Digital Commons Network^™

Native Language Adaptation To Novel Verb Argument Structures By Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Electrophysiological Investigation, Eve Higby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals have to learn two different grammatical systems. Some aspects of these grammars may be similar across the two languages (for example, the active-passive alternation) while others may exist in only one of the two grammars (for example, the distinction between recent and distant past). This dissertation investigates the degree to which grammar information specific to only one language is available when processing the other language. In particular, the current study focuses on the application of grammatical structures from the bilinguals’ second-learned language to their first-learned language, a direction of language transfer not often investigated. Based on a Shared Syntax …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

The Relationship Between Lexical Performance And Regional Gray Matter Volumes: A Longitudinal Study Of Cognitively Healthy Elderly, Jungmoon Hyun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated the longitudinal relationship among aging, performance on lexical tasks, and regional gray matter volumes over 2-7 years. A total of 137 older participants who remained cognitively normal were administered four lexical tasks at each time point: the Boston Naming Test (BNT), Vocabulary Test, Semantic- and Phonemic-Fluency task. In addition, they underwent repeated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning acquired within two months of the lexical tasks. The average interval between time points was 2.36 years (range 1.50-7.64) and the average number of time points was 2.65 times (range 2-5).

Results indicated that age differentially affects lexical task performance …

Sawft.Servindat... [V1.7], Ray Ferreira

Theses and Dissertations

A descriptor of my artistic practice, a text piece, a series of linguistic musings, and more, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] attempts to explore the dance between language, embodiment, and performativity. More specifically, the text moves through metaphor and metonym, Englishes, Spanishes, and Images, the performativity of representation and the representation of performativity —my body. My body moving across spaces and times. As part of the Sawft.servindat… series, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] uses the scroll down format of most PDF reading software to activate the inherently embodied experience of intra-acting with technologies, resisting the dichotomy between the virtual and analog. Englishes juxtaposed with Spanishes juxtaposed …

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Interfictional Identities: Transformation And Dissimulation In The Early Modern Period, Yael Nezer Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Interfictional Identities develops the concept of interfictional transformations. In these transformations, characters in early modern texts adopt new identities rooted in previous literature. Specifically, Interfictional Identities explores how four early modern moments of interfictional transformation—of Nick Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of Pyrocles in Sidney’s New Arcadia, of Uriel da Costa in A Specimen of Human Life, and of Don Quixote in Cervantes’ novel—produce both literary and literal hybridity. One wonders why, in these works, writers and playwrights such as Shakespeare, Sidney, Da Costa, and Cervantes favor interfictional transformations over mere allusions to classical literature, …