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The professional lexicons of middle school mathematics teachers in communities around the world were documented as part of The International Classroom Lexicon Project. This vocabulary captured teachers' naming of classroom pedagogical practice. Reported in this paper are attributes of the lexicons of teachers from Australia and Chile. A comparison of the lexical items revealed commonalities and differences in the named phenomena and in the schema employed for their organisational structure. The analysis revealed differences attributable to cultural and contextual factors. A categorisation system was developed to classify the complexity of similarity of lexical items of one lexicon with another.

Experienced teachers, researchers and mathematics community members, contributed to the documentation of the professional vocabulary of teachers to describe the pedagogical practice of the middle school mathematics classroom. In this paper we use this Australian Lexicon to study which terms teachers deem essential for their classroom practice. We follow with an analysis on whether these essential terms correspond with the language used in commonly disseminated government documents. This examination has given us an insight into the terms that are of great significance and value for our teachers and provided a detailed picture of vocabulary alignment with various official communications.

Members of the Australian mathematics education research community and experienced teachers of mathematics participated in the process of documenting the professional vocabulary of middle school mathematics teachers. This vocabulary, the Australian Lexicon, captures the language in use by Australian mathematics teachers when describing the phenomena of the middle school mathematics classroom. In this paper, we examine the structure of the Australian Lexicon with particular attention given to content, connection, and characteristics of the professional vocabulary available to middle school mathematics teachers in Australia.

This study investigates how cohesion manifests in readers' thought processes while reading texts when they are instructed to engage in self-explanation, a strategy associated with deeper, more successful comprehension. In Study 1, college students (n = 21) were instructed to either paraphrase or self-explain science texts. Paraphrasing was characterized by greater cohesion in terms of lexical overlap whereas self-explanation included greater lexical diversity and more connectives to specify relations between ideas. In Study 2, adolescent students (n = 84) were provided with instruction and practice in self-explanation and reading strategies across 8 sessions. Self-explanations increased in lexical diversity but became more causally and semantically cohesive over time. Together, these results suggest that cohesive features expressed in think alouds are indicative of the depth of students' comprehension processes. [This paper was published in: J. Trueswell, A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, & D. Mirman (Eds.), "Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Philadelphia, PA," (pp. 2681-2686). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.]

Hyperglossing -textual and/or pictorial representations of lexical items is found to be aiding the development of decoding, and narrow reading is a useful strategy for L2 reading pedagogy. Although the research on glossing provides mixed findings regarding the benefits, it is also acknowledged that glossing improves especially incidental vocabulary acquisition. The current study aims to investigate the perceptions of beginner students of English towards learning English vocabulary by narrow reading on "Readlang", a Web 2.0 tool that allows language learners to translate words and phrases into learners' mother tongue. The participants included 55 Turkish learners of English enrolled in the department of Public Administration at Mehmet Akif Ersoy University. The participants were asked to choose five words and/or phrases from a different text on public administration each week during the study, which lasted 12 weeks. The interviews held with the participants at the end of the study indicated that the participants perceived that their reading comprehension improved dramatically since using "Readlang". The results also indicated that the spaced repetition through flashcards helped them recycle the previously learnt lexical items.

When faced with having to assign a grade to a student's oral proficiency in a small group discussion, how can teachers consistently evaluate each student? Because a student's adeptness at a foreign language can vary from one ability to another, it is unfair to evaluate his or her performance solely by grammatical and lexical accuracy or by any other single factor. Responding to this problem, a new evaluation matrix was developed that includes five categories: grammar and lexicon, communicative functions, recognition and use of phrases that convey those communicative functions, contributions of relevant content, and group involvement. These categories are explained in detail, as is the evaluation matrix for grading in the context of a small group discussion. The matrix promotes intrapersonal consistency in assessing a student's performance, provides an accurate means of assessment, and indicates in which areas a student's weaknesses lie. (Contains 14 references.) (JP)

This paper illustrates the research design (including the pilot study) of a work-in-progress study aimed at examining the potential of bilingual podcasts for the vocabulary acquisition in Italian as an L3 in the Austrian school context for beginning learners. The longitudinal study tries to link findings of the Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1993, 1997) and the Mental Lexicon (Aitchison, 2005) by taking into account lexical learning and the importance of spoken language for acquisition and by connecting them to the opportunities offered by podcasts as a means of mobile (micro) learning (cf. Hug, 2007a, 2007b, 2010a, 2010b; Hug & Friesen, 2007). In order to investigate the effects of podcasts on the lexical acquisition of Italian as an L3 two groups of participants will be analysed: (a) an experimental group (students use self-made, bilingual podcasts--German-Italian--to learn the lexical items), and (b) a control group (students are presented with lexical input without using podcasts). During the study, classroom teaching of the two groups will be observed in order to conduct a third-party-observation (cf. Bortz & Döring, 2009) of the participants and to compare and contrast their lexical input. A pre- and a post-test of lexical acquisition will be carried out at the beginning and the end of the observation period. As the use of podcasts as a tool of mobile learning might considerably change the vocabulary learning strategies of the participants in the experimental group, a questionnaire at the beginning and the end of the study will be applied in addition. It is assumed that, due to the Lexical Approach and the Mental Lexicon and enhanced by the mobile nature of the podcasts, the experimental group will achieve a higher increase of Italian lexicon than the control group. However, the executed pilot study has revealed weaknesses in the research design, which have to be adapted for the final case study. [For the complete volume, see ED574893.]

Prior research on early lexical acquisition in bilingual infants has been used by Clark (1987) to support the Principle of Contrast, which states that every two forms contrast in meaning. In this study of an English-Spanish bilingual child, it is argued that the Principle of Contrast is not applicable to bilingual acquisition in general. Daily diary records were supplemented by weekly video recordings from age 1;3 to 1;10. The adults involved spoke either only English with the child or only Spanish. The child's lexicon up to age 1;10 showed that one-third of the child's first 150 words was made up of translation equivalents that were synonymous in reference. Contrast, therefore, cannot be generalized to include bilingual acquisition if there is even one case that refutes its condition that children will give priority to known words and reject apparent synonyms in the earliest stages of acquisition, (Contains nine references.) (Author/JP)

This paper is concerned with a discourse-based approach to lexis and, in particular, the discourse role of lexical patterns or lexicalized sequences which are completely or partially preassembled and more or less fixed in form. Lexical patterns, their function in a community's codes, and the cultural differences that may arise in their use, are briefly discussed. The relationship of lexical patterns to social competence and to two general discourse strategies, framing and symbolizing, is described. Lastly, the latent, pragmatic nature of lexical patterns is addressed. (Author/JP)

The current study aims to investigate form, composition, distribution of acknowledgement and agreement/assessment signals in upper intermediate/advanced Italian as L2 speakers. Data are video-transcribed computer mediated conversations for mutual language learning (Teletandem) during which two female volunteer university students (L1: English and German) talk with a native speaker (NS) female interlocutor (L1: Italian) for developing L2 language proficiency. For each pair, data have been collected during two different meetings: meeting 1 comprises free discussion for mutual introductions; meeting 2 is a discussion on a topic chosen by the Italian non-native speaker. The analysis shows that L2 subjects employ a great variety of (1) acknowledgement and agreement listener responses; (2) both lexical and non-lexical units whose functions, positions and frequency are affected by the level of involvement in the discourse; and (3) acquaintance of the two speakers and by the type of task. Particularly in the second meeting, when a topic is discussed, non-native speakers (NNSs) use more lexical units than in the first meeting, thus highlighting the relevance of situational variables over the discourse structure. [For the complete volume, see ED574893.]

A study administered a 12-item questionnaire to 35 (15 males, 20 females) African-American students (recent high school graduates with a mean age of 17.5 years) enrolled in a university summer enrichment program to examine how their language in casual conversation differed from that of adults. The questionnaire was administered after the final exam on the last day of class, and "casual speech" was defined as that variety of speech used when students gathered to socialize. Results confirmed the hypothesis that the speech of adolescent African Americans differed significantly from that of adult African Americans. In addition, tables showing the chosen words used for various descriptive situations suggest that there were differences according to gender. Drawbacks to the study include the small number of stimuli items used on the survey and the absence of a comparison group or groups. Unmindful of these shortcomings, this preliminary analysis should contribute to the ongoing dialogue of language study in the African American community. (Contains three tables of data, eight notes, nine references, and a copy of the questionnaire.) (TB)

Text complexity has received increased attention due to the CCSS, which call for students to comprehend increasingly more complex texts as they progress through grades. Quantitative text complexity (or readability) indices are based on text attributes (e.g., sentence lengths, and lexical, syntactic, & semantic difficulty), quantified by mathematical formulas to estimate text. Researchers have warned that texts should not be created to reach particular readability scores, which is a frequent practice of "equating" ORF passages. Issues we encountered were: estimates often differ; estimates do not account for student variance; and many require texts of a certain length. The purpose of this study was to provide comparisons of quantitative text complexity estimates based on text features to estimates of "text difficulty" based on student performance. We found (a) moderate correlation among latent fluency and words correct per minute (WCPM); (b) the highest correlations were observed among ARI, Flesh-Kincaid, and WCPM, possibly an artifact of passage development, and partly a similarity between the formulas of ARI and Flesh-Kincaid (particularly for lower grade texts with less multisyllabic words); and (c) the text complexity measure with the lowest correlations among all measures was formality, perhaps suggesting it measures a different dimension of text complexity.

The research and practical questions about the internal lexicon, the associated network of internal representation basic to word meaning, boil down to whether in reading English the phonological route is obligatory or optional. Since the English writing system is morphophonemic, not phonetic, access to the internal lexicon cannot and should not just be at the surface, phonetic level. Simplified spelling cannot quite bring out much of the relevant information in the English writing system. Teachers must balance phonic subskills and reading comprehension even in primary grade classes. The concept of internal dictionary must be broadened to that of an internal encyclopedia or internal library. Fast, accurate decoding of words is necessary but not sufficient for comprehension of text. Research on the reading process has led to schema theory, which postulates that story comprehension evolves around high-level representation of schemata that helps to organize and integrate a story and makes it comprehensible and recallable. The idea that comprehension of text, memory, and knowledge are interwoven means that teachers will have to teach learning strategies explicitly and should be wary of "simplified" stories. The interactive nature of the reading process underscores the importance of both the structure and function of language. Replacing formal, rigid language and reading instruction with instruction that stresses the flexibility and ambiguity of language will produce better teaching methods. (JL)

The flow of normal conversation is often impeded by error. These errors can be divided into at least three categories: phonological, lexical, and pragmatic. A study was designed to assess whether different kinds of errors affect conversation in different ways. Forty-four subjects listened to tapes of conversations. Each conversation contained either no error or one of the three error types. All subjects heard 12 different conversations. Following the taped conversations, the subjects evaluated the speakers and rated the realism of the conversation. They then engaged in a 2-minute distractor task before being asked to recall the errors. Forty-four additional subjects were asked to read transcripts of the conversations before participating in the remainder of the activities. The immediate evaluations of the participants were most strongly affected by the presence of pragmatic errors. In contrast, later memory for the conversations that were read was best when they contained phonological errors. This suggests that different kinds of errors influence conversation in different ways. (Five graphs are included.) (MG)

Most freshman composition textbooks are inadequate in giving information to students on how to interpret dictionaries: instead of presenting them as aids in exploring word usage, textbooks foster a naive trust in dictionaries as arbiters of all usage questions. Rather than treating words as discrete items to be mastered without knowledge of underlying word relationships, vocabulary lessons in freshman textbooks need to investigate (1) differences among dictionaries, (2) derivational morphology--how roots and affixes combine to produce meaning, (3) semantic differentiation, (4) denotation and connotation of various affixes, (5) similarities of word roots, (6) word etymology, and (7) new word generation through compounding. Students above the basic writing level should have a clearer picture of how words develop and of how they change in acceptability, form, meaning, and use. (MM)

The article surveys the comparative German and Russian languages typology textbook. The purpose of the research is to provide a reader with the information about the educational process involving the textbook. The emphasis is placed upon the abilities of the textbook to provide students with professional and linguistic self-determination. The feature of the textbook includes two new sections concerning comparative German and Russian languages typology:comparative syntax and comparative lexicology. The theoretical material of the textbook served as a basis for graduate research papers for Bachelor's and Master's Degrees. It is worth mentioning the implementation of a student's professional and linguistic self-determination with the help of the textbook. It implies that the students were able to clarify the important features of similarities and differences of morphological, syntactic and lexicological composition of the compared languages, which were used by the students during their practice at companies, industries and schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an increasing interest in Linguistic landscape (LL) over the recent years. In multicultural Singapore, where there are four official languages: Mandarin Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil, it has witnessed an increased use of foreign languages in advertisements, shop-signs as well as condominium names. In this paper, the author will display the LL of Telok Kurau district (a residential area located in the east of Singapore) and track its evolution up to 2016. Names of all condominiums in this area will be analysed to highlight the lexical creativity of the developers while respecting the legal requirements regarding the naming of private housing. Perception of autochthonous on this phenomenon will be presented. The gentrification of the Telok Kurau area has some impact on the LL, especially in the housing segment (surveyed in this paper) as more and more condominiums are erected. The trend and increasing use of European names at the expense of local languages will be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I Have a Dream, a speech written by Martin Luther King, Jr., sounds the clarion call to march towards the struggle for freedom, for human rights and against discrimination in the interest of the Negro all over the world. It has great influence on America and worldwide. And this speech which has its historical meaning only considering its language art is worth further analysis. This paper begins with a discussion of phonetics, using examples in the speech to create the beauty by choosing and arranging the combination of pronunciation. Next, the paper considers and, illustrates the lexicology in the speech, considering several characteristics, including the first person used, the word "Negro" used as well as the link-up of lexicon. Third, the syntax is examined, with special emphasis on parallelisms King employed including the parallel nouns and parallel noun phrases, infinitive phrases, prepositional phrases, etc.... The parallelism in syntax not only expresses the thoughts but also the feelings. And finally, examples of his genius for rhetorical devices are discussed possessing the essence of the beauty. It is an excellent example anyway and it is worthwhile for the English learners to learn from it. A successful speech should be rich in power and pay more attention to the artistic language. Only in this way the speech will be the excellent one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to reveal the pedagogical potential of cognitive-oriented teaching of the mother tongue. We started out from the theoretical premises provided by cognitive linguistics, both its American branch, emphasizing the body anchoring of meaning, and from the Polish orientation, concentrated on the theory of linguistic picture of the world and semantic profiling. The theories mentioned were modified in accord with the educational goals of mother tongue teaching and applied namely to the sphere of lexicology. Conducting our research, we used both empiric methods - questionnaire - and interpretative methods. The analyzed population was formed by six groups of children from elementary school and grammar school of the age of 11-14 years. By using a questionnaire we found which connotations were aroused in the children by words naming selected parts of the human body and in which somatic idioms these words were used. We categorize all the data from the semantic point of view, which allowed us to reveal the children's conceptualization of selected parts of the body. Disregarding how the responses in individual groups of children varied in their forms of language expression, they were consistent in terms of semantic categories. It was also shown that given semantic categories were related to imaginative schemas based on the body anchoring of meaning and that they corresponded to semantic profiles. Based on the introduced theory and interpretation of empiric data, we propose potential didactic applications of our research. We introduce ways in which pedagogues can diagnose the conceptualization processes of children and refine the children's conceptualizations. We emphasize the importance of reading and interpretation of texts of different styles and genres as well as work with various types of language dictionaries. Such activities should result in enlarging the linguistic and communicative competence of children. Our paper aims to contribute to the development of cognitiveoriented didactics of the mother tongue, in our case Czech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a description of the main characteristics of the German banking language, especially from the perspective of lexicology. The paper classifies the banking and finance language, which is characterized by the specific lexical features and terms, as a language for special purposes. The banking terminology and other words relating to banking are used in various forms of the internal and external banking communication, such as documents for bank clients, contracts, printed forms or announcements but also in advertising, publications or flyers. The paper provides classification of text types relating to banking and their functions within the frame of the banking relations. Furthermore, it works with the lexical instruments of banking language and focusses especially on banking terms, neologisms, anglicisms, compounds, acronyms and phraseological units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at presenting a systematic and comprehensive overview of the language of the European Union. It defines the most frequent traits on the level of morphology, lexicology, syntax and stylistics. When characterizing the individual language levels we especially aim at those features that have a particular relevance in terms of interlingual transfer. Then, we point out at the status and use of individual EUś official languages and at the end, we describe in brief the situation in foreign language education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online platforms have a wealth of data, run countless experiments and use industrial-scale algorithms to optimize user experience. Despite this, many users seem to regret the time they spend on these platforms. One possible explanation is that incentives are misaligned: platforms are not optimizing for user happiness. We suggest the problem runs deeper, transcending the specific incentives of any particular platform, and instead stems from a mistaken foundational assumption. To understand what users want, platforms look at what users do. This is a kind of revealed-preference assumption that is ubiquitous in the way user models are built. Yet research has demonstrated, and personal experience affirms, that we often make choices in the moment that are inconsistent with what we actually want. The behavioral economics and psychology literatures suggest, for example, that we can choose mindlessly or that we can be too myopic in our choices, behaviors that feel entirely familiar on online platforms. In this work, we develop a model of media consumption where users have inconsistent preferences. We consider an altruistic platform which simply wants to maximize user utility, but only observes behavioral data in the form of the user's engagement. We show how our model of users' preference inconsistencies produces phenomena that are familiar from everyday experience, but difficult to capture in traditional user interaction models. These phenomena include users who have long sessions on a platform but derive very little utility from it, and platform changes that steadily raise user engagement before abruptly causing users to go "cold turkey'' and quit. A key ingredient in our model is a formulation for how platforms determine what to show users: they optimize over a large set of potential content (the content manifold) parametrized by underlying features of the content. Whether improving engagement improves user welfare depends on the direction of movement in the content manifold: for certain directions of change, increasing engagement makes users less happy, while in other directions on the same manifold, increasing engagement makes users happier. We provide a characterization of the structure of content manifolds for which increasing engagement fails to increase user utility. By linking these effects to abstractions of platform design choices, our model thus creates a theoretical framework and vocabulary in which to explore interactions between design, behavioral science, and social media. A full version of this paper can be found at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.11776.pdf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives an analysis of national and cultural colour semantics in Yakut phraseology. The object of the study are phraseological units that have a colour component in their composition. The research topic is chosen due to the understudied Yakut phraseological units and the need to study the national specifics of the Yakut language worldview through a colour prism. This will allow us to apply the obtained results when reading lecture courses on linguoculturology, comparative lexicology, intercultural communication. During the analysis we use such research methods such as descriptive analytical, contextual, linguisticalstylistical, statistical, and also linguocultural analysis. As carriers of cultural information, phraseological units play a special role in the process of understanding the world. The national culture, way of life and way of the worldview are reflected in phraseological units. Reflection of colour perception in the phraseological system of language is not accidental. Colours play an important role in the formation of the linguistic picture of the world and have a special symbolic meaning in traditional Yakut culture. We collected 133 phraseological units with a colour nomination from the Yakut Phraseological Dictionary by A.G. Nelunov with the method of continuous sampling. The most frequent colourvariety in the phraseological body of the analyzed language are the lexemes "hara" (black) and "maŋan" (white). According to the Yakuts, the world is divided into three parts: the Upper World, the Middle World and the Lower World. The Upper world is inhabited by the light deities of Aiyy and is often associated with the white colour, Lower with evil spirits which are corresponded to black. A large number of phraseological units with the nomination of black colour with negative connotations is the vivid evidence. Thus, the phraseological unit'hara sүүrүk'which literally means the 'black runner' denotes the meaning a 'cattle' which according to Yakut mythology crept into the Middle World from the Lower and symbolizes evil spirits and poverty. The phraseological units "hara"; sүүrүk (lit.'white runner') and үrүŋ tүүlēh (lit. 'having white wool') nominate a horse. For Yakuts the horse is a sacred animal from the Upper World. Thus, the study of phraseological cases with the component of colour identification shows that the meaning of colour depends on a number of extra-linguistic factors: cultural traditions, way of life, customs, peculiarities of national psychology and consciousness, as well as various facts of objective reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to present Moodle platform as an assistance resource in learning Romanian as a foreign language in Serbia. Distance learning, i.e. learning at home is becoming more and more relevant. Although the platform Moodle primarily intended for institutions, it certainly does not replace the classical way of learning but also serves as a supplement to the system of learning and opens a world of new possibilities. Moodle as a platform, has not been used with students who learn Romanian. Modernization of teaching and using new methods have opened up a lot of possibilities. In agreement with the Moodle Romania, developers and professional team designed the platform and page novisad.moodle.ro for students who learn Romanian as a foreign language in Serbia. Professors get a free platform, and students integrated set of tools that allows them to have access in common sources of knowledge, exchange of educational material, as well as use of additional modules which provides expanded functionality. In this way, all the materials for learning the Romanian phonetics, morphology, syntax and lexicology found a place on this platform. Thus, this system has become a favorite among students. Shall be placed on various videos, open chat rooms, post quizzes, online tests, drawings, glossaries, do homework. This kind support from the Moodle Romania is very important for the promotion of the Romanian language in Serbia, and this kind of concrete help assist in the preservation and promotion of the Romanian language, culture, history, traditions and customs. According to the students opinion, research results have shown that platform Moodle is better for learning and sharing material than the Faculty site or Facebook group. Reason behind this is specific information available in one place and higher quality of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies show a gap between the expressions commonly used by health consumers and health professionals. To bridge this gap, consumer health vocabularies are presented as a solution. The aim of this paper is to describe an on-going project to create a consumer health vocabulary (CHV) in the Brazilian Portuguese language. This project will be developed in three phases: terms extraction and connection to compose a CHV graph structure, human validation, and computacional application development. We expect to make a CHV beta version (including approximately 5,000 valid consumer terms stored in a database graph) available. This project can contribute to the improvement of CHVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the locality effects exhibited by the prefix concord in Saaroa, a Formosan language, cannot be fully explained by purely syntactic operations (e.g., AGREE). Instead, I suggest Saaroa prefix concord be viewed as contextual allomorphy whose locality properties are predicted by the C1-LIN theory (Embick 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how cyberspace words are made from a semantic point of view. How cyberspace words are created is also explored. Based on research, all cyberspace words are some kind of lexical extensions of ordinary words, which can be explained by metaphorical process. The researcher devised eight categories of the source domains of cyberspace words. These are: vehicle, transportation, and travel; post office, stationery; business and commerce and architecture, among others.

We study the competition complexity of dynamic pricing relative to the optimal auction in the fundamental single-item setting. In prophet inequality terminology, we compare the expected reward Am(F) achievable by the optimal online policy on m i.i.d. random variables drawn from F to the expected maximum Mn(F) of n i.i.d. draws from the same distribution. We ask how big does m have to be to ensure that (1+ε) Am(F) ≥ Mn(F) for all F. We resolve this question and exhibit a stark phase transition: When ε = 0 the competition complexity is unbounded. That is, for any n and any m there is a distribution F such that Am(F) > Mn(F). In contrast, for any ε < 0, it is sufficient and necessary to have $m = φ(ε)n where φ(ε) = Θ(log log 1/ε). Therefore, the competition complexity not only drops from being unbounded to being linear, it is actually linear with a very small constant. The technical core of our analysis is a loss-less reduction to an infinite dimensional and non-linear optimization problem that we solve optimally. A corollary of this reduction, which may be of independent interest, is a novel proof of the factor ~0.745 i.i.d. prophet inequality, which simultaneously establishes matching upper and lower bounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Colonel Blotto game and its variants are a common approach to study competitive allocation of interchangeable resources (e.g., soldiers, money, or votes). We introduce a new variant of Blotto, which we call the Derby game, to study competitive allocation of non-interchangeable resources, such as campaign surrogates in politics or skilled workers in companies, and analyze its Nash equilibria. While Derby games unsurprisingly admit no pure Nash equilibria, our main results surprisingly show that Nash equilibria generically exist where one player plays a pure strategy, and we give necessary and sufficient conditions for such equilibria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anecdotal evidence suggests that linguistic innovations are diffused through cultural consumption, particularly through hiphop music. The present study attempts to quantify the extent to which cultural consumption influences vocabulary learning, and to discuss theoretical underpinnings that can take into account these findings. Specifically, we examine knowledge of African-American English (AAE) vocabulary in populations with low social contact with African-Americans but with a wide variety of musical preferences, including hiphop. Our survey asked 168 participants about their knowledge of AAE vocabulary as well as demographic and cultural questions. Participants were given 64 words to freely define; they were then asked questions to elicit ethnicities for their strong and weak ties. Participants were then asked to freely identify their preferred musical genres and artists in each genre. Finally, participants were asked free-response questions concerning popular culture. A linear regression model was fit to the response variable of vocabulary knowledge, for which a coding scheme was established to transform open definitions to a five-point Likert scale. Responses to demographic and cultural questions were used as predictor variables. The effect of weak ties to African-Americans was a significant predictor of AAE vocabulary knowledge; interestingly, musical preferences and pop-culture knowledge were even better predictors. A preference for hiphop music had a positive association with AAE vocabulary knowledge, as did pop-culture knowledge about African-Americans. Our results support the integration of the broadcast node concept in sociolinguistic network studies. Important features of the broadcast node include its asymmetric ties to and impersonal contact with many speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]