abstract: Spanish is a pluricentric language spoken within the linguistic continuum with high variation. The understanding of the attitudes towards such variation with regard to its geography (diatopic variation) is key to capacitate its students and speakers as a foreign language to successfully communicate in changing and emerging transnational contexts. The research of linguistic attitudes is a topic that has traditionally been approached in Western contexts, with scholars requiring alternative research environments to provide a richer picture of this construct. China, given its steady growth in the number of Spanish as a foreign language students and its current role in the global, transnational arena, becomes a research environment where the study of linguistic attitudes gain even more relevance. Based on this reality, this study seeks to unveil the attitudes towards diatopic variation and towards the five most widely spoken diatopic varieties of Spanish (i.e., Mexico, Argentina, the United States, Spain, and Colombia) in Chinese students of initial level (n = 95) and their professors (n = 16). In doing so, this study collected data through (1) empirically validated questionnaires on attitudes towards diatopic variation, (2) perceptual dialectology tasks and (3) interviews. The main findings of this research showed the presence of positive attitudes towards diatopic variation by students and teachers. Such attitudes can be explained in light of their previous sociolinguistic knowledge and their previous experience as learners of a second pluricentric language. Regarding the attitudes toward the most spoken varieties, this study showed that the variety associated with Spain was the best known by the observed students and teachers, and received the categorization of prestige variety by students. Teachers did not show affective or status assessments toward any of the diatopic varieties. Further analysis of these results, based on ethnolinguistic vitality , and the levels of familiarity of students/teachers with each variety, suggests that teaching expansive proposals from initial levels can provide a more inclusive view of the diatopic variation of the Spanish language in class. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 2019

Ce travail de thèse a porté sur des problèmes de fiabilité de circuits intégrés en technologie CMOS 65 nm, en particulier sur la conception en vue de la fiabilité, la simulation et l'amélioration de la fiabilité. Les mécanismes dominants de vieillissement HCI et NBTI ainsi que la variation du processus ont été étudiés et évalués quantitativement au niveau du circuit et au niveau du système. Ces méthodes ont été appliquées aux modulateurs Sigma-Delta afin de déterminer la fiabilité de ce type de composant qui est très utilisé. / This thesis concentrates on reliability-aware methodology development, reliability analysis based on simulation as well as failure prediction of CMOS 65nm analog and mixed signal (AMS) ICs. Sigma-Delta modulators are concerned as the object of reliability study at system level. A hierarchical statistical approach for reliability is proposed to analysis the performance of Sigma-Delta modulators under ageing effects and process variations. Statistical methods are combined into this analysis flow.

This study examines some lexical and morphosyntactic variation found among the Swahili varieties in Zanzibar, Tanzania. It has been reported that there are three varieties in the island, and the new data collected in the villages inside the island suggest that there is a need for closer investigation and finer categorization of the Zanzibar varieties. Furthermore, there has been little discussion about the relationship between the Standard variety and other varieties or variation in the use of these varieties. In this paper, we report on the use of these Zanzibar varieties, namely, the town variety, Kiunguja-Mjini, the Northern varieties Kichaani, Kikibeni, Kitumbatu-Gomani, Kinungwi and Kimatemwe, and the Southern varieties Kijambiani, Kipaje and Kimakunduchi at the level of the lexicon. In addition, we examine the varieties of the Northern province – Kichaani, Kikibeni, Kitumbatu-Gomani, Kinungwi, and those of the Southern province – Kijambiani, Kipaje at the level of the grammar. In this paper, we concentrate on tense/aspect, the copula sentence, relative clause, and imperative. Among the data on these languages, we investigate, in particular, the variation among these varieties on the one hand, and the variation between these varieties and Standard Swahili on the other.

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Global interconnect reliability is becoming a bigger issue as we scale down further into the submicron regime. As transistor dimensions get smaller, variations in the manufacturing process, and temperature variations may cause undesired behavior, and as a result, compromise performance. This work makes an effort to characterize the effects of such variations, to provide designers with a guideline for making designs tolerant to these variations while benefiting from tighter design margins. Since interconnects contribute to most of the delay and power on a chip, interconnect performance becomes a primary issue in design. One of the main concerns when considering physical transistor dimension variations is the effect on delay. Due to smaller transistor dimensions, the photolithographic process may produce transistors with significant variations from the ideal physical dimensions. Such variations cause delay uncertainty which can lead to over or underestimation in the design phase. This work examines interconnects to establish a guideline of the effect that process variations have on delay. A repeated interconnect is analyzed and the effects of physical device variations on delay are observed. Given the delay distribution in the presence of Leff variation, a supply voltage assignment technique is proposed to correct the observed deviation from the nominal delay on a long, repeated interconnect. This technique results in a significant reduction of the delay distribution, with a negligible power overhead. After looking at static variation effects on interconnect performance, this thesis addresses thermal variations on global signals, which cause delay degradation and may lead to timing failures. Given the presence of a large thermal gradient along a clock signal in a data path clocked by two leaves of an H-tree, several thermal scenarios which can compromise timing are discussed. A buffer-based skew compensation technique is proposed to correct the effect of thermal and manufacturing variations on this system. Having characterized repeated interconnect performance under process variations, the bandwidth of the line can be more effectively utilized by using a technique called phase coding. Phase coded interconnects are introduced in the context of using them once an interconnect has been adequately modeled in the presence of variations. With guidelines quantifying the effects of process variations on interconnect techniques and careful characterization, designers can factor these considerations into their design process, reducing the variation from the nominal expected behavior and allowing for smaller design margins. This will lead to more reliable products as we advance into future technologies and transistor dimensions get smaller.

The ability to adjust behaviors to a particular environment has been well documented across taxa. Our understanding of behavioral plasticity is largely based on experiments in which individuals have a single exposure to an environment. Observed behavioral changes are then traditionally measured in small windows of responsiveness in a single population or species. In this project I investigated the effects of prolonged exposure to predator cues in Gryllodes sigillatus and also tested for the presence of trans-generational effects of this prolonged exposure. I found there were no differences in anti-predator behaviors when measured in subsequent assays compared to control individuals. These results were paired with a comparison of differences in average expressions of behaviors, differences in variances, and behavioral correlations of five closely related cricket species, including G. sigillatus. Our results showed that species differ in average behaviors and plasticity but did not significantly differ in behavioral correlations.

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The research reported in this thesis examines issues of word recognition in human speech perception. The main aim of the research is to assess the effect of regular variation in speech on lexical access. In particular, the effect of a type of neutralising phonological variation, assimilation of place of articulation, is examined. This variation occurs regressively across word boundaries in connected speech, altering the sUlface phonetic form of the underlying words. Two methods of investigation are used to explore this issue. Firstly, experiments using cross-modal priming and phoneme monitOling techniques are used to examine the effect of variation on the matching process between speech input and lexical form. Secondly, simulated experiments are performed using two computational models of speech recognition: TRACE (McClelland & Elman, 1986) and a simple recun-ent network. The priming experiments show that the mismatching effects of a phonological change on the word-recognition process depend on their viability, as defmed by phonological constraints. This implies that speech perception involves a process of contextdependent inference, that recovers the abstract underlying representation of speech. Simulations of these and other experiments are then reported using a simple recurrent network model of speech perception. The model accommodates the results of the priming studies and predicts that similar phonological context effects will occur in nonwords. Two phoneme monitOling studies support this prediction, but also show interaction between lexical status and viability, implying that phonological inference relies on both lexical and phonological constraints. A revision of the network model is proposed which leams the mapping from the surface form of speech to semantic and phonological representations.

This report presents a new way of applying cultural scripts (a form of reductive paraphrase) to the study and description of culturally specific linguistic behavior. Cultural scripts are used to define levels of formality in German culture. This is done by describing typical situations that range from formal to informal in terms of how members of German culture typically conceive of them. The purpose of these levels is to create a scale of formality that can be used to rate particular linguistic expressions in a reference source, thus approximating native speaker intuitions about linguistic formality, and helping readers understand the norms of (in)formal linguistic behavior in German culture. Such a reference source would be immeasurably helpful for students of German, as register variation, particularly formality variation, can be quite difficult for foreign language learners to master. This reference source should help students determine when it is appropriate to use one linguistic expression over another with a similar meaning (and a different level of formality). It would inform students, for example, that a word like “Bulle” in German (“cop” or “pig”) is not appropriate in an academic presentation on European law enforcement agencies, and that the less colloquial terms, “Polizist” or “Polizeibeamte”, would be better suited to such a context. / text

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