Browsing by Subject "African-American English"

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    Dataset for African-American English Hip-hop research
    (2011-10-07) Chesley, Paula
    This dataset corresponds to the paper "You know what it is: Learning words through listening to hip-hop" by Paula Chesley. The artists participants listed are given in alphabetical order and in order of frequency. An additional file lists the genre each artist was classified as (for when non-African-American hip-hop artists were not classified as hip-hop artists). An explanation file goes the dataset the studies were done from, and the dataset is given in file aaeHiphopChesley.csv. Please see the above paper for further details on the model, etc.
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    Linguistic, cognitive, and social constraints on lexical entrenchment.
    (2011-08) Chesley, Paula
    How do new words become established in a speech community? This dissertation documents linguistic, cognitive, and social factors that are hypothesized to affect lexical entrenchment, the extent to which a new word becomes part of the lexicon of a speech community. First, in a longitudinal corpus study, I find that linguistic properties such as the range of a word's meaning and the donor language of a borrowing affect lexical entrenchment. Contextual factors such as frequency, dispersion, and a borrowing's cultural context also play a role in lexical entrenchment. Second, a psycholinguistic study examines the extent to which speakers remember previously unseen words. Through eye-tracking, lexical decision, and free recall tasks, I determine that, again, linguistic and contextual information plays a role in the memorability of a new word. Speakers are more likely to remember words used in particular contexts, and they are also more likely to remember certain word types than others. In a third study, I find that musical preferences, knowledge of popular culture, and social ties influence comprehension of African-American English vocabulary. Together, these studies suggest that lexical entrenchment is predictable to an extent previously undocumented. Results indicate that information relating to dynamical, non-linear systems could be profitable in further studies on lexical entrenchment.