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This portfolio is a collection of works written by the author as he was studying in the Masters of Second Language Teaching program at Utah State University. The focus of these works is on technology and its impact on language learning. The first few sections consist of an introduction to the portfolio, a few pages dedicated to the author’s philosophy on second language teaching, and details and insights from an observation of a teacher in practice while in the program. The following section comprises the bulk of the portfolio and includes a paper devoted to augmented reality’s place in digital language learning. Then the author’s professional goals and plans centered around his teaching philosophy will be addressed.

This pre-registration describes the protocol that will be used to conduct a systematic review of quantitative evidence. The broad review question is whether the melody of newborns’ vocalisations is influenced by prenatal exposure to the melody of their native language. The study aims to systematically describe and critically appraise the experimental designs used and inferences made by existing evidence. This review will increase our understanding of the role of the prenatal period in language acquisition, specifically with regards to early prosodic development.

Tongue coordinates extracted from ultrasound data collection for L2 learners of Lower Sorbian. It includes participant information and extended data for Howson (2023).

In this experiment we will ask participants to select a gesture video to describe unfamiliar objects. In a first condition, participants will only be shown the object and asked to select a video. In a second condition, participants will be shown a written description of what the object can be used for before being asked to select a video. We will study the iconic preferences of participants in these two different conditions, to see if including a description of what an object could be used for will lead participants to prefer the acting strategy over other iconic strategies (representation and drawing). In addition we will study the emergence (or not) of systematicity in the iconic strategies of participants.

This literature review and narrative synthesis assesses the current state of knowledge regarding verbal and/or nonverbal behaviours in individuals who interact with a virtual human or a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an intervention for mental health.

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the amount of variation at the lexical level (i.e., the word-level) in sign languages. One hypothesis concerns the amounts of shared context across a community, that is, how much shared social and psychological information individuals have; communities with shared context are predicted to have more lexical variation than those with less shared context (de Vos, 2011; Meir et al., 2012; Tkachman & Hudson Kam, 2020). This experiment investigates the relationship between shared context and lexical variation using the silent-gesture paradigm (following Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014). In this design, participants must convey information using pre-recorded gestures, to limit the influence of their native language(s), simulating situations of language emergence.

This pre-registration describes a control experiment with hearing non-signers as participants for the experiment on "Visual 'clicks' & sign language constituent structure" with deaf signers described here (https://osf.io/n29az).

In this experiment, we aim to investigate recall accuracy depending on priming due to previous comprehension questions.

An eye-tracking study that examines the online processing of (ING). We ask whether different ING variants (-in' and -ing) affect listener perceptions of speaker persona in offline, holistic judgements, and whether the socioindexical contributions of these cues is reflected in online processing data.

A number of classic psycholinguistic experiments investigated how participants' response time to the perception of a "click sound" during auditory presentation of sentences is influenced by the click's position within the syntactic structure of a sentence. Here we ask whether we can also observe such an effect of “click location” in the visuo-gestural modality?

Preregistration of our systematic review on fetal and neonatal evidence for prenatal auditory learning that is of importance in language learning.

This experiment investigates the origin of basic word order (order of S(ubject), V(erb) and O(bject)) in language. Studies that use a paradigm in which participants improvise to convey information using only their hands and bodies but no speech (silent gesture) suggest that the orders produced by participants in improvisation are influenced by systematic preferences that cannot be explained by virtue of their native language. Schouwstra & de Swart (2014) examined the role of naturalness in generating alternations in basic word order and found that participants prefer using SOV order for extensional verbs (which typically describe some action through space, e.g., 'the pirate swings a guitar') and SVO order for intensional verbs (the direct- object referents of which are non-existent, non-specific, or dependent on the action, e.g. 'a pirate dreams of a guitar', 'a girl wants a cake', 'a boy knits a scarf'; Forbes, 2013). This meaning-based word order preference is important, because it indicates a preference for variation in word order based on semantic properties, in situations that have no conventions for constituent order. We have called this meaning based variation naturalness (Schouwstra et al., in prep), a preference to reflect conceptual relations in structure, when no other rules for structure are dominant. In an attempt to understand better where this naturalness in improvisation comes from, we carry out a study that looks at paratactic descriptions of events. In paratactic descriptions of events, the action and its participants are introduced in separate sentences, independently. The order of the sentences can be varied. The following are two examples: (a) There is a boy. The boy throws something. It is a ball. (b) There is a boy. There is a ball. The boy throws the ball. Because these sets of sentences introduce different elements in different orders, the two patterns above map onto two main basic word orders, SVO and SOV, respectively. In a forced choice picture description task, we will show participants images of extensional and intensional events, and test whether they show preference orders similar to those in silent gesture production. Finding sentence order preference to be influenced by the event type would show evidence of a general preference for ordering of information, which may have been important in the formation of syntactic rules in the languages that we know.

Pre-registration for initial pilot study (proof of concept)

This pre-registration is for a replication of a pilot experiment investigating whether an expectation for iconicity can be manipulated in the lab.

The relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge has been widely observed in typically developing children (Sparks & Deacon, 2013). Strong associations have been found between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge; however, the direction of this relationship is still in question (Sparks & Deacon, 2013). McBride-Chang and colleagues (2008) examined this relationship in monolingual Korean, Cantonese and Mandarin preschool aged children and concluded that at this age, bootstrapping is used between these two skills. However, the older children get, the more difficult it becomes to statistically separate vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness and these skills begin to overlap more (Wagner et al., 2007). The relationship between these two skills in deaf children has not been well documented, but it is well known that many deaf children have delays in spoken language development (e.g., Akmese & Acarlar, 2016; Boons et al., 2013; Geers et al., 2009; Nicholas & Geers, 2006; van Wieringen & Wouters, 2015). Previous research has reported expressive morphological weaknesses in Dutch deaf children with cochlear implants (CI) of school age (Boons et al., 2013). The main aim of the current study is to investigate subskill profiles and error patterns in preschool deaf children’s expressive morphology and how these are related to vocabulary knowledge. We will conduct a secondary data analysis on data already collected as part of a larger ongoing study. The second author conducted a preliminary analysis from the larger study and found a strong correlation between expressive vocabulary and morphology standard scores. The current study will conduct a novel analysis to explore morphology subskill profiles and error patterns. We will address the following research questions: a) Do preschool deaf and hearing children differ in their expressive morphology subskill profiles? b) What kinds of morphological errors do preschool aged deaf children show? Are there differences between deaf and hearing children in the types of errors they make? c) Do deaf children with stronger expressive vocabulary knowledge show similar expressive morphological errors as deaf children with weaker vocabulary knowledge? d) What is the impact of speech intelligibility on the relationship between expressive morphology and vocabulary in deaf children?

This study investigates the role of the inner voice in control of sustained physical efforts - specifically in this case cycling on a stationary exercise bike. Participants will be ask to cycle 1-minute intervals on the exercise bike under 2-back matching verbal or non-verbal distracting conditions as well as in a control condition. If they need their inner voice to maximise cycling performance, we hypothesise that the performance will be more impaired in the verbal distraction condition compared to a non-verbal or a control condition.

This study investigates the role of the inner voice in control of sustained physical efforts - specifically in this case cycling on a stationary exercise bike. Participants will be ask to cycle 1-minute intervals on the exercise bike under verbal or non-verbal distracting conditions. If they need their inner voice to maximise cycling performance, we hypothesise that the performance will be more impaired in the verbal distraction condition compared to a non-verbal or a control condition.

Perception studies have shown that intonational phrase structure (i.e. prosodic boundaries) can be primed and facilitate syntactic ambiguity resolution. However, this prosodic priming effect found in perception has not been replicated in production experiments so far, where intonational phrase boundaries were not primed. We will replicate the prosodic priming paradigm in an online production study on British English, addressing what we consider some methodological limitations in the design. Our aim is to assess whether prosodic boundaries can be primed when the saliency of prosodic cues is not heavily reduced by the syntactic structure. Research Question: Is there a prosodic priming effect of intonational phrase boundaries in syntactic ambiguity resolution in production in English?

This project investigates the prominence and consequences of the trend in experimental language acquisition research to employ only female-talkers in the creation of auditory stimuli

The paradigm of forms of address has been a recurrent topic of study from a sociolinguistic perspective. Voseo, tuteo and ustedeo are the forms of address used in the Hispanic world. Voseo expreses confidence and familiarity, while tuteo same as voseo, denotes confidence and familiarity. Finally, ustedeo has a connotation of formality, respect and distance. This thesis aims to examine how forms of address are used in Ocaña, Colombia, and the relationship between their use and the social factors that affect the choice of pronoun. To achieve this aim, a sociolinguistic survey was applied to 88 participants. The sociolinguistic variables used in this research were gender, age, place of birth, level of education and socioeconomic status. The analysis revealed that the only variable that did not show statistical significance in any of the scenarios proposed in the survey was socioeconomic status. Additionally, results revealed that the use of usted has a semantic duality since it is used in contexts where one would expect to use a pronoun such as tú and vos, which traditionally denote familiarity. Finally, the results revealed evidence of a possible linguistic change in progress in the direction of increased use of tú by younger people and call into question the idea that vos is the most widely used second-person pronoun in Ocaña.

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is a catalyst for creative expression, from the solo dance form known as shuffling, to “Flow Arts” activities (forms of self-expression inducing a flow state) like poi, hula hooping, orbiting, and gloving. Gloving is a subcultural practice and artform that couples LED lights with dexterous finger movements. It is a method of expression for dance music enthusiasts (also known as ravers) and has become an important component of the EDM scene, particularly over the past decade. Glovers engage in “secondary” performances to live music (DJs) using complex techniques such as symbolism, word painting, and what the community refers to as “musicianship.” Performances are comprised mainly of improvisatory gestures and movements drawn from a large lexicon, known collectively as “concepts.” Learning the skill of gloving involves taking part in oral transmission, cyphering, community building activities (both online and in-person), and cultivating a gloving identity with an accompanying pseudonym. This monograph illuminates the lacuna in the discourse regarding the lack of attention given to Canadian rave culture within the field of Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC). It elucidates primarily the practices of gloving within the Toronto rave scene. Toronto has played an integral role in the history of gloving from its earliest roots in “liquiding,” a style of dance that originated at raves during the 1990s. Several glovers and liquid dancers active in the Toronto rave scene between 1990 and 2020 are informants for the work. The work’s methodologies draw from existing practices, pulling from several fields including musicology, sociology, and ethnography. The work itself takes the form of an autoethnographic study, rooted in the participatory approaches of journalists Hunter S. Thompson and Simon Reynolds. The format is unconventional, embracing casual language, audio-visual materials, participant observation methodology, fieldnotes and meta-reflections, interviews, and pictures, presented in a mosaic approach à la Marshall McLuhan. The work also lacks a traditional critique, preferring to infer through storytelling and descriptions by informants from within the scene itself. The author of the work offers a robust critique of the theoretical idealization of fieldwork in EDMC scholarship by purposefully utilizing fluid positionality as a defining quality. The overarching arguments are threefold and include advocating for the acknowledgment of Toronto as a city of importance in the global rave scene, Flow Arts as a pathway to self-actualization, and calling to action the implementation of “Fluid Positionality” as an optimal way to negotiate “the vibe” for more nuanced data collection.

Typological data on the ordering of noun phrase dependents relative to the noun suggest that some types of dependents exhibit a preference for appearing either before or after the head noun. One such typological pattern, which has been noted consistently in the literature, is that adjectives tend to appear after the noun they modify. Current data from WALS states that that 879 languages have the order Adjective-Noun, 373 have the order Noun-Adjective and 110 have no fixed order between these elements. Other NP dependents, such as the genitive (possessor) element in a possessive construction (e.g. “The cat’s” in the phrase “The cat’s tail”), show a similar preference towards a specific order. For genitives this preference is towards the prenominal order and the current WALS data states that there are 685 languages with the order Genitive-Noun, compared to 468 with the order Noun-Genitive and 96 which have no fixed order in this construction. Together these two patterns suggest that there may be interesting interactions between "item-specific" ordering preferences — which determine ordering preferences at the level of individual utterances — and system-wide tendencies, such as the observed bias towards consistent, or harmonic ordering across different types of heads and dependents in a given language. This study examines if participants exhibit item-specific ordering preferences for these two types of constructions, and if these preferences align with the tendencies observed in the typological literature. Previous experimental work has focused on how biases involved in language learning and transmission give rise to typological patterns. However, some experimental work has also been dedicated to studying underlying ordering preferences that are motivated by factors such as semantic composition and conceptual structure. Studying these types of underlying preferences requires a method which limits the influence of participants’ native language. The silent gesture paradigm offers such a method since previous re-search shows that testing participants in a modality (manual) distinct from their own(spoken) reduces the influence of participants’ native language. The experimental conditions in this study use a modified version of the silent gesture paradigm to investigate if there is a prenominal ordering preference for genitives and postnominal preference for adjectives. The study combines the silent gesture paradigm with a forced choice design in an online setting which allows for quick data collection while maintaining the native language-limiting influence of gesture stimuli. The results of this experiment will act as a starting point for establishing whether biases towards postnominal adjectives and prenominal genitives constitute active linguistic preferences in the minds of individuals that could influence typological structure. The experiment forms part of a wider research goal, which is to examine instances in language where item-specific preferences compete with system-wide preferences, and to explore these two types of biases in competition under different experimental conditions.

Word frequency has a significant impact on language acquisition and fluency. It is often a point of reference for the teaching and assessing of a language and indeed, as a control for psycholinguistic studies. This paper presents the results of the first objective frequency analysis of lexical tokens from the Signs of Ireland corpus. We investigate the frequency of fully lexical, partly lexical and non-lexical signs in Irish Sign Language as they are presented in the corpus. We confirm the accuracy of the lexical gloss frequency data with a supplementary corpus subset that is tagged for grammatical class and additional insights from previous lexical frequency studies conducted for American Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, British Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language. This approach has informed us that signers who learn the 100 most frequent signs in Irish Sign Language, will know a third of the language’s vocabulary. This study has found that, in the main, frequency statistics from Irish Sign Language are in line with previous studies and that the text type and annotation strategy can significantly impact results. We found that, without a formalised lexicon, lexical glosses fell short of the requirements for a lexical frequency analysis. However, supported by grammatical class data, frequency data may be reported for symbolic units.

Recent work suggests that linguistic structure develops through cultural evolution, as a consequence of the repeated cycle of learning and use by which languages persist. This work has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of the cognitive basis for language; in particular, human language and the cognitive capacities underpinning it are likely to have been shaped by co‐evolutionary processes, where the cultural evolution of linguistic systems is shaped by and in turn shapes the biological evolution of the capacities underpinning language learning. I review several models of this co‐evolutionary process, which suggest that the precise relationship between evolved biases in individuals and the structure of linguistic systems depends on the extent to which cultural evolution masks or unmasks individual‐level cognitive biases from selection. I finish by discussing how these co‐evolutionary models might be extended to cases where the biases involved in learning are themselves shaped by experience, as is the case for language., Smith gives an excellent overview on research in language evolution, in which he discusses several recent models of how linguistic systems and the cognitive capacities involved in language learning may have co‐evolved. He illustrates how combined pressures on language learning and communication/use produce compositionally structured languages. Once in place, a (culturally transmitted) communication system creates new selection pressures on the capacity for acquiring these systems.

Where does linguistic structure come from? We suggest that systematicity in language evolves adaptively in response to environmental and contextual affordances associated with the practice of communication itself. In two experiments, we used a silent gesture referential game paradigm to investigate environmental and social factors promoting the propagation of systematicity in a novel communication system. We found that structure in the emerging communication systems evolve contingent on structural properties of the environment. More specifically, interlocutors spontaneously relied on structural features of the referent stimuli they communicated about to motivate systematic aspects of the evolving communication system even when idiosyncratic iconic strategies were equally afforded. Furthermore, we found systematicity to be promoted by the nature of the referent environment. When the referent environment was open and unstable, analytic systematic strategies were more likely to emerge compared to stimulus environments with a closed set of referents. Lastly, we found that displacement of communication promoted systematicity. That is, when interlocutors had to communicate about items not immediately present in the moment of communication, they were more likely to evolve systematic solutions, supposedly due to working memory advantages. Together, our findings provide experimental evidence for the idea that linguistic structure evolves adaptively from contextually situated language use.

The Signs of Ireland (SOI) corpus (Leeson et al., 2006) deploys a complex multi-tiered temporal data structure. The process of manually analyzing such data is laborious, cannot eliminate bias and often, important patterns can go completely unnoticed. In addition to this, as a result of the complex nature of grammatical structures contained in the corpus, identifying complex linguistic associations or patterns across tiers is simply too intricate a task for a human to carry out in an acceptable timeframe. This work explores the application of data mining techniques on a set of multi-tiered temporal data from the SOI corpus. Building on Mc Donnell’s work on verb categories in Irish Sign Language (McDonnell, 1996); this research explores the emerging patterns of articulation among ISL verbs, paying particular attention to the depicting verb. We use the ‘Rapidminer’ software tool to carry out an association rules analysis between the Plain verb, Indicating verb, and Depicting verb on the one hand and the articulation of various non-manual features on the other. Results will show associations between these verbs and various non-manual articulations. The original contribution of this work is in the novel methodological approach. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first time an association rules analysis has been carried out on a sign language dataset.

In this thesis, I use an experimental model to investigate the role of social pressures in stimulating language divergence. Research into the evolution of cooperation has emphasised the usefulness of in-group markers for swiftly identifying outsiders, who pose a threat to cooperative networks. Mechanisms for avoiding cheats and freeriders, which tend to rely on reputation, or on (explicit and implicit) contracts between individuals, are considerably less effective against short-term visitors. Outsiders, moreover, may behave according to different social norms, which may adversely affect cooperative interactions with them. There are many sources of markers by which insiders and outsiders can be distinguished, but language is a particularly impressive one.If human beings exploit linguistic variation for this purpose, we might expect the exploitation to have an influence on the cultural evolution of language, and to be involved in language divergence, since it introduces a selective pressure, by which linguistic variants are selected on the basis of their social significance. However, there is also a neutral, mechanistic model of dialect formation that relies on unconscious accommodation between interlocutors, coupled with variation in the frequency of interaction, to account for divergence. In studies of real-world communities, these factors are difficult to tease apart.The model described in this thesis put real speakers in the artificial environment of a computer game. A game consisted of a series of rounds in which players were paired up with each other in a pseudo-random order. During a round, pairs of players exchanged typed messages in a highly restricted artificial “alien language”. Each player began the game with a certain number of points, distributed between various resources, and the purpose of sending messages was to negotiate to exchange these resources. Any points given away were worth double to the receiver, so, by exchanging resources, players could accumulate points for their team. However, the pairings were anonymous: until the end of a round, players were not told who they had been paired with.This basic paradigm allowed the investigation of the major factors influencing language divergence, as well as the small-scale individual strategies that contribute to it. Two major factors were manipulated: frequency of interaction and competitiveness. In one condition, all players in a game were working together; in another condition, players were put into teams, such that giving away resources to team- mates was advantageous, but giving them to opponents was not. This put a pressure on players to use variation in the alien language to mark identity. A combination of this pressure and a minimum level of interaction between teammates was found to be sufficient for the alien language to diverge into “dialects”. Neither factor was sufficient on its own.The results of these experiments suggest that a pressure for the socially based selection of linguistic variants can lead to divergence in a very short time, given sufficient levels of interaction between members of a group.

we test the hypothesis that naming an object depicted in a picture, and reading aloud an object’s name, are affected by the object’s speed. We contend that the mental representations of everyday objects and situations include their speed, and that the latter influences behavior in instantaneous and systematic ways. An important corollary is that high-speed objects are named faster than low-speed objects despite the fact that object speed is irrelevant to the naming task at hand. The results of a series of 7 studies with pictures and words support these predictions.

Language complexity seems to be influenced by population characteristics such as the proportion of adult learners. One potential explanation for this link is that native speakers accommodate to non-native speakers, simplifying their language use during such interactions: learners may then acquire a less complex language. We model accommodation in interaction in a Bayesian framework, where in order to accommodate appropriately, an agent must first infer their interlocutor’s linguistic abilities. We find that when the agent consistently accommodates, learners end up with a simplified language, due to a reinforcing effect between an initially underinformed learner and an accommodating native speaker.

(The Use of Code Switching by Lecturers in Teaching Process at University of Muhammadiyah Sorong| Code Switching is a process of language which intentionally or unintentionally people talk affected by situation and topic with inserted other language when speaking their language. There were three main problems of this research (1). How often do the lecturers make code switching in the learning process? (2). What are types of code switching that used by lecturers in the learning process? (3). What are the factors cause the lecturers used code switching in the learning process? The method of this research was descriptive gualitative. To gain the data, this research used a recording device, field notes, and a guestionnaire. After analyzing the data, it concluded that all of the lecturers used code switching in the teaching learning process more than 244 occurrences of code switching and more 86.67Y”6 responded agree that they often did code switching when teaching. They did code switching based on their material and orally. The writer also found the English codes with added Indonesian prefix and suffix likes dismoothkan, diprint out, utilizingnya, etc. Then, freguently of the codes were Fisheries Faculty 111 of occurrences (45.49”o) Engineering Faculty 59 (24.180), Law of Faculty 25 (10.25Y9), Sociology Faculty and Administrative Science 25 (10.25Y6) and the remaining 24 occurrences (9.84”6) are Agriculture Faculty. About 54 statements that shown as situational code switching and nine statements were metaphorical code switching. And ten out 15 factors that the lecturers agree from statements contained in the guestionnaire and five factors were disagreed.

Like spoken languages, sign languages use a range of linguistic tools to denote the relationship between a predicate and its arguments. One such tool is spatial agreement–the use of space to mark event participants. Spatial agreement has been likened to verbal agreement in spoken languages, but has also been highlighted as a modality-specific phenomenon. Interestingly, recent data from emerging sign languages suggest that systematic spatial modulation as a grammatical feature takes time to develop. We investigate the emergence of systematic argument marking–including spatial agreement–experimentally, investigating how artificial gestural systemsevolve over ”generations” of participants in the lab. We find that participants converge on different strategies to disambiguate clause arguments, which become more consistent through the use and transmission of gestures. Though some strategies use spatial contrasts, the use of space is not inevitable, and, when it does occur, remains highly iconic. We discuss how our results connect with theoretical issues surrounding the analysis of spatial agreement in established and newly emerging sign languages, and the mechanisms behind its evolution.

[In Russian] The article takes into account recent findings in somatosensory neuroscience and provides a new perspective of understanding culturally and biologically predetermined semantics of contact gestures.

This is Postprint article and already published in RET Academy for International Journals of Multidisciplinary Research (RAIJMR) Vol. 5, Issue: 7, July : 2017 ISSN:(P) 2347-5404 ISSN:(O)2320 771X.

For d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children, “communication mode” is often included as a predictor of performance across a wide range of developmental outcomes; however, the operationalization of communication mode is highly variable and often falls short of what would be ideal. Here, I argue that DHH children, their families and service providers, and the field as a whole would benefit from replacing the concept of “communication mode” with that of “language access profile”: a term that reflects the child’s cumulative experience with various types of communicative input, beginning at birth. Language access profiles are intended to capture the multidimensional and dynamic nature of DHH children’s early experiences with diverse types of communicative input. I present data from a study that presents a new method of estimating individual language access profiles. I also use hierarchical cluster analysis to organize individuals with similar profiles into coherent, data-driven groups. Results suggest that this is a promising approach with strong potential for use in diverse contexts, including education, clinical care, and research.

Many have considered Linguistics a science for decades, though linguists themselves have debated the accuracy of this characterization of the study of language. These conversations about linguistics as a science reveal a discipline intent on securing scientific status, often through rigorous methodology and theoretical frameworks mirroring the traditional sciences. If successful, however, linguistics inherits the authority of modern science, which maintains an epistemically hierarchical relationship with non-scientists. By examining and representing the epistemic relationships between expertise, authority, and science, I ask us to think of all linguistics not as a socially neutral endeavor, but as perpetuating the juxtaposition of scientific and popular understanding. To practice science responsibly, I claim, linguists must justify not only their own practice, but the practice of science itself through philosophical analysis and epistemic justification that requires us to ask: Why is my way of knowing better than theirs? Answering this question will help us both research responsibly and engage in productive conversations about the discipline’s place in the larger, often skeptical, world of academia.

Recent controversies in psychology have highlighted disagreements about how science works and how science proceeds. Despite the existence of tools and data that can help to address some of these disagreements, psychologists have been slow to provide empirical evidence that speaks to these issues. Indeed, there is essentially no work on how scientists communicate their findings. In this paper, I use language from scientific literature to answer questions about scientific behavior. Specifically, I find that features of data analysis practices to be associated with two narrative features of these manuscripts -- hedging (diminishing claims) and boosting (amplifying claims). The use of hedging and boosting were found to be associated with statistical errors. Hedging and boosting were also found to be associated with and statistical overfitting, though this relationship is more uncertain. Additionally male first-authors are less likely to hedge. No other characteristics of the author were found to be associated with these linguistics features. Though the work is exploratory, the results are largely consistent with a linguistic overfitting hypothesis, in which the authors of a paper use language to amplify and diminish findings in a paper in order to create a more compelling narrative around theory. The flexibility of language is a powerful tool used to communicate research, but there is a fine line between effective interpretation of data and convenient overinterpretation, and it is worthwhile to be cognizant of when that line may be crossed.

Summary -- The concept of cognitive conflict, that being two competing ideas in the brain at the same time, encompasses a large number of instantiations throughout Psychology (Festinger, 1964; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006), even playing an important role in many philosophies considering how science works best (Kuhn, 1962; Platt, 1964; Popper, 1934/ 2005). This experience of cognitive conflict is widely considered to be aversive, but also motivating, for individuals across a wide range of contexts. Here I examined two ways cognitive conflict affects what topics receive scientific attention. Pairing the philosophies of science with Festinger’s (1950) hypotheses about informal social communication, it was hypothesized that:1.Scientists will discuss things they disagree about more than things they agree about. 2.Scientists will study more those topics which threaten individual or group outcomes. Utilizing publicly available data about scientific publications, I tested these hypotheses within a number of contexts, including public comments on papers, Tweets about papers and topics, and the author and automatically generated keywords describing scientific papers themselves (as a measure of what scientists write about and study). Two studies suggested that more negations in the texts (e.g., but, not, however) were related to larger discussions, more views, and more media attention. Two other studies examined the keywords describing papers, first all papers published across science by PLoS, and then all papers across publishers within Psychology. Both studies suggested that there are more unique negative keywords studied, and that these keywords have more papers written about them, on average. Overall, the results suggest that scientists talk more when they disagree, and that they speak more about threats to the group and individual. This more generally implies that cognitive conflict plays a role in determining what scientists talk about and study, and more generally that general psychological principles can be applied within the context of science.

This project of Pax Populi was presented to the students in the Honors course called Beyond Afghanistan taught by Dr. Brite as an opportunity to do service learning. The goal of Pax Populi as taken from their mission statement is to “put the tools of peacemaking into the hands of ordinary people through initiatives that advance peace through education and economic development within a framework of human rights.” The tool we used in this case was Skype web conferencing to communicate with an Afghan tutee the students were individually partnered up with to teach English skills to whether they be reading, writing, or speaking. The things learned in class about the culture of Afghanistan were applied to make the tutoring sessions more engaging, interesting, and comfortable for both the tutor and the tutee. The impact this service learning seemed to have on the students involved with tutoring was that we realized how much we took our education and freedoms for granted, whereas the Afghan tutees were struggling just to find the time and safe environment to come to class or Skype with us. As a result of doing this project, I learned a lot about myself. I even have a few journal entry reflections regarding my various ideas and realizations as I went through the project that I could present. My greatest takeaway from this was the lifelong friendship that I will have with my tutee and the joy it brought me to see his English skills slowly develop throughout the course of the tutoring sessions.

Bringing conceptual blending into foreign language classroom discussions of cultural narratives can lead to critical language awareness and a deeper and broader understanding of cultural narratives, which the MLA promotes in its (2007) conceptualization of transcultural and translingual awareness. Using the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification as example narratives, this paper seeks to show how political humor can unpack and illuminate complex, blended narratives that infuse everyday linguistic expressions and ways of making meaning. It will then offer suggestions for using conceptual blending to analyze cultural narratives in the classroom.