Linguistics Commons^™

Early Foreign Language Education And The Effect On State-Mandated Standardized Testing Scores, Kaitlyn Elizabeth Duda

Honors Theses

Early foreign language education has been shown to have a positive effect on the performance of students on state-mandated standardized scores. This work gives an overview of the history of foreign language education, as well as a description of a specific program at an elementary school in North Texas. In order to analyze the effects of early foreign language immersion education on the performance of students enrolled in the program at Bedford Heights Elementary school, a statistical evaluation was performed using the STAAR scores of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students enrolled in both the foreign language immersion program and …

Attune With Baby: An Innovative Attunement Program For Parents And Families With Integrated Evaluation, Sara Beth Lohre

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Infants speak in their own language; sounds, screeches, cries, and howls that help them to communicate their caregiving needs. Unaware, parents may develop a checklist of caregiving approaches to the baby. The infant tells the adult directly what they need, and waits for the parent to respond. Infant talk may change from soft and quiet to loud and aggressive; coos and cries become crying and screams as the infant’s caregiver—communicating the intensity of emotion, urgency of their request, or their frustration with varied and sometimes inadequate, failed, or missing caregiving patterns the infant has no choice but to accept. When …

Cognition-Based Approaches For High-Precision Text Mining, George John Shannon

Doctoral Dissertations

"This research improves the precision of information extraction from free-form text via the use of cognitive-based approaches to natural language processing (NLP). Cognitive-based approaches are an important, and relatively new, area of research in NLP and search, as well as linguistics. Cognitive approaches enable significant improvements in both the breadth and depth of knowledge extracted from text. This research has made contributions in the areas of a cognitive approach to automated concept recognition in.

Cognitive approaches to search, also called concept-based search, have been shown to improve search precision. Given the tremendous amount of electronic text generated in our digital …

In Search Of Cowboy B: Bilabial Implosives In American English, David Eddington, Michael Turner

Faculty Publications

This article presents acoustic evidence for the existence of a bilabial implosive, [∫], in one variety of U.S. English. One articulatory observation is that vocal chord vibration of the English bilabial stop, /b/, can only be maintained for a maximum of about 82 ms. Increasing the vibration beyond this threshold is only possible by increasing the size of the vocal cavity, which in turn is often enabled by lowering the glottis, a gesture characteristic of implosive stops. The authors compare the voiced bilabial stops of five white males from the Western United States, three of whom impressionistically appear to have …

Lexicography In-Your-Face: The Active Semantics Of Pastaza Quichua Ideophones, Janis B. Nuckolls, Tod D. Swanson, Diana Shelton, Alexander Rice, Sarah Hatton

Faculty Publications

English:

We argue that a multimodal approach to defining a depictive class of words called ‘ideophones’ by linguists is essential for grasping their meanings. Our argument for this approach is based on the formal properties of Pastaza Quichua ideophones, which set them apart from the non-ideophonic lexicon, and on the cultural assumptions brought by speakers to their use. We analyze deficiencies in past attempts to define this language’s ideophones, which have used only audio data. We offer, instead, an audiovisual corpus which we call an ‘antidictionary’, because it defines words not with other words, but with clips featuring actual contexts …

The Linguistic Effects Of A Changing Timber Industry: Language Change In Cowlitz County, Wa, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Hypothesis: Linguistic changes happened because of the changing timber industry.

Cowlitz County, Washington:

• Sparsely populated before 1920s
• Longview founded in 1923 by R. A. Long - two large lumber mills
• Population ≈ 35,000
• Right off I-5, two hours south of Seattle and one hour north of Portland

The West:

• cot-caught merger
• fronting of /u/
• lack of Southern, Midland, and Canadian features

Automated Large-Scale Phonetic Analysis: Dass, William A. Kretzschmar Jr., Joseph A. Stanley, Katherine Kuiper

Faculty Publications

DASS:

• 64 interviews available on a portable USB drive
• 370 hours of sound files--c. 200Gb, about 5000 files in all—plus metadata
• LICHEN user interface software

Why DASS?

• LAGS already widely used in analyses of Southern speech (e.g. Dorrill 2003, Feagin 2003, Schönweitz 2001, and Thomas 2005).
• Thomas (2001) has demonstrated successful acoustic analysis of our old recordings.
• The Atlas web site gets about a million accesses per year in recent years, so it is already a dataset that people want to use
• DASS makes a good sample across the South

V[Ɛ]Ry V[E]Ried Vowel Mergers In The Pacific Northwest, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

MARY-MERRY-MARRY historically variable, but likely merged today

Status of pre-lateral mergers is unknown, though impressionistically less clear cut

Hypothesis 1: complete MARY-MERRY-MARRY merger

• Not only distinct, but unusual pattern of MARY being the different one

Hypothesis 2: separation of POOL, PULL, POLE, and PULP

• PULL-POLE most merged, and POOL becoming less distinct in apparent time

Vowel mergers are indeed v[ɛ]ry v[e]ried in the Pacific Northwest

• Not all of the Pacific Northwest is the same (urban/rural divide)

• Don’t make assumptions about a community’s speech

The Perception And Production Of Two Vowel Mergers In Cowlitz County, Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Recent literature has revealed ongoing variation in Pacific Northwest English. In particular, back vowels (cf. Ward 2003; Becker et al. 2013; McLarty & Kendall 2014) and pre-velar front vowels (cf. Wassink et al. 2009; Riebold 2015; 2015, and others) have received considerable attention. In this paper I present recent data from Cowlitz County, Washington that shed light other mergers involving these vowels.

As explained in the Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006), some form of the conditioned merger of /e, ɛ, æ/ before intervocalic /r/, sometimes known as the Mary-merrymarry merger, is found in most varieties …

Volcanic Vocalic Changes, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

HYPOTHESES

pre-velars:

• Hypothesis 1: Longview is like the rest of Washington

back vowels:

• Hypothesis 2: /o/ is fronted
• Hypothesis 3: /o/ is monophthongized

Volcano:

• Hypothesis 4: These three changes have to do with a volcano

A Comparative Discourse Analysis Of Spanish Past Narrations From The Actfl Opi And Opic, Alan V. Brown, Troy L. Cox, Gregory L. Thompson

Faculty Publications

The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and accompanying proficiency guidelines have become a mainstay in academic foreign language assessment. In 2006, an asynchronous electronic interface of the OPI was made available in which candidates are asked to record themselves responding to questions delivered aurally via computer, labeled the Oral Proficiency Interview-computer (OPIc). Thompson, Cox, and Knapp (2016) found that both instruments produced similar results but that many students in their sample who scored at the Advanced Low level on the traditional OPI scored one sublevel higher on the OPIc. The primary objective of the present study is to analyze lexical …

A Preliminary Study Of Language Mixture Between Asturian And Spanish, Lucia Hermo Del Teso

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a preliminary analysis of language mixture between Asturian and Spanish produced by Asturian speakers. Asturian is an endangered non- official language, closely related to Spanish, spoken in northwestern Spain. Asturian and Spanish have been in contact since the 14th century (Barnes, 2013). According to Thomason (2001), language contact can lead to different outcomes, like language mixture, language change, or language death. This study offers an investigation of forms in the Asturian language as a result of language contact between Asturian and Spanish. Data used is from an episode of a non-scripted TV show broadcasted in Asturian, which …

Syntactic Change And The Rise Of Transitivity, James Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

This paper analyzes the historical divergence of predicates marked with old passive neuter -no/-to in Polish and Ukrainian. It is argued that the locus of change leading to the rise of the transitivity property involved a rearrangement of morphologically-eroded voice morphology. Despite the surface similarity of the Polish and Ukrainian constructions, their divergent distribution in the modern languages indicates that grammaticalization of the old passive morpheme proceeded along different pathways, implicating the internal structure of vP, and creating new accusative case-assigning possibilities.

Artykuł przedstawia analizę różnic w rozwoju form predykatów z wykładnikami strony biernej w rodzaju nijakim -no/-to w języku …

New Evidence For Early Modern Ottoman Arabic And Turkish Sign Systems, Kristina Richardson

Publications and Research

The earliest descriptions of Latin finger alphabets were recorded in southern Europe between 1579 and 1589. New literary and visual evidence for sixteenth-century Ottoman Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sign systems are presented and analyzed in this article.

Vowels Of Beryozovka Ewen: An Acoustic Phonetic Study, Kang Hijo, Yun Jiwon, Seongyeon Ko

Publications and Research

This study acoustically analyzes 13,540 vowel tokens of Beryozovka Ewen with the aid of automated post-transcriptional processing technique. The focus of the analysis is on the acoustic correlates of [RTR], which is the harmonic feature of the language. In addition to the first three formants, acoustic values representing spectral tilt such as H1−H2, H1−A2, and B1 are measured as potential acoustic cues of [RTR]. The results show that F1, F3, and B1 are the most reliable cues of the feature and that H1− H2 and H1−A2 are nearly reliable. These acoustic cues are also shown to interact with length and …

Similarities And Differences Between Simultaneous And Successive Bilingual Children: Acquisition Of Japanese Morphology, Yuki Itani-Adams, Junko Iwasaki, Satomi Kawaguchi

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper compares the acquisition of Japanese morphology of two bilingual children who had different types of exposure to Japanese language in Australia: a simultaneous bilingual child who had exposure to both Japanese and English from birth, and a successive bilingual child who did not have regular exposure to Japanese until he was six years and three months old. The comparison is carried out using Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann 1998, 2005) as a common framework, and the corpus for this study consists of the naturally spoken production of these two Australian children. The results show that both children went through …

Understanding Translanguaging And Identity Among Korean Bilingual Adults, Nancy Ryoo

Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative study, conducted at a Northern California university, explored how six Korean bilingual adults expressed their unique identities while utilizing both Korean and English in their daily and academic lives. The six study participants shared their journeys as bilingual adults who migrated to the United States from South Korea to attend graduate school. Several will return to South Korea at the conclusion of their graduate studies. Research data included narratives from in-depth personal interviews as well as focus group discussions.

This qualitative study postulated that translanguaging is commonly observed within bilingual/multilingual populations and can be utilized as a source …

Language, Rhetoric, And Politics In A Global Context: A Decolonial Critical Discourse Perspective On Nigeria’S 2015 Presidential Campaign, Yunana Ahmed

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this dissertation, I conceptualize a rhetorical and linguistic analysis of politics from a decolonial framework (Mignolo, 2011; Smith, 2012). My analysis draws on classical rhetoric (Aristotle, 2007), cultural rhetoric (Mao, 2014; Powell, et al., 2014; Yankah, 1995), and linguistics (Chilton, 2004) to reveal the different ways ideological and hegemonic struggles are discursively constructed in Nigerian political campaign discourse. The data for this study come from two speeches delivered by former President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan during the 2015 electoral campaign. This includes his declaration-of-intent speech and his speech marking the commencement of his formal campaign activities. My …

Perubahan Budaya Kerja Pertanian Lahan Kering Atoni Pah Meto Di Kabupaten Timor Tengah Utara, Damasius Sasi

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

The goal of the study is to review changes in dryland farming culture of atoni pah meto in North Center Timor District caused by global climate changes. The research method used was qualitative descriptive: the data collecting method used was interviews, observations, and the document study. Research results prove that the atoni pah meto which consists of eighteen farming rituals, five work patterns, work division between genders, and work ethos, has shifted. It is caused by the interaction of atoni pah meto with other nations, tribes, and ethnic groups, further affected by global climate changes. Climate changes have made a …

Aksara-Aksara Penyimpan Informasi Di Banten, Titik Pudjiastuti

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Banten is one of the 34 provinces which helped to establish the Republic of Indonesia. Although it was just acknowledged as a province of Indonesia in 2000, as a pepper producer Banten had been known around the world long before its sultanate even existed. The various written sources consist of scripts, archives, and inscriptions from various backgrounds, such as history, literature, and religion. This research found that there are several scripts used as a written medium in Banten, such as Arabic, Jawi (Malay-Arabic), Pegon (Arabic-Javanese), Hanacaraka, and Latin. From the text content point of view, it has been found that …