No description available.

This study examines the language attitudes of entrepreneurial students enrolled in the Academy for Creating Enterprise (ACE) in Mexico City toward six rural and urban varieties of Mexican Spanish to consider whether their attitudes towards these varieties influence their decisions about hiring. A verbal guise test and focus groups were used to determine the current attitudes held by 98 ACE students towards the popular and upper-class dialects of Mexico City; the urban dialect of Mérida, Yucatan; the urban dialect of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua; the urban dialect of Monterrey, Nuevo León; and the rural dialect of San Jeronimito, Guerrero. It was determined that the ACE students, who are current and future entrepreneurs and employers, do engage in “linguistic profiling” (Purnell et al., 1999), preferring the northern varieties of Spanish and the variety spoken by the upper class of Mexico City in all three dimensions of attractiveness, status, and hireability. These results indicate that speakers of the popular variety of Mexico City and the southern varieties of Yucatán and Guerrero are less likely to be hired. In addition, the students’ ratings of hireability were also influenced by the students’ age, gender, business owner status, and exposure to the dialect in question. The students’ level of income was found to be the most likely to influence the ratings of speaker attractiveness and status. This case study of current and future employers enrolled at ACE responds to a call for the application of language attitudes research (Edwards, 1982; Garrett, 2010) and provides a model for working with an organization. Based on these findings, it was determined that ACE should modify its curriculum to include explicit training regarding linguistic attitudes and hiring practices.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Decades of priming research have revealed that environmental stimuli feed into our behaviours, often without any awareness of our using this information to guide our behaviour. This has been shown using plentiful stimuli across multiple contexts. One of the most socially rich stimuli in our environment is voice, and yet this has featured surprisingly little in behavioural research, particularly within social psychology. This thesis was written as a step towards addressing this gap, and it explores how voices might affect particular behaviours in different contexts. Three broad experiments, each with their own sub-experiments, investigated how voices, acting as proxies for social categories, could influence one's behaviour. In the first experiment, the responses to socially themed statements were influenced by the sex of the voice presenting those statements. Female voices primed more agreement to these statements than did male voices. In the second experiment, judgements of ambiguous stimuli and questions were also affected by voices, albeit in less clear ways. In the third experiment, the reaction times of participants were again affected by voices. Younger participants' reaction times were slower when listening to an older voice, and older participants' reaction times were faster when listening to an older voice. Across these three experiments, I found too that the presence of a voice led to task differences compared to when voice was absent. The combination of these experiments is, to my knowledge, the first to look at voice-based behavioural priming. How these results fit with selected existing theories, the potential to specify theories based on these results, and the possible practical applications of voice based priming are discussed.

<p> This dissertation examines the social and interactional foundations of a grammatical divergence between Tactile American Sign Language (TASL) and Visual American Sign Language (VASL) in the Seattle DeafBlind community. I argue that as a result of the pro-tactile movement, structures of interaction have been reconfigured and a new language has begun to emerge. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, more than 190 hours of videorecordings of interaction and language use, 50 interviews with members of the community, and more than 14 years of involvement in a range of capacities, I analyze this social transformation and its effect on the semiotic organization of TASL. </p><p> I identify two processes as requisite for the emergence of TASL: <i> deictic integration and embedding in the social field.</i> Deictic integration involves the coordination of grammatical systems with modes of access and orientation that are reciprocal across a group of language-users. Embedding in the social field involves: (1) the legitimation of the language for taking up valued social roles, along with the embodied knowledge necessary for doing so, and (2) authorization of some language-users to evaluate linguistic forms and communicative practices as correct or not. </p><p> In this dissertation, I track these processes among DeafBlind people and I show how they are leading to new mechanisms for referring to the immediate environment and tracking referents across a stream of discourse (Chapter 7), new rules for the formation of lexical signs (Chapter 8), and a new system for generating semiotically complex signs, which incorporate both linguistic and non-linguistic elements (Chapter 9). In order to understand the social and interactional foundations of these emergent systems, I examine the history of two institutions around which the Seattle DeafBlind community was built (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I show how social roles, given by the history of those institutions, were reconfigured by DeafBlind leaders and how this led to changes in modes of access and orientation (Chapters 5 and 6). I argue that as relations between linguistic, deictic, and social phenomena grew tighter and more restricted, a new tactile language began to emerge. I therefore apprehend language emergence not as a process of liberation or abstraction from context, but as a process of contextual integration (Chapter 1).</p>

This thesis has examined the effects of socioeconomic status and linguistic development upon responses to Dwight Dean's Alienation Scale - an accepted social science research instrument.No significant correlations were found to exist between socioeconomic status and linguistic development and/or responses to the scale.A significant negative correlation was found to exist between linguistic development and responses to two out of three revised alienation subscales derived from the Dear, Scale.The thesis suggests that researchers must be wary of accepting current and future research instruments merely on the basis of reliability data. It also suggests that researchers must seek further understanding of the relationship between linguistic development and responses to social science research instruments.

This paper presents a general comparison of Japanese and American communication patterns and includes 30 dialogue lessons which focus on differences in communication patterns between the two nations to be used as oral communication teaching materials for Japanese learners of English.There are four striking contrasts in common personality and cultural norms between Japan and the United States, namely, introversion vs. extroversion, hierarchism vs. egalitarianism, collectivism vs. individualism, and nonverbalism vs. verbalism. The differences in common personality and cultural norms effect behavioral and psychological differences, which in turn cause differences in communication patterns between the two nations. A comparative study of communication patterns, then, makes it possible to speculate on the probable occurrence of misunderstanding and miscommunication in cross-cultural communicative interactions, and finally, provides a firm basis for the development of oral communication teaching materials with attention to cultural relativism for Japanese learners of English.

This study investigates variable positioning of adverbs in compound verb tenses in vernacular Quebec French using the sociolinguistic framework of Variation Theory (Weinreich et al. 1968; Labov 1969). While variable adverb placement is addressed in both the prescriptive and linguistic literature, whether their explanations for it hold in practice remains to be determined; quantitative research of this phenomenon in usage-based corpora is limited, and rare in French. The research objectives are therefore to determine the productivity of variable adverb placement in French in these verbal contexts, to uncover the linguistic and/or social factors which constrain it, and to evaluate the extent to which current treatments of this variable in the literature accurately reflect what occurs in speech. Data is thus extracted from a corpus of spontaneous discourse, is coded for several linguistic and social factors, and is quantitatively analysed using standard variationist methodology (Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001). Overall rates of variant use suggest that variable adverb placement is robust, with adverbs occurring just slightly more frequently after the past participle than between the auxiliary and the participle; placement at the beginning of the sentence is rare. The results of the distributional and multivariate analyses largely confirm the purported conditioning effects of the tested linguistic factors, suggesting that prescriptive and theoretical linguistic approaches are generally correct in their accounts of this phenomenon. However, closer investigation reveals these effects to be sensitive to the lexical identity of the adverb, namely, their particular placement preferences; once these positioning predilections are taken into consideration, the conditioning effects of the linguistic factors essentially disappear. Sociodemographic factors are also found to be mildly implicated in variable adverb placement, and these too are sensitive to the influence of the lexical identity of the adverb. Ultimately, it is argued that this variable is primarily lexically-constrained, a finding which can be only minimally and indirectly inferred from the relevant literature. Taken together, the results of this study provide new and vital insight into the mechanisms underlying variable adverb placement in French, and also highlight the importance of quantitatively investigating such variable language phenomena in corpora of vernacular speech.