The UTSA Journal of Undergraduate Research & Scholarly Work
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12588/5
The University of Texas at San Antonio Journal of Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Works (JURSW) is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Office of the Vice President for Research. The JURSW publishes scholarly inquiry from a wide variety of disciplines and from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary frameworks.
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Browsing The UTSA Journal of Undergraduate Research & Scholarly Work by Department "Modern Languages and Literacy"
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Item The Effects of Accent Familiarity and Language Attitudes on Perceived English Proficiency and Accentedness(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2016) Carnicle, Jocelyn; Huang, BeckyIf accents are a permanent indicator of difference, to what degree do our accents determine how we are perceived by others? The goal of this project was to examine the relationship between raters' accent familiarity, attitudes toward non-native accents, and their judgments of non-native speech. This project was designed to extend the Huang, Alegre, & Eisenberg (2016) study with several methodological improvements. The study included five groups of raters who vary in their familiarity with Korean and Arabic accents (No Familiarity, Korean Heritage Raters, Korean Non-Heritage Raters, Arabic Heritage Raters, Arabic Non-Heritage Raters). There were 10 raters in each group (n = 50), and all participants consisted of undergraduate or graduate students who were born in the U.S. or immigrated to the U.S. before the age of twelve. Participants listened to 24 speech samples selected from Educational Testing Service's TOEFL iBT public database, and rated each sample on magnitudes of perceived proficiency and accentedness. After rating the speech samples, participants completed a survey on their demographic background information, attitudes toward accents, rating tendency, and beliefs/perceived cultural factors. Finally, two participants from each group were randomly selected to participate in a face-to-face think-aloud follow-up study to discuss their cognitive processes during rating. Because foreign accents can be subject to negative perceptions and linguistic profiling, understanding the potential sources of biases is critical for removing such biases and improving human communication and interactions.Item Lexical-Semantic Transfer and Strategies for Teaching and Learning Putonghua Vocabulary for Cantonese-speaking Learners(Office of the Vice President for Research, 2016-04-26) Cheng, Ka Ying; Li, YingLanguage transfer refers to the language that learners apply to the knowledge of one language to the language that they are learning. According to Bransford (2000), "all new learning involves transfer based on previous learning." Language transfer includes positive and negative transfer. Positive transfer means the previous knowledge that the language learner obtains from the first language----phonetics, grammar, expressions, and so forth to help the learner learn the new language, while negative transfer means the previous knowledge interferes with the learner's ability to learn the new language. In the United States, the number of Cantonese speakers who choose to study Mandarin has grown increasingly. While a number of past studies have focused on the language transfer of the phonetics system of the two languages, few studies have paid attention to the semantics system. Cantonese and Mandarin belong to Sino-Tibetan languages family and shared similar characters and grammars, however, the meanings of words with similar characters are comparatively different. Generally speaking, Cantonese speakers encounter more difficulties when learning Mandarin because of this difference of semantics system. The present study focuses on the language transfer of the semantics system from Cantonese language to Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua). By adopting Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis method, the current study (1) analyzed the difference of the meaning of the vocabulary (973 words) from the book, "Great Wall Chinese textbooks"; (2) identified the positive and negative language transfer via comparing the meaning of the words in Cantonese and Mandarin; and (3) explored the strategies that Cantonese-speaking leaner and L2 Mandarin Chinese teachers can use in Mandarin teaching and learning.