Linguistics Commons^™

Avatar To Depict Sign Language: Building From Reusable Hand Animation, Rosalee Wolfe, John Mcdonald, Jerry C. Schnepp

Visual Communications and Technology Education Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Mika Ishino, Gale Stam

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cultivating Knowledge In The School Garden: New Ways Of Teaching Literacy To Esl Students, Michele Durivage

MA TESOL Collection

My thesis project includes a combination of materials development and classroom-based research. In my paper, I explore existing garden-related curricula, and create original garden-based lesson plans to teach literacy to fourth grade ESL students. This curriculum development project contributes to the field of ESL in its innovative garden-based pedagogy. The field study took place during the spring semester of 2009 at Increase Miller Elementary School in Westchester County, New York. Using nature as inspiration for writing descriptive essays and poetry, the ESL students at Increase Miller produced imaginative writing pieces, using their own voices to express their thoughts. The students’ …

Instructional Practices That Hinder And Support Esl Students In The Self-Contained Esl Classroom And The Mainstream Classroom, Ebru N. Bozburun

MA TESOL Collection

This paper describes the academic challenges that many English Second Language (ESL) students must deal with from the moment they start attending a bilingual program at elementary school until they finish the last step of their academic experience. These students continually struggle to keep up with their peers, often fail the state mandated tests, and eventually, drop out before receiving their high school diploma. For the past three years, both as a self-contained ESL teacher and an ESL certified co-teacher in the mainstream classroom, I taught ESL Language Arts to Spanish- speaking students at a public junior high school in …

Using Technology In The Efl Classroom In Saudi Arabia, Neil Oby Morris

MA TESOL Collection

This paper explores the ways that technology, specifically the use of laptop computers and cellular phones, may be incorporated in the EFL classroom to enhance learning and lower the affective filter of male Saudi Arabian university students.

Saudi Arabia presents the EFL teacher with many challenges that are unique to this gender-segregated Islamic kingdom. Meeting these challenges and turning them into learning opportunities that other EFL teachers may find useful within their teaching contexts is the purpose of this paper.

The appendix includes a writing rubric and a 40-day materials introduction calendar. The calendar illustrates the day-by-day introduction of material …

Cognitive Load And Its Major Pedagogical Implications, Focus On Education In Jordan, Bassam Kutkut

MA TESOL Collection

Through my teaching experience in Jordan, I noticed the amount of work students had to do. I noticed the tremendous amount information they received from their teachers on a daily basis. I also noticed that students forgot most of the information they learned in class right after their exams. I was wondering if that’s the right way of teaching. Then, after my study at SIT, I learned that this is a cognitive overload that can impair the learning process.

Cognitive load refers to the information processing abilities in the human memory system which has limitations. When these limitations are exceeded, …

The Effect Of Strategies On Relieving Initial And Recurring Tip Of The Tongue States, Cheryl Elizabeth Emery

Theses Digitization Project

One of the most common forms of memory failure is the phenomenon known as "tip-of-the-tongue" (TOT) where you can't quite articulate a particular word even though you know that you know it. Strategies for resolving this phenomenon were explored in two experiments. This thesis explored the effectiveness of different strategies for resolving the TOT experience.

Lenition, Naomi Gurevich

Faculty Research and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Bilingualism On Goal Representation And Maintenance, Amina Saadaoui

Theses Digitization Project

The main focus of this study was to examine whether the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is due to the bilinguals' ability to represent and maintain goal information in working memory. Cognitive control, also referred to as executive control, is the ability to inhibit one cognitive task while executing another task.

The English Experience: An Examination Of Philippine English Use Among Filipino Immigrants In The United States, Nicholas Macias-Williams

Theses Digitization Project

The present study aims to discover how a variety of world English, like Philippine English, serves Filipino immigrants who use it here in the United States. In order to conduct this investigation, a series of one-on-one interviews with ten Filipino immigrants was conducted. This thesis examines the attitudes of a group of adult Filipino immigrants to the U.S. towards the English language vis-a-vis their Filipino languages, and their experiences using English in the Philippines and the U.S.

The Role Of Psychology In The Philosophy Of Language, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

Are psychological facts relevant to philosophy of language; and, in particular, does scientific psychology have a legitimate role to play? For example, is it methodologically permissible for philosophers of language to rely upon evidence from neurological development, experiments about processing, brain scans, clinical case histories, longitudinal studies, questionnaires, etc.? If so, why? These two questions are the focus of this survey. I address them in two stages. Psychology may seem obviously relevant. I thus begin by introducing arguments against relevance, to motivate the discussion. I will urge that these ultimately fail, and that the appearance of relevance should be taken …

The Segments And Tones Of Soyaltepec Mazatec, Heather D. Beal

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation describes the segments and tones of Soyaltepec Mazatec, an Oto-Manguean language of southern Mexico virtually undescribed in the literature with the exception of Pike (1956). The preliminary work done by Pike and subsequent analyses by Goldsmith (1990) and Pizer (1994) are reviewed giving evidence that the system is complex and not easily explained. Documentation of the segments of the language as well as a more complete documentation of the tonal system has significance for language preservation, comparative Oto-Manguean studies, and for phonological theories of tone. This paper presents original field data gathered by the author during visits to …

Resolutions And Their Incongruities: Further Thoughts On Logical Mechanism, Christian F. Hempelmann, Salvatore Attardo

Faculty Publications

This paper is a contribution to the study of the resolution of incongruities in humor. We reject some criticisms of logical mechanisms and analyze three different types of incongruities in humorous texts: completely backgrounded, backgrounded, and foregrounded. Only the latter are addressed by logical mechanisms. We identify a mechanism of “incongruity shifting” which may be a candidate for “deep” logical mechanism (along the lines of “parallelism” in Attardo et al. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 15: 1–44, 2002). We finally discuss the similarities between Oring's (Engaging humor, University of Illinois Press, 2003) “appropriate incongruity” theory and our approach, which …

Timing In The Performance Of Jokes, Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering

Faculty Publications

The notion of timing in humor is often mentioned as a very significant issue, and yet very little has been written about it. The paper reviews the scant literature on the subject and narrows down the definition of timing as comprising pauses and speech rate. The discussions of timing in the literature see it either as a speeding up or slowing down of speech rate. Using data collected from twenty joke performances, we show that speakers do not significantly raise or lower their speech rate at and around the punch line. The other common assumption is that punch lines are …

Spanish In Contact With Arabic, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Spanish and Arabic have been in contact for long periods and in different regions. While this is largely due to the geographical proximity of the Iberian Peninsula to western North Africa, a set of historical, political and social developments helped bring both languages into close contact. Of remarkable significance was the presence of Arabic in Iberia from 711 to 1492 and, at least, for several more decades after the Reconquista was completed. This fact, as is often mentioned, led to heavy lexical borrowing from Arabic into Spanish and other Ibero-Romance languages. Also important was the introduction of Spanish into North …

The ManI Said SheI Would Return: English Pronominal Gender In Native Mandarin Speaking Learners, Examined Within A Comprehensive Theory Of Language Acquisition, Rachelle Felzien

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

The project that led to this honors thesis was begun in the Fall semester of 2010, in a graduate-level psycholinguistics course taught by Dr. T. Daniel Seely. At that time, I was intensively studying Mandarin and had been living with a native speaker who was also in the process of learning English. The types of speech errors in her English, particularly the ones that appeared to have resulted from influence from her native Mandarin, interested me greatly. One of the most striking errors that she tended to make, however, was mis-matching English gender-marked pronouns with the gender of the referent. …

The Case For Fewer Cases In Pre-Chukotko-Kamchatkan: Grammaticalization And Semantics In Internal Reconstruction, Dibella Wdzenczny

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This work internally reconstructs the case system of Pre-Chukotko-Kamchatkan from the comparative reconstruction of Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan. Using the comparative and etymological dictionaries by Fortescue (2005), Mudrak (2000), and Zhukova & Kurebito (2004), I demonstrate that in many instances, groups of cases in Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan have developed from a single case. I outline the paths of grammaticalization that led to the expanded case system in Proto-Chukotko- Kamchatkan, and I use semantic typology to support the plausibility of these developments. Examples of similar phenomena in other language families are used for comparison as well. I conclude that six grammatical cases (and a more regular …

Valence Sensitivity In Pamirian Past-Tense Inflection: A Realizational Analysis, Gregory Stump, Andrew R. Hippisley

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Puerto Ricans' Evaluations Of Dominicans And Dominican Spanish As Reflected In Inter-Personal Interviews, Eva-Marie Suarez Budenbender

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

The present study investigates the connection between linguistic perceptions, speaker identification, and speaker attitude and examines the attitudes of speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish towards Dominican Spanish in sociolinguistic interviews. Although both varieties are linguistically very similar (Lipski 1994), the participants report being attuned to a range of linguistic differences between their variety and Dominican Spanish, while confirming widespread stigmatization of Dominicans and Dominican Spanish on the island. Their evaluations of Dominican Spanish are positive, indicating some degree of solidarity towards speakers of other Caribbean variety speakers. It is hypothesized that reported stigmatization of Dominicans and Dominican Spanish (Duany 2005) …

Introduction, Jose Esteban Hernandez

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

Introduction to the Special Issue on Spanish Dialect Contact in the Americas