Language Description and Documentation Commons^™

Understanding A Discourse Marker In Quito, Ecuador, Hannah Jesberger

Honors Projects

The present research project examines the possible factors to explain the word-final /f/ in Ecuadorian Spanish including but not limited to: where it is used, who uses it (gender, age ranges, social class), and with which words it is most commonly used. As the first extensive research study on the word-final /f/, the project may lead to other investigations of this phenomenon and other features of Ecuadorian Spanish. In addition, if there are other variations of the marker pues in the Spanish varieties spoken in different regions and/or countries, researchers can use this present study as basis to analyze the …

Studies In Words: Laborious Ben Jonson's Lexicon, Steven Hrdlicka

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation examines significant words in Ben Jonson’s poetic lexicon that the poet inherited, borrowed, and shaped from antiquity and through the Middle Ages. Jonson used etymology as a means to rhetorical inventio, a common practice in the Renaissance. Etymology comprehended more than mere word derivation in the Renaissance but also notably included philological study. Ben Jonson’s extensive knowledge of language, history, architecture, the plastic arts, and philosophy is well known, but the extent to which Jonson’s knowledge of these subjects contributed to his understanding and use of poetic language is not. Thus this dissertation seeks to explore the intellectual …

Student Expectations And Motivation In Spanish For Heritage Speakers Programs, Sergio A. Guzman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The changing demographics in the United States and the growing need for multilingual individuals originated by globalization, among other reasons, have contributed to the emergence of a new field within the area of Applied Linguistics: The Teaching and Learning of Heritage Languages. Due to historical and geographic causes, Spanish for Heritage Speakers (SHS) is currently the largest and most established of these programs. However, the curricula, like those of most college courses, has been developed from professors’ perspectives, largely ignoring what students want to learn and/or their motives for enrolling in these classes. The lack of student input is especially …

The N170 Erp Component Differs In Laterality, Distribution, And Association With Continuous Reading Measures For Deaf And Hearing Readers, Karen Emmorey, Katherine J. Midgley, Casey B. Kohen, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Phillipp J. Holcomb

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

The temporo-occipitally distributed N170 ERP component is hypothesized to reflect print-tuning in skilled readers. This study investigated whether skilled deaf and hearing readers (matched on reading ability, but not phonological awareness) exhibit similar N170 patterns, given their distinct experiences learning to read. Thirty-two deaf and 32 hearing adults viewed words and symbol strings in a familiarity judgment task. In the N170 epoch (120–240 ms) hearing readers produced greater negativity for words than symbols at left hemisphere (LH) temporo-parietal and occipital sites, while deaf readers only showed this asymmetry at occipital sites. Linear mixed effects regression was used to examine the …

Phenomenal Marks, Ruptured Spaces, Relearning Language, Crossing Cultures, Meelee Ahn

Graduate School of Art Theses

The form of my thesis is one of interruptions, or “Ruptures,” as I call them. These are events of my personal history, or stories from the lives of artists, that intervene against my narrative through graphic and language devices meant to be understood as equivalent to the material affects in my painting. Important artists and movements mentioned are Gerhard Richter, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenhauler, Lee Ufan, Doho Suh, and Abstract Expressionism. Writers and philosophers Maurice Merlou-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Joan Banach, Sigmund Freud, John Gage, Brian Massumi, Allen Weiss, Clement Greenburg, Shin-Chulgyu, and Yoon-Dongju are also discussed. The idea discussed include …

Keres Language Loss In The Santo Domingo Pueblo Community, Christopher Chavez

American Studies ETDs

The purpose of this research is to consider the effect of the Keres language loss in the Santo Domingo Pueblo community and the need for language revitalization. The Keres-speaking community of Santo Domingo Pueblo has been adamantly opposed to instituting oral and written Keres language in the school system. The Santo Domingo people began to withhold information in response to the European intrusion into the Pueblo world. Isolating itself from the colonial powers served to maintain the unity of the Pueblo’s traditions and culture. However, a revitalization of the Keres language requires integration with the global society. Without the written …

Table Of The Sun, Christine Bettis

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My creative thesis is a 48-page collection of poems titled Table of the Sun. Each poem is an intimate interrogation of varied ecological, romantic, and/or political disasters ranging from the Dakota Access Pipeline, cruel love, and Donald Trump. Some poems are reckonings, and others work to heal trauma, heartache, clinical illness, and supernatural afflictions like those experienced by the Tarantati of Puglia. Some are combative, it's true. Water is everywhere and it is multitudinous as an agent of destruction, cleansing, and transformation, and as a life-giver. The collection was influenced by readings, lectures, and courses I've experienced at UNLV, including …

De-Colonizing Language Needs: A Critical Ethnographic Study Of Former And Current Teachers’ Language Dispositions And How Taking A Multicultural Education Course Mediates Those Dispositions, Ravijot Singh

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this critical ethnographic research was to examine how taking a Multicultural Education course mediated teachers’ language dispositions. Particularly, this study examined how language and culture have a profound connection that is largely unrecognized in the American education system, and how lack of respect for the home language of students by their teachers leads to negative attitudes towards the children and impedes students’ academic progress.

This study used a theoretical and conceptual framework that incorporate intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) as its research paradigm to understand the interaction and overlapping roles of language and culture in society, and how neoliberal …

Implicit Co-Activation Of American Sign Language In Deaf Readers: An Erp Study, Gabriela Meade, Katherine J. Midgley, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Phillipp J. Holcomb, Karen Emmorey

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

In an implicit phonological priming paradigm, deaf bimodal bilinguals made semantic relatedness decisions for pairs of English words. Half of the semantically unrelated pairs had phonologically related translations in American Sign Language (ASL). As in previous studies with unimodal bilinguals, targets in pairs with phonologically related translations elicited smaller negativities than targets in pairs with phonologically unrelated translations within the N400 window. This suggests that the same lexicosemantic mechanism underlies implicit co-activation of a non-target language, irrespective of language modality. In contrast to unimodal bilingual studies that find no behavioral effects, we observed phonological interference, indicating that bimodal bilinguals may …

Loneliness In Pepperdine Students, Brandon Vandyke, Haley St Martin, Ayelen Lee

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

No abstract provided.

P06. The Western Archive Of Dialects And Languages, Michael Iannozzi

Western Research Forum

Traditionally, once fieldwork in a community was complete, the researcher left, and the participants never saw what became of those recordings and digitized materials. The Western Archive of Dialects and Languages (WADL) is a new project between the author and Western Libraries to ensure that the community of research directly benefits from sharing their stories, materials, and time.

The materials, dialect, and stories are preserved in a permanent and accessible, online archive. This ensures that future generations, wherever they live, will be able to access the heritage and history their family members shared with researchers.

I have already digitized, and …

Formal And Functional Linguistic Properties Of Esl Textbooks, Jessica Shea Lewis

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Based on the formal and functional perspectives espoused in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the main purpose of this thesis was to investigate the extent to which such lexico-grammatical features as lexical density, choice of nominal groups, and grammatical metaphor are used in ESL texts to scaffold target language proficiency levels. Of the number of lexico-grammatical metafunctions and their functional constituents, interpersonal metafunctional categories were analyzed from these three functional features in this thesis in order to reveal the ways in which interpersonal categories and the lexico-grammatical features are correlated as the level of difficulty of each text increases.

The analysis …

Rhetoric Of Typography: Cross-Cultural Perceptions Of Typefaces For Technical And Visual Communication, Michael Peterson

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Since the early 2000s, scholars have been conducting research to determine whether typefaces influence a reader's response to a document. Some areas of research have included the role of gender, age, or other demographics on typeface perception. However, the role of culture in academic discourse on the rhetoric of typography has been largely underexplored, and this is concerning given the ease with which technical documents can be delivered to cultures around the world with a couple of clicks on a computer.

I developed my research topic to explore whether Koreans perceive typefaces differently from non-Koreans and to discover what typefaces …

Phonetic Complexity Affects Children’S Mandarin Tone Production Accuracy In Disyllabic Words: A Perceptual Study, Puisan Wong, Winifred Strange

Publications and Research

This is the first study to examine the effect of phonetic contexts on children’s lexical tone production. Mandarin tones in disyllabic words produced by forty-four 2- to 6-year-old children and twelve mothers were low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information. Native Mandarin speaking adults categorized the tones based on the pitch information in the filtered stimuli. All mothers’ tones were categorized with ceiling accuracy. Counter to the findings in most previous studies on children’s tone acquisition and the prevailing assumption in models of speech development that children acquire suprasegmental features much earlier than segmental features, this study found that children as …

Scalar Implicature In Chitonga-Speaking Children, Jodi Reich, Kelly Nedwick, Teodora Niculae-Caxi, Yang Liu, Elena L. Grigorenko

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

Research on the acquisition of scalar implicature (SI) has provided evidence that young children interpret SI differently from adults. However, results have varied, and there is now mounting evidence that around six years of age, children are able to derive the pragmatic inferences associated with SI (Foppolo, Guasti, and Chierchia, 2012). Variability in results across studies could be due to factors such as data collection methods and language-specific differences. In order to add to the growing body of literature in a meaningful way, this research investigated the interpretation of sentences that include SI by Chitonga-speaking children (7-15 years old) in …