Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Toward A Psychological Understanding Of The Effects Of Changes In Group Status On Intergroup Relations, Katya Alex Migacheva

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Societies undergoing drastic transformation are often inundated with intergroup strife, particularly, when the transformation is accompanied by drastic shifts in groups' status (e.g., Bettlehem & Janowitz, 1964). The present dissertation project aimed to begin understanding the effects of such changes in group status on intergroup outcomes, and to identify psychological processes that may underlie these effects. To achieve these goals, two studies examined perceived dimensions of status change ( magnitude, direction, and speed ) in relation to outgroup-specific outcomes (unity and threat ) and general diversity-related outcomes (attitudes toward equity, openness to diversity, and ethnocentrism ). Study 1 …

Word Recognition In The Parafovea: An Eye Movement Investigation Of Chinese Reading, Jinmian Yang

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Chinese is a logographic writing system that drastically differs from alphabetic scripts in many important aspects. Thus, the nature of parafoveal processing in reading Chinese may be different from that in reading alphabetic languages. Here, four eye-tracking experiments using the boundary display change paradigm (Rayner, 1975) were conducted to explore the role of high level information, like semantic and plausibility information, in the parafovea for Chinese readers.

Experiments 1 and 2 used two-character words that can have the order of their component characters reversed, and still be lexical units as target words. Readers received a parafoveal preview of a target …

Phonological Trends In The Lexicon: The Role Of Constraints, Michael Becker

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation shows that the generalizations that speakers project from the lexical exceptions of their language are biased to be natural and output-oriented, and it offers a model of the grammar that derives these biases by encoding lexical exceptions in terms of lexically-specific rankings of universal constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004). In this model, lexical trends, i.e. the trends created by the phonological patterning of lexical exceptions, are incorporated into a grammar that applies deterministically to known items, and the same grammar applies stochastically to novel items. The model is based on the Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm …

It’S ‘A Good Thing’: The Commodification Of Femininity, Affluence, And Whiteness In The Martha Stewart Phenomenon, Melissa A Click

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This study examines the ideologies of gender, race, and class present in Martha Stewart's unprecedented popularity, beginning with the publication of Stewart's first magazine in 1990 and ending in September 2004, after Stewart's conviction for her involvement in the ImClone scandal. My approach is built on the intersection of American mass communication research, British cultural studies, and feminist theory, and utilizes Hall's Encoding/Decoding model to examine how social, cultural and political discourses circulate in and through a mediated text and how those meanings are interpreted by those who receive them. Drawing from textual and ideological analysis of over thirteen years …

Landscape Ecology Of Large Fires In Southwestern Forests, Usa, Sandra L Haire

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

The recent increase in large fires in southwestern forests has prompted concern regarding their ecological consequences. Recognizing the importance of spatial patterns in influencing successional processes, I asked: (1) How do large fires change plant communities?; (2) What are the implications of these changes for ponderosa pine forests?; and (3) What is the relationship of fire severity to gradients of climate, fuels, and topography? To address the first two questions, I studied succession in the woody plant community at two sites that burned in high-severity fire: La Mesa fire in northern New Mexico (1977) and Saddle Mountain in northern Arizona …

High Stakes: A Poly-Communal Archaeology Of The Pocumtuck Fort, Deerfield, Massachusetts, Siobhan M Hart

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

The process of defining heritage is fraught with the inequalities of social and political power concomitant with colonialism. As a result, disenfranchised and marginalized groups worldwide have been given little say in heritage matters until recently. Though often perceived as "experts" on the past, archaeologists are just one of many stakeholders with interests in how the past is used in the present. As such, archaeologists today face the challenge of decolonizing heritage work through engagement with diverse stakeholder communities. In this dissertation, I explore the ways that archaeologists have been working at this over the last two decades through a …

Do Actions Speak Louder Than Knowledge? Action Manipulation, Parent-Child Discourse And Children’S Mental State Understanding In Pretense, Dawn K Melzer

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

In the current study children 3-5 years of age (N = 75) participated in a mental state task to investigate the effect of action saliency on young children's appreciation of mental states during pretend play activities. They also engaged in a parent-child interaction period, including storybook reading and pretend play activities, in order to examine the relation between mental state term utterances and performance on the mental state task. Two actors appeared side-by-side on a television screen, either in motion or as static images; one actor had knowledge of the animal he was pretending to be; the other actor did …

Post-Marxism After Althusser: A Critique Of The Alternatives, Ceren Ozselcuk

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation provides a particular Marxian class analytical political economy critique of post-Marxism. The dissertation demonstrates the ways in which different positions within post-Marxism continue to essentialize the conceptualizations of class and capitalist economy. What distinguishes this dissertation from other dominant critiques of post-Marxism is the anti-essentialist epistemological and ontological position it adopts. By adopting an anti-essentialist epistemological position the dissertation is able to demonstrate the discontinuities and continuities between post-Marxism and the Marxian tradition. The dissertation does this by reading the heterogeneous and disparate post-Marxian approaches as so many different ways to "resolve" the central tension of the Althusserian …

Word, Phrase, And Clitic Prosody In Bosnian, Serbian, And Croatian, Adam Werle

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

I investigate the phonology of prosodic clitics--independent syntactic words not parsed as independent prosodic words--in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian. I ask, first, how clitics are organized into prosodic structures, and second, how this is determined by the grammar. Following Zec (1997, 2005), I look at several clitic categories, including negation, prepositions, complementizers, conjunctions, and second-position clitics.

Based on a reanalysis of word accent (Browne and McCawley 1965, Inkelas and Zec 1988, Zec 1999), I argue that in some cases where a preposition, complementizer, or conjunction fails to realize accent determined by a following word, it is not a proclitic-- that …

Understanding Occlusion Inhibition: A Study Of The Visual Processing Of Superimposed Figures, Destinee L Chambers

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This study investigates a phenomenon that I have termed occlusion inhibition. This research and a small number of earlier studies suggest that, in some experimental conditions, when an attended (target) object is partially occluded by a distractor object, there is less attention allocated to the occluded region of the target object than to the visible parts of that object. In the literature, there are mixed results concerning this attentional effect. Some studies find it and others do not. This study investigates the differences between those conflicting studies with the goal of identifying the factor or factors that govern when occlusion …

Leviathan’S Rage: State Sovereignty And Crimes Against Humanity In The Late Twentieth Century, Cecil Bryant Lawson

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation explores the relationship between state sovereignty and major instances of crimes against humanity committed in the latter 20 ^th century. In order to examine this dynamics of this relationship, the author analyzes the history and theory of the concept of sovereignty and examines five case studies of crimes against humanity: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Argentina during the military junta from 1976 to 1983, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda in 1994, and the ongoing conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. State sovereign power is shown to be an important facilitating factor in these atrocities as …

The Role Of Lexical Contrast In The Perception Of Intonational Prominence In Japanese, Takahito Shinya

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

In this dissertation, I examine the effects of lexical accent on the perception of intonational prominence in Japanese. I look at how an F0 accent peak is perceived relative to another flanking F0 peak in the same utterance with respect to perceived intonational prominence. Through four experiments, I show that the lexical prosodic structure plays a significant role in the perception of intonational prominence.

I first show that two distinct perceptual processes are at play in the perception of relative perceived prominence in Japanese: accentual boost normalization and downstep normalization . Accentual boost normalization normalizes the accentual boost of an …

Variables In Natural Language, Meredith Landman

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

A central goal of generative linguistics is to determine what constitutes a possible grammar of a natural language. This thesis works toward that goal in positing a constraint on the possible semantic types of variables in natural language. Specifically, I argue here that the logical forms (LFs) of natural languages do not contain higher-type variables, i.e., variables of a type higher than that of an individual, type e (see Chierchia (1984) and Baker (2003) for similar proposals). I refer to this constraint as the No Higher-Type Variables constraint (NHTV).

Assuming that the domain of individuals, D, includes at least objects, …

The Syntax And Semantics Of Questions In Swedish, Elisabet Britt Engdahl

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation provides an explicit syntactic and semantic account for a reasonably large sample of question constructions in Swedish. Within generative grammar, the existence of non-local dependencies as in constituent questions has been taken as evidence for the need to postulate transformational rules in the grammar of natural languages. Recently a number of linguists have proposed ways of handling such dependencies without transformations. Until now, these proposals have been based on English. In this study, we investigate the possibility of extending non-transformational approaches to languages like Swedish where question formation differs from English in a significant way. In Swedish, more …

Keeping Alternative Institutions Alternative: A Comparative Study, Grant M. Ingle

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This research investigated the issue of keeping alternative institutions alternative both as an organizational problem of bureaucratization and as a research area with methodological complications. More specifically, the research addressed both sides of the issue by defining bureaucratization as gradual transformation of member control into conventional hierarchical control, and by employing an action-research model. To develop a coherent context for substantive and methodological questions, a detailed literature review identified several relevant areas of past research and commentary. In this review the Holleb and Abrams (1975) model of organizational development was examined in detail. Following consideration of workplace democratization and organizational …

Capturing The Adjective, Muffy E. A. Siegel

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Capturing the Adjective presents a formal, Montague Grammar treatment of an intuitively accessible distinction among adjectives. Many adjective meanings are computed relative to the properties corresponding to the common nouns they modify, but adjectives may also be absolute modifiers of individuals. Marya is a beautiful dancer may mean either that Marya is beautiful as a dancer – she dances beautifully (relative) or that Marya herself is beautiful (absolute).

The dissertation documents the relative/absolute distinction in Russian (where it is morphologically marked as long versus short) and in English (where it is not so marked, and some adjectives are exclusively relative …