Linguistics Commons^™

Order Of Operations In Sociophonetic Analysis, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

In modern sociophonetic data analysis, a researcher makes numerous decisions when processing their data. Many of the “big” decisions include how data is collected, how audio is transcribed, how these transcriptions are aligned to the audio, and how acoustic measurements are extracted. Once a spreadsheet of numbers has been generated, further decisions must be made regarding normalization, detecting and handling outliers, and excluding tokens irrelevant to the research question. This paper takes a closer look at this second group of decisions—those made after acoustic measurements have been extracted—and shows that the order in which they are applied can have significant …

How Sample Size Impacts Pillai Scores: And What Sociophoneticians Should Do About It, Joseph A. Stanley, Betsy Sneller

Faculty Publications

Pillai scores in Sociolinguistics

• A way to quantify overlap in multiple dimensions (e.g., F1, F2, duration) (Hay et al., 2006; Nycz & Hall-Lew 2013)
• Some concern about unequal vowel categories sizes (Johnson 2015; convo on Twitter June 2, 2021)
• Our solution: a big simulation to show exactly what impact sample size has on Pillai scores

The Simulation

1. Start with a single bivariate normal distribution.

2. Sample two “vowel classes” from this distribution. – Ground Truth is they’re merged.

3. Calculate the Pillai score – Should be close to 0 because they’re merged!

4. Repeat many, many times.

Generational Change In Formant Trajectories: The Low-Back-Merger Shift In Longview, Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

How have vowel formant trajectories changed as part of the LBMS?

As the front lax vowels lower and centralize, their formant dynamics change

• Specifically, F2 is less dynamic, resulting in a “bounce” shape in F1-F2 plots.
• More evident for lower vowels than higher ones.

Formant dynamics may change as global position changes (but not always).

• Especially true with BAT and BET here.
• BIT mostly unclear.
• BAN did not have substantial changes in vowel dynamics.

Vowels Can Merge Because Of Changes In Trajectory: Prelaterals In Rural Utah English, Joseph A. Stanley, Lisa Morgan Johnson

Faculty Publications

Overview

• Front vowels: tense-lax pairs getting closer in apparent time.
• Back vowels: three-way convergence of WOLF, JOLT, and MULCH.
• This data suggests a merger by approximation.

Expanding to trajectories gives greater insight into this type of merger.

• Kinda like a zipper.

Greater detail in this merger by approximation.

• The nuclei don’t appear to trigger the shift
• The lateral gradually increases its influence, and the nucleus follows.

Trajectories are potentially important for discovering how vowels shift.

• More recent techniques can allow us to answer these questions.

Homogeneity And Heterogeneity In Western American English, Joseph A. Stanley, Jessica Sheperd, Auna Nygaard

Faculty Publications

The Low-Back-Merger Shift (Becker 2019)

Description:

• BAT, BET, BIT lower and retract
• Arguably a chain shift
• Triggered by BOT-retraction
• Typically BAT shifts the most
• BET and especially BIT less shifted

Previous accounts are based on isolated, independent studies.

“Clearly, collecting the same type of data from all sites would be optimal in allowing us the most reliable cross-region assessment.” (Fridland et al. 2017:172)

This study is a direct response to that call.

Methods:

Speakers:

• Recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk (“MTurk”; cf. Kim et al 2019)
• 85 speakers

Procedure:

• Read 132 sentences and a 300-item wordlist
• Submitted audio 10 sentences at …

Microcore: Using Online Playable Cases To Increase Student Engagement In Online Writing Environments, Jon Balzotti, Kevin Haws, Amy A. Rogers, Jason K. Mcdonald, Matt Baker

Faculty Publications

This case study explores a type of educational simulation, an alternative reality game we call a playable case study (PCS), and how its use influenced student engagement in an online writing classroom. The goal of the simulation was to help students create professional communication artifacts and experience real-world professional communication situations. This article reports the effectiveness of the playable case study as a tool specifically for online writing instruction (OWI). The context of our research was a PCS called Microcore. Acting as interns for a company, students are asked to investigate a serious problem that occurs and present a solution …

Temporal Fluency And Floor/Ceiling Scoring Of Intermediate And Advanced Speech On The Actfl Spanish Oral Proficiency Interview–Computer, Troy L. Cox, Alan V. Brown, Gregory L. Thompson

Faculty Publications

The rating of proficiency tests that use the Inter-agency Roundtable (ILR) and American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines claims that each major level is based on hierarchal linguistic functions that require mastery of multidimensional traits in such a way that each level subsumes the levels beneath it. These characteristics are part of what is commonly referred to as floor and ceiling scoring. In this binary approach to scoring that differentiates between sustained performance and linguistic breakdown, raters evaluate many features including vocabulary use, grammatical accuracy, pronunciation, and pragmatics, yet there has been very little empirical validation …

Una Lengua En Un Cuerpo, Silvia Rivera Alfaro

Publications and Research

Texto autoetnográfico sobre el trabajo lingüístico.

Aprendizaje En Inglés En Línea: Efectos Sobre La Elaboración De Textos Escritos Y Relación Con La Percepción De Los Docentes Sobre La Integración De Tecnología, Yetzy Limarys Díaz Maldonado

Theses and Dissertations

Los estudiantes de una escuela secundaria del área sur de Puerto Rico presentan un bajo aprovechamiento académico en los cursos de ESL para realizar trabajos escritos en inglés. Por lo tanto, esta disertación aplicada fue diseñada con el propósito de examinar el efecto del uso del programa de aprendizaje de idiomas en línea Grammarly sobre la elaboración de textos escritos y la percepción del docente sobre la integración de tecnología.

El diseño de este estudio fue uno cuasi-experimental. El marco teórico que sustenta el estudio se basa en la teoría del procesamiento de información cognitiva de Atkinson y Shiffrin (1968). …

Trademark Fame And Corpus Linguistics, Jake Linford, Kyra Nelson

Scholarly Publications

Trademark law recognizes that the same word can mean different things in different commercial contexts. Legal protection might extend to two or more owners who use the same symbol (like Delta) to indicate different sources of disparate goods or services, such as airlines and faucets. Generally, only those uses that threaten to confuse consumers-the use of similar symbols on identical or related goods-are subject to legal sanction.

But the law extends special protection to famous trademarks, not only against confusing use, but also against dilution: non-confusing use that blurs or tarnishes the distinctiveness of the famous mark. The result of …

A Micro-Typology Of Contact Effects In Four Tibeto-Burman Languages, Kristine Hildebrandt, Oliver Bond, Dubi Nanda Dhakal

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

When minority languages with similar typological profiles are in long-term contact with a genealogically unrelated socioeconomically dominant language, the perfect context is provided for investigating which observed contact effects are demonstrably allied to sociolinguistic dynamics rather than purely structural ones. This paper investigates the factors determining the different extent of contact effects in four Tibeto-Burman languages (Gurung, Gyalsumdo, Nar-Phu, and Manange) spoken in a geo-politically defined and multilingual region of Nepal. Using corpus data and sociolinguistic interviews collected in the field, we demonstrate that a range of social, economic and geo-spatial factors contribute to asymmetries where contact effects are observed …

Emotion Validating Language Regarding Negative Emotions In The Classroom Differing By Gender And Emotion Type, Tea Rose Pankey

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This study examined teachers’ emotion validating language regarding negative emotion in early childhood classrooms. By analyzing teachers’ emotion language differing by gender, the research highlights the gendered socialization of emotional expression, especially regarding negative emotions, in early childhood contexts. In toddler and preschool classrooms, 28 teachers were video recorded during 4 thirty-minute sessions of free play time. Videos were coded for teachers’ emotion language regarding negative emotions with attention to the gender of the child to whom the language was spoken. Results indicate that teachers validate negative emotions more to girls than to boys. This aligns with previous research that …

The Electrophysiological Correlates Of Text Integration And Direct Vs. Indirect Articles: A Centralized And Lateralized Examination, Deanna C. Hall

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

As we read, we develop mental models of the discourse content called situation models. Situation models are integral to how we keep track of information, and to do so in an ongoing event incoming information needs to be integrated into the model or discarded. The type of information being presented, and its relation to prior data, impacts how that new information is processed. The current research examined discourse passages containing concepts that were either previously mentioned (match), mentioned with a general term (general category), unmentioned in lieu of another concept (mismatch), or completely unmentioned previously (indeterminate), and examined how these …

Learning And Advancement: Insights From Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

Part of our research process has been to engage the voices of individuals involved in employer-supported education and training initiatives or otherwise impacted by the issues we have been investigating. To this end, we hosted a series of convenings to discuss our findings and invited a group of 12 interested parties who represented a range of backgrounds and experience in the workforce development system to respond to our initial observations, to make sure that we are doing things that were relevant and useful, and to identify things that we had missed or that we didn't get right.

Participants in the …

Reading Comprehension Constrains Word Reading: A Tongue Twister Study By Moderating Attentional Control, Xueying Wang

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Numerous research studies show word reading performance influences reading comprehension. Few studies investigate how reading comprehension influences word reading. The current study explores whether alleviating the attention required for reading comprehension correlates with a better word reading performance. Three types of tongue twister reading tasks that involve recall (RR), semantic priming (PP), and instructional focus on the phonological information (PF) all have a high demand for attention on word reading. Differently, the attention demanded by PP tasks on reading comprehension is smaller than RR and RF tasks. Numbers of speech errors are used to manifest the variability of these three …

A Corpus Study Of The Development Of The Adjective Phrase In French Children, Avery Elizabeth Baggett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis I attempt to answer three questions:

H1) Do children use proportionally more prenominal or post-nominal placement of adjectives than adults?

H2) Are children more conservative or more creative in their behavior in alternating prenominal and post-nominal placement of adjectives?

H3) If colored terms are more frequent in child speech will they pattern more like prenominal adjectives or more like post nominal adjectives, as in adult speech?

To do this, I examine two general semantic viewpoints, opting to use Scontras & Goodman (2017) subjectivity hypothesis. Next, I provide a general overview of First Language Acquisition research and then …

Fighting 'Stance': The Role Of Conversational Positioning In League Of Legends (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) Discourse, William Breslove

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

For researchers, the study of video game players - how they behave, interact, and cooperate in a virtual world – presents a challenge: what methodologies are best suited to approaching these interactions? From a sociolinguistic approach, how do gamers converse, and what do these conversations reveal about epistemic, affective, and political relationships? This study uses John DuBois’ Stance Theory (2007) and recent modifications of it (Kiesling 2022), to analyze data gathered from the popular multiplayer online battle-arena (MOBA) game League of Legends. It focuses on in-game interlocutors’ conversation samples to show their positioning, intersubjective alignment, and evaluation of a …

Microvariation In Verbal Rather, Jim Wood

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper uses survey results and interactive mapping tools to analyze correlations across different versions of the non-standard verbal use of the word rather, in particular with participial morphology, as in rathered. Across numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb HAVE. The overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, silent verbs can be licensed by head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but …

Indigenous Language Revitalization: Success, Sustainability, And The Future Of Human Culture, Grace Lewis

Capstone Showcase

This thesis looks at different styles of Indigenous language revitalization programs and seeks to delineate the three most successful characteristics seen across differing designs in an effort to promote the presence of these characteristics in existing programs. The literature analyzed outlines three main schools of thought: first, that language-based education is the most effective program design, second, that language-based education is only effective if it is directed and driven by the community it serves, and third, that culture-based education is the most effective design. The data rejects the idea that one design is superior to another, and instead presents three …

A Critical Biography Of John Algeo: From Historical Linguist To Dialectologist, Lindy Sipes

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This critical biography of lexicographer, linguist, and dialectologist Dr. John Algeo delves into his corpus of research data and notes and seeks to analyze his methods and the resulting wealth of publications derived from their compilation. It also aims provide a succinct overview of his life and career. Algeo experienced many changes within these fields; perhaps most notably, the advent of technological advances that made data collection and storage easier, such as the Internet and computer processes. As a result, his work lends itself as an incredible historic model and, as such, will be compared to current techniques of dictionary-making. …