (Psych)

No abstract provided.

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Reading Words In Spanish And English: Mapping Orthography To Phonology In Two Languages, Ana Schwartz, Judith Kroll, Michele Diaz Jan 2007

Reading Words In Spanish And English: Mapping Orthography To Phonology In Two Languages, Ana Schwartz, Judith Kroll, Michele Diaz

Departmental Papers (Psych)

English-Spanish bilinguals named visually presented words aloud in each language. The words included cognates (e.g., fruit-fruta) and non-cognate translations, (e.g., pencil-lápiz). The cognates were selected so that the orthographic and phonological similarity of their lexical form in each language varied orthogonally. Cognate naming latencies were influenced by the cross-language match of the orthographic and phonological codes. When the orthographic forms were similar in the two languages, naming latencies were slowed by dissimilar phonology, providing evidence for feed-forward activation from orthography to phonology across languages. When the orthographic forms were dissimilar, the effects of the corresponding phonological match were not statistically …

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F1 And Center Of Gravity Interplay In The Maintenance Of Phonological Height Within A Statistical Model Of A Communal Grammar: The Case Of Foodo [Atr] Acoustics, Colleen G. Anderson Jan 2007

F1 And Center Of Gravity Interplay In The Maintenance Of Phonological Height Within A Statistical Model Of A Communal Grammar: The Case Of Foodo [Atr] Acoustics, Colleen G. Anderson

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

This paper presents the notion of an idealized or communal grammar as a statistical model of mode, mean or median as emerging from a representative number of a population, rather than in individual speech, per se. Like other languages with a 9-vowel Cross Height Vowel Harmony (CHVH) system, the most reliable correlate of ATR is F1; [+ATR] vowels have lower F1 values than their [-ATR] counterparts, while F2 differences show considerable variation across speakers. F1, however, fails to maintain phonological height differences as the [+ATR] mid vowels of level 3 overlap in acoustic space with the [-ATR] high vowels of …

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A Perception Study On The Third Tone In Mandarin Chinese, Rui Cao, Priyankoo Sarmah Jan 2007

A Perception Study On The Third Tone In Mandarin Chinese, Rui Cao, Priyankoo Sarmah

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

This experimental study examines the role of the shape of the pitch contour in the perception of the Mandarin Chinese tone 3.2 A set of stimuli was constructed by varying the pitch of tone 3 on two conditions: (1) varying the duration of the dip (or turning point) and (2) varying the timing of the turning point (duration of the slope). The manipulated pitch contours of tone 3 were presented to the native speakers of Mandarin Chinese in two sets: (a) a set of speech stimuli and (b) a set of non-speech stimuli. The participants of the experiment were asked …

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Argument Realization Of Chinese Result And Phase Complements, Han-Chun Huang Jan 2007

Argument Realization Of Chinese Result And Phase Complements, Han-Chun Huang

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

This paper discusses result complements and phase complements in Chinese, both of which are postverbal elements. Despite their surface similarity, they are different with respect to argument realization. While the result complements allow complicated argument realization (in terms of semantic host, verbal transitivity, and subcategorization of objects), the phase complements function as lexical aspect markers, or Aktionsarten, and do not participate in argument realization. I adopt a constructional approach, particularly Boas’s (2003) event-frames and linking rules. Inverted causative resultative constructions in Chinese are also discussed. They are strong evidence for “constructional participants” that interact with event participants in determining syntactic …

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Early And Late Preferences In Relative Clause Attachment In Spanish And Portuguese, Marcus Maia, Eva M. Fernández, Armanda Costa, Maria Do Carmo Lourenço-Gomes Jan 2007

Early And Late Preferences In Relative Clause Attachment In Spanish And Portuguese, Marcus Maia, Eva M. Fernández, Armanda Costa, Maria Do Carmo Lourenço-Gomes

Publications and Research

This study presents new data about the cross-language application of the Late Closure principle (Frazier, 1978), whose universality was put in question by data from Spanish (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988). Using sentences containing a restrictive relative clause unambiguously modifying the first or the second noun of a complex NP (os cúmplices do ladrão/o cúmplice dos ladrões que fugiram), this study compares the behavior of Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers participating in a self-paced reading task. The data confirm that, in early phases of processing, attachment preferences are driven by a locality principle such as Late Closure. Based on a review …

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“The Problem Of Science” In Nietzsche And Heidegger, Babette Babich Jan 2007

“The Problem Of Science” In Nietzsche And Heidegger, Babette Babich

Research Resources

Nietzsche and Heidegger pose important philosophical questions to science and its technological projects. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and I argue that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and I argue that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. More than a thoughtful reflection on science, however, the heart of philosophy is also at stake in …

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Stimulating Reading Excitement In Secondary Level English Language Learners, Rachael J. Schweigert Jan 2007

Stimulating Reading Excitement In Secondary Level English Language Learners, Rachael J. Schweigert

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose of this paper is to examine how ESL teachers can stimulate reading excitement in secondary level English language learners. The current research about factor which affect reading enjoyment in secondary level English language learners will also be discussed. These factors include element in reading instruction, attitudes toward reading, readability of text, interest level in literature, and availability of meaningful literature. Current research regarding applications that can be used in classrooms will also be reviewed, such as reading models and reading strategies. Based on the results of this research, suggestions will be presented regarding literature that can be used …

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Acquisition Of Tense In Xhosa: The Long And The Short Of It, Sandile Gxilishe, Jill De Villiers, Peter A. De Villiers Jan 2007

Acquisition Of Tense In Xhosa: The Long And The Short Of It, Sandile Gxilishe, Jill De Villiers, Peter A. De Villiers

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

The purpose of the present paper it so determine when Xhosa-speaking children master the morphology of tense. Specifically, we ask when Xhosa-speaking children learn the conditions on the two forms of the Present and Recent Past tenses, namely the long and the short forms. Despite the fact that there are complex grammatical conditions on which form is appropriate in a sentence, the paper will demonstrate that young children can attend to these grammatical conditions.

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Liberated Jokes: Sexual Humor In All-Female Groups, Janet Bing Jan 2007

Liberated Jokes: Sexual Humor In All-Female Groups, Janet Bing

English Faculty Publications

Females have formerly been under-represented in jokes. Many scholars have claimed that joke making is primarily a male activity, particularly in the domain of sexual jokes. In this paper, I discuss sexual jokes that women share with each other both in all-female groups and by e-mail. After reviewing some widely held assumptions about women and jokes, I explore liberated women's jokes, including their structure, use of stereotypes, and subversive ideas. Finally, I discuss why humor theory is incomplete without the inclusion of a female perspective and suggest that women should tell more jokes.

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Generating And Presenting String Frequency Measurements Of Project Gutenberg Texts, Ronald P. Reck Jan 2007

Generating And Presenting String Frequency Measurements Of Project Gutenberg Texts, Ronald P. Reck

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The electronic age has increased the range of human capabilities to such an extent that the expectations about appropriate empirical linguistic analysis are changing. A hundred years ago, linguistics was largely an empirical manual process that produced information intended for humans. Today, the world is different as inexpensive computing power and the prevalence of information in electronic format encourages that, whenever possible, information be processed by automated and scalable means and the results be usable and understandable by computers. Creating sustainable and usable observations is best achieved through a standards-based approach that meets long term persistence and usability goals. This …

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Proceedings Of The 4th Acl-Sigsem Workshop On Prepositions At Acl-2007., Fintan Costello, John D. Kelleher, Martin Volk Jan 2007

Proceedings Of The 4th Acl-Sigsem Workshop On Prepositions At Acl-2007., Fintan Costello, John D. Kelleher, Martin Volk

Conference papers

This volume contains the papers presented at the Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions. This workshop is endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (ACL-SIGSEM), and is hosted in conjunction with ACL 2007, taking place on 28th June, 2007 in Prague, the Czech Republic.

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Review Of Adrian Holliday's "The Struggle To Teach English As An International Language.", Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez Jan 2007

Review Of Adrian Holliday's "The Struggle To Teach English As An International Language.", Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Review of Adrian Holliday's "The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language," published by Oxford University Press, 2005.

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