<p> This work presents the first large-scale empirical analysis of vowel variation in the three dialects (Northern, Central, Southern) of the spoken Iranian Taleshi. The vowel system of this minority language is underdocumented. My data provide unique and important insight, therefore, into this contracting language variety. Acoustic analyses are conducted on 6252 realizations of the Taleshi central vowels /[schwa]/ and /i/ in the spontaneous and controlled speech of 142 men and women living in Iran, in order to explore the impact centuries of contact with Farsi and other languages has had (and continues to have) on Taleshi. Fine-grained analyses in the F2 vowel formant reveal subtle permutations of the Taleshi sound system suggestive of convergence with neighboring languages (Farsi, Turkish). Specifically, this work identifies convergence between schwa /[schwa]/ (a vowel in Taleshi) and /o/ (a vowel in Farsi) as well as the convergence between /i/ (a vowel also in Taleshi) and /u/ (again in Taleshi and Farsi) in the three dialects of Taleshi. The impact of language contact is evident in significant F2 differences between speakers of the Central dialect, who have geographically less contact with other languages (Farsi, Turkish, etc.) vs. those speaking the Northern and the Southern dialects who have more contact with other languages. Statistical analyses controlling for internal factors (the target words&#129;' phonetic environment) and external factors (speaker age, education, settlement, and gender) known to contribute to formant variation, identify factors driving variation. Furthermore, the influence of language contact becomes evidenced in enhanced phonological convergence (F2 differences) in words that overlap phonologically, orthographically, and semantically (cognates and loanwords) with Farsi compared to words that do not share such interlingual similarity. Lastly, the degree of language activation in different speech settings would also support a contact explanation, in that convergence is most apparent in the speech reflecting increased activation of the contact language (as measured by percentage of language use in different speech settings during data collection). These comparisons demonstrate the role that convergence plays in the sound variations that are already inherent in Taleshi and contribute new data to the field of language contact. The paper argues that the sound variations in Taleshi are a consequence of both long-term language contact as well as more general social factors.</p>

<p> This study set out to explore and investigate the effects of age and gender on Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Abha Arabic dialect. VOT is "the time interval between the burst that makes the release of the stop closure and the onset of periodicity that reflects laryngeal vibration" (Lisker and Abrahamson, 1964, p.422). Three research questions were asked: (1) what are the normative patterns for VOTs by children and adults in Abha dialect? (2) Are there any gender or age differences in the productions of VOTs by native Abha Arabic dialect speakers? (3) At what age do children fully acquire VOTs that are similar to those of adults in Abha dialect? Thirty-eight subjects were recruited including children and adults from both genders, who were asked to complete a picture-naming task. The results revealed that the plosives in Abha Arabic utilize three conditions of VOTs depending on their voicing and emphasis. Whereas the voiced plosives are produced with lead voicing, the voiceless plosives are produced with long-lag. The emphatic stop is produced with short-lag. Also, the results showed that age and gender affected that can affect the VOTs significantly. Lastly, the results indicated that children achieved adult-like VOTs at age 10 to 12 years old.</p>

<p> The current study investigates loanword adaptations in the Arabic language. It supports the perceptual approximation stance asserting that the adaptation process is based on acoustic similarities rather than segment preservation by drawing evidence from two phenomena found in loanword adaptations. The first phenomenon is the pharyngealization phenomenon in which some loanwords adapted into Arabic are adapted with emphatic pharyngealized consonants, while the second phenomenon is vowel epenthesis. The claim presented in this study suggests that the pharyngealization phenomenon occurs due to the back vowel found in the source language in which it is associated with emphatic pharyngealized consonants in Arabic. Hence, the perception of the source language phoneme as an allophonic variant of an Arabic phoneme led to the pharyngealization phenomenon. The study also claims that the site in which a vowel is inserted to treat forbidden structures is governed by the nature of the cluster to increase the acoustic similarities between the input and the output. Fifty-five Najdi Arabic monolinguals and 55 Najdi Arabic-English bilinguals were recruited. The participants were given English nonce words containing /s/ and /t/ followed by the English back vowel /?/ which is also an allophonic variant of the Arabic phoneme /a/. They were also given English nonce words containing illegal initial consonant clusters in Najdi Arabic. The findings revealed that Najdi Arabic monolinguals adapted the consonant /s/ with pharyngealization more than the Najdi Arabic bilinguals; however, they did not show significant pharyngealization adaptation for /t/. Regarding vowel epenthesis, the study showed that vowel insertion was systematically governed by the nature of the cluster. However, they findings were not very clear regarding initial tri-consonant clusters. </p>

No description available.

The Quinault language must be revitalized. The question addressed in this dissertation is, "What are the best possible strategies for the Quinault community and its language to achieve language revitalization?" This dissertation provides the strategies that will lay the foundation for Quinault language revitalization. These strategies include utilizing documentary linguistics to analyze previous documentation, selecting Revitalization methods best suited for a community without L1 speakers, ensuring Revitalization documentation meets the community's goals, and planning the first lessons to initiate fluency in the Quinault community. This research is important because the Quinault Indian Nation has prioritized the revitalization of the Quinault language. Based upon previous documentation of Quinault, fluency in its language has proven difficult without a linguistic analysis of its structure. This research will allow the Quinault community to recognize linguistic structures inherent to Quinault. Finally, new language learners and teachers will benefit from the historical and qualitative reviews, the recommendations for language revitalization and the linguistic findings within this dissertation.

<p> Previous research has examined the discourse features of legitimate phone interactions including commodity trading calls (Firth 1994), emergency phone calls (Zimmerman 1992), company-initiated sales calls (Freed 2010), and call center telephone calls (Hultgren and Cameron 2010). This research describes the structure and operation of phone fraud calls, specifically calls in which scammers pretend to provide Windows technical service and support. In contrast to expectations in the work on social engineering that indicates that it operates on trust, this research finds that this bulk phone scam follows a rigid discourse structure in which the calls pass quickly to a &ldquo;proof&rdquo; phase that convinces the target that they need the service and then a &ldquo;sales&rdquo; phase that is surprisingly varied in its length. An analysis of lexical chains in the proof phase show how those lexical chains create cohesion and thus texture, creating an overall linguistic meaning between the target and the scammer even when neither understands the technical topic under discussion and creating a situation in which the target is faced with an urgent problem for which a solution is being sold.</p>

<p> This dissertation investigates bilingual language acquisition among children between the ages of 4 and 7, who are raised in the home where both parents speak L1, but they have been exposed to L2 later on during their childhood with some regularity over and above their L1. The focus of this study is the developmental patterns in English and Korean produced by the young Korean-English bilingual children and how they gradually accommodate to two different obstruent systems.</p><p> Korean and English have different obstruent systems. Korean has an unusual three-way voiceless contrast. Korean has a three-way distinction in both stops and affricates: aspirated, lax, and tense, and a two-way distinction in fricatives: non-tense (aspirated or lax) and tense. All Korean obstruent consonants are voiceless. English has a two-way distinction in stops, affricates, and fricatives: voiceless (the stops are often aspirated) and &lsquo;voiced&rsquo; (the stops are usually voiceless unaspirated).</p><p> The children who participated in this study were 24 Korean-English bilingual children (KEB children), ages 4-7 years old, and 24 monolingual English-speaking and Korean-speaking children (EM and KM children) in the same age range. The bilingual children learned Korean as their L1, but subsequently learned and started to speak English at some point in the age range of 1:6-4:0 years. Subjects looked at a set of pictures to prompt a set of words which contained the target segments in the word-initial position; they were taught what words they should say in English or Korean depending on which language was being tested. They were asked to say the correct word in response to each picture. VOT, stop closure, frication and aspiration durations, total duration, F0, and H1-H2 at the onset of the following vowel were measured. The results showed that the KEB children showed similar phonetic development patterns to the EM and KM children in each language, but they showed slower language acquisition in each language relatively later. The results also showed interactions between English and Korean in the KEB children. In order to distinguish English obstruents from Korean obstruents, the KEB children exaggerated phonetic values of Korean obstruents. Also, some distinct phonetic features of Korean obstruents were found in English obstruents produced by the KEB children, and the KEB children produced less pressed voice for Korean tense obstruents than did the KM children due to the influence of English.</p>

<p> Previous studies of border regions have characterized linguistic divergence as a natural consequence of the social psychological and cognitive processes speakers apply in constructing their conceptualizations of the border and those on the other side (Auer 2005). For the border shared by Canada and the United States, in particular, Boberg (2000) highlights a resistance to the diffusion of sound change across the national border. While providing some valid descriptions, these assessments neglect the multi-faceted social function of language to both unite and distinguish speakers and social groups. They also ignore the potentially important role of cultural affinity and regional solidarity spanning a national border. As Irvine &amp; Gal (2000) explain, ideological processes that serve to project contrasts occur recursively and simultaneously with processes that ideologically erase other contrasts at different levels of the system. These ideological processes have consequences for linguistic structure and for sound change. With its strong regional solidarity spanning the U.S.-Canadian border and lack of previous trans-border comparisons in the region, the Pacific Northwest is an ideal site to examine the effects of these ideological processes. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) </p>

When studying a second language with a different alphabetic script, how does acquiring second script influence our perception of our first language? Does it change the way we read in our own language? Are both languages active and do they compete when we read? Most studies on bilingualism have shown that language visual comprehension processing is language-nonselective, i.e., both languages are active. However, almost all of the studies were conducted with same-script bilinguals, namely speakers of two languages that share the same orthographic system. The purpose of the present research is to test whether written language processing is language-selective or language-nonselective at the letter level for languages with different alphabetic scripts, namely, English and Russian. More precisely, I want to find out whether English-Russian bilinguals activate knowledge of the non-target language, Russian, when reading solely in English. In order to answer my research question, I will conduct an experiment in which English-Russian bilinguals who study Russian as their second language at FSU will complete a semantic relatedness task. In this task, they will be presented with two English words and will need to decide whether they are semantically related. A form manipulation will be used on the second word on the critical trials: it will share the onset letters with the Russian translation of the first word. For instance, in the pair “dog-cob,” the second word shares the onset with the Russian word “собака” which means “dog”. Because of the similarity of the forms, both words are expected to be activated and cause lexical interference during processing. I predict that this will result in slower reaction times and a larger percentage of errors on critical trials. If evidence supports my prediction, it will be a strong confirmation for the language-nonselective visual processing position at the letter level of visual processing. In other words, my research would show that studying a language with a different script influences the way in which we process our first language. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2018. / March 6, 2018. / bilingualism, English-Russian bilinguals, letter recognition, psycholinguistics, visual processing / Includes bibliographical references. / Gretchen L. Sunderman, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Lisa R. Wakamiya, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Robert Romanchuk, Committee Member.

<p> This study investigated the contributions of segments (consonants vs. vowels) to speech intelligibility in Arabic and English. In these two languages, consonants and vowels play crucially different grammatical roles. Arabic is a nonconcatenative language that primarily assigns lexical information to consonants and morphosyntactic information to vowels, while English is a concatenative language that does not assign distinct roles to either class of segments. On this basis, we hypothesized that consonants and vowels would play very different roles in the intelligibility of the two languages. Five laboratory experiments were conducted, three on Arabic and two on English. Participants listened to words and sentences in which either all consonants or all vowels were replaced with silence and were asked to indicate what they heard. Unlike previous studies, all stimuli were carefully controlled for ratio of consonants to vowels. Results showed that in Arabic, consonants made a greater contribution than vowels to speech intelligibility, both in isolated words and in complete sentences. Furthermore, in consonant-only conditions, stimuli containing more consonants were more intelligible than those containing more vowels, displaying a clear effect of segmental ratio. In English, by contrast, the consonants and vowels made roughly equivalent contributions to speech intelligibility, and segmental ratio played a negligible role. These two disparate findings suggest that segmental contributions are crucially modulated by language-specific factors. That is, the different contributions of consonants and vowels to speech intelligibility are not solely determined by their distinct acoustic cues, but also by the grammatical role they play.</p><p>