39. Quantitative analysis of language contact data

Author(s):  
Wladyslaw Cichocki
Author(s):  
Kassie A. Cigliana ◽  
Raquel Serrano

The present study investigates individual differences in study abroad through a quantitative analysis of U.S. learners of Spanish studying in Barcelona, Spain (n = 54). While many studies have aimed at discussing one or two specific items, the present study combines aspects of attitude, motivation, and language contact with perceived gains in language skill by examining answers from a comprehensive questionnaire designed to accurately gather information on these individual differences. The data reveal that these study abroad students are highly motivated, and correlational analyses establish significant positive relationships between integrative orientations, attitude, language contact and self-reported perceived gains in linguistic skills. The study suggests that a positive attitude towards the target language and integrative motivation can be important factors in influencing how much contact students have with the target language and how much they feel they have improved in a variety of language skills. It also explores the potential effects of learning a language in a bilingual context and calls for further research on this theme.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicté Fuller Medina

The current paper focusses on Spanish (de facto second official language) in contact with English (official language) and Belize Kriol (considered to be a lingua franca). These three languages are numerically the majority languages and, as a consequence, are an important axis of study for multilingualism. Previous quantitative analysis of interviews with a cohort of Spanish speakers who use all three languages in the same utterance are examined within the context of linguistic ideologies to draw insights into the Belizean semiotic landscape and the ways in which speakers enact linguistic agency. More than linguistic competency, this analysis makes evident speakers’ plurilingual competency which entails simultaneously navigating ideological norms as well as mulitple grammatical systems.


Author(s):  
Shana Poplack

This chapter reviews the analytical and methodological tenets associated with the variationist perspective on language and outlines its specific applications to the study of language mixing. Key among them are the principled selection of participants and their validation in the community, the primacy of actual bilingual performance data, contextualization of its major manifestations across speakers, mixing strategies (lexical borrowing and code-switching) and language pairs, and systematic quantitative analysis of usage patterns, incorporating checks on the validity and reliability of the results. We explain how the method enables us to address and answer a number of questions that have plagued scholars of language contact for decades.


2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Sanchez

ABSTRACTPrinciples of structural borrowing have been proposed, relating to structures of the languages involved and sociodemographic circumstances of their respective societies. This article quantitatively evaluates the roles of both linguistic and social factors in structural borrowing via examination of language contact data from Aruba and Curaçao, where creole Papiamentu is in contact with Spanish, Dutch, and English. Variationist methods, rooted in Labov's Principle of Accountability, are applied in a novel way to the system of verbal morphology to flesh out factors promoting borrowing. Linguistic factors are found to be quantitatively stronger, and only one nonlinguistic factor was found to promote borrowing. Results are discussed in light of prevailing theories of language contact. Findings contribute to our understanding of the long-term consequences of language contact and the relationship of contact-induced change to a more general sociolinguistic theory of language variation and change.


Author(s):  
Nese Demir

Little is known about patterns of vowel harmony change in language contact situations. Trabzon Turkish (TT), which is spoken in the North East of Turkey and has a language contact history with (Pontic) Greek, Armenian, and Laz, provides such a context. This study investigates vowel harmony in TT and compares it with Standard Turkish (ST). Based on a quantitative analysis derived from a corpus of written texts in TT, this study shows how TT exhibits partial vowel harmony. TT displays a reduced amount of vowel harmony compared to ST, which suggest that TT might have experienced decay. Additional findings of this study indicate that vowels are influenced by following adjacent consonants, some suffixes have fixed forms with non-alternating vowels, but linear harmony decay across the word is not observed.


Author(s):  
J.P. Fallon ◽  
P.J. Gregory ◽  
C.J. Taylor

Quantitative image analysis systems have been used for several years in research and quality control applications in various fields including metallurgy and medicine. The technique has been applied as an extension of subjective microscopy to problems requiring quantitative results and which are amenable to automatic methods of interpretation.Feature extraction. In the most general sense, a feature can be defined as a portion of the image which differs in some consistent way from the background. A feature may be characterized by the density difference between itself and the background, by an edge gradient, or by the spatial frequency content (texture) within its boundaries. The task of feature extraction includes recognition of features and encoding of the associated information for quantitative analysis.Quantitative Analysis. Quantitative analysis is the determination of one or more physical measurements of each feature. These measurements may be straightforward ones such as area, length, or perimeter, or more complex stereological measurements such as convex perimeter or Feret's diameter.


Author(s):  
V. V. Damiano ◽  
R. P. Daniele ◽  
H. T. Tucker ◽  
J. H. Dauber

An important example of intracellular particles is encountered in silicosis where alveolar macrophages ingest inspired silica particles. The quantitation of the silica uptake by these cells may be a potentially useful method for monitoring silica exposure. Accurate quantitative analysis of ingested silica by phagocytic cells is difficult because the particles are frequently small, irregularly shaped and cannot be visualized within the cells. Semiquantitative methods which make use of particles of known size, shape and composition as calibration standards may be the most direct and simplest approach to undertake. The present paper describes an empirical method in which glass microspheres were used as a model to show how the ratio of the silicon Kα peak X-ray intensity from the microspheres to that of a bulk sample of the same composition correlated to the mass of the microsphere contained within the cell. Irregular shaped silica particles were also analyzed and a calibration curve was generated from these data.


Author(s):  
H.J. Dudek

The chemical inhomogenities in modern materials such as fibers, phases and inclusions, often have diameters in the region of one micrometer. Using electron microbeam analysis for the determination of the element concentrations one has to know the smallest possible diameter of such regions for a given accuracy of the quantitative analysis.In th is paper the correction procedure for the quantitative electron microbeam analysis is extended to a spacial problem to determine the smallest possible measurements of a cylindrical particle P of high D (depth resolution) and diameter L (lateral resolution) embeded in a matrix M and which has to be analysed quantitative with the accuracy q. The mathematical accounts lead to the following form of the characteristic x-ray intens ity of the element i of a particle P embeded in the matrix M in relation to the intensity of a standard S


Author(s):  
John A. Hunt

Spectrum-imaging is a useful technique for comparing different processing methods on very large data sets which are identical for each method. This paper is concerned with comparing methods of electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) quantitative analysis on the Al-Li system. The spectrum-image analyzed here was obtained from an Al-10at%Li foil aged to produce δ' precipitates that can span the foil thickness. Two 1024 channel EELS spectra offset in energy by 1 eV were recorded and stored at each pixel in the 80x80 spectrum-image (25 Mbytes). An energy range of 39-89eV (20 channels/eV) are represented. During processing the spectra are either subtracted to create an artifact corrected difference spectrum, or the energy offset is numerically removed and the spectra are added to create a normal spectrum. The spectrum-images are processed into 2D floating-point images using methods and software described in [1].


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