Linguistics Commons^™

The Influence Of Visual Perspective On The Cognitive Effort Required For Mental Representation, Jeffrey P. Hong

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Mental representation is the process by which an individual simulates an event in their mind’s eye. This process is the foundation of the ability to remember the past, engage in prospective thinking, or imagine fictitious scenarios. An individual can mentally represent any event through their own eyes—the first-person perspective or from the viewpoint of an external observer—the third-person perspective. The perspective of representation influences outcomes related to memory, visuospatial processing, affect, social cognition, clinical diagnoses, and language processing. In turn, an individual’s tendency to favour either perspective is shaped by related factors.

The current research consists of four experiments, designed …

Where Do Central Cushitic Ejectives Come From?, Paul D. Fallon

English & Linguistics Articles

This paper examines and accounts for the origin and presence of ejectives in Central Cushitic (CC) languages. Appleyard (2006) claimed that most occurrences of ejectives are due to borrowing from the Ethiosemitic languages. This is certainly true for all ejectives in Kemantney, and some in Blin and Xamtanga. However, examination of Appleyard’s data shows that only 37% of ejectives in Blin and 25% of ejectives in Xamtanga are found in borrowings. Most ejectives in CC in these two languages are therefore “of indubitable Agaw origin”, which suggests that ejectives are from the proto-language rather than through sound change. This paper …

‘People With Disabilities,’ ‘Disabled People,’ Or ‘The Disabled’: A Corpus Analysis Of Disability Labeling Constructions, Eliza Forrest

Linguistics ETDs

The way language shapes perceptions about disability is a complex and long-debated topic within popular disability discourse. With the rise of “person-first” language in recent decades, this debate has shifted toward a grammatical, rather than lexical one, contrasting forms such as people with disabilities, disabled people, and the disabled. While these different construction types—prepositional, attributive, and nominalized, respectively—refer to the same entity, the purported connotations of each have been highly contested. Despite this, research on the topic has been limited and mixed, particularly for studies focusing on actual usage. By analyzing these constructions in the Corpus of …

When Would You Feel Like A Writer? Exploring Writing With Newcomer Students, Sinélia Peixoto, Thea Williamson

English Faculty Publications

The authors share a story of a middle school writer's experience navigating across languages in an English for Speakers of Other Languages support classroom.

Processing Visual Form Information During L1 And L2 Lexical Access, Xinwen Zhang

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study investigates visual word recognition in the first language (L1) and second language (L2). Several studies in this area have reported L1/L2 processing differences at the lexical form level; however, the nature of these differences remains a matter of theoretical debate. The present study examines the extent to which these differences might relate to disparities in orthographic processing in the L1 and L2. Specifically, it uses masked identity priming to investigate whether skilled L2 readers differ from skilled L1 readers in terms of the efficiency with which they access abstract lexical representations during the early stages of visual word …

A Computer-Assisted Approach To Lexical Borrowing In Northeast Caucasian Languages, Bonnie Eleanor Wren-Hardin

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The disambiguation of loanwords and cognates can be a challenge, especially in areas where there has been intense language contact over an extended period of time, when the contact is between genetically related languages, and when the number of languages involved is large Over the past several decades, more and more computational approaches to automatic cognate and borrowing detection have been created in an attempt to ease the load of examining hundreds to thousands of individual lexemes, as well as determine language family relationships with allegedly greater accuracy. While these methods are not perfect and cannot replace the knowledge or …

Beyond The Hands: Exploring Intersectional Identities Of Black American Sign Language Users, Tatum Turner

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

There is a significant gap in research related to the impact of intersectionality on linguistic identity performance among individuals negotiating multiple marginalized identities. This gap is especially significant among deaf Black and African American individuals who use the American Sign Language (ASL) variety deemed Black American Sign Language (BASL) (Hairston & Smith, 1983). This research aims to identify and discuss the use of the eight distinguishing features of BASL (McCaskill et al. 2011) as indexes of intersectional identities.

My data consists of videos sourced from YouTube, each chosen according to the following criteria: must have at least one self-identifying Black …

The Movie Is On!: Pragmatics Of The Video Joker In Who Killed Captain Alex?, Hunter Hulett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The film Who Killed Captain Alex? (WKCA) is a Ugandan film that provides an opportunity to examine the use of pragmatic and specifically deictic features to study the manipulation of borders between the film and reality. A commentator called the Video Joker (VJ) is the film’s deictic center, constantly destabilizing deictic relations and orienting the internal and external pragmatics of the film around themself. As the film’s ultimate pragmatic force, they occupy a position blurring diegesis and non-diegesis due to originating as real-time film commentators before being edited into the text. In this unique position, they shift the deixis’s organization …

La Nueva Argumentación De Twitter: El Cambio De Paradigma Retórico Y La Independencia De Catalunya En Tuits, David Cortes Ferrandez

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Technology changed our world and shapes our reality in forms that widely differ from the traditional ones. Discourse and persuasion are not an exception. This study analyzes the tweets and oral discourses of eight politicians and social leaders during three of the most important days in the independence struggle between Catalonia and Spain to argue that the way people in power try to persuade their voters is changing, especially in new social networks such as Twitter.

The main object of study are the argumentative and persuasion processes that take place both in Twitter and oral discourses from the same politicians …

Introducing Comprehensive Sexuality Education And Hiv Prevention And Treatment Methods Through Pop-Up Clinics To Secondary School Girls In Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, Eliza I. Tobin, Joaquin Carlos Pinga, Caitlyn Stanya

Capstone Showcase

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that attacks the immune system leading to people living with HIV (PLHIV) immunodeficient and more susceptible to other infections or diseases (UNAIDS, 2023b). This can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) within 8-10 years of infection (UNAIDS, 2023b). HIV does not always present symptoms, making it hard for people to identify their HIV status without proper screening. The lack of awareness around a person’s status has led HIV to spread worldwide. In addition to the worldwide spread of HIV, there is no cure for the disease, however, antiretroviral therapy (ART) is mainly used …

Does Heightened Perceptual Encoding In Blind Individuals Extend To Word Learning?, Lindsay N. Harris, Marissa Renee Bamberger

CISLL Publications

Past research reported blind participants tend to encode sensory details of encounters with stimuli they will later recall or recollect, whereas sighted individuals tend to abstract meaning from sensory information when encoding memories. Here we ask whether blind individuals’ use of perceptual in addition to semantic encoding extends to a task—word learning—whose purpose amounts to semantically encoding the word and definition. After studying the definitions of spoken or written words, blind braille readers (n = 23) and sighted print readers (n = 20) re-encountered each word and indicated whether it was previously presented in the same modality. Analyses …

Exploring Language Patterns: Integrating Corpus Linguistics In The Pedagogical Grammar Class, Larissa Goulart

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Yiddish Intelligibility Retention Across The Jewish Diaspora: A Comparison Between Argentina And The U.S., Shannon R. Friel , '24

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

U.S. Ashkenazi Jews may call their grandma “bubbe” ([bʊbi]) in Yiddish, but in Argentina they usually call her “bobe” ([βoβe]). Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants brought Yiddish to the U.S. and Argentina, where the language was exposed to English and Spanish and Yiddish speakers lost touch with each other as they assimilated to different cultures far away from one another. This study attempts to answer whether English-Yiddish speakers can understand Yiddish words as produced by a Spanish-Yiddish speaker. U.S. participants completed a perception test, listening to a list of 20 words gathered from two Argentinian consultants and answering a series of questions …

How Phonological And Syntactic Overlap Impact Cognate Processing Speeds In Bilinguals, Ella Marie Peterson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This paper investigates individuals who are proficient in two languages (bilinguals) and the speeds at which bilinguals process cognates (words with comparable form and meaning across languages). This paper cites two ongoing experiments: The Language Identification (LID) task and the Self-Paced Listening (SPL) task. Findings from the LID suggest that phonological overlap in cognates facilitates bilingual language processing speeds, when cognates are presented in isolation. Findings from the SPL suggest that syntactic overlap in cognates also facilitates bilingual language processing speeds, when cognates are presented in sentences. These findings are significant in that the tasks present cognates to participants in …

Humor Matters: An Adapted Multiple Case Study Exploring Music Therapists’ Perspectives Of Humor With Older Adults, Caleb M. Posey

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Humor is a ubiquitous human experience and a skill retained in older adulthood. It is also an integral but elusive therapeutic tool with numerous benefits and risks to well-being. Therapeutic humor – the application of humor to client well-being – is an emerging area of study. However, scant music therapy literature on humor is available. The purpose of this qualitative thesis was to explore the use and function of humor in music therapy with older adults from the perspectives of experienced music therapists. There were three research questions: (1) how do music therapists describe their use of humor with older …

Nasals And Nasalization In Yoruba-Ijebu Dialect, Khadijat Olakintan Abdulrazaq

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis focuses on how nasals behave in Yoruba-Ijebu Dialect (YID); YID is one of the dialects of the Yoruba language spoken in Nigeria. The main findings of the thesis are in two parts. The first part discusses local nasalization spreading in a YID CV syllable (sequence of a consonant and a vowel). Three local nasalization spreading rules (simplified to two), which are (i) Nasal spreading from an inherent nasal consonant to an adjacent oral vowel, (ii) Nasal spreading from an inherent nasal vowel to an adjacent sonorant consonant, (iii) Oral (-Nas) spreading from an obstruent to adjacent nasal vowels …

Attention-Language Interface In Multilingual Assessment Instrument For Narratives (Main), Irina A. Sekerina, Olga Parshina, Vladislava Staroverova, Natalia Gagarina

Publications and Research

The current study employed the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to test comprehension of narrative macrostructure in Russian in a visual world eye-tracking paradigm. The four MAIN visual narratives are structurally similar and question referents’ goals and internal states (IS). Previous research revealed that children’s MAIN comprehension differed among the four narratives in German, Swedish, Russian, and Turkish, but it is not clear why. We tested whether the difference in comprehension was (a) present, (b) caused by complicated inferences in understanding IS compared with goals, and (c) ameliorated by orienting visual attention to the referents whose IS was critical …

Visual Similarity Effects In The Identification Of Arabic Letters: Evidence With Masked Priming, Maryam A. Aljassmi, Manuel Perea

All Works

Research using masked priming and parafoveal preview techniques has shown that visual letter similarity has an impact on word processing during the initial stages in Latin-derived scripts. However, these effects appear to be absent in Arabic. One reason for this discrepancy could be attributed to the distinctive features of the Arabic script, which includes numerous letters sharing a basic form while varying in the location or number of diacritics. To shed light on this issue, the present study employed Arabic letters rather than words in two masked priming experiments: an alphabetic decision task and a letter-matching task. Both experiments showed …

Whiteness As The Standard: Shifting Ideologies, Race, And Social Context, Kelsey Swift

Publications and Research

In previous work, I have documented and analyzed the persistence of mainstream ideologies around ’standard’ and ’nonstandard’ American English in the adult ESOL classroom and their connection to linguistic racism and anti-Blackness. This study explores how these ideologies developed more broadly, employing elements of raciolinguistic genealogy and metapragmatics to analyze historical language scholarship. I find that while the linguistic features of ‘nonstandard’ English have remained remarkably consistent in the popular imagination, they became increasingly linked with Blackness, especially during and after white backlash to the Great Migration (and other cultural and political changes) in the mid-20th century. I argue that …

Exploring Etymology Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

The English language is a borrowed language, a blend of words from many languages from around the world. We see this in the various ways sounds are represented by letters and letter combinations. In transparent or shallow orthographies, there is high predictability and consistent letter-sound correspondence whereas in opaque or deep orthographies, there are many ways to spell the same sound as well as there are many sounds for the same spellings (Burkins & Yates, 2021; Moats, 2020). This assignment description is a guided inquiry for preservice teachers to explore the concept of etymology by watching and reflecting on six …