Browsing by Subject "Language"

Now showing 1 - 16 of 16
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    Clothing values of Anishinaabeg
    (2025) Davis, Sage
    This study explores an alternative fashion system by examining values through the lens of language and culture. This research aimed to understand the value of clothing in the Anishinaabe fashion system. Dialogue around the acquisition, use, and disposal of clothing was explored to un-derstand how clothing and language use reflects lifestyle, identity, and mindset. This research en-gages Anishinaabe language learners and speakers to explore how clothing acquisition, use, and disposal connects to language use. Participants chose Anishinaabe language phrases throughout the interview corresponding to insights shared in English. Using qualitative research grounded in In-digenous knowledge and methodologies, this research investigates two central questions: (1) How do Anishinaabeg use their clothing? and (2) How do Anishinaabeg value their clothing? Findings reveal distinct differences between the values expressed in English and An-ishinaabemowin. English language responses reflected individualistic and compartmentalized per-spectives, mirroring the separation prevalent in European American fashion systems. In contrast, Anishinaabemowin responses demonstrated interconnectedness, reflecting community-centered and holistic values. Additionally, spirituality emerged as a distinct and separate element in English themes but was integrated throughout Anishinaabemowin themes. Findings highlight the im-portance of detaching fashion from capitalistic values and the significance of exploring sustainable fashion systems that respect and integrate Indigenous worldviews and cultural practices.
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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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    A design study exploring the use of Osage orthography stencils in the Osage language classroom
    (2021-08) Harjo, Jessica
    Language loss is accelerating among Native American groups in the United States. This is predominantly due to the result of the assimilation process that occurred when Native Americans were forced to learn and speak only English in boarding schools (early 1900s), along with the current evolution of language shifts and too many first and second speakers dying. However, there is also a lack of teaching resources that tribal language departments can access—especially languages with unique orthographies like the tribal language of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma, the endangered language of focus in this study. This can negatively impact the retention of language students, the ways students learn, and the abilities teachers must have to teach a language. This research takes a qualitative approach through a design lens to explore the need for teaching resources in the Osage Nation language department. Through observation and interviews, a focus was centered on the use of stencils in the Osage Nation language classroom. Dual code theory and visuo-haptics were used with Jean Piaget’s Stage Theory and Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory as a theoretical foundation to support the use of the Osage orthography stencils as learning aids. The results discover the role stencils have in enhancing the language learning experience as a visual resource, addresses the power that orthographies have in terms of identity, self-esteem, confidence, and empowerment, and provides recommendations for the use of Osage orthography stencils and new teaching resources.
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    Developing (Inter)cultural Competence through Foreign Language Learning: Turning Promises into Practices
    (2018-06) Baden, Elizabeth
    I intend to explore the link between language and culture and how that transfers to developing (inter)cultural competence in the foreign language classroom with special attention to French at various learner levels but particularly within higher education in the United States. (Inter)cultural competence provides an overarching and balanced perspective for interacting appropriately in culturally diverse settings; however, research on its relationship with second language acquisition has been minimal to date despite its acceptance within the U.S. foreign language teaching curriculum. As international mobility (i.e. travel, study abroad, immigration etc.) is becoming progressively accessible, (inter)cultural competence is essential to building peaceful relationships among diverse groups of people locally, nationally, and internationally. While this skill set is essential in today’s global context, the wide-ranging claim that learning a second language provides a framework towards developing (inter)cultural competence in the classroom is problematic without further research to comprehensively integrate and assess it as a foreign language learner goal
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    Does age of language acquisition affect the relation between American sign language and mental rotation?
    (2009-10) Martin, Amber J.
    Past research has shown a relation between knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) and mental rotation. The goal of the current study was to examine factors related to American Sign Language use that contribute to mental rotation skills. In particular, the factors examined were age of acquisition of ASL, hearing status, gender, spatial language comprehension, spatial language production and amount of use of ASL. Many studies have examined the role of language on cognition, but few have examined which aspects of language knowledge (comprehension or production) contribute to those effects. Further, this study examines the role of age of acquisition of ASL on mental rotation. Participants were adults who had learned ASL at different ages across development. Participants completed a spatial language production task, spatial language comprehension task and a computerized-nonlinguistic mental rotation task that recorded participants' accuracy and reaction times. Results showed that native male signers were significantly faster on mental rotation compared to other groups based on the slope of change across degrees of rotation. Further, male native signers were also slightly more likely to interpret spatial relations in the comprehension task by rotating the signer's description. There were no overall differences between the age of acquisition groups in mental rotation. Men and women did not differ overall in mental rotation nor did hearing and Deaf participants. These results indicate that age of acquisition of ASL after infancy does not affect mental rotation. Implications are discussed for age of acquisition effects on language-cognition relations, for the effects of practice on male native signers' speed of mental rotation, and implications for findings on the language tasks. Further research should examine the effects of age of acquisition of a first language on general speed of processing.
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    Evaluation of an explicit instructional approach to teach novel grammatical forms to children with autism spectrum disorders
    (2014-06) Miller, Danneka Joy
    Purpose: Limited or unusual syntax may reduce the functional use of language for children with ASD and exacerbate difficulties with academic and social skill development. The current study evaluated an explicit instructional approach to teach novel grammatical forms to children with ASD.Method: Eleven children with ASD between the ages of 4:4 and 9:9 years who demonstrated weaknesses in expressive grammatical language were randomly assigned to complete two space-themed computer games. In each game participants attempted to learn a novel grammatical form after receiving explicit or implicit instruction. During explicit instruction, the examiner presented a rule guiding the novel form to be learned as well as models of the form. During implicit instruction, only models of the grammatical form were presented. Learning was assessed during each of four treatment sessions and after a 1-week delay in two contexts.Results: Nonparametric analyses revealed a trending advantage for learning novel grammatical morphemes with an explicit instructional approach. Successful learners tended to have stronger expressive language skills then unsuccessful learners. Successful and unsuccessful learners did not differ in nonverbal intelligence or severity of autism- related behaviors.Conclusions: Explicit instruction may lead to more robust learning of targeted grammatical forms for children with ASD. Future research should continue to examine this effect using true grammatical forms.
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    Exceptional Empire and Exceptional Subjects: Biopolitics and the Transnational Making of the Korean/Asian/American through the Cold War
    (2016-12) Kim, Seonna
    This dissertation explores how the contemporary Korean American and Korean diasporic literary productions imagine and respond to the nexus between the “exceptional” American empire and the exceptional juridico-political subjects it produced and managed in South Korea and across the Pacific through the prolonged Cold War. Drawing on critical biopolitical studies, this project frames the Cold War U.S. military and humanitarian interventions in Asia as neoimperialist governmentality, which not only created excessive, doubled sovereignty and states of exception but also produced and displaced exceptional subjects in the areas affected. My research on the historical, political, legal, and cultural discourses on these displaced subjects evinces that they were not simply excluded as a demographic exception to the Korean and American nation-states, but included in their Cold War geopolitics and biopolitics. This dissertation proposes that the transnational making of the exceptional Korean, Asian, or Asian American subjects through the Cold War provides key sites for understanding the transnational history and dimensions of the post-World War II formation of Asian America as it illuminates the links between U.S. foreign policy in Asia and domestic racial liberalism during the Cold War. Tracing the origin of the transpacific exceptional subjects and their transpacific links, the project also draws a genealogy of a forgotten Korean diaspora that still haunts the modernity of Korean and American nation-states. I argue that the selected cultural memories and imaginaries produced by Nora Okja Keller, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Jane Jeong Trenka, and Chang-rae Lee expose and intervene in the complex operations and technologies of U.S. sovereign biopower and governance within and across its national border and its logics of exclusion and inclusion by verbally enacting scenes of multiple subjectifications of the exceptional figures in Asia and America. Chapter by chapter, the dissertation attends to the particular conjunctures of local and global biopolitics in which the exceptional subjects emerged and were subjectified. It also demonstrates how each of these texts in a unique and experimental way disrupts the normative codifications and configurations of the exceptional empire as a global peacekeeper or humanitarian force and of the exceptional(ized) subjects as undeserving racial aliens or exceptionally deserving model citizens. Collectively, these literary texts create an aesthetics of the stateless that imagines alternative models of politics, subjectivity, and cross-national and interracial community to move beyond biopolitics and towards a decolonized future.
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    Frame Semantics as a Framework to account for the Foreign Language Effect
    (2023) Al-Khatib, Mai
    Linguistic meaning can be expressed in multiple languages. One may assume that equivalent texts/ utterances in two languages by means of translation generate equivalent meanings in their readers/ hearers. This follows if we assume that meaning calculation is solely objective in nature. However, research in language and cognition is building up to show otherwise. Meaning calculated from semiotic input is not objective but is influenced by and grounded in experience of the language acquisition process and the habitual interaction of the speaker with the referents of linguistic content. In this dissertation, I address a phenomenon that exposes the subjectivity of meaning called the Foreign Language Effect (FLE). It refers to the finding that late bilinguals exhibit different decision-making patterns when language content of emotional nature is presented to them in their native (L1) versus non-native (L2) language. I adopt Pavlenko’s (2012) account where she hypothesizes that this behavior reflects disembodiment of L2. I construct a semantic representation of embodied language processing through unifying two theories: The Embodied Simulation Hypothesis (Bergen, 2015a; 2015b) and Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1976) resulting in a cognitive model of meaning simulation: the Embodied Simulation Frame Semantic blueprint model (ES-FS blueprint). I implement it as an algorithm that calculates an information structure to serve as a representation of embodied meaning simulation yielding an insight to semantic memory with an embodied and grounded lens. The simulation blueprint is composed of frames retrieved from FrameNet: an implementation of Frame Semantics as a network of background knowledge concepts (Ruppenhofer et al., 2016) called frames which depict total experiential situations indexed by words. I test my model on empirical data from the Semantic Priming Project (Hutchison et al., 2013) and find support for it in the L1 English. I then run a semantic priming experiment on L1 and L2 speakers of English to conduct a comparison of meaning processing across the two nativeness conditions. I provide preliminary support to Pavlenko’s account for the FLE from experiential grounding of language, a major factor of disparity in language acquisition and use between the L1 and the L2 in the late bilingual.
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    Hunting literary legacies: captatio in Roman satire
    (2012-12) Woods, Heather A.
    Legacy hunting (or captatio) is the practice of insinuating oneself into the will of a wealthy (usually childless) individual through various types of attention (including flattery, social deference, political, legal, or moral support, and even sexual favors). This dissertation examines the three most substantial legacy hunting narratives in Latin literature (Horace Sermones 2.5, the end of Petronius' Satyrica, and Juvenal Satire 12) to discover the metaliterary meaning of captatio in these satiric texts through the transformation of metaphors used to describe this practice.
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    If you're ESL, can you be anything else?: exploring the local production of ESL students
    (2013-06) Rambow, Adam C.
    In the field of education, there are numerous categories that identify students based on their abilities and aptitudes. Two such terms are "ESL" and "gifted." However useful these labels are for the purposes of identifying students' needs and creating instructional programs, the fact remains that they are also steeped in hegemonic discourses surrounding learner identity (Lightfoot, 2001; Schulz, 2005). Therefore, it is crucial to examine how these broad institutional categories are produced locally. Employing the theoretical frames of disciplinary technology (Foucault, 1977), cultural production (Levinson & Holland, 1996) and figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain, 1998), this ethnographic study explores how teachers and students in a single middle-school classroom, through their daily practices, created a specific, local understanding of what it meant to be "ESL." Findings indicate that in this classroom, the teachers were aware of the social stigma their students faced by being labeled ESL. Part of their strategy to counteract this stigma involved using the language and artifacts of the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program (IBMYP) to position their students as gifted. The teachers encouraged their students to adopt habits associated with a gifted identity; however, many of these habits were related to maintaining order in the classroom and positioning the students as "docile bodies" (Foucault, 1977). The process was fraught with contradictions, but ultimately opened up the possibility for students to reposition themselves as both ESL and gifted. Little research exists on the way that the institutional category ESL is locally produced in classrooms. There is even less research on how the IBMYP program is implemented in schools with large contingents of linguistically diverse students. Given the disparate implications for academic success that accompany the labels "ESL" and "gifted," this study begins to bridge a gap in an important area.
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    The interaction of structural and inferential elements in characterizing human linguistic communication.
    (2012-01) Lucast, Ellen Irene
    Is human linguistic communication different only in degree from other animal communication, or is it different in kind? If it is different in kind, can this difference best be attributed to one or a small number of core features? If so, what are these features? What role does the code itself play in characterizing human linguistic communication and what role is attributable to its communicative function? To answer these questions, I argue the following: Human linguistic communication is in fact different in kind from other animal communication; its difference can be attributed to two main factors, one coded and one communicative, that lie at the core of the phenomenon of human language; and these two factors are a discrete combinatorial system and the ability to infer others' mental states. I demonstrate that these two factors limit the function of systems which do not display them in ways that are characteristically different from the function of human linguistic communication. This work serves to update existing research on language features by integrating insight from the cognitivist research paradigm that currently prevails in linguistics. It also integrates two traditionally separate areas of inquiry, those of the functioning of the language code itself and of the inferential mechanisms that humans employ when using language for communication, to provide a more comprehensive theory on the nature of human linguistic communication.
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    International students' language and culture learning experience in study abroad
    (2014-08) Kong, Kaishan
    This dissertation is a study of Chinese students' language and cultural learning experience through mediational means in a study abroad context. While there is extensive quantitative research to measure linguistic gains or cultural adjustment, there is limited research on study abroad participants' perspectives on their language and cultural learning experience through a sociocultural lens. This dissertation contributes new knowledge in Asian students' sojourn experience. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine, from Chinese students' perspectives, what mediational resources were used and how they used the materials to foster learning in a study abroad context. Data sources included in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, focus group discussion, social media post and other documents. Sociocultural theory, mediation in particular, was adopted as the theoretical framework for this study because it resonates with my assumption that learning takes place in interaction between individuals and other materials and other people. Study abroad contexts are unique in offering multiple forms of resources that can be similar or different from the students' background. International students' interaction with materials and people in this study abroad community can be a mediational process that leads to learning. It also fits in my purpose of the study to examine the learning process but not the product. This study was not to measure the students' linguistic outcomes or cultural skills; instead, it was to attain more in-depth understanding of their personal experience in learning English and multiple cultures in the United States. Findings show that participants used multiple resources to mediate learning, including tools such as textbooks and on-line technology and semiotic systems such as language, email communication and peer review. Language, including dialogues with other people and private speech, stood out as powerful mediation means. Data also showed that emotions, identities and motivation played a crucial role in mediation. They not only influenced participants' choice of materials but also became mediational means themselves. These findings have significant theoretical and practical implications for study abroad students, instructors and program administrators. Students are encouraged to become reflective learners and to raise awareness of selecting multiple resources to mediate learning through various strategies. For instructors, this study also shows the importance of various pedagogies to address students' need and the significance of understanding students as individuals in a broader sociocultural context. It is also suggested that training, guidance and mentorship should be offered through the entire study abroad journey and beyond.This project confirms findings from many existing papers that study abroad is a complex experience. There are multiple affordances for learning but there is no definite causal relationship with linguistic gains. Students' interaction with mediational means can produce learning. It also extends the discussion of mediational tools and signs, by showing evidence of how emotions, identities and motivations mediated learning. This study exemplifies efforts to break the either-language-or-culture dichotomy that is often seen as the focus of research, and to inspire more future research on both aspects.
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    Language and literacy in Roman Judaea: a study of the Bar Kokhba documents
    (2012-10) Wise, Michael Owen
    This is a study of language and literacy in an ancient multi-lingual setting, Judaea in the years 63 B.C.E. - 136 C.E. It first surveys scholarly views on these topics, and then proposes a new method of investigating the questions raised: a study of the signed documents and letters discovered among the materials conventionally known as the "Bar Kokhba texts." The major sites where materials were discovered are reviewed, and the complex history of publication is examined for each site. The essential approach is that of "signature literacy," a well-established method for investigating the rates of literacy in societies of the past. The language of each signature is studied in relation to the language of the document to which it is attached, and analyzed to determine fluency of the writing. One thereby learns something about language knowledge and level of literacy for each signatory. In tandem with this approach significant efforts are made to elucidate the prosopography of the texts. A separate chapter considers the Bar Kokhba letters. The final chapter proposes a new understanding of the uses of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek in Judaea during these years, and argues for particular levels of literacy for each tongue.
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    Language environments in toddler classrooms: the contribution of setting, teacher, and child variables.
    (2010-06) Hickey, Meghan C.
    This study sought to ascertain to ascertain the relative contribution of setting, teacher, and child variables to the prediction of the amount of language teachers used in their toddler classrooms as well as the amount of engaged conversations they had with children. The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system, Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) and Teacher Beliefs Scale (TBS) were used. Child variables included age, gender, and disability, English language learner, and poverty (tuition subsidy) status. Results indicated that classroom quality, teacher education and experience, teacher pedagogy, and the percentage of tuition subsidy students in the classroom predicted adult word rates; however, they were not significant independent predictors. No significant relationships were found for conversational turns. Study limitations and implications for policy and practice are discussed.
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    Understanding Technical Language Use in Competitive League of Legends
    (2019-04) Ernst, Nathan
    League of Legends (LoL) is an online competitive strategy game that necessitates a constant sharing of information between five teammates. The game is the largest part of the esports industry with more than 100 million monthly players. Professional “gamers” play in competitive matches that last anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour and require constant communication of details and strategy between the five teammates. This study was done to better understand the role of technical language within competitive LoL teams. What tools do they utilize to communicate in this high stress environment? What does their ‘technical’ communication look like when it’s broken down?