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The Shifting Purpose and Audience of Community-Based Heritage Language Education: Making Space for Mixed Heritage Families
(Georgetown University, 2021)
This dissertation explores the construction of the “mixed-heritage” category in Polish community-based heritage language education (HLE) and its effect on school purposes and school operations. As the number of heritage ...
Cue-based Features: Modeling Change and Variation in the Voicing Contrasts of Minnesotan English, Afrikaans, and Dutch
(Georgetown University, 2021)
Phonological voicing in obstruents is signaled by numerous acoustic cues, both spectral and temporal. Voicing contrasts have been featurally described as [±voice], [±spread glottis], fortis versus lenis, or a combination ...
Rethinking Post-Entry Language Assessment Policies in the Context of U.S. Higher Education: A Socially Responsible Approach
(Georgetown University, 2021)
Many higher education institutions (HEIs) in the United States have developed what is called post-entry language assessment (PELA) policies. The stated goal of PELA policies is to help admitted international students succeed ...
Tools and Techniques for Corpus-based Analysis of Non-native Speech Patterns
(Georgetown University, 2021)
This study examines the problem of describing non-native speech from the perspective of corpus linguistics. Recent data storage and manipulation techniques have allowed for the development of rich phonological corpora, but ...
Referenceless Evaluation of Natural Language Generation from Meaning Representations
(Georgetown University, 2021)
Automatic evaluation of NLG usually involves comparison to human-authored references which are treated as the ground truth. However, these references often fail to adequately capture the range of valid output for an NLG ...
Articulating Non-Native Vowel Contrasts
(Georgetown University, 2021)
The goal of this dissertation is to better understand the targets of vowels in speech production. Three experiments investigate vowel production in non-native speech, probing how new vowel categories, and thus targets, are ...
Local International School Students: Identity and Language Learning Investments
(Georgetown University, 2021)
International schools often use English as the medium of instruction and include large student populations of expatriate children with parents in globally mobile professions, who decided that the local education would not ...
Experiments on Approaches to Named Entity Recognition in IsiZulu
(Georgetown University, 2021)
Named Entity Recognition (NER) has always been one significant part of Natural Language Processing technologies. This thesis investigates a range of approaches to address the NER task in isiZulu, a morphologically complex ...
The Category of Gender in Spanish–English Bilingual Grammars: Corpus and Experimental Evidence of Switched Determiner Phrases
(Georgetown University, 2021)
This dissertation is about the category of gender in bilingual grammars. The specific focus is on the interplay between the linguistic properties that correlate with gender assignment in Spanish–English codeswitched speech ...
A Systematic Investigation of the Spanish Subjunctive: Mood Variation in Subjunctive Clauses
(Georgetown University, 2021)
Standard Spanish grammar states that desideratives (querer que), directives (aconsejar que ), purpose clauses (para que), causatives (hacer que), emotive-factives (alegrarse de que), negated epistemics (no creer que), ...