Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2018, Linguistics (Arts and Sciences)

Past studies have suggested that the progression of dementia, especially Alzheimer's disease, can be detected in the writing of literary authors through analysis of their lexical diversity patterns. However, those studies have used oversimplified measures and vague definitions of lexical diversity. This study uses a multi-faceted, computationally operationalized model of lexical diversity innovated by Scott Jarvis to analyze a total of 129 novels by five authors (three with dementia and two without), with the purpose of identifying the lexical characteristics of dementia in literary writing. A total of 22 novels by two authors with suicidal depression were also analyzed in order to determine whether this condition also leads to changes in authors' lexical diversity patterns. Analyses were conducted with six individual lexical diversity measures and two supplementary lexicosyntactic measures. Results suggest that dementia as well as the effects of healthy aging manifest in different aspects of lexical diversity for different authors, and that this model of lexical diversity is a robust tool for detecting lexical decay indicative of dementia. The model achieves 100% classification accuracy in discriminating between dementia-affected and non-dementia-affected novels. Classification accuracy drops slightly with leave-one-out cross-validation but remains higher than 88% for all dementia group authors.

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2007, English (as a Second Language)

This thesis incorporates a study that shows a relationship between verbal and nonverbal behaviors and the outcome of a communicative event. This study was conducted by observing the communicative behaviors that potential customers exhibited after they were offered a free sample. The societal norm of reciprocity states that people who receive gifts (such as free samples) are likely to express obligatory feelings to the gift-giver (Spradly 2000). However, it was demonstrated by El-Alayli and Messe (2003) that people who receive a gift may feel that their social freedom is challenged and choose not to respond. The study shows that although the majority of people accept a free sample, they are not likely to reciprocate; and responses that are traditionally assumed to show acceptance can actually refer to denial or rejection when one observes nonverbal responses. For example, ten percent of the time when the responses of “sure”, “yeah” or “okay” were spoken by a customer after a free sample was offered, he/she did not accept the sample. Four percent of the time when the customer said “thanks” or “thank you”, he/she also did not take the sample. The outcomes of this study coincide with Hard Science Linguistics that values human communication as being comprised of all observable behaviors in real world situations. Nonverbal behaviors are important to analyze because they do not depend on the properties of the researcher to be observed. Furthermore, articulations that are traditionally viewed as positive acceptance (such as "thanks", "thank you", "sure", "yeah" or "okay") can actually be part of a denial or rejection of an offer when analyzed in combination with nonverbal responses. Evaluations of the cultural and pragmatic circumstances surrounding an event directly reflect the behaviors of potential customers when they were offered a free sample. When teaching communication, one must take into account verbal and nonverbal behaviors of the native setting in relation to the (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2006, English (as a Second Language)

This thesis presents a historical overview of conceptions of language and language teaching and discusses the incompatibility of these conceptions with the reality of human communication. Emphasis is put on the work of Noam Chomsky and his followers, and assumptions on which they based their research are refuted. The thesis discusses the domain confusions on which traditional linguistics relies and reviews Victor H. Yngve's framework for human linguistics. Based on human linguistics theory, a change in focus is suggested, from language teaching to communication learning; research in neurobiology that supports the proposed change is presented. An experiment (previously reported at TESOL 2006) is described that looks at what constitutes input in real-world communication. The results of the experiment indicate the role of mental imagery in generating input for communication learning; the concept of mental imagery is discussed. New terminology is suggested as well as a number of ways to improve the outcomes of communication learning in classroom settings. Simulation in the classroom is reviewed from the perspective of human linguistics and retained as the most appropriate practical application for communication learning.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Linguistics

Alternation patterns between sounds under certain conditions are widely attested in the history of various languages, and the development of German Umlaut is one of the best-studied sound alternations that have their triggering condition shifted from phonological to morphological ones. In Germanic linguistics, the term Umlaut refers to the fronting process of certain vowels. It first occurs as a purely phonological alternation that is triggered by a following unstressed syllable containing i, i or j in Old High German (OHG). Since some suffixes of certain morphological categories start with unstressed syllables with i, i or j, there is an overlapping between the phonological and the morphological conditions, and when the phonological condition is obscured because of the dropping of j and the weakening of i, i to a schwa in Middle High German (MiHG), the Umlaut alternation becomes a pattern that is completely conditioned by the morphological categories of the umlauting forms. The research question of this dissertation is how the contributions phonological conditions and morphological conditions make to the general predictability of the Umlaut alternation change from OHG to MoHG. For this purpose, I conduct a quantitative investigation on OHG, MiHG and MoHG corpora with different regional varieties using two methods of measuring conditional entropy as quantification of predictability: the first one, developed from the practice in Ackerman et al. (2009) and Ackerman & Malouf (2013), is based on the distribution of Umlaut alternants across the corpora, and the second one uses the LSTM (Long short-term memory) model (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber 1996; Williams et al. 2020). I collect verb tokens with umlautable stem vowels from annotated corpora of OHG, MiHG and MoHG, and the conditional entropy of the Umlaut alternation is calculated under the distribution-based method and the LSTM model respectively and is compared with each other. There are two main findings in the re (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Linguistics

The principle of compositionality is axiomatically assumed in many modern syntactic and semantic research programs, and is integral to the interface of syntax and semantics. Compositionality is the idea that the meaning of a complex linguistic construction generally ought to be derivable based on the meanings of its components and how they are combined. (Frege (1988) Pelletier (1994), [2016], Janssen (2012)) Ellipsis, the systematic inference of meaning in the absence of an explicit linguistic string, is a phenomenon of considerable interest on the syntax-semantics interface precisely because it is one area where the typical assumptions of compositionality break down. As a result, it is an area where this and other constraints of syntactic and semantic theory can be examined and tested. This dissertation arose from a formal research program concerning certain elliptical constructions in English, gaps and strips, which are discussed in more detail and investigated from a variety of methodological perspectives throughout the rest of this book. In their 2016 paper, Kubota and Levine put forth an analysis of gapping (G) (1-a) in English in the Type-Logical Grammar (TLG) framework. A subsequent paper, Puthawala (2018) extended this analysis to cover stripping phenomena (S) (1-b). The two analyses taken together license combinations of those constructions such as strip-gaps (SG) (1-c) and gap-strips (GS) (1-d). However examples of these complex constructions, particularly single-speaker utterances, are rare and difcult to fnd in corpora, and proved unacceptable to some speakers. These facts gave rise to two questions: First, are strip-gaps and gap-strips well-formed in English? If evidence suggests that they are, it would validate the predictions made by the combined Kubota & Levine and Puthawala (KLP) analysis. If they aren't, then it provides a straightforward way to challenge the analysis. Supposing that there is reason to believe that strip-gaps a (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, Cognitive Linguistics

Given the role of distributional semantics in child language acquisition, adult linguistic development, and the conceptualization of abstract entities, the present investigation seeks to explore if the variable frequency of linguistic utterances across clusters of users in a social network can be correlated with divergent interpretations of an ostensibly shared concept within a discursive community. Are differing rates of linguistic entrenchment within a community a marker of divergent conceptualization? To begin to address this question, this present pilot study details the socio-cognitive processes underlying entrenchment of language and concepts, and develops a method for studying divergent conceptualization in the online social media network Twitter.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Linguistics

There is rich diversity in New Iranian nominal systems reflecting retentions from a common Old Iranian ancestor and many significant innovations. My primary aim is to engage in a discussion of the typological richness of inflection among these languages as comprehensively as possible. This work represents a combination of synchronic and diachronic linguistics, where a thorough theoretically anchored synchronic analysis feeds my otherwise diachronic study. I have divided the work into distinct sections that represent issues concerning the nominal morphology of the Iranian languages, focusing on those spoken in the Kurdish zone. These sections, taken together, demonstrate the breadth of issues concerning New Iranian nominal morphology. I begin with a typological overview of nominal systems in New Iranian languages focusing on the interaction of case, number, gender, and attribution marking. At the intersection of these features exist several patterns that establish the issues addressed in subsequent sections. Perhaps the most well-studied phenomenon in Iranian nominal morphology is the ezafe (attribution marker). Here, I break from previous work on the ezafe phenomenon by describing the syntactic combinatorics of the various attribution/possession strategies in New Iranian languages in a categorial framework (HTLCG). This analysis unifies two facts of Iranian languages: (1) adjectives are both attributive and substantive, and (2) nouns are the marked entity in attributive constructions. I use the principles established in my discussion of the ezafe to unify the analysis of the Iranian noun-phrase syntax and nominal morphology based on foundational assumptions of inferential–realizational morphology and Categorial Grammar. Additionally, I propose several novel solutions to issues in Iranian historical morphology.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Spanish and Portuguese

The present study is an analysis of two innovative uses of grammatical forms in the future domain of expression in Cuban Spanish: the past prospective construction 'iba a,' acquiring uses as a hypothetical marker, and the obligation construction 'tener que,' acquiring uses as a future marker. Two naturally-occurring examples of these phenomena are exemplified below. [Context: Yuleidys calls a bed and breakfast to confirm a reservation:] Estoy llamando por mi hermano que tiene que quedarse en tu casa. `I'm calling on behalf of my brother who is going to stay in your house.' [Context: Odaisy is discussing her young son's eating preferences. He only eats crackers and juice for breakfast:] `Que bueno que todavia hay jugo. Si no, iba a pasarla mal. `It's good that there is still juice. If not, he would have a hard time.' The present study will take an amphichronic semantic approach, which has roots in grammaticalization theory (Bybee et al., 1994; Traugott & Dasher, 2001) and is closely related to the emerging field of diachronic semantics (Deo, 2015). This approach combines historical corpus analysis, experimental study, and formal semantic theory to develop a precise definition of the meaning of the grammatical phenomena under study at each relevant stage in their history and understand how and why these changes take place. The principle semantic contribution of the present work is a constraint on the Kratzerian ordering source, such that all propositions in an ordering source are biconditional generalizations. I also propose that there are two principle categories of generalizations: Universal Generalizations and Action-oriented Preferences. From these two categories and a subsetting of these categories called an Environmental State, all modal necessity meanings for the grammatical elements under study can be derived. To test this framework, I conducted semantic interviews with Spanish speakers in Cuba (n=44). Acceptability ratings and (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Spanish and Portuguese

This project examines the development of the compound pluperfect (ex. Sp. (yo) habia cantado `I had sung') in the western Romance languages and specifically what relation this process may have had with the perfect-to-perfective shift in the Romance compound past. In Romance, the areas in which the synthetic pluperfect was first replaced by a compound pluperfect show the largest perfect-to-perfective shift in the compound past. This is perhaps due to the early presence of a compound tense with perfective aspect upon which the compound past began to be modeled. Specifically, modern French and Italian show the most advanced perfect-to-perfective shift (Squartini & Bertinetto 2000) in the compound past and therefore likely had a common and generalized perfective compound pluperfect earlier than in other languages where the shift is less advanced (Occitan, Catalan, Spanish) or altogether absent (Portuguese, Galician). This project presents quantitative evidence that the development of a perfective-in-the-past compound pluperfect and the degree of perfect-to-perfective shift experienced by the compound past are not simply parallelisms in Romance, or "two complementary phenomena" (Squartini 1999: 79). Rather, the early development of a generalized perfective-in-the-past compound pluperfect provided a model of a compound tense with perfective aspect. Once this compound pluperfect form gained a perfective-in-the-past interpretation, through analogy the compound past also began to be able to be used in perfective, in addition to perfect, contexts. This happened in medieval French and Spanish. However, the generalization of this perfective-in-past compound pluperfect did not always lead to the perfect-to-perfective shift of the compound past. Data from Portuguese is examined to show why this later shift never took effect there, as well as in several other varieties. This work proposes a "Pluperfect First Hypothesis" which states that in order for there to have been (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, Case Western Reserve University, 2020, Cognitive Linguistics

Morphological analysis is most often the first step of natural language processing. Difficulty in analyzing words from a lexical standpoint can be compounded in the Arabic language. This paper will model select Arabic adjectives of degree to examine their root form and how those words can be conceptualized differently based on differences in semantic knowledge, cognitive semantics and the symbolic thesis. These differences occur when compared to the same words modeled using the English language.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, East Asian Languages and Literatures

Grammatical errors in a foreign language point to us as bad speakers of the language, but pragmatic failures point to us as bad people (Thomas 1983). This is also true when using facial expressions in a second/foreign language (“L2”) or culture (“C2”). Facial expression research has revealed that while there are some cross-cultural universals in how we interpret certain facial expressions, whether we display, suppress, or even mask our facial expressions is governed by culture-specific conventions. Violations of these “display rules” (Ekman and Friesen 1969)—just like violations of pragmatic language strategies—can have unintended results. When American learners enter the L2 Japanese classroom, they are already armed with facial expression strategies associated and integrated with their L1. These strategies unconsciously translate into their performances in L2 Japanese, although the effects of such transfer have yet to be studied. To learn about the perceptions that Japanese natives have of the facial expressions of L2 speakers of Japanese, data were collected through an online survey from 30 Japanese women in Japan and the US. First, a Likert scale was used to measure the respondents' assessments of the naturalness and appropriateness of the L2 Japanese performances of four performers: one 1st-year and one 2nd-year American learner of Japanese; one advanced American speaker of Japanese; and one native speaker of Japanese. Next, a “select-all that apply” question was used to identify (i) which facial expressions the raters observed in each performance, and (ii) which of those observed were violations for the context. Finally, raters gave written feedback about the performances and how they could have been made more culturally appropriate. An ordinal regression revealed no statistically significant difference between the naturalness and appropriateness ratings, indicating that both are likely measuring aspects of the same behavioral construct. A Kruskal-Wallis (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, Cognitive Linguistics

Moral communication by nature involves individuals of diverse viewpoints. The underlying viewpoint of a speaker may be readily visible in grammatical constructions, particularly the resultative construction. Roe v Wade being a significant and controversial landmark case in American legal history, the case was selected for examination of construction grammar in moral argumentation. The resultative construction was found to reveal an underlying default state of being, or presupposition, with regard to the resulting state of the object in question. This state is achieved through the implied state prior to the resultative construction's transformative usage. Roe v Wade possesses several resultative constructions describing significant transformative events in the legal sense, outlining when abortion was made a crime and when statutes were declared void. The transformative nature of the resultative construction creates a significant impact in legal discourse, which this thesis seeks to uncover and outline fully.

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2018, Spanish (Foreign Languages)

Este trabajo se centrara en el analisis linguistico de varios dialectos del espanol: el espanol de Colombia, el espanol de Cuba, y el espanol de Mexico. Con cada variedad de espanol, se analizara los rasgos fonetico-fonologicos, morfosintacticos y lexico-semanticos en una entrevista con un(a) hablante nativo(a) de cada pais. Para este estudio, se va a analizar una grabacion de una entrevista de un hablante de Pereira, Colombia y una hablante de La Habana, Cuba, disponibles en el corpus de PRESEEA (PRESEEA, 2014-). Para el analisis del espanol de Mexico, se analizara una grabacion de una entrevista realizada por el propio autor. Con cada analisis, se va a explicar y analizar los contextos historicos que han influido en cada dialecto y tambien los rasgos linguisticos generales de cada uno de estos dialectos. Estos rasgos dentro de un marco teorico que sigue los principios sociolinguisticos son tomados como el punto de partida en el analisis del habla de los tres hablantes estudiados. En este trabajo se observa la relevancia de las variables diatopicas, diastraticas y diafasicas en el habla de estos tres hablantes.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, East Asian Languages and Literatures

Even after more than a century of linguistic research, the question of whether the Japanese and Korean languages share a common origin remains unanswered. This dissertation presents evidence for a comprehensive theory that Japanese and Korean descend from the same ancestor language, `proto Korean Japanese'. I employ the Comparative Method of historical linguistics (Campbell 1999, Hock & Joseph, 1996) to propose over 500 Korean Japanese related words that build on the foundations laid by Martin (1966) and Whitman (1985). I also offer original theories of how the Japanese and Korean grammatical systems can be traced back to a common proto Korean Japanese grammar, and explain how such grammatical correspondences are unlikely to be the result of borrowing or chance. This means that related words and grammatical structures can only be explained as inheritances from the same source language. Finally, I discuss how the most reasonable interpretations of non linguistic evidence from Korean and Japanese history also point to common linguistic ancestry. Crucially, this dissertation is able to identify a significantly greater number of shared Korean Japanese words than previous research such as Martin (1966) or Whitman (1985), who have previously underestimated the amount of shift in grammar and meaning that has taken place in both languages. This dissertation thus establishes a strong set of core correspondences in the vocabulary of Japanese to that of Korean, and provides a solid basis for positing common origin for these two languages.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Spanish and Portuguese

Dialects of Spanish in the Caribbean and southern Spain are described as "switching" liquids in syllable-final position, resulting in the neutralization of the two sounds. This dissertation considers liquid variation in San Juan Spanish (SJS), which is frequently cited as neutralizing /r/ to /l/ such that arma ('weapon') and alma ('soul') are both pronounced [al.ma]. In light of recent work suggesting that neutralization is often incomplete, i.e. small but significant differences exist between two sounds previous considered to be merged, this study examines the formant structure (F1, F2, F3, F4) and duration of rhotics and laterals in SJS to determine the neutralization status of /r/ and /l/. This dissertation also features a perception experiment which tests how well SJS listeners are able to hear acoustic differences between the liquids. Using twenty-four sociolinguistic interviews with SJS speakers, I extracted 2,212 vowel+/r/ and 728 vowel+/l/ sequences. The conditionings of word position, stress, vowel, preceding and following consonants, gender, and age are considered for two separate data analyses. The first analysis considers the conditioning on the manner of articulation of the liquid. Then, approximant liquids, which are the site of potential neutralization, were analyzed for formant structure and duration. In order to develop an understanding of the dynamic formant trajectories, seven equidistant points were sampled for all four formants. These measurements were submitted to both linear regression analyses and Smoothing Spline ANOVAs. To test liquid perception, an online survey with vowel+liquid audio clips with varying formant structure was presented to both SJS and northern Spain Castilian Spanish (CS) listeners. The results for approximant liquid production indicate that rhotics are far more variant in SJS than laterals and their realization depends on linguistic and social factors. Therefore, I propose viewing this dialect as possessing a liquid c (open full item for complete abstract)

BA, Kent State University, 2015, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

In the present study, gender and sexual orientation are consciously measured in respect to color naming. Previous research concludes that women wholly identify color in more precise terms, with varying levels of color vocabulary. Men, oppositely, tend to identify color by marrying saturation variables with basic color terms. The introduction of sexual orientation as a means of assemblage distinction proposed the idea that homosexual men identify color in superior terms, even to their heterosexual female counterparts. Heterosexual men and homosexual women identify color in nearly identical terms, with a minuscule deviation in scoring. The results of the present study suggest that one's lexicon is formed differently than previously gestured, and that gender may no longer serve as an adequate means of separation.

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2014, College of Languages, Literature, and Social Sciences

Previous studies have been done on the use of `this' and `that' by native speakers (NSs) of English, non-native speakers (NNSs) of English or foreign language speakers (FLSs) by Kelly-Lopez (2005), Esseili (2006), Hickman (2005), and Imai (2003). Although the first three studies were very well thought out they were missing one point that Imai had. But as Esseili points out in her thesis, Imai's research was flawed because he told his subjects what he was looking for. I want to re-do his test but remove the bias from the study to see if the presentation of objects would be more likely to elicit `this' for near objects and `that' for objects that are farther away from the subjects. In the current study four identical objects will be presented to subjects aligned at equal distances on a flat plane going away from the subjects on a mat, either on a table or on the floor. They may or may not be able to touch the items they are referring to. This will allow the researcher to see if the relative distance from the subject is important or not in the use of `this' and `that' and if Imai's “contact/control” theory is valid (Imai, p. 135). Affective distance of all objects presented horizontally to the subjects has been proven to have the same effect on the choice of `this' or `that', whether closer or farther from the subject. Using NSs and NNSs of English, I plan on testing relative distance of the same types of objects, set up on a table or on the floor, so that one object is closest to the subject and the following items are spaced on the axis so that the final object presented is completely out of the subject's physical reach. I feel that this presentation will elicit the desired response of `this' and `that' along with other possible deixis responses from the subjects. I would ask the subject in random order which item is first, second, third, and fouth. I also will use the survey provided by Christman for the assessment of handedness to check if handedness h (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, Latin American Studies

The genesis of aspirates and ejectives in several Southern Quechua varieties, and their putative Aymara source, remain in contest. They are scantly distributed in Quechuan languages outside the Quechua II-C Sprachraum. Such consonants occur in Aymara under less restrictive phonotactic parameters and are generally more freely distributed. A majority of linguists subscribe to what Landerman (1994) terms the “Aymara Origin Hypothesis”, which postulates that Southern Quechua varieties acquired these phonemes through long periods of intensive bilingual contact with Aymara in Peru and Bolivia. Some linguists dissent, claiming they are inherited from earlier phonemic vestiges of a Proto-Quechumaran language (an idea henceforth designated the Proto-Quechumaran Hypothesis). Chapter 1 of this thesis presents a survey of various scholarly arguments for the Aymara Origin Hypothesis and considers their Proto-Quechumaran counterarguments. After examining claims within a theoretical framework of historical phonology and contact-induced language transfer, I cast doubt on the conclusiveness of arguments in favor of a Proto-Quechumaran language and subscribe to the Aymara Origin Hypothesis. Chapter 2 reviews the pre-Incan history of the region as well as the pre-Columbian historiography regarding Incan social organization and imperial expansion that brought a Southern Quechua variety as far north as Ecuador. It describes the pre-Columbian historical setting in which Quechuan and Aru speakers cohabited for centuries prior to Spanish invasion. Chapter 3 interprets the results of a Swadesh lexical comparison of Southern Quechua, Aymara, Northern Kichwa, and Central Quechua words. I then discuss the probability that the high percentage of shared vocabulary in these lists is the consequence of contact phenomena that manifested during centuries of Quechua-Aru contact in the Central Andes in pre-Columbian and pre-Incan times. Using the van Coetsem (1988) framework, I construct the interplay (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, Linguistics

The Neogrammarian Principle, that sound change must be phonetically conditioned and exceptionless, has developed into a well-accepted heuristic that is the foundation for the comparative method. However, during the 20th century, researchers discovered a number of changes in sounds that had developed perfectly regular correspondences, but without the required phonetic conditioning environment, apparent sound-changes-in-progress that were not entirely regular, and confirmed that speech sounds are highly variable from utterance to utterance, and from talker to talker. A terminological dispute erupted over what counted as sound change, and was settled by the introduction of new terminology, such as the initiation or actuation and spread or diffusion of sound change. Because of the usefulness of the Neogrammarian principle to historical and comparative linguists, researchers who examine other aspects of sound change have largely avoided direct confrontation, allowing the gradual narrowing of the meaning of the term sound change to refer to something that is very small in scale in order to maintain its phonetic conditioning and exceptionlessness, even though the phenomena to which it first referred were very broad and sweeping changes. While there is debate about just what may be considered sound change, the larger goals of all linguists studying sound change is to understand how sound change works, to isolate the causes and mechanisms of change, to better understand language, and hopefully one day be able to make predictions about sound change. In this dissertation, I outline a general model of phonetically gradual sound change, using experimental evidence to support its premises. This general model holds that while the basis for sound change is phonetic variation, the actuation period of sound change begins when the phonetic variation is associated with some other co-occurring factor, whether phonetic, phonological, physical, social, grammatical, syntactic, etc., or i (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2007, English (as a Second Language)

The field of second language acquisition (SLA) has accepted the ancient Greek tradition of grammar and the structure of language as a foundation for language acquisition, instruction and assessment (Yngve, 1996). Accordingly, much emphasis has been placed on how well foreign language learners (FLLs) can reproduce sentences that are grammatical. Instructors spend much of their time teaching their students grammatical rules in a fashion that follows current theories of SLA, and even though the theories of SLA have changed slightly the focus has continued to remain on the students learning grammar. Nonetheless, there have been many researchers who question the students' language ability. Upon such evaluation of the Foreign Language programs, these researchers look at the order of acquisition as a possible cause for the problems FLLs have when learning a foreign language (Pupura, 2004; Gass and Selinker, 2001). As Yngve (1996, p. 46) points out, the problem lies within the conceptual framework of traditional theoretical linguistics, which assumes that grammar exists in the physical domain or real world. Typically, researchers in the fields of SLA and foreign language instruction have thought of communication as what happens when people use language. This conventional assumption places language (the abstraction) in the center and marginalizes, or at least makes secondary, the people who are communicating (the physical domain reality). This assumption has lead researchers of SLA to focus on the apparent order of acquisition of grammar. Because of this domain confusion, FLLs are not taught to communicate but are taught to talk about a language. Accordingly, FLLs are assessed on how well they know the grammar of a language or on a person's ability to produce language in a grammatically appropriate manner. This study will examine different instruction methods, either traditional grammatical language instruction, or methods focused on real-world observable communicative behav (open full item for complete abstract)