Journal of Undergraduate Research

Vitalijs Sadovskis and Dr. Royal Skousen, Department of Linguistics and English Language The primary purpose of this project was to explain the common and frequently occurring phenomena of variation in Russian morphology. This research is based on empirical data from the Russian language output of native speakers of Russian. The data sets were prepared for […]

Justin Stark People encounter and make decisions constantly. Trivially, we may need to decide which color blue better matches our eyes or, significantly, we may be asked to make a decision as participants in a jury, a decision that could affect the rest of someone’s life. Some of the more important and influential decisions we […]

Karl Olaw Christian Wagner and Dr. Wendy Baker Smemoe, Department of Linguistics The research the grant from the Office of Research and Creative Activities has allowed me to perform has been a wonderful opportunity that has helped me to take my undergraduate work to a higher level. To be able to apply the linguistic knowledge […]

Spencer Ring and Andrew Westover with Dr. Dan Dewey, Department of Linguistics and English Language In this project, we aimed to investigate factors that influence study abroad students’ development of linguistic proficiency in Mandarin Chinese. We decided to focus on Mandarin Chinese because, as Dewey (2007) observes, an understanding of what factors affect the development […]

Kendon Kurzer and Dr. Dan Dewey, Linguistics and English Language This project explored connections between language gains and instances of positive and negative responses as recorded in pseudo-dialogue journals kept by second language learners of Arabic participating in a study abroad (SA) program to Jordan. Daily journals from seven of forty-four total participants were analyzed […]

Nathan Glenn and Dr. Deryle Lonsdale, Linguistics Abstract In this project, we created a Japanese sentence parser that functions within a cognitive modeling architecture known as Soar. It was created by modifying an existing English parser called XNL-Soar, which implements minimalist principles in syntactic parsing. Japanese lexical access is performed via GoSen and a Java […]

Sarah Franklin and Dr. Wendy Baker-Smemoe, Department of Linguistics and English Language Over the past forty years a significant amount of research has explored how to improve second language (L2) acquisition, most of which has examined factors that influence this ability. Little research, however, has examined how ethnic group affiliation (defined as how closely you […]

C. Anton Rytting and Dr. Royal Skousen, English; Deryle Lonsdale, Linguistics The k/Ø Alternation and Analogical Modeling Turkish is an agglutinative language, meaning that each word consists of a word stem followed by a variable number of suffixes. Sometimes, the addition of suffixes causes the stem to change its form. For example, stem-final velar consonants […]

Nate Blaylock and Dr. Deryle Lonsdale, Linguistics The topic of this research, by way of review, was to try to predict, using the Analogical Modeling of Language (AML) method, the formation of Japanese loanwords from English. In other words, given an English word, how would a Japanese person pronounce it if they adopted it into […]

Craig M. Warren and Dr. John Robertson, Linguistics Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the Mayan Civilization was their development of a writing system. Remnants of this highly sophisticated writing system can be found beautifully etched on temples and other ancient structures scattered throughout parts of Southern Mexico and Central America. Much of these […]