Linguistics Commons^™

Cross-Modal Distraction On Simultaneous Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet A. Young

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Bilingualism has been studied extensively in multiple disciplines, yet we are still trying to figure out how exactly bilinguals think. A bilingual advantage has been observed in various experimental studies, but also has not been observed in many other studies. A bilingual advantage has been shown in tasks using selective attention. These tasks study the effects of language interference, where two types of interference are observed: interlingual (between-languages) and intralingual (within one language). This study examined language interference in Spanish-English bilinguals, using an auditory-visual simultaneous translation experimental setup. 16 college English monolinguals and 17 college Spanish-English bilinguals were tested. The …

Spooky Grammatical Effects, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

Linguistic constructs often correspond to nothing concrete: Descriptivists’ zero morpheme, generativists’ trace, variationists’ null instantiation, and Columbia School’s null signal. These represent structural relations with no phonetic substance. Columbia School has posited, moreover, three types of relatively insubstantial semantic structure: The residual member and the including member are semantic value oppositions within a grammatical system, each defined by the system’s other members. In the opposition of substance, in my own work, two signals share a value from one semantic substance but only one of them bears a meaning from an additional semantic substance. All of these …

Blueprint For Designing Digital Problem Solving Tasks, Jill Castek, Cindy Gibbon, Gloria Jacobs, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Digital Problem Solving Toolkit

This document explains how the research team developed tasks and an observational protocol that allowed for the examination of individuals’ digital problem solving. These tasks, and the metacognitive scaffolding prompts and protocol associate dwith them, were developed and refined with the Multnomah County Library’s website resources in mind. Other libraries can adapt these tasks and protocol or develop a related observational protocol inspired by the design principles offered. This document suggest what libraries can do to support digital problem solving development.

The Origin Of The Gilaki Causative Suffix -Be(ː)-, Zia Khoshsirat

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The Proto-Indo-European causative/iterative suffix *-ei̯e- was inherited by Old Iranian and persists in almost all Middle and Modern Iranian languages as -aya- and -ēn- (-Vn-) respectively. Comparably, in the Indic branch -aya- functions as a causative suffix in Sanskrit beside another suffix -āpaya which became the productive causative suffix -āvē- in Middle Indic and still used in Modern Indic today. Evidence shows eight Eastern Iranian languages- †Khotanese, †Khwarazmian, Parachi, Wakhi, Munji, Pashto, Ormuri, and Yidgha- using the morphological causative suffix in addition to the expected Iranian one -aya- or -Vn-. This alternative causative suffix is …

#Hashtags: A Look At The Evaluative Roles Of Hashtags On Twitter, Leah Rose Schaede

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Social media has become a large part of today’s pop culture and keeping up with what is going on not only in our social circles, but around the world. It has given many a platform to unite their causes, build fandoms, and share their commentary with the world. A tool in helping group posts together or give commentary on a thought is the hashtag. In this paper I explore the evaluative roles of hashtags in social media discourse, specifically on Twitter. I use a sample of randomly selected tweets from the Twitter API stream I collected and compiled myself. I …

Pragmatic Functionality Of Punctuation On Twitter, Elizabeth M. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work presents an analysis of punctuation use in computer-mediated communication (CMC); in particular, the present study aims to describe the pragmatic functions of nonstandard punctuation on Twitter, providing a corpus-driven overview of the distribution and frequency of nonstandard punctuation use, and an analysis of sampled tweets at the individual tweet level to estimate noise levels in the overall corpus. A survey was also conducted which aimed to identify user understanding of the affective content of nonstandard punctuation strings and to identify any possible effects of character repetition. Survey results indicate that linguistic content was the strongest indicator of affective …

“Listening With An Attitude”: The Role Of Attitude On Native And Non-Native Intergroup Communication, Aidah N. Aljuran

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

People tend to draw their own conclusions about similarities and differences between who they are and the “other.” Having perceptions of being similar to the in-group and being different from the out-group “satisfies psychological needs” (Robbins & Krueger, 2005). Based on this social perception, individuals show communication variations as a way of expressing their identities (Giles 1973). This study implements quantitative and qualitative methods in order to examine the attitude of native speakers (NSs), as well as the potential impact of these attitudes on their communication with non-native speakers (NNSs). The potential impact of NSs’ interactions on NNSs’ interactions was …

Empowering Parents To Encourage Children To Read Beyond The Early Years, Margaret K. Merga, Saiyidi Mat Roni

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Enjoyment of reading books is related to reading proficiency, and fostering students’ enjoyment of reading is imperative to support continued reading engagement. However, not all students understand that reading is important, and not all students are regularly engaged in recreational reading. Children typically read for pleasure less often as they age, leading researchers to seek effective ways that social influences can support them to be lifelong readers beyond the early years. Parents can play an important role in communicating the continued importance of reading and fostering positive attitudes toward reading. However, after independent reading skill acquisition, parents may become a …

The Effects Of Enactment On Communicative Competence In Aphasic Casual Conversation: A Functional Linguistic Perspective, Rimke Groenewold, Elizabeth Armstrong

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Background: Previous research has shown that speakers with aphasia rely on enactment more often than non-brain-damaged language users. Several studies have been conducted to explain this observed increase, demonstrating that spoken language containing enactment is easier to produce and is more engaging to the conversation partner. This paper describes the effects of the occurrence of enactment in casual conversation involving individuals with aphasia on its level of conversational assertiveness. Aims: To evaluate whether and to what extent the occurrence of enactment in speech of individuals with aphasia contributes to its conversational assertiveness. Methods & Procedures: Conversations between a speaker with …

Apertium’S Web Toolchain For Low-Resource Language Technology, S. Cherivirala, S. Chiplunkar, Jonathan North Washington, K. B. Unhammer

Linguistics Faculty Works

The Apertium web toolchain, consisting of a front end (Apertium HTML-Tools) and a back end (Apertium APy), is a free and open-source toolchain that supports a range of open-source technologies. The internationalised interface allows users to translate text, documents, and web pages, as well as morphologically analyse and generate text. Other features, including support for multi-step/pivot translation, dictionary-style lookup, spell-checking, and accepting user suggestions for translations, are nearing release.

Rule-Based Machine Translation From Kazakh To Turkish, S. Bayatli, S. Kurnaz, I. Salimzianov, Jonathan North Washington, F. M. Tyers

Linguistics Faculty Works

This paper presents a shallow-transfer machine translation (MT) system for translating from Kazakh to Turkish. Background on the differences between the languages is presented, followed by how the system was designed to handle some of these differences. The system is based on the Apertium free/open-source machine translation platform. The structure of the system and how it works is described, along with an evaluation against two competing systems. Linguistic components were developed, including a Kazakh-Turkish bilingual dictionary, Constraint Grammar disambiguation rules, lexical selection rules, and structural transfer rules. With many known issues yet to be addressed, our RBMT system has reached …

La Aculturación En La Comprensión Lectora De Los Estudiantes Universitarios: La Valoración En El Uso Polifónico De Las Citas, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

El acceso de los alumnos universitarios a los estudios de nivel superior implica un proceso de adaptación y aculturación que encuentra respuesta principalmente en la lectura y en la escritura académica. Esta transformación genera al principio altos grados de ansiedad en los sujetos, quienes en este nivel carecen aún de las coordenadas necesarias para la interpretación de textos científicos codificados en géneros discursivos que en muchas ocasiones han sido expresamente elaborados por escritores expertos para otros especialistas de la disciplina.

El cambio conceptual que se produce en el individuo que trata de integrarse en una nueva comunidad discursiva viene marcado …

[Introduction To] Language And Meter, Dieter Gunkel, Olav Hackstein

Bookshelf

In Language and Meter, Dieter Gunkel and Olav Hackstein unite fifteen linguistic studies on a variety of poetic traditions, including the Homeric epics, the hieratic hymns of the Ṛgveda, the Gathas of the Avesta, early Latin and the Sabellic compositions, Germanic alliterative verse, Insular Celtic court poetry, and Tocharian metrical texts. The studies treat a broad range of topics, including the prehistory of the hexameter, the nature of Homeric formulae, the structure of Vedic verse, rhythm in the Gathas, and the relationship between Germanic and Celtic poetic traditions. The volume contributes to our understanding of the relationship between language …

Sign Modulation By Chimpanzees To Produce Interrogatives, Kailie Dombrausky

All Master's Theses

Native signers of American Sign Language produce interrogatives by holding signs for an extended duration while employing the questioning look. The questioning look is defined as raised eyebrows, a tilted head, and direct eye contact maintained for the duration of the utterance. Chimpanzees who communicate using signs have demonstrated modulation of signs including held sign, raised brow, and eye gaze. The present study used archived video data to compare the duration of signs when the chimpanzees did or did not employ the questioning look. In both single and multi-sign utterances, the chimpanzees held their signs for a mean of 0.6 …

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 …

Good, Better, Best: English Language Development Practices In Graduate Business Programs, K. James Hartshorn, Maureen Snow Andrade, Norman W. Evans, Shaylana Davis

Faculty Publications

Business is the top field of study for international students in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Yet, evidence suggests that not all international students who speak English as a second language are adequately equipped with the language skills they need to succeed. At the same time, the number of international students seeking business training in English-medium universities continues to rise. Thus, this study sought to fill an increasingly important gap in the literature by examining the strategies, innovations, challenges, and outcomes for U.S. schools of business who admit large concentrations of international ESL students at 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 …

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 …

Finding Pockets Of Social Variation In The Digital Archive Of Southern Speech, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

Potential outcomes of Southern shifting:

Southern Vowel Shift:

• Increased overlap or “swapping” of /i ɪ/, /eɪ ɛ/; overlap of /æ ɛ/
• Decreased acoustic distance between /u i/, /oʊ i/

African American Vowel Shift:

• Increased overlap of /i ɪ/, /eɪ ɛ/, /æ ɛ/ (swapping less likely)

SVS vs. AAVS

• Front vowels positioned differently
• Back vowels positioned differently …in European American vs. African American speech

Does shifting strengthen over time? - Age effects

Do European American and African American speakers shift differently? - Race effects

Do women and men shift differently? - Sex effects

Do speakers in different parts of the South …

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 …

Variation In Past Counterfactual Constructions, Victoria Zencak

All Master's Theses

The two past counterfactual constructions under investigation in this study are the past counterfactual conditional (Type 3) and the past counterfactual wish complement clause (PCWCC). Each of these has both a standard and variant form. The verb in the standard forms is had + past participle; the verb in the variant forms is would have + past participle. Although reference books and textbooks acknowledge variant forms, generally describing them as informal or conversational, they have not received serious scrutiny. It was the goal of this study to see whether variant forms are currently common in usage and to understand more …

An Eye-Tracking Study Examining The Role Of Question-Answer Congruency In Children’S Comprehension Of Only: A Preliminary Report, Lauren Covey, Caitlin E. Coughlin, Utako Minai

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

‘Crain’s puzzle’ is a term that has been used to describe children’s difficulty comprehending the focus operator only when it is in subject position (subject-only), showing a tendency to interpret only as if it preceded the verb phrase instead. While some researchers attribute children’s difficulty to impoverished pragmatics in the discourse (Hackl et al., 2015), others argue that children’s grammar fundamentally differs from adults’ Notley et al. (2009), yielding a debate regarding whether children’s misinterpretation reflects a non-adult-like linguistic representation of only or some computational burden on their processing of meaning. This study addresses this debate by using eye-tracking to …

Pampanitikang Gawain Ang Pagsasalin, Michael M. Coroza

Filipino Faculty Publications

Binibigyang-diin sa maikling pagtalakay na ito na ang pagsasaling pampanitikan ay isang pampanitikang gawain. Kaugnay kung hindi man tunay na isang sangay ng mga araling pampanitikan ang pagsasalin. Lampas sa tumbasan ng mga salita o parirala, higit sa paghanap ng literal na kahulugan o praktikal na aral ng teksto, ang pampanitikang pagsasalin ay nakatuon sa pagkapanitikan ng panitikan. Ito ang dahilan kung bakit para kay Clifford E. Landers ay mahirap ipatanggap o ipaunawa sa maraming nasa larang ng pragmatikong pagsasalin ang pagsasaling pampanitikan. Hindi ang ibig sabihin lamang ang mahalaga, madalas na mas mahalaga pa ang paraan ng pagsasabi. Wika …

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 …

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.

Aspectos Formales De La Citación En El Discurso Científico Desde Una Perspectiva Diacrónica, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

La presente investigación hace una revisión histórica del tratamiento del elemento retórico-discursivo de la citación desde su primera aparición en el ámbito de la comunicación científica en la Philosophical Transaction de la Real Sociedad de Londres para el avance de la Ciencia Natural.

Language Attitudes In Algeria, Kamal Belmihoub

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Auditory Disruption Improves Word Segmentation: A Functional Basis For Lenition Phenomena, Jonah Katz, Melinda Fricke

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This paper presents evidence that spirantization, a cross-linguistically common lenition process, affects English listeners’ ease of segmenting novel “words” in an artificial language. The cross-linguistically common spirantization pattern of initial stops and medial continuants (e.g. [ɡuβa]) results in improved word segmentation compared to the inverse “anti-lenition” pattern of initial continuants and medial stops (e.g. [ɣuba]). The study also tests the effect of obstruent voicing, another common lenition pattern, but finds no significant differences in segmentation performance. There are several points of broader interest in these studies. Most of the phonetic factors influencing word segmentation in past studies have been …

Literacies Of The Disaster Zone: New Media Genres And Participatory Rhetorics After The 2010 Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill, R. J. Lambert

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

On April 20, 2010, explosions at the British Petroleum (BP) Macondo Project in the Gulf of Mexico initiated what would become the world's largest accidental release of oil into the ocean. This ecological disaster, a unique combination of natural and human causes, is one of many significant traumas over approximately the last two decades that various stakeholders have documented, participated in, and responded to largely through the expanding and increasingly ubiquitous media of the internet, computers, cell phones, and other networked communicative technologies, which both enable and constrain the variety of responses to traumatic events.

This Dissertation improves our understanding …