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Multilingualism And Multiculturalism: Opinions From Spanish-Speaking English Learners From Mexico, Central America, And South America, Cailey Catherine Moe

Dissertations and Theses

Within the population of adult English-language learners in the United States, the largest portion is comprised of Spanish speakers from Mexico and Central and South America. At the same time, Spanish is the second-most commonly spoken language in the U.S., and an increasing presence in U.S. media and culture. This puts English learners from this demographic in a unique position with respect to language and culture acquisition and the experience of working towards their goals within U.S. society at large.

The purpose of this study is to explore motivations and beliefs about language and culture held by a small number …

The Use Of Evidentials In Hearsay Contexts In Japanese And English, Tomomi Matsumura

Dissertations and Theses

Evidentials are one of the language codes that convey the speaker's beliefs in terms of the degree of reliability of information and how the speaker obtained information (Chafe, 1986; Ishida, 2006; McCready and Ogata, 2007). Evidentials play an important role in communication since they also function to show the speaker's attitude toward the interlocutors by making a sentence softer (Trent 1998). In his theory of territory of information, Kamio (1990, 1997, 2002) proposed that pragmatic rules of evidentials are different in Japanese than in English. Ishida (2006) studied these differences and argued that learners of Japanese (JF learners) face difficulties …

Cuasi Nomás Inglés: Prosody At The Crossroads Of Spanish And English In 20th Century New Mexico, Jackelyn Van Buren

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation investigates prosodic change in the long-term language contact setting of Traditional New Mexican Spanish (NMS). NMS prosody is perceptually distinct from other contemporary varieties of Spanish (Hills 1906, Bowen 1952, Lipski 2011), yet the features which make it unique have not been acoustically examined. This study hypothesizes that bilingualism with English has affected NMS prosody and analyzes three features which are known to differ between Spanish and English and therefore provide a quantitative point of comparison: pitch peak alignment, pitch variability, and rhythmic timing. These variables have been demonstrated to be susceptible to transfer in contact situations, including …

Thinking-For-Speaking And The Efl Mind: Face-To-Face Dialogue To Talk About Vertical Space, Kunisawa

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Studies of thinking-for-speaking (Slobin, 1987) and of linguistic relativity (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996) in multilinguals have been attracting more attention (Ortega, 2015). I propose the incorporation of sociocultural theory and linguistic relativity as a novel research approach in second language acquisition (SLA). Japanese learners of English go through a process in which word meaning develops from a single to binary semantic categorization as they learn to express vertical spatial operations in their second language (L2). Japanese has a nonobligatory distinction between contact and noncontact relationships when expressing vertical space (single semantic categorization), whereas English has an obligatory contrast (binary semantic …

Neural And Behavioral Mechanisms Of Clear Speech, Jenna Silver Luque

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Clear speech is a speaking style that has been shown to improve intelligibility in adverse listening conditions, for various listener and talker populations. Clear-speech phonetic enhancements include a slowed speech rate, expanded vowel space, and expanded pitch range. Although clear-speech phonetic enhancements have been demonstrated across a variety of talkers, only a subset of these changes may be required for listeners to benefit perceptually from clear speech. Furthermore, while current literature has provided some understanding of the phonetic enhancements that are typical of clear speech and the improvements in intelligibility resulting from its use, less is understood regarding how listeners …

Producing "Fabulous": Commodification And Ethnicity In Hair Braiding Salons, Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Greensword

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Black women wearing fabulous braids are a striking feature of the Afro-diasporic cultural landscape. However, the braiders and salon owners who enable this aesthetic engineering are seldom acknowledged. This dissertation investigates the experience and role of Caribbean and West and Central African women in the hair braiding industry, a rapidly growing business in the U.S. I address the complexity of these women’s multiple social roles and the multiple consciousness (King, 1988) associated with their demographic characteristics (color, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and immigrant status). The commonalities between the braiders and their mostly African American customers contrast vividly with their perception of …

Language Experience With A Native-Language Phoneme Sequence Modulates The Effects Of Attention On Cortical Sensory Processing, Valerie L. Shafer, Monica Wagner, Jungmee Lee, Francesca Mingino, Colleen O'Brien, Adam Constantine, Mitchell Steinschneider

Publications and Research

Auditory evoked potentials (AEP) reflect spectro-temporal feature changes within the spoken word and are sufficiently reliable to probe deficits in auditory processing. The current research assessed whether attentional modulation would alter the morphology of these AEPs and whether native-language experience with phoneme sequences would influence the effects of attention. Native-English and native-Polish adults listened to nonsense word pairs that contained the phoneme sequence onsets /st/, /sət/, /pət/ that occur in both the Polish and English languages and the phoneme sequence onset /pt/ that occurs in the Polish language, but not the English language. Participants listened to word pairs within two …

Advancing Digital Skills For Problem Solving In Technology-Rich Environments, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs

Presentations and Publications

Digital and disciplinary literacies are not simply tools or cognitive behaviors. They have the potential to provide opportunities for students to better understand themselves, their communities, and their world. The presentation examines ways of conceptualizing and understanding digital literacies and disciplinary learning and consider implications for teacher education and community outreach efforts.

Above, On, Or Shang (上)? Language And Spatial Representations Among English–Mandarin Bilinguals, Wei Xing Toh, Lidia Suãrez

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study investigated if exposure to spatial language could affect spatial cognition in English-Mandarin bilinguals by focusing on contact/noncontact distinctions, an area that has been a source of contention in the language-and-thought literature. Sixty-three participants were first primed with sentences containing spatial terms (e.g., above, on) before performing a spatial decision task. Approximately half of the participants (n = 33) were primed in English; for the remaining participants (n = 30), primes comprising Mandarin spatial terms―which mark spatial distinctions differently than in English (e.g., shang in Mandarin signifies both above and on in English)―were employed instead. Our findings revealed that …

Nature Or Nurture In English Academic Writing: Korean And American Rhetorical Patterns, Sunok Kim

Theses and Dissertations

For many years, linguists, ESL writing teachers, and especially students have puzzled over the phenomenon where non-native English writers' sentences are grammatically correct, but their paragraphs and complete essays often appear illogical to native English speaking readers. From the perspective of Kaplan's original contrastive rhetoric theory where American rhetoric is "linear," Korean L2 writers' apparently circular rhetoric causes problems. Even though Korean writers are trying to write paragraphs that are logical for native English readers, this illogical output results in Korean ESL students being perceived as poor writers. In order to discover more about the nature of the rhetorical problems …

The Interactional Production Of Race And Religious Identity In An Urban Catholic School, Robert Jean Leblanc

Journal of Catholic Education

This paper describes how students in an urban Catholic school draw on racial and religious categories to construct classroom-specific identities during coursework. When students engage with each other in classroom discussions, they use broadly circulating, institutional, and event-level categories to position one another, and in doing so articulate who may speak and participate in class talk. This paper draws from interactional ethnographic data, showing how Vietnamese American and African American students used different religious and racial categories to delimit the interactional floor during class time and in the process exclude speakers.

La producción de las interacciones de la identidad racial …

From Lingua To Glossa: Linguistics In Fair Open Access, Johan Rooryck

Open Access Day

Johan Rooryck with be presenting from a remote location via GoToMeeting.

A description of his presentation is below:

Open Access publishing is often said to be the future of academic journals, but the actual move from a subscription model to an Open Access model is not easily achieved. The transition from Lingua to Glossa provides proof of concept that it can be done. This transition was made possible by our model of Fair Open Access, a model for flipping subscription journals to Open Access. This model has 3 main features:

1. Discipline-based: Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA, www.lingoa.eu) helps flipping …

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Single Versus Concurrent Systems: Nominal Classification In Mian, Greville G. Corbett, Sebastian Fedden, Raphael Finkel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Papuan language Mian allows us to refine the typology of nominal classification. Mian has two candidate classification systems, differing completely in their formal realization but overlapping considerably in their semantics. To determine whether to analyse Mian as a single system or concurrent systems we adopt a canonical approach. Our criteria – orthogonality of the systems (we give a precise measure), semantic compositionality, morphosyntactic alignment, distribution across parts of speech, exponence, and interaction with other features – point mainly to an analysis as concurrent systems. We thus improve our analysis of Mian and make progress with the typology of nominal …

Cloud‐Based Text Analytics Harvesting, Cleaning And Analyzing Corporate Earnings Conference Calls, Michael Chuancai Zhang, Vikram Gazula, Dan Stone, Hong Xie

Commonwealth Computational Summit

No abstract provided.

Cloud-Based Text Analytics: Harvesting, Cleaning And Analyzing Corporate Earnings Conference Calls, Michael Chuancai Zhang, Vikram Gazula, Dan Stone, Hong Xie

Commonwealth Computational Summit

Does management language cohesion in earnings conference calls matter to the capital market? As a part of the research on the above question, and taking advantage of the modern IT technologies, this project:

• harvested 115,882 earnings conference call transcripts from SeekingAlpha.com
• parsed and structured 89,988 transcripts using regular expressions in Stata
• analyzed 179,976 text files using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which
• saved almost 2 years (675 days) of the project time

Una Entrevista Con José Plácido Ruiz Campillo Sobre La Gramática Operativa Y Cognitiva Y Su Estado En La Enseñanza Del Español Como Lengua Extranjera, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Cultural Re-Presentation And Translation : Chinese And English Anthologies Of Tang Poetry, Chi Man, Cecilia Chan

Lingnan Theses

Due to its unique prestige, classical Chinese poetry written during the Tang dynasty is often anthologised. These anthologies serve various purposes (e.g. recreational, educational, or both), but they are generally expected to feature works high in aesthetic value, and represent the culture wherein they are produced. While the functions of anthologies are seldom contested, representations of Tang poetry in anthologies have many different manifestations.

Using China’s most famous anthology, Tangshi sanbaishou 唐詩三百首, as an opening case study, research shows that within its home culture, the anthologising of Tang poetry has a long history by itself, and anthologists negotiate between ideological …

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 …

Maps For Sherbro Area, George Tucker Childs

The Sherbro Language and Culture of Sierra Leone

Maps pertaining to Sherbro language and culture.

Vowel Formant Dispersion Reflects Severity Of Apraxia Of Speech, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Elena Galkina, Alexandra Basilakos, Julius Fridriksson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Background: Apraxia of Speech (AOS) has been associated with deviations in consonantal voice onset time (VOT), but studies of vowel acoustics have yielded conflicting results. However, a speech motor planning disorder that is not bound by phonological categories is expected to affect vowel as well as consonant articulations.

Aims: We measured consonant VOTs and vowel formants produced by a large sample of stroke survivors, and assessed to what extent these variables and their dispersion are predictive of AOS presence and severity, based on a scale that uses clinical observations to rate gradient presence of AOS, aphasia, and dysarthria. …