Syracuse University
Old Dominion University
University of Connecticut - Storrs
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Murray State University
University of Central Florida
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Lingnan University
SIT Graduate Institute
Drawing About Writing: Exploring Egyptian Middle School Students’ Writing Motivation And Perceptions,
2023
American University in Cairo
Drawing About Writing: Exploring Egyptian Middle School Students’ Writing Motivation And Perceptions, Maryam Elbayady
Theses and Dissertations
The principal aim of this study is to explore Egyptian middle school students’ perceptions of their writing experiences using artistic expression, specifically drawings. It also aims to understand their levels of writing motivation using the Self-Beliefs, Writing-Beliefs, and Attitude Survey (SWAS) (Wright et al., 2019). Finally, it examines the relationships among participants’ perceptions, motivation, and their narrative writing performance. The view that students’ voices are valuable to research geared towards school improvement has largely propelled this study (Bland, 2018; Zumbrunn et al., 2017). In addition, due to the limited literature about middle school students enrolled at private Egyptian schools, this …
Kxanuw! (Miichuwaakan Waak Aweeyayusak),
2023
Montclair State University
Kxanuw! (Miichuwaakan Waak Aweeyayusak), Kira Fucci, Camilla Bager
Games
Kxanuw! (I have it!) is modeled after bingo. This version allows players to practice plant and animal names, engaging listening comprehension, speaking, and visual recognition. The game kit includes instructions, a caller's card, and printable player cards.
Nii Neemun...,
2023
Montclair State University
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.
The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal,
2023
American University in Cairo
The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal, Habib Khan
Theses and Dissertations
The emergence of modern-nation states saw the end of the empirical era of exploitation and exercise of inherent racist tendencies towards the 'other'. However, the effect of that colonial system is still ever-present in the creation and governance of these newly independent states. While every new state aims to be 'modern', they adopt the international legal framework of the West as their own - a system they had initially wanted to escape. The concept of Muslim universality in the form of the ummah should have freed Pakistan from the shackles of its former colonial masters. Instead, this phenomenon was replaced …
Theological Implications Of The Symbols And Signs In The Sacrament Of Matrimony Of The Syro-Malabar Church,
2023
Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram
Theological Implications Of The Symbols And Signs In The Sacrament Of Matrimony Of The Syro-Malabar Church, Nelson Mathew O. Carm.
Journal of Global Catholicism
This article discusses the significance of the signs and symbols used in the sacrament of the marriage of the Syro-Malabar Church and the adaptations from different cultures, particularly the Hindu culture of India. It concentrates on the specific elements found in the marriage celebration of the St. Thomas Christians. The rituals that are unique to the Sacrament of Matrimony of the Syro-Malabar Church, mainly expressed through symbols and signs, remain a significant contribution to the liturgy, spirituality, and theology of the Sacrament of Matrimony, and to the theology of inculturation. In the Syro-Malabar liturgy, marriage rituals, and signs and symbols …
The Interplay Between Language And Culture In J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth,
2023
Liberty University
The Interplay Between Language And Culture In J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Mackenzie Wangberg
Masters Theses
The construction of detailed languages was a lifelong passion of J.R.R. Tolkien. While creating the world of Middle-earth, he assigned different languages to the various cultures which inhabit this fantasy landscape. He carefully matched languages and cultures to try to elicit particular responses from his audience. It is well known that J.R.R. Tolkien wanted certain languages of Middle-earth to sound beautiful and others to sound ugly. Research so far, however, has not answered why the specific phonemes, or sounds, which Tolkien chose for these languages might cause the specific reactions he intended. I have used Tolkien’s influences to explain why …
A Guide To Vowel Pronunciation In Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey, Penobscot, And Abenaki,
2023
University of Southern Maine
A Guide To Vowel Pronunciation In Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey, Penobscot, And Abenaki, Greyson Kurtz
Thinking Matters Symposium
There are many structural and cultural barriers to learning Wabanaki languages. These barriers are compounded by the fact that Abenaki, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy use similar but varying writing systems. This issue was not contrived, but arose through the independent development of these writing systems. The key difference lies in the vowels; vowels are often among the first sounds to shift in any given language, and these three languages have followed this pattern. Any modern word that comes from a shared Proto-Eastern Algonquian root and appears in Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Abenaki will exhibit clear systematic variation in the pronunciation of their …
Destined Failure,
2023
Rhode Island School of Design
Destined Failure, Chengjun Pan
Masters Theses
I attempt to examine the complex structure of human communication, explaining why it is bound to fail. By reproducing experienceable phenomena, I demonstrate how they can expose communication structure and reveal the limitations of our perception and symbolization.I divide the process of communication into six stages: input, detection, symbolization, dictionary, interpretation, and output. In this thesis, I examine the flaws and challenges that arise in the first five stages. I argue that reception acts as a filter and that understanding relies on a symbolic system that is full of redundancies. Therefore, every interpretation is destined to be a deviation.
Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India,
2023
Rhode Island School of Design
Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar
Masters Theses
This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …
Preface: Scil 2023 Editors’ Note,
2023
University of California, Los Angeles
Preface: Scil 2023 Editors’ Note, Tim Hunter, Brandon Prickett
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
This volume contains research presented at the sixth annual meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL), held in Amherst, Massachusetts, June 15–17, 2023.
Analogy In Contact: Modeling Maltese Plural Inflection,
2023
The Ohio State University
Analogy In Contact: Modeling Maltese Plural Inflection, Sara Court, Andrea D. Sims, Micha Elsner
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Maltese is often described as having a hybrid morphological system resulting from extensive contact between Semitic and Romance language varieties. Such a designation reflects an etymological divide as much as it does a larger tradition in the literature to consider concatenative and non-concatenative morphological patterns as distinct in the language architecture. Using a combination of computational modeling and information theoretic methods, we quantify the extent to which the phonology and etymology of a Maltese singular noun may predict the morphological process (affixal vs. templatic) as well as the specific plural allomorph (affix or template) relating a singular noun to its …
Extracting Binary Features From Speech Production Errors And Perceptual Confusions Using Redundancy-Corrected Transmission,
2023
University of Toronto
Extracting Binary Features From Speech Production Errors And Perceptual Confusions Using Redundancy-Corrected Transmission, Zhanao Fu, Ewan Dunbar
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
We develop a mutual information-based feature extraction method and apply it to English speech production and perception error data. The extracted features show different phoneme groupings than conventional phonological features, especially in the place features. We evaluate how well the extracted features can define natural classes to account for English phonological patterns. The features extracted from production errors had performance close to conventional phonological features, while the features extracted from perception errors performed worse. The study shows that featural information can be extracted from underused sources of data such as confusion matrices of production and perception errors, and the results …
Language Models Can Learn Exceptions To Syntactic Rules,
2023
New York University
Language Models Can Learn Exceptions To Syntactic Rules, Cara Su-Yi Leong, Tal Linzen
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Artificial neural networks can generalize productively to novel contexts. Can they also learn exceptions to those productive rules? We explore this question using the case of restrictions on English passivization (e.g., the fact that ''The vacation lasted five days'' is grammatical, but ''*Five days was lasted by the vacation'' is not). We collect human acceptability judgments for passive sentences with a range of verbs, and show that the probability distribution defined by GPT-2, a language model, matches the human judgments with high correlation. We also show that the relative acceptability of a verb in the active vs. passive voice is …
An Mg Parsing View Into The Processing Of Subject And Object Relative Clauses In Basque,
2023
University of Utah
An Mg Parsing View Into The Processing Of Subject And Object Relative Clauses In Basque, Matteo Fiorini, Jillian Chang, Aniello De Santo
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Stabler (2013)'s top-down parser for Minimalist grammars has been used to account for a variety of off-line processing preferences, with measures of memory load sensitive to subtle structural details. This paper expands the model's empirical coverage to ergative languages by looking at the processing asymmetries reported for Basque relative clauses. Our results show that the model predicts a subject over object preference as identified in the relevant psycholinguistic literature.
Modeling Island Effects With Probabilistic Tier-Based Strictly Local Grammars Over Trees,
2023
University of California, Irvine
Modeling Island Effects With Probabilistic Tier-Based Strictly Local Grammars Over Trees, Charles J. Torres, Kenneth Hanson, Thomas Graf, Connor Mayer
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
We fuse two recent strands of work in subregular linguistics—probabilistic tier projections (Mayer, 2021) and tier-based perspectives on movement (Graf, 2022a)—into a probabilistic model of syntax that makes it easy to add gradience to traditional, categorical analyses from the syntactic literature. As a case study, we test this model on experimental data from Sprouse et al. (2016) for a number of island effects in English. We show that the model correctly replicates the superadditive effects and gradience that have been observed in the psycholinguistic literature.
Morpheme Combinatorics Of Compound Words Through Box Embeddings,
2023
(formerly at) University of Leipzig
Morpheme Combinatorics Of Compound Words Through Box Embeddings, Eric R. Rosen
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
In this study I probe the combinatoric properties of Japanese morphemes that participate in compounding. By representing morphemes through box embeddings (Vilnis et al., 2018; Patel et al., 2020; Li et al., 2019), a model learns preferences for one morpheme to combine with another in two-member compounds. These learned preferences are represented by the degree to which the box-hyperrectangles for two morphemes overlap in representational space. After learning, these representations are applied to test how well they encode a speaker’s knowledge of the properties of each morpheme that predict the plausibility of novel compounds in which they could occur.
Parasitic Gaps In Japanese: An Mg-Based Approach,
2023
Universität Leipzig
Parasitic Gaps In Japanese: An Mg-Based Approach, Yu Tomita, Hitomi Hirayama
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
This paper aims to provide an account based on Minimalist Grammar (MG) for what are called parasitic gaps in Japanese, which we take as a null pronoun. The main goal of this paper is to provide a syntactic account of the environment in which a parasitic gap reading is licensed in Japanese. First, Japanese parasitic gaps are compared with English ones, illustrating the puzzle to be solved. We argue that the possibility of co-indexing between a parasitic gap (null pronoun) and wh-phrase is correlated with the point at which the wh-phrase enters the derivation. We also show that scrambling counterbleeds …
Processing Advantages Of End-Weight,
2023
Universitat Leipzig
Processing Advantages Of End-Weight, Lei Liu
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Previous research has established that English end-weight configurations, where sentence components of greater grammatical complexity appear at the ends of sentences, demonstrate processing advantages over alternative word orders. To evaluate these processing advantages, I analyze how a Minimalist Grammar (MG) parser generates syntactic structures for different word orders. The parser's behavior suggests that end-weight configurations require fewer memory resources for parsing than alternative structures. This memory load difference accounts for the end-weight advantage in processing. The results highlight the validity of the MG processing approach as a linking theory connecting syntactic structures to behavioral observations. Additionally, the results have implications …
Rethinking Representations: A Log-Bilinear Model Of Phonotactics,
2023
Rutgers University
Rethinking Representations: A Log-Bilinear Model Of Phonotactics, Huteng Dai, Connor Mayer, Richard Futrell
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Models of phonotactics include subsegmental representations in order to generalize to unattested sequences. These representations can be encoded in at least two ways: as discrete, phonetically-based features, or as continuous, distribution-based representations induced from the statistical patterning of sounds. Because phonological theory typically assumes that representations are discrete, past work has reduced continuous representations to discrete ones, which eliminates potentially relevant information. In this paper we present a model of phonotactics that can use continuous representations directly, and show that this approach yields competitive performance on modeling experimental judgments of English sonority sequencing. The proposed model broadens the space of …
Stochastic Harmonic Grammars Do Not Peak On The Mappings Singled Out By Categorical Harmonic Grammars,
2023
MIT, CNRS
Stochastic Harmonic Grammars Do Not Peak On The Mappings Singled Out By Categorical Harmonic Grammars, Giorgio Magri
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
A candidate surface phonological realization is called a peak of a probabilistic constraint-based phonological grammar provided it achieves the largest probability mass over its candidate set. Obviously, the set of peaks of a maximum entropy grammar is the categorical harmonic grammar corresponding to the same weights. This paper shows that the set of peaks of a stochastic harmonic grammar instead can be different from the categorical harmonic grammar corresponding to any weights. Thus in particular, maximum entropy and stochastic harmonic grammars can peak on different candidates.
