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Girls’ Education And Child Marriage In Central Africa | Insights From Qualitative Fieldwork Part Ii: The Republic Of Congo, Jean-Christophe Boungou Bazika, Wolf Ulrich Mféré Akiana, Quentin Wodon

Journal of Global Catholicism

Child marriage is defined as a formal or informal union before the age of 18. As in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the prevalence of child marriage remains high in the Republic of Congo (RoC), in part because educational attainment for girls is low. Based on qualitative fieldwork, this article looks at communities’ perceptions of child marriage and girls’ education and their suggestions for programs and policies that could improve outcomes for girls. The article also discusses potential implications for Catholic and other faith-based schools, as well as faith leaders.

Girls’ Education And Child Marriage In Central Africa | Insights From Qualitative Fieldwork Part I: The Democratic Republic Of Congo, Geneviève Bagamboula Mayamona, Jean-Christophe Boungou Bazika, Quentin Wodon

Journal of Global Catholicism

Child marriage is defined as a formal or informal union before the age of 18. As in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the prevalence of child marriage remains high in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in part because educational attainment for girls is too low. Based on qualitative fieldwork, this article looks at communities’ perceptions of child marriage and girls’ education and their suggestions for programs and policies that could improve outcomes for girls. The article also discusses potential implications for Catholic and other faith-based schools, as well as faith leaders.

The Parish Choir Movement And Generational Festivals In Romania’S Socialist Period: New Community Festivities In Transylvania’S Gheorgheni (Gyergyó) Region, Eszter Kovács

Journal of Global Catholicism

Among the post-1945 East European socialist regimes, Romania and Poland were the only countries where the Catholic Church—despite government interventions, controls, and bans—managed to play a significant social and political role in community life. This case study provides an ethnographic description of the parish choir movement and graduating class reunions, called “generational festivals” in Hungarian, in the Gheorgheni (Hu: Gyergyó) region in the 1970s and 1980s. The gatherings will be analyzed in the context of everyday life, the socialist system’s distinctive shortage economy, and official limits on religious activity that characterized the era. I will first describe the world of …

Overview & Acknowledgments, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Editorial Note, Antonio Medina-Rivera

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

Editorial note for Volume 42, No 1, 2023

Editorial Advisors

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

During the preparation of this volume, the International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest have benefited from the counsel of the following group of language scholars who have served as blind reviewers, and proof-readers. Each has been an indispensable element in the editorial program providing advice to the executive editor and helpful critique to contributors. The journal is indebted to these professionals for their generous contribution of time and expertise.

Uky Slang Collection Project, Zada Komara

Lewis Honors College Research Data: Linguistics

The UKY Slang Collection Project is an ongoing effort (Fall 2021-present) to document the use of slang (group-specific language of informal register) primarily among college students at the University of Kentucky. The project is administered by Dr. Zada Komara (Lewis Honors College) as part of HON 140 Knowledge and Society, a foundational seminar about epistemology and ontology. This original research is performed by Lewis Honors College students. The project aims to document slang, both ephemeral and persistent, as a means of investigating students’ lived experiences of college, language evolution, and social identities among UKY student communities. Slang in the …

Lakota Language Revitalization And The Meaning Of Life, Gabriel Bruguier

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

Lakota Language Revitalization and the Meaning of Life

Thesis: Indigenous languages reveal information about that peoples’ conception of the meaning of life.

Notes/working document from a presentation given at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy conference, 2023.

Simulating The Machine Translation Of Low-Resource Languages By Designing A Translator Between English And An Artificially Constructed Language, Michaela Snyder

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Natural language processing (NLP), or the use of computers to analyze natural language, is a field that relies heavily on syntax. It would seem intuitive that computers would thrive in this area due to their strict syntax requirements, but the syntax of natural languages leaves them unable to properly parse and generate sentences that seem normal to the average speaker. A subfield of NLP, machine translation, works mainly to computerize translation between different languages. Unfortunately, such translation is not without its weaknesses; language documentation is not created equal, and many low-resource languages—languages with relatively few kinds of documentation, most often …

Context And Coherence, By Una Stojnic, Robert Stainton, Arthur Sullivan

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Narratives Reflecting Theory Of Mind Among Bilingual Lyuli Children Of Uzbekistan, Hristo Kyuchukov, Jill De Villiers, Bahodir B. Mamurov, Gulbahor R. Akramova

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

This is the first known study of the socio-cognitive development of Lyuli children, a Roma-type group living in Bukhara in Uzbekistan. The research was conducted in schools in Bukhara serving both Lyuli children and Uzbek children, both of whom are multi-lingual but whose sociolinguistic circumstances are somewhat different. There has been less cross-cultural work on later stages of Theory of Mind development, in which children have to make inferences about the mental states of characters in a complex narrative. The research here shows that the children from both groups do remarkably well on these tasks, and their multilingualism is hypothesized …

¿El Papel Lo Aguanta Todo? Linguistic Nationalism In Hispanic Constitutions, Mihir Kale

Gaines Fellow Senior Theses

Linguistic nationalism is among the most well-documented sections of nationalist study, as it is one of the predominant mechanisms in which nationalist sentiments are codified or enforced within a state. Cultural or ethnic nationalist preferences are typically expressed through the imposition and preference of a certain nation’s language to demonstrate power, and examples of linguistic nationalism have been recorded across all continents and societies throughout history.

Comprehensive List Satirical News Websites, Salvatore Attardo

Faculty Publications

Index of Satirical News Websites created by Dr. Salvatore Attardo.

La Descortesía En Los Comentarios Digitales De La Prensa Deportiva. El Tenis, Mucho Más Que Un Juego, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Comments on sports news published on the digital platforms of newspapers have turned these spaces into forums for debate in which homogeneous social communities are established. The aim of this research is to find out how the participants of these platforms interact in the sports press and what impoliteness strategies they use when evaluating the text of the news and the comments of other users. For this purpose, a qualitative textual analysis of a corpus of 1,000 digital comments produced on the Australian Open 2022 final in four of the most widely distributed Spanish newspapers with the highest national circulation, …

Donald R. Kelley (1931-2023), Michael C. Carhart

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (Braporus) Corpus: Automatic Transcription And Acoustic Quality Of Elderly Speech During Covid-19 Pandemic, Irina A. Sekerina, Anna Smirnova Henriques, Aleksandra Skorobogatova, Natalia Tyulina, Tatiana V. Kachkovskaia, Svetlana Ruseishvili, Sandra Madureira

Publications and Research

This article presents the Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus, whose goal is to collect, analyze, and preserve for posterity the spoken heritage Russian still used today in Brazil by approximately 1,500 elderly bilingual heritage Russian–Brazilian Portuguese speakers. Their unique 100-year-old variety of moribund Russian is disappearing because it has not been passed to their descendants born in Brazil. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we remotely collected 170 h of speech samples in heritage Russian from 26 participants (Mage = 75.7 years) in naturalistic settings using Zoom or a phone call. To estimate the quality of collected data, we focus on two methodological …

Turkish-German Heritage Speakers’ Predictive Use Of Case: Webcam-Based Vs. In-Lab Eye-Tracking, Onur Özsoy, Büsra Çiçek, Zeynep Özal, Natalia Gagarina, Irina A. Sekerina

Publications and Research

Recently, Özge et al. have argued that Turkish and German monolingual 4-year- old children can interpret case-marking predictively disregarding word order. Heritage speakers (HSs) acquire a heritage language at home and a majority societal language which usually becomes dominant after school enrollment. Our study directly compares two elicitation modes: in-lab and (remote) webcam- based eye-tracking data collection. We test the extent to which in-lab e��ects can be replicated in webcam-based eye-tracking using the exact same design. Previous research indicates that Turkish HSs vary more in the comprehension and production of case-marking compared to monolinguals. Data from 49 participants–22 Turkishmonolinguals and …

Titles And Keywords: ‘Great Love Isn’T Two People Finding The Perfect Match In One Another!’, Junli Diao

Publications and Research

Compared with abstracts, titles and keywords are briefer, more condensed, but fragmented textual elements on the first page of research articles (RAs) that summarise their content and represent their themes to enhance the discoverability. Therefore, the hid- den, subtle relationship between titles and associated keywords increasingly attracts scholars’ attention. This research attempts to analyse title lengths and lexical words of two major title types: nominal titles and colonic titles, and investigate the matching coefficient (MC) values between lexical words and keywords assigned by authors. A total number of 505 RA titles from 15 journals in Library and Information Science were …

Learner Engagement With Written Corrective Feedback: The Case Of Automated Writing Evaluation, Hooman Saeli, Payam Rahmati, Svetlana Koltovskaia

Journal of Response to Writing

The study explored six ESL university students’ behavioral, cognitive, and affective engagement with e-rater feedback on local issues and examined any changes in students’ engagement over two weeks. We explored behavioral engagement through the analysis of screencasts of students’ e-rater usage and writing assignments. We measured cognitive and affective engagement by analyzing students’ comments during the think-aloud protocol and reflection surveys. The findings indicated that the students had varying levels of engagement with the feedback. Behaviorally, all students used a range of revision operations to address errors based on the provided feedback. Cognitively, some students were more engaged than others. …

Contents

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

Table of Contents for Volume 42, Number 1, 2023

Automatic Transcription Of Northern Prinmi Oral Art: Approaches And Challenges To Automatic Speech Recognition For Language Documentation, Connor Bechler

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

One significant issue facing language documentation efforts is the transcription bottleneck: each documented recording must be transcribed and annotated, and these tasks are extremely labor intensive (Ćavar et al., 2016). Researchers have sought to accelerate these tasks with partial automation via forced alignment, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) (Neubig et al., 2020). Neural network—especially transformer-based—approaches have enabled large advances in ASR over the last decade. Models like XLSR-53 promise improved performance on under-resourced languages by leveraging massive data sets from many different languages (Conneau et al., 2020). This project extends these efforts to a novel context, applying …

Generic Interpretations Of Possessive Recursion In English-Speaking Children, Tyler Poisson, Jill De Villiers, Hirsto Kyuchukov, Bea Weinand, Lilly Young, Sofia Morales, Laisha Aniceto

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Two-part s-possessives such as the dad’s kid’s bike admit at least two distinct interpretations: the dad has a kid who has a bike, or the dad has a bike that is made for kids. We propose that the former interpretation derives from recursively embedding DP-possessives, whereas the latter derives from representing kid’s bike asa generic NP-possessive. Accordingly, in the right context, two-part s-possessives are fully ambiguous for adults between ‘recursive’ and ‘generic’ readings. These readings can be disambiguated syntactically. Consider the difference in meaning when we insert a relative clause and extract the constituent kid’s bike—the kid’s bike that is …

Teaching Culture In The Argentinian Efl Classroom: Beliefs, Practice And Challenges, María Mercedes Sempé

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The need to address culture in EFL/ESL classrooms has been stressed by scholars in the SLA field for decades (see Kramsch, 1993, 2009, 2011; Byram, 1988; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). The original intention of working with culture in the English classes as a means to develop language proficiency –sociocultural competence– was expanded, and nowadays, the focus is on the role culture instruction has in developing empathy and respect for other ways of living and in promoting reflection about learners’ own lifestyle –intercultural competence (Byram, 1988, 2008; Deardoff, 2006). This new focus on cultural instruction is reflected in national curriculums around …

Rechazos Del Español: Una Comparación De Mexicanos Monolingües, Hablantes De Herencia Y Aprendices De Español, Maribel Fernández Moctezuma

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Learners of Spanish as a second language can use advanced grammatical structures, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions and have good pronunciation and communication skills. However, the speech act of refusal is not a natural act for them. The aim of this study is to analyze the structure and function of the refusal speech act by comparing three populations: 1) monolingual Mexicans, 2) Spanish heritage speakers and 3) second-language learners of Spanish (3 groups). This research will serve and help heritage speakers and Spanish learners improve their communicative competence to express themselves more clearly and concisely, as well as learn to communicate more …

Corpus Of Founding Era American English: Designing A Corpus For Interpreting The United States Constitution, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

The original meaning of words or phrases is often in dispute in Founding Era legislation, especially the US Constitution. The Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA) accurately provides evidence for the meaning of contested terms during the Founding Era. COFEA consists of 126,394 texts and over 136 million words. This corpus has been and is being used by legal researchers and interpreters in scholarly research as well as various courts, including the Supreme Court. This paper describes the motivation for the creation of COFEA and describes the process of designing and collecting the corpus.

The Missionary Voice: Perceptions Of An Emerging Register, Josh Stevenson, Joseph A. Stanley, Wendy Baker-Smemoe

Faculty Publications

Today’s presentation is on a particular way of speaking among certain members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Specifically, today I’ll be telling you about Latter-day Saint missionaries, who you may encountered before. Let’s set aside any preconceived notions you may have about missionaries or their faith and explore what appears to be an emerging missionary-based register.

In essence, missionaries are Latter-day Saint volunteers who dedicate 18 months to two years to tell others about their faith. They’re assigned around the world and often have to learn a new language, are typically college-aged, and adhere to strict …

Enriching Our Understanding Of Language Change With Vowel Formant Trajectories, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

American English vowels are variable in pronunciation

• ban vs. bat, too vs. boo
• feel vs. fill, [bæt] vs. [bæ̞̙ t]

We can categorize these differences:

Shifts:

• I pronounce /u/ fronter than my grandparents do.
• My students pronounce /æ/ as lower and more centralized than I do.

Mergers:

• For me, cot and caught are distinct; for 95% of my students, they’re homophones
• In Utah, feel and fill are often pronounced the same

Language change happens as some variants spread to more and more people.

"Does This Make Sense?": The Effect Of Congruent Guise In Regional Accent On Grammatical Acceptability Judgments, Nour Kayali

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by presenting participants with congruent or incongruent social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgement task. Participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey with place-based grammatical structures spoken in either a congruent place-based, local accent or a nonlocal accent. Place-based structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. These results suggest that judgment of grammaticality results from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with accent and sentence structure. Judgement of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.

Language Values Guide, Bank Street College Of Education. School For Children

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Designed to be used as a tool and to provide useful information on our daily interactions with both adults and children. The purpose of this guide is to continue educating our community toward maintaining a safe and inclusive community by recognizing what we say does matter. This guide will be used as a support document throughout the College, including with our partners, so we share a common language that respects both individuals and groups.

Impact Of Accent On Receptive Language Assessments For Bilingual Children, Katherine Stariknok

Honors Theses and Capstones

Language assessments are used to screen and diagnose children with language disorders. Many speech-language pathologists (SLP) practicing in Spanish in the United States do not speak Spanish as their first language, so they are administering these assessments in accented speech. This study aims to find what effect an SLP’s accent will have on a bilingual child’s language assessment. Initial findings show that participants were largely able to understand words in the L2 accent, with most of the errors due to several repeating consonantal features (i.e., voicing alone; place and manner of articulation). The broader impact of this work is to …