The results of an industry research survey showed, understanding Dissertation Research categories has not been the focused on many researchers and institutions. This research expands on machine learning methodologies using two similar datasets to answer these three questions: 1. Is there a way to track the trends of Pace University's Doctor of…

In 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley published findings that young children from low-income backgrounds will hear 32 million fewer words than their more affluent peers by the time they turn four years old. Historically, this "word gap" has solely been identified as a function of socioeconomic status--or more specifically, family income.…

Second language (L2) learners of tone languages do not perceive and produce the different tones of the target language with equal ease. The most common explanation for these asymmetries is that acoustically salient tones are the easiest to learn. An alternative explanation is that tones are easiest to learn when they are highly frequent in the…

This study examines the frequency effect of two-word collocations involving "para" "to," "for" (e.g. "fui para," "para que") on the reduction of "para" to "pa" (in Spanish) and "pra" (in Portuguese). Collocation frequency effects demonstrate that language speakers…

This dissertation investigates the effects of phonological neighborhoods on pronunciation variation in conversational speech. Phonological neighbors are defined as words that are different in one and only one phoneme by addition, deletion and substitution. Phonological neighborhood density refers to the number of neighbors a certain word has. …