Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

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  Acquisition versus long-term retention of Japanese words and syntax by children and adults: Implications for the critical period hypothesis in second language learning.

  Boswell, Paul Duane; Reyna, Valerie; Brainerd, Charles; Aleamoni, Lawrence M. (The University of Arizona., 1993)

  The critical period hypothesis for second language learning, which states that young children learn additional languages better than adults, lacks unambiguous empirical support as well as a coherent theoretical model. An experimental study was conducted which analyzed child-adult differences in difficulty of acquisition and long-term retention for rules of syntax and words in Japanese, a language unfamiliar to the subjects. The results of this study found no advantage for children over adults either in acquisition or long-term memory. However, relative to the difficulty of acquisition, the children had lower forgetting rates for words than for rules when both materials were learned completely. In the lexical study, the children's performance at retention was closer to the adults' than at acquisition, whereas in the syntax study, the opposite was the case. These results confirm the existence of developmental differences in the forgetting rates of different materials. Such results imply that, if there is an advantage for learning language at an early age, it might be localized in lexical retention.
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  A unified theory of tone-voice.

  Archangeli, Diana B.; Peng, Long; Hammond, Michael; Demers, Richard (The University of Arizona., 1992)

  This thesis studies the interactions of vowel tone with consonantal voice. Briefly, tone-voice interactions refer to: (i) voiced--not voiceless--onsets block high tone spreading; (ii) voiceless--not voiced--onsets block low tone spreading; (iii) sonorant onsets are transparent to both tonal processes. There are many variations to these archetypical patterns of tone-voice interactions. I argue that these variations as well as the archetypical patterns can receive a revealing account from the phonological theory. Specifically, this thesis explores the Prosodic Hypothesis of Tone-Voice, which claims: (i) tone must be represented prosodically (namely, tone is associated to mora); and (ii) tone-voice relations must be expressed by conditions (namely, path conditions, proposed in Archangeli and Pulleyblank (in prep)). By exploiting tonal representations and conditions on tone-voice, the Prosodic Hypothesis provides a principled account of tone-voice in Ngizim, Ewe, and Nupe. The result is a principled theory that unifies the known phonetic and phonological facts about tone-voice and that makes testable predictions about the nature and type of expected tone-voice interactions. In addition to tone-voice, this thesis investigates a range of theoretical issues from tonal representations, to onset representations, to the privative voicing theory to Grounded Phonology (Archangeli and Pulleyblank in prep.). I demonstrate that detailed formal analyses of tone-voice can not only uncover facts about tone-voice, but can also make important contributions to phonological theory.
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  The Creation of the Moon: A Traditional Story Publication and Pedagogical Reference for the Karapanã Language Community

  de Lima Silva, Wilson; DiRado-Owens, Christian Anthony; Zepeda, Ofelia; Fountain, Amy (The University of Arizona., 2020)

  Para una traducción aproximada, no oficial pero completa al español de esta tesis, consulte los archivos suplementarios conectados a esta publicación. This thesis highlights aspects of an ongoing, community-driven collaboration with Karapanã language speakers from the San Antonio community residing in Mitú, Colombia to publish a bi-translational picture book and derive cultural, linguistic, and pedagogical resources from its content. The book is based on a traditional oral narrative with deep cultural significance titled The Creation of the Moon. Associated efforts include the creation of a light grammar sketch of the Karapanã language, a glossed section of part one of The Creation of the Moon story, and sample resources for cultural and language pedagogy. Karapanã is an endangered Tukanoan language of the Vaupes region of Colombia. The health, sovereignty, and well-being of the Karapanã community is inextricable from the continued, healthy expression of the community’s shared cultural identity and relationships through the Karapanã language. Caring for, respecting, and valuing not only the Karapanã language but also the Karapanã community is the primary objective of this research and of the utmost importance. Through linguistic capacity-building fieldwork and documentation under the guidance of Dr. Wilson de Lima Silva during the summer of 2019, community-derived language goals and interests were identified. It was expressed that a bilingual picture book in Spanish and Karapanã would be a valuable resource for Karapanã families. The linguistic analysis presented in the grammar sketch and glossing is based on language data graciously shared with me by Karapanã speaker Jhon Edison Vargas Correa and his family. It makes specific reference to the transcription of The Creation of the Moon story as told by community member Carlos Vargas Acosta. Karapanã exhibits a number of interesting typological features as a highly agglutinating, strongly affixing language with a unique system of noun classification, nasal harmony, serial verb constructions, and grammatical evidentials. Documenting the language will help support the health and well-being of the Karapanã community as well as its current language revitalization goals. Taken in isolation, however, a sketch grammar will not transmit the language across generations nor protect and create valuable spaces to validate and/or facilitate language use. Efforts to mobilize cross-community collaborations, secure language speaking domains, establish a culture-based pedagogy, create just and protective Indigenous language policies, and empower community language leaders are also vital to initiate and sustain a Karapanã language revitalization movement. The thesis begins by positioning the research and introducing the Karapanã community and their language in chapter one, including sociolinguistic information and some historical background. Chapter two presents a phonological description of Karapanã, followed by a description of the parts of speech and morphosyntactic properties -- including nominal morphology, adjectives and adverbs, and verbal morphology. Chapter three presents a 164-line glossing of part one of The Creation of the Moon story. Lastly, chapter four presents a few examples of prospective pedagogical lesson templates based on story content.