Linguistics Commons^™

Cultures-Of-Use And Morphologies Of Communicative Action, Steven L. Thorne

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article I revisit the cultures-of-use conceptual framework-that technologies, as forms and processes comprising human culture, mediate and assume variable meanings, values, and conventionalized functions for different communities (Thorne, 2003). I trace the antecedent arc of investigation and serendipitous encounters that led to the 2003 publication and conclude by proposing that digital environments and the human experience of activity form unified ecologies with agency distributed through the system.

Reactive Effort As A Factor That Shapes Sign Language Lexicons, N. Sanders, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

Many properties of languages, including sign languages, are not uniformly distributed among items in the lexicon. Some of this nonuniformity can be accounted for by appeal to articulatory ease, with easier articulations being overrepresented in the lexicon in comparison to more difficult articulations. The literature on ease of articulation deals only with the active effort internal to the articulation itself. We note the existence of a previously unstudied aspect of articulatory ease, which we call reactive effort: the effort of resisting incidental movement that has been induced by an articulation elsewhere in the body. For example, reactive effort is needed …

Digging Deeper: Can Patrons Use Our Resources, And Are Basic Digital Literacy Classes Enough?, Cindy Gibbon, Jill Castek

Presentations and Publications

We know our resources are easy to use and our patron training is relevant...don’t we? International assessment data show the US population scores below the international average in problem solving in technology-rich environments. At risk of disrupting the status quo, a public library collaborates with an urban university on a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to assess patrons’ skills. Results will help inform how library services and digital content are presented and will help ensure patron training content includes meaningful skills. Come learn how our research might reflect the needs of your patrons.

Rethinking Vocabulary Size Tests: Frequency Versus Item Difficulty, Brett James Hashimoto

Theses and Dissertations

For decades, vocabulary size tests have been built upon the idea that if a test-taker knows enough words at a given level of frequency based on a list from corpus, they will also know other words of that approximate frequency as well as all words that are more frequent. However, many vocabulary size tests are based on corpora that are as out-of-date as 70 years old and that may be ill-suited for these tests. Based on these potentially problematic areas, the following research questions were asked. First, to what degree would a vocabulary size test based on a large, contemporary …

Getting All The Ducks In A Row: Towards A Method For The Consolidation Of English Idioms, Ethan Michael Lynn

Theses and Dissertations

Idioms play an important role in language acquisition but learners do not have sufficient time to learn all of them. Therefore, learners need to focus on the most frequently occurring idioms, which can be determined by corpus searches. Building off previous corpus studies, this study generated a comprehensive list of English idioms by combining lists from several sources and developed a methodology for organizing and sorting idioms within the list. In total, over 27,000 idiom forms were amalgamated and a portion of the list was compiled, which featured 2,697 core idioms and 5,559 variant idiom forms. It was found that …

The Effectiveness Of Using Written Feedback To Improve Adult Esl Learners' Spontaneous Pronunciation Of English Suprasegmentals, Chirstin Stephens

Theses and Dissertations

This report describes a systematic procedure designed to give students pronunciation feedback on suprasegmental features of English in spontaneous production (rather than students' pronunciation during a read-aloud task). The procedure was developed to find out if written feedback (given frequently enough) could impact students' spontaneous production of suprasegmentals. Pronunciation feedback was given to the treatment group by marking transcripts of spontaneous speech with written symbols. Both the treatment group and the control group received form-focused pronunciation instruction. After 14 weeks, there was no significant difference between the groups, but there was a statistically significant improvement in students' comprehensibility overall (regardless …

A Hybrid Approach To Cross-Linguistic Tokenization: Morphology With Statistics, Logan R. Kearsley

Theses and Dissertations

Tokenization, or word boundary detection, is a critical first step for most NLP applications. This is often given little attention in English and other languages which use explicit spaces between written words, but standard orthographies for many languages lack explicit markers. Tokenization systems for such languages are usually engineered on an individual basis, with little re-use. The human ability to decode any written language, however, suggests that a general algorithm exists.This thesis presents simple morphologically-based and statistical methods for identifying word boundaries in multiple languages. Statistical methods tend to over-predict, while lexical and morphological methods fail when encountering unknown words. …

Language And Inter-Racial Harmony: The Battle For English As Singapore Lingua, Margaret Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Against the backdrop of world religious violence, Singapore is as a beacon of inter-ethnic harmony: A 2015 poll, carried out in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, returned the unanimous verdict that it was Singapore that had made the most social progress among the four Chinese ethnic Chinese societies. In 2014, the Pew Research Center ranked Singapore at the top of their Religious Diversity Index. The nation's bilingual policy is critical to the integration of the multi-racial communities of Singapore. This position is highlighted in a discussion of how, in the early years after independence in 1965, the Singapore government …

Performing Language And Identities: Adult Immigrant Students And The Creation Of A Play, Kathleen R. Mcgovern

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis presents findings from a yearlong study of a classroom of adult immigrants studying English as a Second Language (ESL) in the U.S., who collaboratively created and performed plays based on their life experiences. This research is rooted in poststructuralist theories of identity in second language learning (e.g., Norton, 2000; 2013), a view of language pedagogy as a form of liberation (Freire, 1970), and the notion that theater can be used by non-actors to critically engage with issues of relevance to the community (Boal, 1979). The teacher-researcher of the class used ethnographic investigation informed by autoethnography and action research …

Transmigration Experiences Of Newcomers In The Context Of An English-Only Education: Sense-Making By Former Newcomer Ells, Elizabeth Paulsen Tonogbanua

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative interpretive study explored how former newcomer English Language Learners (ELLs) in Boston Public Schools (BPS) made sense of their transmigration experiences through a digital storytelling project. The study fills a gap on transmigration experiences in the context of English-only learning environments, with a particular orientation toward the value of students’ home languages, and in turn, cultures within an urban school setting. The immigrant student population in BPS continues to increase and teachers must be able to understand and plan for newcomers’ specific needs. To this end, my conceptual framework drew on four areas: general educators and their urban …

Social Capital And Cultural Identity For U.S. Korean Immigrant Families: Mothers' And Children's Perceptions Of Korean Language Retention, Su-Jin Sue Jung

Dissertations and Theses

Through increasing immigration, the U.S. society is becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse. Yet, as many U.S. language minority groups seek to assimilate, they face many challenges. One challenge is that their home language does not match the dominant language, English, that their children are learning at school. For Korean communities, maintaining Korean language presents a problem for families, especially for the mothers and children. The purpose of this study was to explore the U.S. Korean immigrant mothers' and children's perceptions of and experience with maintaining the Korean language and the effect that has on the development of social capital …

Language As A Marker Of Cultural Identity For Tcks, Nick Cooper

Sandanona

The presenter will make conference participants aware of the linguistic and cultural conflicts that Adult Third Culture Kids experience in educational systems. Together we will come to understand the self-identity conflicts experienced by ATCKs, the hybrid identification process of blended accent, and mode of pronunciation as an adaptive strategy.

One’S A Crowd: Gendered Language In Ursula Le Guin’S The Left Hand Of Darkness, Kayla Stephenson

Senior Capstone Theses

Deconstruction questions the very meaning of words put into an assigned use. Yet how can we imply meaning unto words that do not exist in our language? To have a word for an intended use is to have an implied concept behind it, and where there is no concept there can be no word. Consequently, to construct a concept outside of the realm of human and earthly possibility is to create something outside of the limits of the human language. Concerning gender, to imagine a third or a singular gender is to be unable to describe such a concept without …

American Sign Language As A Foreign Language Equivalent At James Madison University, Abigail E. Compton

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

ASL is increasingly gaining acknowledgment as a foreign language in the university setting. At James Madison University, sign language classes have traditionally been housed within the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. This research makes a case for considering ASL as an equivalent to courses in the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and argues that ASL meets the university standards for the study of a foreign language with regard to fulfilling Bachelor of Arts requirements.

Considering the linguistic history of ASL and the language’s accompanying culture, we will demonstrate the standards for teaching ASL are identical to the …

(Re)Positioning Black: Negotiating Racial Subjectivities In White Discursively Constructed Spaces, Elisa Davidson

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis is both a personal and social inquiry of the experience of Black students at a predominantly white university. Within this inquiry, I extend Nakayama and Krizek's (1995) concept of whiteness as having "no true essence" to conceptualizations of blackness to assert that blackness is “a pattern of negotiation that takes place in conditions generated by specific discursive formations and social relations” (McLaren, 1999, pg. 40) rather than a fixed, essential category. Viewing blackness as encounter means that it is emergent through specific social and discursive conditions that are constantly constructed and negotiated through interactions with whiteness. I approach …

Language Use Statistics And Perceptual Simulation In Language Processing, Alena Hejl

Linguistics Honors Projects

Humans’ ability to comprehend language seems to rely on both mental reconstructions of what we have experienced in the world and statistically-based expectations of how language is used. This study adapted a comparison of perceptual and statistical explanations of word comprehension in the auditory modality. Participants completed a series of trials in which they heard cue words, some of which were spatially oriented (e.g., sky, ground), and then completed a letter identification task. In this task, the letter appeared on the computer screen in either a congruent location or an incongruent location. The position of the letter at the top …

'The Letter Killeth': The Obscurity Of Language And Communication In Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure 2016, Victoria T. Corning

Master's Theses

While the epistolary novel is a genre closely associated with 18th century England, 19th century Victorian literature also incorporates letter writing as a significant form of communication. Written messages convey what can often not be said out loud, as it is easier to hide behind a pen and paper, write in solitude, and be absent when the letter is read by the recipient. Impulsive and emotional thoughts and feelings can be written down immediately and then later edited, which makes writing an unstable form of communication. Is the author conveying true feelings or concealing true feelings? Layering multiple modes of …

Plausibility And Structural Reanalysis, Ju-Young Lee

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study examines whether highly proficient comprehenders of English with different language learning profiles -- English native speakers (NSs, N=40), late (Korean-English) learners (LLs, N=32), and early bilinguals (EBs, N=28) -- make comparable use of plausibility information in the online processing of structurally complex sentences. Two sentence types involving temporarily ambiguous structural configurations, subordinate-clause (SC) ambiguity sentences and split/non-split phrasal verb (PV) constructions, were tested using self-paced reading. In SC ambiguity sentences, the pattern of reading times indicated that all three groups were able to use plausibility information to recover from initial structural misanalysis. NSs and EBs were also able …

Cest: City Event Summarization Using Twitter, Deepa Mallela

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

Twitter, with 288 million active users, has become the most popular platform for continuous real-time discussions. This leads to huge amounts of information related to the real-world, which has attracted researchers from both academia and industry. Event detection on Twitter has gained attention as one of the most popular domains of interest within the research community. Unfortunately, existing event detection methodologies have yet to fully explore Twitter metadata and instead rely solely on identifying events based on prior information or focus on events that belong to specific categories. Given the heavy volume of tweets that discuss events, summarization techniques can …

Independent Sources Of Relative Clause Processing Difficulty: Evidence From Russian, Iya Khelm Price

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study investigates the influence of syntactic, semantic, and frequency-of-occurrence information, as well as role of memory in the comprehension of complex sentences. This was done by examining the processing of Russian subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (SRCs and ORCs) that had the same word order configuration, but different noun phrase (NP) types (descriptive noun vs. pronoun) in the relative clause (RC). In both SRCs and ORCs, this word order was such that an NP argument preceded the RC verb, establishing equivalent linear distance between the modified noun and its integrating verb. A corpus analysis and offline acceptability rating experiment …