Applied Linguistics Commons^™

De Acordo Com A…: Lexical Bundles And Disciplinary Variation In Academic Brazilian Portuguese, Larissa Goulart

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Research on formulaic language has shown that few lexical bundles overlap across disciplines in expert academic writing, with disciplinary writing being characterized by specific bundles. This was proven to be the case in both English (Hyland, 2008) and Spanish (Cortes, 2008). This paper explores the use of lexical bundles in Portuguese academic writing in two disciplinary groups, life sciences and humanities. Using a corpus of research articles written by Brazilian scientists, four-word bundles were extracted and compared for their function (Biber; Conrad; Cortes, 2004) and structure (Biber; Johansson; Leech; Conrad; Finegan, 1999). The results of this study indicate that writing …

Ai Or Student Writing? Analyzing The Situational And Linguistic Characteristics Of Undergraduate Student Writing And Ai-Generated Assignments, Larissa Goulart, Marine Laísa Matte, Alanna Mendoza, Lee Alvarado, Ingrid Veloso

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, universities have faced the issue of whether there is still a place for written assignments in higher education. ChatGPT's capacity to mimic various written forms raises questions about the necessity of traditional assessments. Given this background, this study explores to what extent AI-generated assignments can replicate the situational and linguistic features of student-authored assignments. Using a corpus of undergraduate assignments from an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context, we compare student responses with ChatGPT's outputs. Employing a register approach, we analyze the situational and linguistic characteristics of texts across three different registers—essays, critiques, …

Young Children’S Directed Question Asking In Preschool Classrooms, Michelle Wong, Koeun Choi, Libby Barak, Elizabeth Lapidow, Jennifer Austin, Patrick Shafto, Elizabeth Bonawitz

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children’s speech, providing a means by which young learners can rapidly gain information about the world. Previous research has demonstrated that children exhibit sensitivity to the knowledge state of potential informants in laboratory settings. However, it remains unclear whether and how young children are inclined to direct questions that support learning deeper content to more knowledgeable informants in naturalistic classroom contexts. In this study, we examined children’s question-asking targets (adults, other preschoolers, self-talk) during an open-play period in a US preschool classroom and assessed how the cognitive and linguistic characteristics of questions varied …

Examining The Source Of Island Effects In Native Speakers And Second Language Learners Of English, Saad Aldosari, Lauren Covey, Alison Gabriele

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We investigate sensitivity to island constraints in English native speakers and Najdi Arabic learners of English, examining (1) whether second language (L2) learners whose native language (L1) does not instantiate overt wh-movement are sensitive to island constraints and (2) the source of island effects. Under a grammatical account of islands, these effects arise due to violations of syntactic constraints. Under the resource-limitation account, island effects arise due to processing difficulty. The source of island effects is interesting to examine in L2 learners because it is possible that reduced processing abilities in the L2 may lead to the low acceptance of …

Exploring Language Patterns: Integrating Corpus Linguistics In The Pedagogical Grammar Class, Larissa Goulart

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Nii Neemun..., Johanna Tumux, Hannah Nosch

Games

Nii Neemun... (I Spy...) is designed for use inside a classroom, where learners can practice hearing and naming the objects that surround them. This game includes a full set of instructions, a learner worksheet, and an answer key, as well as recommendations for adjusting play for beginning and more experienced participants.

Register Variation In Understudied Academic Contexts, Larissa Goulart

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

A major focus of register research has been language variation in academic discourse. These studies describe patterns of language use in spoken and written academic texts. Although there have been numerous studies of this type, most have focused on academic registers in English and on descriptions of published academic registers (e.g. textbooks, research articles, and abstracts). Much less work has been caried out on academic registers in other languages or unpublished academic registers. This special issue presents five studies describing the language patterns of understudied academic discourse in English (learners’ writing and statutory law), as well as descriptions of published …

Towards Better Structured And Less Noisy Web Data: Oscar With Register Annotations, Veronika Laippala, Anna Salmela, Samuel Rönnqvist, Alham Fikri Aji, Li Hsin Chang, Asma Dhifallah, Larissa Goulart, Henna Kortelainen, Marc Pàmies, Deise Prina Dutra, Valtteri Skantsi, Lintang Sutawika, Sampo Pyysalo

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Web-crawled datasets are known to be noisy, as they feature a wide range of language use covering both user-generated and professionally edited content as well as noise originating from the crawling process. This article presents one solution to reduce this noise by using automatic register (genre) identification-whether the texts are, e.g., forum discussions, lyrical or how-to pages. We apply the multilingual register identification model by Rönnqvist et al. (2021) and label the widely used Oscar dataset. Additionally, we evaluate the model against eight new languages, showing that the performance is comparable to previous findings on a restricted set of languages. …

Creating A Theoretical Framework To Underpin Discourse Assessment And Intervention In Aphasia, Lucy Dipper, Jane Marshall, Mary Boyle, Deborah Hersh, Nicola Botting, Madeline Cruice

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Discourse (a unit of language longer than a single sentence) is fundamental to everyday communication. People with aphasia (a language impairment occurring most frequently after stroke, or other brain damage) have communication difficulties which lead to less complete, less coherent, and less complex discourse. Although there are multiple reviews of discourse assessment and an emerging evidence base for discourse intervention, there is no unified theoretical framework to underpin this research. Instead, disparate theories are recruited to explain different aspects of discourse impairment, or symptoms are reported without a hypothesis about the cause. What is needed is a theoretical framework that …

Examining Variability In The Processing Of Agreement In Novice Learners: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials, Alison Gabriele, José Alemán Bañón, Lesa Hoffman, Lauren Covey, Amy Rossomondo, Robert Fiorentino

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The present study examines both properties of the language and properties of the learner to better understand variability at the earliest stages of second language (L2) acquisition. We used event-related potentials, an oral production task, and a battery of individual differences measures to examine the processing of number and gender agreement in two groups of low-proficiency English-speaking learners of Spanish who were tested in multiple sessions. The results showed an advantage for number, the feature also instantiated in the native language, as both groups showed a native-like P600 response to subject–verb and noun–adjective number violations across sessions. The more advanced …

Theme: Mobile Language Learning, Glenn Stockwell, Susana Sotillo

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

There has been increased interest in portable technologies which allow learners to access tools for learning languages in virtually any time or place that suits them. The quickly developing functionalities of mobile phones, MP3 players, laptop and tablet computers, and other hand-held devices with touch screen technology mean that the range of possibilities for language learning has greatly diversified. GodwinJones (2011), for example, points out that iPhone and Android phones have ushered in a phenomenal expansion in the development of Apps for just about every topic under the sun, and educators have been exploring the value of Apps for learning …

A Positional Tagset For Russian, Jirka Hana, Anna Feldman

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Fusional languages have rich inflection. As a consequence, tagsets capturing their morphological features are necessarily large. A natural way to make a tagset manageable is to use a structured system. In this paper, we present a positional tagset for describing morphological properties of Russian. The tagset was inspired by the Czech positional system (Hajič, 2004). We have used preliminary versions of this tagset in our previous work (e.g., Hana et al. (2004, 2006); Feldman (2006); Feldman and Hana (2010)). Here, we both systematize and extend these preliminary versions (by adding information about animacy, aspect and reflexivity); give a more detailed …

Like Finding A Needle In A Haystack: Annotating The American National Corpus For Idiomatic Expressions, Laura Street, Nathan Michalov, Rachel Silverstein, Michael Reynolds, Lurdes Ruela, Felicia Flowers, Angela Talucci, Priscilla Pereira, Gabriella Morgon, Samantha Siegel, Marci Barousse, Antequa Anderson, Tashom Carroll, Anna Feldman

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper presents the details of a pilot study in which we tagged portions of the American National Corpus (ANC) for idioms composed of verb-noun constructions, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. The three data sets we analyzed included 1, 500-sentence samples from the spoken, the non-fiction, and the fiction portions of the ANC. This paper provides the details of the tagset we developed, the motivation behind our choices, and the inter-annotator agreement measures we deemed appropriate for this task. In tagging the ANC for idiomatic expressions, our annotators achieved a high level of agreement (< .80) on the tags but a low level of agreement (>.00) on what constituted an …

The Composite Nature Of Interlanguage As A Developing System, Longxing Wei

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper explores the nature of interlanguage (IL) as a developing system with a focus on the abstract lexical structure underlying IL construction. The developing system of IL is assumed to be 'composite' in that in second language acquisition (SLA) several linguistic systems are in contact, each of which may contribute different amounts to the developing system. The lexical structure is assumed to be 'abstract' in that the mental lexicon contains abstract elements called 'lemmas', which contain information about individual lexemes, and lemmas in the bilingual mental lexicon are language-specific and are in contact in IL production. Based on the …

Phonological Facilitation Through Translation In A Bilingual Picture-Naming Task, Paul Amrhein, Aimee Knupsky

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a critical examination of phonological effects in a picture-word interference task. Using a methodology minimizing stimulus repetition, English/Spanish and Spanish/English bilinguals named pictures in either L1 or L2 (blocked contexts) or in both (mixed contexts) while ignoring word distractors in L1 or L2. Distractors were either phonologically related to the picture name (direct; FISH–fist), or related through translation to the picture name (TT; LEG–milk–leche), or they were unrelated (bear–peach). Results demonstrate robust activation of phonological representations by translation equivalents of word distractors. Although both direct and TT distractors facilitated naming, TT facilitation was more consistent in L2 naming …

The Word Out : A Stylistic Analysis Of Rap Music, Claudia Coscarello

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Rap music is a particular socioculturally bound music phenomenon that was conceived on the streets and birthed within the African-American communities in the urban boroughs of New York City during the 1970's. It was developed as a particular kind of linguistic self expression in the form of music for African- American youth. Rap music is a display of ethnic creativity and cultural pride which gives expression to a speech community's voice as it declares the stark reality of urban life.

For close to three decades, rap music has maintained its position at the forefront of the youth culture across the …

Discourse Functions And Syntactic Complexity In Synchronous And Asynchronous Communication, Susana Sotillo

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The present study investigates discourse functions and syntactic complexity in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learner output obtained via two different modes of computer-mediated communication (CMC): asynchronous and synchronous discussions. Two instructors and twenty-five students from two advanced ESL writing classes participated in this study. Answers were sought to the following questions: a) Are the discourse functions present in ESL learners' synchronous discussions of reading assignments quantitatively and qualitatively different from those found in asynchronous discussions? And, b) which mode of CMC shows more syntactically complex learner output? The results showed that the quantity and types of discourse functions present in synchronous discussions …