UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
13 results
Search Results
Item INVESTIGATING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES’ PREDICTION OF LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY OUTCOMES: A LATENT GROWTH CURVE MODELING APPROACH(2023) Rhoades, Elizabeth Rogler; Gor, Kira; Clark, Martyn; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although decades of research within the field of second language acquisition have been dedicated to investigating the impact of individual differences on second language learners’ success, longitudinal research focused on individual differences and their impact on adult second language acquisition is extremely limited. Additional longitudinal research on individual differences is necessary to further our understanding of the nature of the process of adult second language acquisition. This area of research is also critical to the U.S. Government and the Department of Defense as thousands of military service members work in language-related positions, and these service members’ maintenance of high levels of language proficiency is critical for our nation’s national security. The current study used a longitudinal design to investigate the impact of individual differences such as general cognitive ability, language aptitude, and attitude toward learning assigned second language (L2) on military service members’ language proficiency outcomes. Latent growth curve modeling (LGM) was used to model participants’ initial proficiency levels and growth trajectories, and measures of cognitive ability, language aptitude, and attitude toward learning assigned L2 were used to measure the impact of these individual differences on language proficiency outcomes. Additional variables including GPA, age, education level, number of language training hours, billet type, and sex were also included in the analyses. The results from the four phases of analyses support the conclusion that the predictive value of individual difference factors on language proficiency outcomes differ not only by DLI Language Difficulty Category, as suggested by previous research, but also by language and even language modality.Item AN ANALYSIS OF CODE SWITCHING EVENTS IN TYPICALLY DEVELOPING SPANISH-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN(2020) Guevara, Sandra Stephanie; Ratner, Nan; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Code-switching (CS) patterns were investigated in language samples of 14 typically-developing Spanish-English bilingual preschool-aged children. CS occurred primarily when the children spoke in Spanish. We investigated code-switched events, vocabulary measures, and disfluencies to better understand if children utilize code-switching to fill in lexical gaps in Spanish, as measured by disfluencies surrounding the code-switch. Results indicate that children’s spoken vocabulary diversity is not related to code-switching frequency, although their receptive vocabulary skills are negatively correlated to proportions of code-switched events. We also found no significant relationship between code-switched events and disfluencies across participants. Findings suggest clinical implications related to best practice for speech-language pathologists when working with bilingual children, as they observe language attrition, and code-switching related to language proficiency and dominance.Item Parent- and Teacher-Rated Social Skills and Theory of Mind in Kindergarteners(2018) Caputo, Maryke Haasbroek; Teglasi, Hedwig; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigated how kindergartners’ use of Theory of Mind (ToM; understanding and inferring others’ mental states to predict and explain behavior) relate to their Social Competence (SC), as rated by parents and teachers. This study aimed to determine whether social skills items could be classified as more or less conventional (knowledge of emotions and social conventions) or intentional (requires noticing and interpreting other’s beliefs and intentions) based on their correlates with more or less structured performance measures of ToM, respectively. Results partially supported this this distinction. Patterns suggested that parents and teachers judge children’s social skills differently. This study also explored relations of language with SC and ToM. Language accounted for much of the variance in the more structured ToM task and teacher-rated social skills, but not the less structured ToM task or parent-rated social skills. Implications for SC conceptualization and scale construction and interpretation are discussed.Item An Examination of the Relationship Between Prior Musical Sophistication and Language Outcomes in People With Aphasia(2018) Fisher, Sarah J.; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research suggests there is a neural relationship between music and language, such that higher levels of musical sophistication may be positively correlated with a person’s linguistic and cognitive functioning. Though most of the research has focused on neurotypical individuals, the implication is that musical sophistication could benefit a person with a neurological impairment such as aphasia, perhaps by preserving linguistic abilities after the person has sustained a stroke. The study outlined here seeks to replicate and expand on the findings of Faroqi-Shah et al. (in prep) by looking at musical sophistication’s influence on aphasia severity as well as on specific language and cognitive domains (e.g., syntax, auditory processing, memory, and cognitive control). Knowing what specific domains of language or cognition are involved could help researchers better understand the neural location of musical and linguistic resources as well as the behavioral benefit of increased reserve in a neurologically impaired individual.Item MEMORY AND PREDICTION IN CROSS-LINGUISTIC SENTENCE COMPREHENSION(2014) Lago, Maria S.; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the role of morphological and syntactic variation in sentence comprehension across languages. While most previous research has focused on how cross-linguistic differences affect the control structure of the language architecture (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) here we adopt an explicit model of memory, content-addressable memory (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, 2006) and examine how cross-linguistic variation affects the nature of the representations and processes that speakers deploy during comprehension. With this goal, we focus on two kinds of grammatical dependencies that involve an interaction between language and memory: subject-verb agreement and referential pronouns. In the first part of this dissertation, we use the self-paced reading method to examine how the processing of subject-verb agreement in Spanish, a language with a rich morphological system, differs from English. We show that differences in morphological richness across languages impact prediction processes while leaving retrieval processes fairly preserved. In the second part, we examine the processing of coreference in German, a language that, in contrast with English, encodes gender syntactically. We use eye-tracking to compare comprehension profiles during coreference and we find that only speakers of German show evidence of semantic reactivation of a pronoun's antecedent. This suggests that retrieval of semantic information is dependent on syntactic gender, and demonstrates that German and English speakers retrieve qualitatively different antecedent representations from memory. Taken together, these results suggest that cross-linguistic variation in comprehension is more affected by the content than the functional importance of gender and number features across languages.Item Using a high-dimensional model of semantic space to predict neural activity(2014) Jackson, Alice Freeman; Bolger, Donald J; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation research developed the GOLD model (Graph Of Language Distribution), a graph-structured semantic space model constructed based on co-occurrence in a large corpus of natural language, with the intent that it may be used to explore what information may be present about relationships between words in such a model and the degree to which this information may be used to predict brain responses and behavior in language tasks. The present study employed GOLD to examine genera relatedness as well as two specific types of relationship between words: semantic similarity, which refers to the degree of overlap in meaning between words, and associative relatedness, which refers to the degree to which two words occur in the same schematic context. It was hypothesized that this graph-structured model of language constructed based on co-occurrence should easily capture associative relatedness, because this type of relationship is thought to be present directly in lexical co-occurrence. Additionally, it was hypothesized that semantic similarity may be extracted from the intersection of the set of first-order connections, because two words that are semantically similar may occupy similar thematic or syntactic roles across contexts and thus would co-occur lexically with the same set of nodes. Based on these hypotheses, a set of relationship metrics were extracted from the GOLD model, and machine learning techniques were used to explore predictive properties of these metrics. GOLD successfully predicted behavioral data as well as neural activity in response to words with varying relationships, and its predictions outperformed those of certain competing models. These results suggest that a single-mechanism account of learning word meaning from context may suffice to account for a variety of relationships between words. Further benefits of graph models of language are discussed, including their transparent record of language experience, easy interpretability, and increased psychologically plausibility over models that perform complex transformations of meaning representation.Item Effects of Statistical Learning on the Acquisition of Grammatical Categories through Qur'anic Memorization: A Natural Experiment(2013) Zuhurudeen, Fathima Manaar; Huang, Yi Ting; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigated the effects of ambient exposure to Arabic through Qur'anic memorization versus formal classroom exposure to Arabic on the ability to acquire knowledge of Arabic grammatical categories. To do this, we exposed participants to a 5-minute familiarization language of Arabic phrases. Then, we measured accuracy on a two-alternative forced choice grammatical judgment task, which required participants to identify a grammatical phrase based on rules that followed the statistical properties of items in the familiarization language. We compared results of this task with those of language background surveys, and found that memorizers were more accurate than non-memorizers in distinguishing between novel grammatical phrases and ungrammatical phrases. While classroom experience had no effect on accuracy, naïve listeners also experienced statistical learning. Thus, semantic representations are not required to abstract rules of Arabic grammar. We discuss possible explanations for these findings and implications for language acquisition.Item Subjacent Culture, Orthogonal Community: An Ethnographic Analysis of an On-Line Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fan Community(2013) Ali, Asim; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents an ethnographic analysis of the community of fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer whose members frequented the online linear posting board known as The Bronze. Buffy originally aired from 1997 until 2003, but the community that formed at the official Buffy fan site in 1997 continues on in real life and on line, having survived the end of Buffy and the closure of all three of its official posting boards. This study uses an interdisciplinary combination of textual analysis and ethnographic techniques (interviews, participant observation, autoethnography, cyberethnography) to ascertain the importance, relevance, and meaning of The Bronze community to its members, known as Bronzers. I argue that the nature of the linear posting board allowed Bronzers to form a unique and long-lived community by using The Bronze in creative and imaginative ways. In particular, language--to some degree appropriated from Buffy--was used by Bronzers to write a better world for themselves on line. Hence, the community is built on (and maintained by) language that is used in an unusually postmodern manner. As a group, Bronzers tend to be highly educated, literary, and artistic. To Bronzers, much of Buffy's appeal was its emotional realism and imaginative depth. Unusually for television, these elements were combined with strong female leading roles, a cast of bookish and somewhat countercultural characters, and a foregrounding of emotionality and interpersonal relationships. Bronzers were drawn to these aspects of Buffy--which formed its "gothic aesthetic"--and in turn created their own somewhat countercultural community, one that came to reflect their own close ties and emotional attachments. I argue that The Bronze community exists subjacent to mainstream cultural formations, and orthogonal to real life communities. Using this framework, a number of implications emerge for computer-mediated communication in general, including an explanation for the prevalence of hostility in online communication. Furthermore, when situated in its broader context, The Bronze can be seen as a meager palliative to the damaging effects of contemporary post-industrial capitalism, one that nonetheless illumines the brightly stultifying commonplaces that lead people to seek shelter in dimly-lit imagined spaces.Item Effects of birthplace, language and length of time in the U.S. on receipt of asthma management plans among U.S. adults with current asthma(2009) Williams, Sonja; Carter-Pokras, Olivia; Public and Community Health; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Approximately 7% of the adult population in the United States suffers from asthma and only 32% of those adults have an asthma management plan, which is an important component in asthma management. Racial/ethnic minorities have higher rates of asthma and lower rates of good asthma management. There is a lack of research in examining how foreign birth and other proxy measures of acculturation may affect long term management of asthma. Using data from both the 2002 and 2003 National Health Interview Survey, this secondary data analysis examined the relationship between the receipt of asthma management plans among 18-64 year old adult asthmatics by birthplace, length of time in the U.S., and language of interview. Hispanic/Latino participants who spoke English during the interview had a 3.43 times greater odds of having an asthma management plan when compared to those who spoke Spanish (95% CI: 1.97-5.98).Item The predictive nature of language comprehension(2009) Lau, Ellen Frances; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the hypothesis that predictive processing--the access and construction of internal representations in advance of the external input that supports them--plays a central role in language comprehension. Linguistic input is frequently noisy, variable, and rapid, but it is also subject to numerous constraints. Predictive processing could be a particularly useful approach in language comprehension, as predictions based on the constraints imposed by the prior context could allow computation to be speeded and noisy input to be disambiguated. Decades of previous research have demonstrated that the broader sentence context has an effect on how new input is processed, but less progress has been made in determining the mechanisms underlying such contextual effects. This dissertation is aimed at advancing this second goal, by using both behavioral and neurophysiological methods to motivate predictive or top-down interpretations of contextual effects and to test particular hypotheses about the nature of the predictive mechanisms in question. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the lexical-semantic predictions made possible by word and sentence contexts. MEG and fMRI experiments, in conjunction with a meta-analysis of the previous neuroimaging literature, support the claim that an ERP effect classically observed in response to contextual manipulations--the N400 effect--reflects facilitation in processing due to lexical-semantic predictions, and that these predictions are realized at least in part through top-down changes in activity in left posterior middle temporal cortex, the cortical region thought to represent lexical-semantic information in long-term memory,. The second part of the dissertation focuses on syntactic predictions. ERP and reaction time data suggest that the syntactic requirements of the prior context impacts processing of the current input very early, and that predicting the syntactic position in which the requirements can be fulfilled may allow the processor to avoid a retrieval mechanism that is prone to similarity-based interference errors. In sum, the results described here are consistent with the hypothesis that a significant amount of language comprehension takes place in advance of the external input, and suggest future avenues of investigation towards understanding the mechanisms that make this possible.