Linguistics Commons^™

Multi-Script Morphological Transducers And Transcribers For Seven Turkic Languages, Jonathan North Washington, F. Tyers, O. Kuyrukçu

Linguistics Faculty Works

This paper describes ongoing work to augment morphological transducers for seven Turkic languages with support for multiple scripts each, as well as respective IPA transcription systems. Evaluation demonstrates that our approach yields coverage equivalent to or not much lower than that of the base transducers.

Investigating The Modulatory Effect Of Expectations On Memory Retrieval During Sentence Comprehension, Luca Campanelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Memory retrieval and probabilistic expectations are recognized factors in sentence comprehension that capture two different critical aspects of processing difficulty: the cost of retrieving and integrating previously processed elements with the new input words and the cost of incorrect predictions about upcoming words or structures in a sentence. Although these two factors have independently received substantial support from the extant literature, how they interact remains poorly understood. This study investigated memory retrieval, more specifically retrieval interference, and lexical-semantic expectations in three reading experiments, pitting these factors against each other to observe how they interact. Overall, results showed that retrieving and …

Tonal Adaptation Of Loanwords In Mandarin: Phonology And Beyond, Zhuting Chang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the tonal adaptation of English and Japanese loanwords in Mandarin, and considers data collected from different types of sources. The purpose overall is to identify the mechanisms underlying the adaptation processes by which tone is assigned, and to check if the same mechanisms are invoked regardless of donor languages and source types. Both corpus and experimental methods were utilized to survey a broad sampling of borrowings and a wide array of syllable types that target specific phonetic properties.

To maximally rule out the effect of semantic tingeing, this study examined English place names that were extracted from …

The Synchronic And Diachronic Phonology Of Nauruan: Towards A Definitive Classification Of An Understudied Micronesian Language, Kevin Hughes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nauruan is a Micronesian language spoken in the Republic of Nauru, a small island nation in the central Pacific. Lack of data and difficulty in analysis has hindered progress in better understanding Nauruan for decades, particularly regarding its phonology and its classification within the Micronesian family. Because of these challenges, earlier researchers have presented their work on Nauruan as highly tentative. This dissertation establishes more confident analyses of Nauruan phonology, sound change and classification, which have been made possible through original fieldwork.

Approximately one hundred hours of digital recordings have been collected as part of this research, including wordlists, phrases, …

Testing The Perceptual Magnet Effect In Monolinguals And Bilinguals, Michael C. Stern

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research has demonstrated an apparent warping of the perceptual space whereby the best exemplars or ‘prototypes’ of speech sound categories minimize the perceptual distance between themselves and neighboring stimuli in the same category. This phenomenon has been termed the ‘perceptual magnet effect’ (PME). The present study extends work on the PME to a speech sound category previously unstudied in this paradigm (American English /æ/), and to bilingual speech sound representation and perception. American English monolinguals and Turkish-English bilinguals completed identification tasks, category goodness rating tasks, and same-different discrimination tasks with synthesized vowel sounds from the American English /æ/ category—not …

The Interplay Between Interference Control And L2 Proficiency In L2 Auditory Sentence Comprehension In The Presence Of Verbal And Non-Verbal Masking, Jungna Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Speech perception and comprehension in the presence of interfering auditory stimuli is a challenge for bilingual listeners (e.g., Ezzatian, Avivi-Reich, & Schneider, 2010; Krizman, Bradlow, Lam, & Kraus, 2017). How efficiently and skillfully listeners manage auditory interference may also be closely related to their ability to pay attention to a target and suppress irrelevant information. Based on Friedman and Miyake’s (2004) framework of interference control, this dissertation investigated the underlying mechanisms of late Korean-English bilingual individuals’ auditory interference control in the presence of auditory verbal and nonverbal masking and evaluated the potential interaction between L2 proficiency and interference control.

Two …

Knowledge Of The Present Perfect By Albanian/English Bilinguals, Erjon Xholi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper concerns the acquisition process of a specific part of English grammar by native speakers of Albanian. The focus is the English present perfect, and the similarities and differences that it bears to the Albanian Compound Perfective. The two constructions are made from similar parts, but they crucially differ in the aspectual nature of their participles. While the Albanian particle is perfective, the English is underspecified. We argue that the process of the acquisition of the PP by Albanian bilinguals is one where input, analogy, and direct grammar teaching do not suffice. We apply Generative Grammar logic to the …

Ghost Peppers: Using Ensemble Models To Detect Professor Attractiveness Commentary On Ratemyprofessors.Com, Angie Waller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In June 2018, RateMyProfessors.com (RMP), a popular website for students to leave professor reviews, removed a controversial feature known as the “chili pepper” which allowed students to rate their professors as “hot” or “not hot.” Though past research has rigorously analyzed the correlation of the chili pepper with higher ratings in other categories (Felton, Mitchell, and Stinson, 2004; Felton et al., 2008), none has measured the effect of the removal of the chili pepper on the text content submitted by students. While it is a positive step that the chili pepper has been removed, text commentary on teacher attractiveness persists …

Spatial Distribution Of Chinese Language Education And Historical Development Of Chinese Language Pedagogy In Higher Education In The United States, Jing Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project includes two major components: an interactive digital map that displays the geographical distribution of Chinese language programs in colleges and universities in the United States, their program starting years, the types of such universities and colleges, and their names and states; and a multimedia essay on the evolution of Chinese language pedagogy in colleges and universities in the United States. Data has been collected on the program start year, school names, states where schools are located, school types, and whether the school had been funded by two federal sponsored language programs: the National Defense Education Act in …

Phonologically-Informed Speech Coding For Automatic Speech Recognition-Based Foreign Language Pronunciation Training, Anthony J. Vicario

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) systems used in foreign-language educational contexts are often not developed with the specific task of second-language acquisition in mind. Systems that are built for this task are often excessively targeted to one native language (L1) or a single phonemic contrast and are therefore burdensome to train. Current algorithms have been shown to provide erroneous feedback to learners and show inconsistencies between human and computer perception. These discrepancies have thus far hindered more extensive application of ASR in educational systems.

This thesis reviews the computational models of the human perception of American …

Beyond Exposure: Markers Of English Proficiency In School-Aged French–English Bilinguals, Erin Quirk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingual children show more variation in their language development than monolingual children, a fact that has been linked to their experience with their languages. Bilingual language experience also varies more than monolingual children's, both in terms of how much they hear the language spoken around them (exposure) and how much they speak the language themselves (production). This dissertation investigates the following aspects of the relationship between bilinguals’ language experience and development which are not well-understood: how children’s language production relates to their proficiency in that language, how children’s language exposure relates to receptive versus expressive and lexical versus grammatical skill, …

Computational Approaches To The Syntax–Prosody Interface: Using Prosody To Improve Parsing, Hussein M. Ghaly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prosody has strong ties with syntax, since prosody can be used to resolve some syntactic ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguities have been shown to negatively impact automatic syntactic parsing, hence there is reason to believe that prosodic information can help improve parsing. This dissertation considers a number of approaches that aim to computationally examine the relationship between prosody and syntax of natural languages, while also addressing the role of syntactic phrase length, with the ultimate goal of using prosody to improve parsing.

Chapter 2 examines the effect of syntactic phrase length on prosody in double center embedded sentences in French. Data collected …

Penggunaan Lakuan Tuturan Dalam Interaksi Semasa Kelas Bahasa Cina Peringkat Prasekolah, Yee Wah Lim

Student Works (2020-2029)

Kajian ini dijalankan untuk mengenal pasti jenis-jenis lakuan tuturan yang digunakan oleh kanak-kanak prasekolah semasa mereka berinteraksi dengan guru dan rakan sebaya dalam kelas bahasa Cina di tadika. Pemerolehan bahasa dan perkembangan bahasa kanak-kanak masih berlaku pada peringkat umur mereka antara 4 tahun hingga 6 tahun (Piaget, 1964; Saxton, 2017). Data yang dikumpul melibatkan rakaman video semasa kanak-kanak prasekolah sedang belajar, menjalankan aktiviti, bermain dan berinteraksi dengan guru dan rakan sebaya. Justeru, kajian ini menggunakan kaedah analisis kandungan dan kerangka analitikal yang diadaptasi daripada kerangka lakuan tuturan Searle (1976) dan Yule (1996), serta kajian-kajian lakuan tuturan yang terkini (Özge Gül, …

Research In Progress: Applied Linguistics At Northern Arizona University, Usa, Brett James Hashimoto, Daniel Keller, Ekaterina Sudina, Katherine Yaw, Jesse Egbert, Luke Plonsky

Faculty Publications

Founded in 1990, the Applied Linguistics program at Northern Arizona University (NAU) represents a staple of scholarly activity and graduate training in the field. Indeed, the program, which consists of ten core faculty members and approximately 30 Ph.D. students has been and remains highly active and vibrant in terms of professional/societal involvement and, of course, research. This article highlights recent and current projects carried out by the students and faculty members in the program, divided into five focal areas: corpus linguistics, second language (L2) speech, research methods, second language acquisition (SLA), and psycholinguistics.

The Ielts Exam And Cut-Off Decisions: One University's Mistake, Ann E. Roemer

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

College and university admissions officers are the gatekeepers who decide which individuals may join the "country club" of higher education. As such, the decisions they make have a significant impact on the lives of individuals, especially those who are willing to travel across the globe and risk living in an unfamiliar country in order to receive a postsecondary education. Making decisions about international students and their credentials is much more complicated than evaluating the applications of U.S. students. Part of this complicated process involves decisions regarding English language proficiency and cut-off scores for exams such as the Test of English …

Du « Romance Au Romancé » : La Transformation De L’Épopée De La Guerre Civile Espagnole Dans La Traduction D’Urgence (Décembre 1936 – Février 1937), Carole Fillière

Al-Kīmiyā

The brotherhood of French intellectuals committed to fighting fascism took shape in an unprecedented project during the winter of 1936-1937: a special issue of the journal Commune, which included translations of 24 Spanish poems published in El Mono Azul from besieged Madrid for those on the front. Conceived in urgency as a response echoing wartime action-poetry, this translation subsequently evolved into a full anthology in February 1937, Le Romancero de la guerre civile. On the translation front, intellectuals thus demonstrated solidarity by reactivating a traditional Spanish epic form: the romance. The combined effects of time constraints, the …

« Errances, Discordances, Divergences ? Approches Interdisciplinaires De L’Erreur Culturelle En Traduction », Nada El Khoury

Al-Kīmiyā

Lacheny, M., Rentel, N., Schwerter, Stéphanie (dir.) (2019). Errances, discordances, divergences ? Approches interdisciplinaires de l’erreur culturelle en traduction. Berlin, Allemagne : Peter Lang, 351 p.

On dit souvent « l’erreur est humaine », partant de la locution latine errare humanum est qui signifie littéralement « se tromper est humain ». L’erreur est donc le propre de l’homme, cet être faillible qui, semble-t-il, ne détient pas de vérité absolue mais plutôt relative, parfois même précaire [...]

La Traduction Dans L’Enseignement-Apprentissage De L’Espagnol Langue Étrangère En Côte D’Ivoire, Djandue Bi Drombe, Karidjatou Diallo

Al-Kīmiyā

Translation has long been a pedagogical instrument of choice in the hands of the traditional method, before falling out of favor with the emergence of methods hostile to the intervention of the mother tongue in a foreign language class. As part of this tradition, and complying with a certain approach of the communicative method, the teaching of Spanish in the Ivorian second degree is marked by a strong tendency to refuse translation, especially in the evaluation. Through a survey of 270 first-year Spanish students, this contribution provides an overview of the real-life manifestations of translation in our Spanish high school …

« À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu » En Roumain. Le Patois De Françoise, Anca Lungu Gavril

Al-Kīmiyā

Part of a thesis about translating the Proustian idiolect, the article outlines the analysis of rendering patois, specific to Françoise. The two complete Romanian versions were achieved by Radu and Eugenia Cioculescu in the 60’s, and Irina Mavrodin in the 80’s. Linguistically significant for the servant class, Françoise speaks a savory French where 17th century French, patois, language faults, slang and innovations meet and overlay, making a clear analysis hard to accomplish. The article presents the expressive examples which underline translators’ disregard to idiolect, an aspect that ruins the prominent theme of the Proustian novel, the language.

Résumé
Extrait d’une …

Préface – Éthique Et Traduction, Marc De Launay

Al-Kīmiyā

Depuis bientôt un demi-siècle en France, les traducteurs, et notamment ceux qui se sont regroupés autour de l’Association des Traducteurs Littéraires de France (ATLF), ont cherché à faire reconnaître pour leurs travaux un droit moral qui a fini par leur être accordé [...]