Department of English
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Item Acquisition of English lexical stress by English language learners(2024-10-30) Alotaibi, FarisThis study examines the production and perception of English lexical stress by English language learners (ELLs) whose native languages are Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish. The choice of these first languages (L1s) is intended to examine the role of a stressless language (Chinese) and languages with different stress patterns than English (Arabic and Spanish). The scope of this study is limited to examining primary stress in English words of four and five syllables. The main aim of the study is to contribute a pedagogical procedure to help the students acquire English stress. The secondary aim is to assess the impact of the L1 on English stress acquisition and to assist English language instructors to teach stress more effectively. The study is designed to start with a pretest to diagnose the students’ proficiency levels vis-à-vis English stress. Next, the researcher creates an intensive training session on the production and perception of English stress. The instruction makes use of a rule illustrated via a three-word mnemonic: Colorado, Philadelphia, and globalization. The study ends with two posttests to measure the efficacy of the training session and the acquisition rate. Outcomes reveal that Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish ELLs all face difficulty with English stress production, but the degree of difficulty varies according to the L1. Stress perception is an easier task for these ELLs. As far as the impact of the L1 is concerned, Chinese ELLs exhibit the most difficulty in producing stress. Nevertheless, they are good at English stress perception. Arabic and Spanish ELLs did not show the same difficulty. Finally, this pedagogical procedure is shown to be effective in improving English stress production and perception.Item Broad and fine acoustic categories in bod, bond, bald, and bard: A step toward acoustic phonology(2024-05-17) Kelley, Matthew C.Acoustics is central to the study of speech communication, but it is conspicuously under-represented in abstract representations of speech. Many flavors of phonological analysis tend toward articulatory descriptions, and transcriptions focus on strings of articulatory actions. All this is despite acoustics being easier to measure than articulation with current technology. The present study explores basic concepts for an acoustic phonology, with two types of postulated categories: broad and fine. Resonant, turbulent, transient, and occludent types of sounds comprise the broad categories, as general methods of filtering the speech source. Fine categories are conceptualized as specific types of acoustic actions within a broad category. These acoustic actions are goal-oriented, as for achieving a particular acoustic effect like the presence of antiformants or a lowered F2 or F3. However, these actions are not explicitly restricted to manipulating traditional phonetic features like formants. By default, fine categories are assumed to be produced in parallel when possible, yielding overlap effects like anticipatory nasalization, lateralization, and rhotacization. These concepts are explored in a microanalysis of bod, bond, bald, and bard from the speaker in the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision data set, with an eye to seeding the ground for a future acoustic phonology.Item Collecting Psycholinguistic Response Time Data Using Amazon Mechanical Turk(Public Library of Science, 2015-03-30) Enochson, Kelly; Culbertson, JenniferResearchers in linguistics and related fields have recently begun exploiting online crowd-sourcing tools, like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), to gather behavioral data. While this method has been successfully validated for various offline measures—grammaticality judgment or other forced-choice tasks—its use for mainstream psycholinguistic research remains limited. This is because psycholinguistic effects are often dependent on relatively small differences in response times, and there remains some doubt as to whether precise timing measurements can be gathered over the web. Here we show that three classic psycholinguistic effects can in fact be replicated using AMT in combination with open-source software for gathering response times client-side. Specifically, we find reliable effects of subject definiteness, filler-gap dependency processing, and agreement attraction in self-paced reading tasks using approximately the same numbers of participants and/or trials as similar laboratory studies. Our results suggest that psycholinguists can and should be taking advantage of AMT and similar online crowd-sourcing marketplaces as a fast, low-resource alternative to traditional laboratory research.Item Collecting Response Time Data Using Amazon Mechanical Turk(2014-11-02) Enochson, Kelly; Culbertson, JenniferResearchers in linguistics and related fields have recently begun exploiting online crowd-sourcing tools, like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), to gather behavioral data. While this method has been successfully used for various offline measures—grammaticality judgment or other forced-choice tasks—its validity for mainstream psycholinguistic research remains in question. This is because psycholinguistic effects are often dependent on relatively small differences in response times, and there is substantial doubt as to whether precise timing measurements can be gathered over the web. Here we show that three classic psycholinguistic effects can in fact be replicated using AMT in combination with open-source software for gathering response times client-side. Specially, we find reliable effects of subject definiteness, filler-gap dependency processing, and agreement attraction in self-paced reading tasks using approximately the same numbers of participants and/or trials as similar laboratory studies. Our results suggest that psycholinguists can and should be taking advantage of AMT and similar online crowd-sourcing marketplaces as a fast, low-resource alternative to traditional laboratory research.Item The Syntax of Wh-Questions: A Minimalist Account of the Optional Wh-Movement in Jazani Arabic(2024-10) Doshi, AbdullrahmanThis study investigates the optional wh-movement in Jazani Arabic, a southern Saudi Arabian dialect spoken near Yemen. Optionality in wh-movement occurs when a language allows wh-phrases to remain in situ or be optionally fronted. This challenges the Minimalist Program, which predicts that no language permits both mechanisms simultaneously. Focusing on simple wh-questions, the study examines this optionality from a Minimalist perspective, employing the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995), the Split-CP Hypothesis (Rizzi, 1997), and Contrastive and Information Focus (Kiss, 1998). Data were collected via questionnaires and interviews with 17 Jazani speakers in the USA, who judged the grammaticality of various wh-phrases. The findings reveal that SVO is the default word order in Jazani Arabic, while VSO is the marked word order. Regarding wh-questions formation, simple wh-questions include argument and adjunct wh-phrases, which can either remain in situ or move to the left periphery. Their positions, however, are not entirely optional but are motivated by distinct syntactic and semantic triggers. In-situ wh-phrases exhibit a less costly movement process due to their weak [+wh] feature, which prevents them from moving overtly to the CP domain. Instead, they involve the covert movement of an Operator to the CP for interpretation as wh-questions. Conversely, fronted wh-phrases are driven by the need to check a strong contrastive focus feature, attracting them to the Focus Projection. These findings provide a Minimalist-compatible analysis of wh-movement, demonstrating that both in-situ and fronted wh-phrases can coexist in the same dialect, thereby refining our understanding of wh-movement optionality.Item Which phonetic features should pronunciation Instructions focus on? An evaluation on the accentedness of segmental/syllable errors in L2 speech(Research in Language, 2018) Gao, Zhiyan; Weinberger, StevenMany English language instructors are reluctant to incorporate pronunciation instruction into their teaching curriculum (Thomson 2014). One reason for such reluctance is that L2 pronunciation errors are numerous, and there is not enough time for teachers to address all of them (Munro and Derwing 2006; Thomson 2014). The current study aims to help language teachers set priorities for their instruction by identifying the segmental and structural aspects of pronunciation that are most foreign-accented to native speakers of American English. The current study employed a perception experiment. 100 speech samples selected from the Speech Accent Archive (Weinberger 2016) were presented to 110 native American English listeners who listened to and rated the foreign accentedness of each sample on a 9-point rating scale. 20 of these samples portray no segmental or syllable structure L2 errors. The other 80 samples contain a single consonant, vowel, or syllable structure L2 error. The backgrounds of the speakers of these samples came from 52 different native languages. Global prosody of each sample was controlled for by comparing its F0 contour and duration to a native English sample using the Dynamic Time Warping method (Giorgino 2009). The results show that 1) L2 consonant errors in general are judged to be more accented than vowel or syllable structure errors; 2) phonological environment affects accent perception, 3) occurrences of non-English consonants always lead to higher accentedness ratings; 4) among L2 syllable errors, vowel epenthesis is judged to be as accented as consonant substitutions, while deletion is judged to be less accented or not accented at all. The current study, therefore, recommends that language instructors attend to consonant errors in L2 speech while taking into consideration their respective phonological environments.