1,848 research outputs found
Introduction to Psychology
Introduction to Psychology is a modified version of Psychology 2e - OpenStax
What effect does short term Study Abroad (SA) have on learners’ vocabulary knowledge?
This thesis describes a study which tracks longitudinal changes in vocabularyknowledge during a short-term Study Abroad (SA) experience. A test ofproductive vocabulary knowledge, Lex30 (Meara & Fitzpatrick, 2000),requiring the production of word association responses, is used to elicit vocabulary from 38 Japanese L1 learners of English at four test times at equal intervals before and after an SA experience. The study starts by investigating whether there are changes in both the total number of words and in the number of less frequently occurring words produced by SA participants. Three additional ways of measuring the development of lexical knowledge over time are then proposed. The first examines changes in the ability of participants of different proficiency levels in producing collocates in response to Lex30 cue words. The second tracks changes in spelling accuracy to measure if improvements take place over time. The third analysis uses an online measuring instrument (Wmatrix; Rayson, 2009) to explore if there are any changes in the mastery of specific semantic domains. The results show that there is significant growth in the productive use of less frequent vocabulary knowledge during the SA period. There is also an increase in collocation production with lower proficiency participants and evidence of some improvement in the way certain vocabulary items are spelled. The tendency for SA learners to produce more words from semantic groups related to SA experiences is also demonstrated. Post-SA tests show that while some knowledge attrition occurs it does not decline to pre-SA levels. The studyshows how short-term SA programmes can be evaluated using a word association test, contributing to a better understanding of how vocabularydevelops during intensive language learning experiences. It also demonstrates the gradual shift of productive vocabulary knowledge from partial word knowledge to a more complete state of productive mastery
The Realisation of syntactic principles in non-standard Afrikaans: the correspondence of Jan Jonker Afrikaner (1820-1889)
This study compares the syntax of nineteenth-century Orange River Afrikaans with Dutch and synchronic Afrikaans varieties, with particular attention to Griqua Afrikaans. It provides an account of the differences that are found between the earliest attestations of an extraterritorial variety of the Dutch language on southern African soil (the so-called Cape Dutch Vernacular) with the present-day outcome. The data collected for this study originate chiefly from an hitherto undisclosed corpus of letters kept in the Namibian State Archives by the so-called Oorlam-Nama, people of mixed descent who lived on the periphery of the nineteenth- century Cape colonial society. This thesis argues that nineteenth-century Orange River Afrikaans is a representative continuation of the earliest developments in the linguistic contact situation that existed at the Cape. The thesis advances that literacy and social class are important factors in the assessment of the written record from the Dutch colony at the Cape. The thesis centers around the letters by one author, Jan Jonker Afrikaner, written over a period of nearly twenty years in the second half of the nineteenth century. This legacy is a unique contribution to the diachronic data concerning the development of Afrikaans. From the data it is shown that this author had the command over different registers, fluctuating between a near perfect metropolitan Dutch and a Hollands that is classified as basilectal Afrikaans. The comparison of the data is set in a framework inspired by the concepts put forward in Generative Grammar. This has precipitated an exciting linguistic comparison of contemporary Afrikaans grammar with the diachronic material. This dissertation challenges the idea that the Khoesan Languages were of no or little influence in the development of Afrikaans. The linguistic analysis of the nineteenth-century data reveal that the developments which took place cannot be attributed to one single origin. It is demonstrated that the innovations and change that can be identified run parallel to regular patterns that are found in other languages generally classified as creole languages. It is argued that the syntax of the Khoesan languages is a major reinforcing factor in the development of the syntactic idiosyncrasies that are identified as un-Germanic characteristics of Afrikaans. Limited to nonstandard varieties of Afrikaans, in the concluding sections the question is raised how these findings are to be addressed in the larger context of language change
Explaining the distribution of implicit means of misrepresentation:A case study on Italian immigration discourse
This study analyzes Fillmore's frames in a large corpus of Italian news headlines concerning migrations, dating from 2013 to 2021 and taken from newspapers of diverse ideological stances. Our goal is to assess whether, how, and why migrants' representation varies over time and across ideological stances. Our approach combines corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis with cognitive linguistics. We present a new methodology that exploits SOCIOFILLMORE, a tool integrating a novel Natural Language Processing model for automatic frame annotation into a web-based user interface for exploring frame-annotated corpora. In our corpus, the frequency distribution of frames varies over time according to detectable contextual factors. Across political stances, instead, the most frequent frames remain more constant: both right-winged and left-winged news providers contribute to reifying migrants into non-agentive entities. Further, in religious (Christian) press migrants are given a more humanizing depiction, but they still often appear in non-agentive roles. The distributions of frames can be explained by the fact that the latter act as indirect, routinized, and implicit means of (mis)representation. We suggest that framing entails inferential operations that take place unconsciously and can therefore escape the cognitive screening not only of those who receive discourse, but also of those who (re)produce it.</p
Política lingüística en Luxemburgo y en la Comunidad germanófona de Bélgica: Ideologías lingüísticas
The language policy discourses of Luxembourg and the German-speaking Community of Belgium
(GC) exhibit fundamental differences, yet interesting similarities that so far have not been subject
to a discourse analysis from a mixed framework of linguistic anthropology and discourse
linguistics (Diskurslinguistik). On the basis of a corpus consisting of current language policy texts
and semi-structured interviews with key actors involved in current policy design and
implementation, this research aims to answer the question regarding the interplay of ideology and
discourse in the design and implementation of the language policy of Luxembourg and the GC.
The bulk of the analysis is made up of three layers for each case. Starting point of the analysis is
a historical overview that identifies ideologies and language policy discourses that emerged,
predominated, and transformed from the 19th century until the 21st century in each case. The second
layer is a discourse analysis of current language policy texts with a focus on the ideologies
informing current discourses about Luxembourgish in Luxembourg and German in the GC.
Finally, the third layer is a discourse analysis of interview extracts with equal focus on ideologies.
Through a combined thematic and discourse analysis based on the social semiotics of language,
this research provides a description of the discursive patterns of the linguistic structure of passages
of each text and interview with the aim of linking these patterns to the identified ideologies that
inform the policy discourses. It was found that the connecting node between Luxembourg and the
GC lies in the tension between the two themes of standardization and multilingualism. It is shown
that standardization and multilingualism are thematic centers from which discourses about
language, identity, and nation emanate in these two cases. Through the combination of the
historical overview and the meticulous analysis of discursive patterns identified in the linguistic
structure of language policy texts and interview extracts, it is not only shown how ideology informs
current language policy discourses in Luxembourg and the GC, but also why language policy
discourses transform or sediment through time
Le goût d'Orval: constructing the taste of Orval beer through narratives
This study explores the construction of taste through narratives, using Orval beer as a
case study. Often found on lists of the best or most unique beers in the world, Orval is a bottle
conditioned, dry-hopped strong Belgian ale with Brettanomyces yeast, creating an orange-hue
beer topped with a large volume of white foam. It is both easy to drink and complex in flavour.
Made in southeastern Belgium within the walls of a Trappist Abbey, Orval is closely associated
with the country of Belgium, a pilgrimage site for beer lovers because of its unique and diverse
beer culture. In 2016 “Beer Culture in Belgium” was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative
List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Orval beer also carries the Authentic Trappist
Product label, ensuring that this product is brewed under the supervision of Trappist monks or
nuns, within the Abbey walls, and is non-profit. Additionally, the beer has a unique, distinctive
taste. This dissertation explores narratives that tell of all these aspects. The first section,
Narrating Belgium, examines how social and economic histories build Belgium as a beer nation,
and how conversion narratives of Belgian beer enthusiasts support this theory. The Narrating
Trappist section examines how the Legend of Orval and the history of Orval Abbey create a
sense of place for Orval beer and how the Authentic Trappist Product label helps construct its
terroir. The last section, Narrating Taste, focuses on narratives of taste as shared in online
reviews of Orval beer. I first conduct lexical and network analysis of reviews on Untappd,
RateBeer, and BeerAdvocate before focusing specifically on themes found in BeerAdvocate
reviews. Through ethnographic and textual research, this dissertation introduces a folkloristic
approach to taste and argues that both contextual and sensory elements are essential in building
taste through narratives
The neural basis of semantic processing across comprehension contexts
Current neurobiological models of semantic cognition have been predominately derived from studies of single-words or sentences which may provide an impoverished estimate of how semantic processing occurs in real-world contexts. Studies that make use of more ecologically valid stimuli such as natural language or narratives suggest that, counter to the hub-and-spoke framework in which the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) serves as a graded hub integrating information from proximal sensorimotor spokes, the semantic system displays voxel-wise category specialization tiled across a large, distributed network. A complicating factor in reconciling these seemingly conflicting claims is the over-reliance on concrete conceptual knowledge in describing the organization of the semantic system. A recent theoretical account argues that social knowledge, like other types of semantic knowledge, is processed within the ventrolateral ATL, but this claim has not been tested using naturalistic stimuli, which better sample abstract social knowledge, including pragmatic inference.
This thesis investigates the organization of the semantic system across multiple scales, from isolated words to multimodal narratives, and across multiple types of semantic conceptual knowledge, from concrete to abstract. Using comprehension of concrete words as a starting point, the first study describes a critical examination of specialization within the semantic system for taxonomic (dog – bear) and thematic (dog – leash) relations using intracranial EEG recordings from an array of depth electrodes within ATL, inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and two regions within the semantic control network, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG). Moving across the context and conceptual scale to build upon this work, the second study investigated how the concrete and abstract lexical and semantic properties of single-words, akin to those that informed the hub-and-spoke model, are processed in a complex, complete narrative presented to participants during fMRI scanning. In doing so, this study enabled comparisons between prior studies of isolated words and naturalistic work, thus moving toward an integrated cross-scale account of semantic cognition. Using the same neuroimaging data, the third study extended this work to investigate how context contributes to the construction of meaning by studying how the semantic and social cognitive systems are engaged by social and pragmatic sentence-level content. This enabled a direct, naturalistic test of the claim that social knowledge is housed within the semantic system. The fourth study investigated shared processing between social and semantic systems using fMRI data collected during movie-viewing, which captures the multimodal environment in which social knowledge is exchanged.
The results of these studies collectively demonstrate that the semantic and social systems are differentially engaged across the scales investigated here. Concrete conceptual relations engage one (or more) specialized hubs within the semantic system, whereas processing of naturalistic verbal and event content co-varies with activation in large brain networks. There is evidence of functional gradations within ATL that are differentially sensitive to the demands of narrative comprehension – the anterior superior temporal gyrus (i.e., dorsolateral subregion) and anterior fusiform (i.e., ventral subregion) appear to be particularly sensitive to the quantity and informativeness of external input whereas the anterior middle and inferior temporal gyri (i.e., ventrolateral subregion) appear to be engaged by internal, or endogenous, semantic processing during narrative comprehension. Engagement of this same ventrolateral subregion is observed in response to social word and sentence content, providing support for the claim that social processing is subsumed within the semantic system. Taken together, the results suggest an extension to the current neurobiological model of semantic cognition that accommodates comprehension contexts. The studies undertaken as part of this thesis build upon the existing concept-level frameworks towards a narrative-level framework of semantic cognition
Design of an E-learning system using semantic information and cloud computing technologies
Humanity is currently suffering from many difficult problems that threaten the life and survival of the human race. It is very easy for all mankind to be affected, directly or indirectly, by these problems. Education is a key solution for most of them. In our thesis we tried to make use of current technologies to enhance and ease the learning process.
We have designed an e-learning system based on semantic information and cloud computing, in addition to many other technologies that contribute to improving the educational process and raising the level of students. The design was built after much research on useful technology, its types, and examples of actual systems that were previously discussed by other researchers.
In addition to the proposed design, an algorithm was implemented to identify topics found in large textual educational resources. It was tested and proved to be efficient against other methods. The algorithm has the ability of extracting the main topics from textual learning resources, linking related resources and generating interactive dynamic knowledge graphs. This algorithm accurately and efficiently accomplishes those tasks even for bigger books. We used Wikipedia Miner, TextRank, and Gensim within our algorithm. Our algorithm‘s accuracy was evaluated against Gensim, largely improving its accuracy.
Augmenting the system design with the implemented algorithm will produce many useful services for improving the learning process such as: identifying main topics of big textual learning resources automatically and connecting them to other well defined concepts from Wikipedia, enriching current learning resources with semantic information from external sources, providing student with browsable dynamic interactive knowledge graphs, and making use of learning groups to encourage students to share their learning experiences and feedback with other learners.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Luis Sánchez Fernández.- Secretario: Luis de la Fuente Valentín.- Vocal: Norberto Fernández Garcí
Northeastern Illinois University, Academic Catalog 2023-2024
https://neiudc.neiu.edu/catalogs/1064/thumbnail.jp
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