This dissertation investigates the locus of language selection during bilingual speech production. In particular, it explores whether distinct language backgrounds, proficiency, and age of acquisition determine language selectivity and how competition is resolved between languages in the bilingual mind. For example, when an English-Spanish bilingual is asked to name a picture of a dog in English, at what point does the mind select English and not Spanish as the target language? Two distinct theories explaining this are presented: Green's Inhibitory Control (IC) Model (1986; 1998) and The Concept Selection Hypothesis (La Heij, 2005). Costa and Santesteban (2004) have recently supported that both may be accurate but may be sensitive to proficiency level. In particular, they suggest that the IC Model and the Concept Selection Hypothesis can only represent lexical processing of bilinguals with low and high proficiency levels, respectively. This study investigates Costa's and Santesteban's claim and explores factors that affect the loci of language selection and competition. In the present study, low proficient language learners, heritage speakers, and highly proficient language learners participated in two processing tasks. The first experiment was a word translation task in which participants translated words in the second language (L2) to their more dominant language (L1). Accompanying each target was a distracter item in the form of a picture or word that was semantically related or unrelated to the target. Experiment 2 was a picture naming task in which participants were asked to switch back and forth between their two languages. The results suggest that bilingual type and age of acquisition do not affect the loci of language selection and competition during lexical processing. However, striking patterns emerged in the data supported a notion in which L2 proficiency is a determining factor in the locus of language selection. Finally, the researcher presents the Selection by Proficiency Model which links the Inhibitory Control Model and the Concept Selection Hypothesis. This model illustrates the critical role and effects of proficiency in language selectivity. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2007. / February 28, 2007. / Lexical Processing, Bilingualism, Language Selectivity, Bilingual Speech Production / Includes bibliographical references. / Gretchen Sunderman, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michelle Stebleton, Outside Committee Member; Roberto Fernández, Committee Member; Michael Leeser, Committee Member; Lara Reglero, Committee Member.

The end in 1975 of the Francoist regime in Spain opened the door to new forms of self-expression, many of them suppressed during the 40 years of dictatorship. This change is especially significant around the traditionally peripheral Comunidades Autónomas that are bilingual, bicultural, and are experiencing a revival of their nationalistic feelings. This study focuses on the work of three Catalan authors who choose Spanish as their literary vehicle of self-expression. Juan Marsé's El amante bilingüe (1990), Eduardo Mendoza's La ciudad de los prodigios (1986), and Maruja Torres' Mientras vivimos (2000) are the works analyzed. These novels take place in Barcelona as it embodies the values of Catalan society, and exhibits many of the tendencies and social problems of the modern urban centers. Border Studies are the theoretical approach. Therefore, I consider here the emergence of a border literature (and identity) in the contact zone between Catalonia and the rest of Spain. Chapter II focuses on linguistic issues. The use of Catalan as the only means to express catalanidad is questioned here, while other textual strategies employed to reflect the linguistically diverse society are studied. Chapter III looks at the cultural aspects of the novels. Marsé, Mendoza and Torres criticize institutions, traditions, and cultural symbols on both sides of the "dividing" line, aiming to defy the concept of cultural purity and to show that transculturation has been in place for centuries. Globalization and immigration patterns also break the Catalan-Spanish binary opposition, thus becoming key elements of a fast changing cultural identity. Chapter IV analyzes Barcelona as an urban space where social relations take place. The work of social theorists Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja is applied to the analysis, especially the concepts of "monumental space" and "thirdspace." In Chapter V, Francisco Franco serves as a border which conditions sexual behavior. The chapter focuses on three aspects: women's identity in connection with their own spaces; transvestites as border subjects and symbols of a Spanish national identity; and possible solutions to the border problem based on the theories of national allegory and sexual politics. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Modern Languages in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2006. / April 19, 2006. / Eduardo Mendoza, Maruja Torres, El Amante Bilingüe, La Ciudad De Los Prodigios, Mientras Vivimos, Juan Marsé, Post-Franco Novel, Novela Post-Franco, Boder, Border Studies, Frontera, Narrativa Española / Includes bibliographical references. / Brenda Cappuccio, Professor Directing Dissertation; Karen Laughlin, Outside Committee Member; Delia Poey, Committee Member; José Gomariz, Committee Member.

In this study, I evaluate and explore the role of the antihero and the subordinate male in the patriarchal society as a marginalized voice throughout discourse at the end of the twentieth century. These discourses are first-person accounts of abuse of human rights, violence and social oppression and form an intricate part of testimonial literature. In the Latin American novels that I explore, the antihero faces marginalization due to dominant discourses with the structures of society and he lives an exclusion from meaningful participation in society, partly because the labor market does not or cannot accommodate him. This proves to be one of the most dangerous forms of oppression. This study investigates and demonstrates the antihero as an active participant in society. Furthermore, this research demonstrates the study of the representation of male images that transgress and deconstruct hegemonic models of masculinity. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2008. / October 29, 2007. / Representación, Antihéroe / Includes bibliographical references. / Delia Poey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Robinson Herrera, Outside Committee Member; Santa Arias, Committee Member; Brenda Cappuccio, Committee Member.

Readings of the economic thought of Cuban poet and social theorist José artí have focused on the portion of his journalistic works that looks like economic writing in a conventional sense. I argue that Martí's economic writings are far more extensive than those that appear to have been written for a "linguistic community" of economists and economic journalists. Much of Martí's economic thinking is revealed through an extensive system of symbols, images, metaphors and allusions in articles that appear to have little to do with economics. Martí, one of the best known members of a group of Latin American poets who later came to be known as the modernistas, often used tropes developed in his poetic practice in his economic writing for newspapers such as La Nación of Buenos Aires and La Opinión Nacional of Caracas. I further argue that the full range of Martí's economic views only becomes evident upon close reading of his journalistic production as if it were poetry. What becomes clear by this method is Martí's rejection of the version of U.S. capitalism he witnesses in New York City in the 1880's as an economic system for future Latin American development. This is not merely a condemnation of particular economic practices, such as protectionism or the dominance of monopolies, but rather a systematic rejection of capitalism on economic, social, cultural and even spiritual grounds. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 demonstrate this rejection through examination of a sample of his economically oriented tropes including The Mayflower, Henry George, prizefighting, the biblical Cain and the locomotive. Martí appears to have developed this highly codified style in part to avoid censorship by his editor at La Nación since that paper had devoted itself to the promotion of U.S. style capitalism as the only appropriate economic model for Argentina's future development. However, it is reasonable to argue that Martí also had in mind a subconscious appeal to his readers as a strategy for opposing the adoption of the U.S. capitalist economic model. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Modern Languages in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2006. / March 29, 2006. / Pensamiento Económico, Economic Thought, 19th Century Economic Thought, Henry George, Escenas Norteamericanas / Includes bibliographical references. / José Gomariz, Professor Directing Dissertation; Virgilio Suárez, Outside Committee Member; Roberto Fernández, Committee Member; Ernest Rehder, Committee Member.

This study investigates the effects of input and interaction activities on the acquisition of French reflexive verbs. In this research project, I address the following two research questions: 1) Will acquisition and production of French reflexive verbs vary according to instructional treatment? 2) Will acquisition and production of French reflexive verbs vary according to the proficiency level of the participants? The findings will be discussed within the input-interaction framework of second language acquisition. All data collection takes place within the university classroom environment. Intact university classes from first semester French (N=62), second semester French (N=54), and third semester French (N=64) participated in this study based upon communicative classroom activities. Proficiency level was divided into three groups that received the following forms of instruction: input (N=68), interaction (N=74), and no instruction/control (N=38). The interaction groups were further divided into "high" and "low" learners according to each individual's teacher rankings. The target forms chosen for this experiment were French reflexive verbs. Comprehension, acquisition, and production of the target forms were measured three times during a pretest, immediate post-test, and a 7-day delayed post-test using two tasks: a composition of daily routines and a translation of typical daily routines. Two tasks were evaluated: 1) a composition task that was evaluated according to attempted target forms and correct target forms; and 2) a translation task that was evaluated by correct target forms. The results for attempts on the composition task revealed that input and interaction groups significantly increased their production of French reflexive verb attempts from pretest to post-test; overall the first semester students did better than the advanced students. The results for the correct target forms on the composition task revealed that overall input and interaction groups performed significantly better than the control groups and first semester performed better than the advanced students. For the translation task, the results indicated that each class performed relatively the same on this task at each point in time; significant results were found for time and its interactions with class and activity. As before, the input and interaction groups performed significantly better than the control groups from pretest to post-test. The results suggest that indeed production and accuracy does vary according to treatment type. The results also suggest that proficiency has an effect on production and accuracy as well. However, as we will see, the results are counter-intuitive because the lower proficiency groups performed higher than the more proficient groups. Implications for evaluating the data using a qualitative analysis will be discussed as well. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2006. / March 22, 2006. / Qualitative, Proficiency, LRE, Dyad, SLA / Includes bibliographical references. / Gretchen Sunderman, Professor Directing Thesis; Michael Leeser, Committee Member; William Cloonan, Committee Member.

Most of the research on Charlotte Delbo has remained within the realm of Holocaust studies, and her writing, in particular, has been seen as a means of witnessing and preserving memory. Labeled solely as a "Holocaust survivor" and subsequently overshadowed by male writers of the Holocaust, Charlotte Delbo has not been adequately read and appreciated as a writer of the 20th century. Although her experiences in Auschwitz are one of the main subjects of her writing, I do not focus explicitly on her experiences, but rather on the methods and literary devices that Delbo uses to (re)construct and articulate these experiences. Delbo breaks the traditional template that labels her as a survivor by using a combination of two or more literary genres, known in general as generic hybridity, to create a unique literary form that captures her struggles with the social and cultural demands of post-World War II France. My dissertation will attempt to convey salient aspects of this unique literary form which I will call doubling. In this study, I investigate the various ways that identity, narrative settings, literary characters, time frames, and narrative forms are doubled. Doubling, I believe, is a result of Delbo's gendered experience in the camps and in France after the war. Not only do we witness the experience of Delbo trying to maintain a unified self in the camps as the Nazis relentlessly strip away her humanity, but we also follow Delbo's experiences of trying to understand her own duality as she resettles back in France- homeless, jobless, and a widow. As a woman, writing about women, in a women's camp, Charlotte Delbo gives us a unique perspective, not yet explored, of what is was like for her and the 230 women in her convoy to experience, and for a few- to survive Auschwitz. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2011. / February 11, 2011. / French Literature, Holocaust studies, Women's Writing, Charlotte Delbo / Includes bibliographical references. / William J. Cloonan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Laurel Fulkerson, University Representative; Aimée Boutin, Committee Member; James Tarpley, Committee Member; Reinier Leushuis, Committee Member.

This dissertation investigates transfer and markedness in bilingual and L2 Spanish stop-rhotic sequences (e.g., the 'br' in brisa 'breeze'). It also examines the phonetics-phonology interface in Spanish. To this end, it explores the production of these sequences in two different experiments. Experiment 1 compares the production of these sequences by 6 Spanish monolinguals and 6 Spanish-Basque bilinguals. Experiment 2 does so for 25 L2 learners and 5 native Spanish speakers. Acoustic analysis of these sequences revealed that Spanish-Basque bilinguals produced trills 5% of the time whereas Spanish monolinguals did not have any trills. Additionally, fricative rhotics and coarticulation accounted for 35% of L2 realizations, but were not present in the native Spanish speaker dataset. These findings indicate a role for transfer in both bilingual and L2 phonological acquisition, although it is more prevalent in the L2 learner dataset. This is in line with the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995), which posits a stronger role for transfer amongst late learners (i.e., L2 learners) than early learners (i.e., Spanish-Basque bilinguals). In order to examine the role of markedness in bilingual and L2 phonological acquisition, this dissertation investigates the role of sonority in bilingual and L2 Spanish syllable structure. To do so, it proposes a sonority hierarchy for rhotic variants based on their specifications for voicing, intensity and continuancy. According to this hierarchy, approximant rhotics are the most sonorous, followed by taps, trills and fricative rhotics. Therefore, approximant rhotics were expected to be the most common realization followed by taps, trills and fricative rhotics. Although Spanish monolinguals adhered to this expectation, the other groups did not; taps were the most common realization for Spanish-Basque bilinguals, L2 learners, and native Spanish speakers and fricative rhotics were more common than trills for Spanish-Basque bilinguals and L2 learners. These results suggest an interaction between transfer and markedness, consistent with Major (2001). They also reflect dialectal differences in native Spanish speakers. Finally, this dissertation explores the phonetic-phonology interface in Spanish in two ways. First, it investigates the function of svarabhakti vowels, vocalic elements of variable duration that emerge between consonants, in Spanish stop-rhotic sequences. For the most part, the findings support a dissimilatory role for svarabhakti vowels in this context (see also Colantoni & Steele, 2005). Second, in order to examine the impact of gestural timing in Spanish stop-rhotic realization, it considers the role of the sounds surrounding the rhotic (see also Bradley & Schmeiser, 2003). The results can be explained in terms of different degrees of gestural overlap for all groups except L2 learners, which may be due to a strong role of transfer. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2014. / May 2, 2014. / Acoustic phonetics, Acquisition, Rhotics, Spanish / Includes bibliographical references. / Carolina González, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michael Kaschak, University Representative; Michael Leeser, Committee Member; Gretchen Sunderman, Committee Member; Lara Reglero, Committee Member.

Interest in foreign language, in particular English, education in China has grown considerably in the past three decades, not only in terms of linguistic aspects, but also, more recently, its cultural dimension. The recent syllabuses for non-English and English majors have placed emphasis, to varying extents, on the development of students’ cultural knowledge and/or intercultural communicative competence. The purpose of the research reported in this dissertation is to provide a panoramic picture and a characterisation of the conceptions of culture and its role in English language teaching and learning in China. The research was designed as two discrete, but related, studies: a survey of academic publications; and a field study. The survey aimed at providing a systematic account of the main themes and emphases of writings about culture teaching and intercultural communication studies. Its aim was to discover the research interests, beliefs about culture and the role of culture in foreign language, mainly English, education, and culture teaching techniques. The field study employed semi-structured interviews and non-participant classroom observations to investigate Chinese university EFL teachers’ conceptions of culture and beliefs about culture teaching, and their instructional practices in the classroom. The findings from the studies indicate that the writers and the teachers shared a similar, fairly circumscribed, range of conceptions about culture and culture teaching. Culture is viewed principally as one’s way of life; the role of teaching culture in language learning as presenting factual information relating to products, practices and perspectives. Culture teaching is regarded as important and necessary in foreign language teaching, and its goal as the development of knowledge about cultures and awareness of other cultures. The main culture teaching techniques used in education are introduction, comparison and culture, and student projects Nonetheless, teachers were found to have little acquaintance with culture theory and to lack pedagogical training in culture teaching. They rely predominantly on their own, personal and largely limited, knowledge about and experience of other cultures and tend to focus on the development of students’ language proficiency without sustained cultural input. Despite the rapidly expanding scholarly literature on these topics, it appears to have very limited influence on actual foreign language teaching in universities. On the basis of these findings, a tentative model for cultural education in FLT in China is proposed, comprising (1) developing teachers’ beliefs about and knowledge of culture and culture learning; (2) strengthening comparative cultural studies and cultural pedagogically-oriented research, especially by teachers themselves; (3) developing expertise in culture-related pedagogical practice; (4) extending opportunities for both teachers and learners to gain immersion experiences in other cultures.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 61 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-61).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 2007. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-41)