ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- Creators: Shen, Wei
- Creators: Gelderen, Elly van
This study investigates the emergence of aspectual morphology by testing the DPTH and the effect of adverbials at interpreting grammatical aspect in this process of acquisition. Twenty-eight English-speaking learners of Spanish (beginning, intermediate and advanced) and twenty native-Spanish speakers are tested with two written comprehension tasks that assess the interpretation of habitual/imperfect and episodic/preterite readings of eventive verbs. The truth-value judgment task incorporates forty short stories with two summary sentences, from which participants must choose one as true. The grammaticality judgment task presents sixty-four sentences with temporal adverbials of position and duration, thirty-two are grammatical and thirty-two are ungrammatical. Participants must accept or reject them using a 5-point likert scale.
The findings indicate that the DPTH is partially supported by the statistical data showing a default marker, imperfect for beginning learners, and preterite for intermediate learners. This provides support to the argument of unsteady aspectual checking of [-bounded] in the spec of AspP and not necessarily by only checking [+past] in the TP for intermediate learners. The influence of the lexical aspect value of the verb is partially evident with advanced learners. Temporal adverbials play an important role at interpreting grammatical aspect with intermediate and advanced learners. Results show that beginning learners are not influenced by the presence of adverbials due to their inexperience with the Spanish aspectual morphology.
The findings also allow the confirmation of prior results about factors that influence the interpretation of preterite and imperfect. First, the instruction of aspectual morphology co-indexed with specific temporal adverbials, and second, that learners rely on lexical cues at the sentential level, while native speakers rely on discursive ones.
This thesis is organized as follows. First, I provide a brief description about the emergence and development of China’s guarantee industry, as well as its current status. Next, I explain what kinds of risks faced by guarantee firms in China that influence their performance and survival, and summarize the various external and internal risk factors. I also conduct one in-depth case analysis to illustrate how a guarantee firm can better identify the risks it is exposed to. Next, on the basis of another in-depth case analysis, I develop a framework that can help guarantee firms to systematically develop effective measures of risk identification and prevention. I conclude with a discussion of this study’s implications for guarantee firms and the regulatory governmental agencies in China.
This foundational study designs a sensorimotor approach to pronunciation pedagogy and tests its effect on the L2 speech of five adult (late) learners of American English. Throughout an eight week classroom experiment, participants from different first language backgrounds received instruction on Articulatory Settings (Honickman, 1964) and the sensorimotor mechanism of speech acquisition (Waldron 2010; Guenther et al., 2006). In addition, they attended five adapted lessons of the Feldenkrais technique (Feldenkrais, 1972) designed to develop sensorimotor awareness of the vocal apparatus and improve the quality of L2 speech movement. I hypothesize that such sensorimotor learning triggers overall positive changes in the way L2 learners deal with speech articulators for L2 and that over time they develop better pronunciation.
After approximately eight hours of intervention, analysis of results shows participants’ improvement in speech rate, degree of accentedness, and speaking confidence, but mixed changes in word intelligibility and vowel space area. Albeit not statistically significant (p >.05), these results suggest that such a sensorimotor approach to L2 phonological acquisition warrants further consideration and investigation for use in the L2 classroom.
On the basis of prior research findings and the current situation of the Chinese securities industry, I first develop a theoretical model about the sources of competitive advantage for Chinese securities companies, and then compile a comprehensive list of observable indicators that can be used to assess a Chinese securities company’s core competency. Next, I conduct a quantitative analysis to assess the core competency and relative market positions of the leading Chinese securities companies using data from 2010 to 2014. Overall, the results suggest that market-driven M&As increases the core competency of the acquiring securities companies. I then conduct four in-depth case analyses to better understand the mechanisms through which M&As can help increase the acquiring firms' core competency. I conclude with a discussion of the findings and their implications for Chinese securities companies and the overseeing governmental agencies.
Firstly, the essay analyzes the relationship between the universities education and the supply and demand labor market by using the view of labor economics, and shows the mainly phenomenon and features of supply-demand imbalance. And then, the writer considered that universities talent cultivation development of China has gone through “absolute shortage”, “relative shortage” and “structural unbalanced” three stages. Thirdly, the survey results confirmed that the talent cultivation in universities does not match the demand of the labor market. On one other hand, over educated is a common phenomenon in the academic education. On the other hand, the graduates are lack of education skills training. Fourthly, the essay analyzes the reasons which lead to the unbalance. The unbalance is not only affected by the macro factors, but also by the micro factors. Fifthly, build up the interaction system model “UPT-LM” for the universities talent cultivation and the labor market, and separately building up the macro interaction system and the micro interaction system to analyze the balance of supply and demand. Based on this, it should strengthen the interaction on the feedback mechanism. At last, strengthening the connection of universities talent cultivation and labor market is a systematic program which needs the corporation from the government, the universities and the labor market.
In the late 1990s, Chomsky established the Minimalist Program which aims to describe the clause structure in as simple and economic mechanism as possible, and he advanced his famous research program to include phase theory, which aims to restrict the syntactic operations. On the other side, Rizzi (1997, 2001) proposed the Cartographic approach. In this approach, Rizzi attempted to analyze the left periphery domain in detail, and suggested the split CP hypothesis. Following those two approaches, Ginsburg (2009) and Totsuka (2015) unified them into one approach and suggested that ForceP, TopicP, and IntP are phasal domain while FocusP, FinP, and WhP are not. An overview of the Chomskyan model and Rizzi’s approach has been provided in Chapter 2. Also, this dissertation discussed the unified approach by Ginsburg (2009) and Totsuka (2015).
In addition to the overview of the general frameworks, this dissertation discussed the clause structure such as the word order, left periphery domain (i.e., CP), and resumption in MSA. Furthermore, Chapter 2 presented the earlier studies on the wh-questions in MSA and highlighted the major gap which this dissertation attempts to fill. In these studies the structure of wh-questions in MSA were mis-analyzed because the surface structure of the nine wh-questions might look the same, but, in fact, they are not. Therefore, this dissertation attempts to (re)study the structure of wh-questions with taking into consideration the resumption and [definiteness].
In Chapter 3, the methodology and corpus analysis, which is used in collecting the wh-questions in MSA, are discussed. Finally, Chapter 4 analyzed the corpus findings based on the unified approach by Ginsburg (2009) and Totsuka (2015) and showed some evidence that man ‘who’ and ayy ‘which’ questions in MSA are in phasal phrase (i.e., IntP) while the rest of wh-questions are not.
innovation into the burst period, Shared faster economic growth, and then entered into a
rapid expansion in 2014, quickly penetrate into many areas and market segments.
As the securities industry practitioners and Internet financial practitioners, I am
very concerned about sharing economic model in the development of securities
investment niche. As the Internet and mobile penetration rate rise in recent years, the
Internet financial in the rapid development of our country, investors get used for
investment decision-making information via the Internet. Internet social investment
sharing platform based on knowledge sharing and rapid development, has formed
"opinion leaders", "combined with", "automated financial innovation model". The
emergence of these new patterns, provide investors with investment of knowledge sharing,
the investors behavior changes, many small and medium-sized investors into social
sharing platform for the combination of investment talent information and follow orders,
and centered on investment talent view form fan interaction.
This article around the "Shared economic environment on the impact of portfolio
share on investor behavior research," the theme, the relevant literature and resources, and
to detect Shared economic environment provided by the social share portfolio, whether to
change the traditional information decision and disadvantages of small and medium-sized
investors, whether really improved the small and medium-sized investors return on
investment, its conclusion try to explain the traditional period research literature on active
investment and passive investment, the relevant conclusions of small and medium-sized
investors and institutional investors, sharing in the Internet the rapid development of
economic period is changed.