This thesis investigated how Chinese language and culture education as supported by the Confucius Institutes is perceived by secondairy education students in the Netherlands and assesses whether...Show moreThis thesis investigated how Chinese language and culture education as supported by the Confucius Institutes is perceived by secondairy education students in the Netherlands and assesses whether these students experience Chinese influence on their education by conducting interviews. The analysis from the interviews concludes that students have a generally positive experience with learning Chinese, that there is a lot of attention paid to culture education, and that students do not appear to experience any Chinese influence on their education.Show less
The tritone paradox is a compelling auditory illusion discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1986. Upon hearing a tritone interval (i.e. a tone pair related by half an octave) such as A#-D, any one...Show moreThe tritone paradox is a compelling auditory illusion discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1986. Upon hearing a tritone interval (i.e. a tone pair related by half an octave) such as A#-D, any one listener might hear it ascend, whilst another listener might hear the same interval descend. The illusion is based on Shepard tones (1964), which are simple to identify in terms of pitch class, but complex in terms of specific relative tonal height. This makes it difficult for two of such tones spaced at an equal distance to determine which tone is higher than the other. However, much remains unknown about the different interpersonal factors that contribute to the mental strategies that lead to deciphering the complex intervals as either ascending or descending. Previous research suggests that not someone’s musicality, but the language variation spoken and heard during childhood might influence their perception of the tritone paradox. More specifically, it is thought that experience pertaining to the pitch range of a language would shape our general interpretation of which pitch classes are heard as higher or lower than others, in turn affecting our perception of the tritone illusion (Deutsch, 1987, 1990, 1994, 2004, 2007; Deutsch et al, 1991). In an attempt to unravel this psychoacoustic mystery further, this study examines the relationship between musical, spoken, and perceptive behaviour of people who had grown up in the Netherlands speaking Dutch as their first language. Therefore, a group of 29 native Dutch participants were recruited for an online experiment. After completing a short background survey, the participants received a perception task in which they needed to identify tritone paradox intervals as either ‘falling’ or ‘rising’, and they were asked to record themselves reading aloud a passage of text, from which F0 measurements were drawn. Additionally, participants were presented with a tailored version of the Musical Ear Test (Correia et al., 2021, adapted from Wallentin et al., 2010), a standardised test to index their level of musicality. Based on the findings from these tasks, it was concluded that a) Dutch listeners of the tritone paradox follow a perception pattern similar to Californian American listeners (their mental orientations of the pitch class circle, reflecting which pitches they generally perceive as relatively higher than others, are both centred around peak pitch classes C-C#); b) level of musicality is not a key factor in someone’s perception of the tritone paradox; and c) (Dutch) pitch range in speech does not correlate with perception of the tritone paradox. Nevertheless, since the (confirmed) hypothesis that Dutch and Californian listeners react similarly to the illusion was based solely on pitch range literature, it is expected that future replication of the study with a larger and more balanced participant population, and an improved methodology pertaining to spoken data collection could find more conclusive support for the theory that spoken pitch range influences tonal perception. Doing so would further contribute to gaining insight in the psychological connections between our spoken language and how we personally experience the auditory world around us.Show less
This thesis approaches the problem of cross-linguistic authorship attribution in the context of written English by native Japanese authors. To this end, a hybrid qualitative and quantitative...Show moreThis thesis approaches the problem of cross-linguistic authorship attribution in the context of written English by native Japanese authors. To this end, a hybrid qualitative and quantitative analysis of a learner corpus is conducted, making use of a novel automatic error classifier ERAA. It was found that in a comparison with authors from nine other Asian countries, language errors that native Japanese authors tend to produce in written English that were found in earlier literature appear to be unique to the Japanese authors within a given writing theme. Following statistical analysis, it is furthermore suggested that there exist types of L2 language errors that are unaffected by the surrounding writing theme, while other types are affected. Finally, it is concluded that the employed hybrid analysis method is viable to efficiently conduct large-scale corpus research to study a variety of L2 linguistic traits.Show less
South Korea’s growing economic status and power over the last century has brought more attention to the increasing presence of the country in the global arena. One of the prime examples of South...Show moreSouth Korea’s growing economic status and power over the last century has brought more attention to the increasing presence of the country in the global arena. One of the prime examples of South Korea’s rising presence on the global stage is the transnational phenomenon known as the Korean Wave. As K-pop and K-dramas continue to spread across the world, the Korean language is making its way to increase its spread at a similar pace. Therefore, at the centre of this paper stands the following research question: How does the spread of Hallyu serve as a tool of soft power for South Korea to promote the Korean language around the world?Show less
On the background of the Korean split into North and South, this thesis examines the lexical changes found in the Korean language as influenced by entirely different political and social structures...Show moreOn the background of the Korean split into North and South, this thesis examines the lexical changes found in the Korean language as influenced by entirely different political and social structures that developed in each part of the peninsula and what those developments mean for reunification prospects. The dictatorship in the North has been found to prescribe language changes top-down, purging most foreign influences in Korean lexica, while the South experienced a bottom-up language change shaped by the influx of foreign, particularly American, influence, economic growth and globalization. Situations of contact over the years, and especially the joint project for 'A Unified and Unabridged Korean Dictionary', as well as shared cultural roots and sufficient lexical similarities, lead to the conclusion that a hypothetical reunification could be executed despite the 75-year long separation.Show less
