Digital Commons Network^™

Terminating Pregnancies In Boccaccio, Anne C. Leone

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

Analyzing examples from the Decameron (1349-51), De mulieribus claris (1361), and the Corbaccio (1365), I argue that Boccaccio (1313-75) demonstrates an awareness of theological, legal and medical opinions on abortion and contraception at the time. However, he is more attuned to the practical concerns of pregnancy than are many of his contemporaries. Acknowledging the variety of situations facing pregnant people and some parts of their lived experience that were ignored by many religious and legal authorities, Boccaccio highlights a disconnection between theory and practice, and thereby raises questions about the limits of abstract knowledge in the face of practical concerns.

Diverse Presentations Of Aphasia: A Comparative Analysis Of Polysynthetic And Analytic Languages Through Kanien'keha (Mohawk) And English Morphology And Syntax, Halle L. Elder

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

This paper looks to compare two linguistically diverse languages, English and Kanien'keha, a native American language commonly known as Mohawk. The comparison will revolve around the morphology and syntax typologies of these two languages. In addition to the morphological and syntactic comparison, I will discuss how aphasia presents itself in different language typologies, placing this comparison onto English and Kanien'keha. The research questions I look to answer are: How does word formation and sentence structure differ between English and Kanien'kéha? Does aphasia present differently in analytic and polysynthetic languages like English and Kanien'kéha? The morphological data and syntactic data are …

9th Gsep Research Symposium - 2025

GSEP Research Symposium

The Ninth Annual GSEP Research Symposium, themed "Building Bridges to Elevate Humanity: Innovations and Insights in Education and Psychology", was hosted by the Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology (GSEP) on June 19–20, 2025, at the historic Château d’Hauteville in Switzerland and virtually via Zoom.

This hybrid symposium convened a vibrant global community of students, alumni, faculty, and scholars to share research that addresses real-world challenges, advances scholarly inquiry, and builds pathways for inclusive collaboration and leadership. Spanning a wide array of topics—from artificial intelligence and mental health to trauma-informed practices, educational equity, social justice, and cross-cultural leadership—the …

Visual Literacy, English Learners, And The Slider, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

The article looks at some of the ways “degrees of intensity” can be taught and practiced with visual supports such as sliders, graphs, or emojis, with a focus on English learners of all ages.

Indigenous And Online: Implications For Contemporary Zapotec Language Acquisition And Heritage Learning In Central Oaxaca, Esénia Bañuelos , '26

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Within the Indigenous communities of the United States and Mexico, combating language loss in a moment of exponential language loss is one of working in conjunction with contemporary tools – or creating the future of language preservation itself from them. Technological advances of the 21st century– including the expansion of instant messaging, video streaming, and photography sharing platforms– have sometimes been considered antithetical to language reclamation practices and Indigenous cultural maintenance more generally (Chibrow and Meighan-Chibrow, 2021; Warschauer, 1998). One example of this is made visible in concerns expressed by First Nations Elders in that technology may be depended upon …

Colonial Christianity: The Language Of Evangelization Through The Levanto 1766 Joyful Mysteries Of The Rosary Poems, Lillian E. Chan , '26

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This thesis presents a translation from Colonial Valley Zapotec to English of the five poems based on the biblical Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary found in the 1766 Christian catechism attributed to Dominican friar Leonardo Levanto. I analyze the construction of the linguistic strategies revealed by the translation (periphrasis, semantic bifurcation, neologisms, calques, and metaphors) as well as examine the extent to which these constructions were poetic innovations versus drawing on already-established language. Together, the translation and analysis of the Levanto (1766) Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary poems illustrate how language was used as a tool for evangelization in colonial …

Postcolonial Policies And Practices Towards Language In Algeria And Côte D’Ivoire, Charlotte Anne Dutcher , '26

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This thesis discusses language policies and practices in Algeria and Côte d’Ivoire. These two countries were both colonized by France in the 19th century, and under their rule, French was enforced as an official language across French colonies. After their respective decolonizations in the mid-20th century, Algeria and Côte d’Ivoire diverged in their language policies. Côte d’Ivoire kept French as an official language, and Algeria instead chose Arabic, pursuing a national policy of Arabization. This thesis aims to analyze the factors contributing to these differing policies, while also addressing the language practices, and how they vary from the policies. To …

“He’S Here, He’S Not Queer”: The Indexical Potential Of Pronoun Use On American Drag Reality Television, Finn Verdonk , '26

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

When English speakers talk about drag performers, what factors impact the pronoun that is used? Pulling data from two seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race (Season 4 and Season 14) and one season of Dragula (Season 5), this thesis attempts to understand the ways in which drag performers use pronouns in discourse about fellow drag performers. Building from Myers’s 2018 proposal that using he/him pronouns for drag queens can index shadiness or criticism, I expand her sample to see if her findings hold up over time and across franchises. I find that he/him pronouns on RPDR no longer index shadiness and …

¿Soy Bilingüe? ¡Soy Bilingüe!: How Bilingual Proficiency Influences Code Switching, Natalie S. Cortez , '26

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

Between Opposite And Unity: A Cross-Linguistic Study Of Contranyms In Classical Chinese, German, And English, Che Lu , '26

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This thesis aims to contribute to the study of contranyms — a special kind of polysemy where one word, character, or even morpheme, has two contradictory meanings — from a comparative perspective by examining representative examples in Classical Chinese, English, and German, with a brief consideration of the absence of such phenomena in Modern Chinese. With the help of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and Hegelian dialectics, this study will analyze how such words encode semantic dialectics and the evolution of meaning.

The selection of these three languages reflects their distinct typologies and approaches to meaning formation. Classical Chinese, as an …

What’S In A Name (Order): Linguistic And Extralinguistic Constraints In Fandom Ship Names, Glory Zhang , '26

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

Morphology-Performance Relationships To Understand Cichlid Neurocranial Evolution In The Context Of Adaptive Radiation, Sarah Pascarella

Theses and Dissertations from DePaul University

Cichlid fishes have undergone multiple adaptive radiations in the rift lakes of East Africa pairing rapid taxonomic and morphological diversification. Lake Malawi’s rock-dwelling cichlids (mbuna) have diversified into hundreds of species that partition their habitat by depth and diet resulting in high morphological and behavioral diversity. We characterized morphological differences and performed behavioral assays among four cichlid genera from Lake Malawi focused on understanding form-function relationships in the neurocranium and oral feeding apparatus. We characterized neurocranial shape using 3D geometric morphometrics across a large taxonomic sample of mbuna cichlids, focusing primarily on the Tropheops species complex. Alongside broad changes in …

Mama, Appa, And Titi: What Makes Words Sound Parental? A Phonological Exploration Of Parental Terms In And Beyond The Gender Binary, Madeleine C. S. Kruckemeye , '26

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This paper addresses the following research question: What phonological components make a word sound ‘parental’ cross-linguistically and (how) do those components relate to the social genders associated with the word? The goal in answering this question is to extend Jakobson (1960) and Murdock’s (1959) work to be inclusive of our current understanding of gender and gender roles, and to create more options for queer parents and other families that are recognizable as parental terms, an important factor as found by Frank et al. (2017). The research consists of a literature review, an analysis of cross-linguistic parental terms, and an online …

Lost In Translation: Chomskyan Analysis Of Language Variation In Ai, Post-Critical Learners, And Native Speakers, Hannah Van Rijnswou

Holster Scholar Projects

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized linguistic theory, raising questions about human language acquisition. Some argue AI's language generation challenges the concept of innate linguistic ability, while others contend it reinforces it. This research examines AI's "Surplus of the Stimulus" learning—relying on vast datasets—against human language acquisition, particularly within Chomskyan frameworks of Universal Grammar and the "Poverty of the Stimulus." By analyzing language production across three groups—Native English Speakers, Post-Critical Period Second Language Learners, and LLMs—this study compares linguistic complexity using the Lexical Opulence Index (LOI). Data is collected through structured prompts across four linguistic registers: …

The Processing Of Emotional Prosody And Semantics In Native And Non-Native Chinese Speakers, Cheng Xiao

Theses and Dissertations

Emotional information in spoken language is conveyed through both semantic and prosodic cues. While listeners interpret the meaning of utterances (what is said), they also detect the speaker’s emotional prosody (how it is said). For non-native speakers, processing these two types of information simultaneously can be challenging, particularly in a tonal language such as Mandarin Chinese, where the same acoustic feature (i.e., pitch) encodes both lexical semantics and emotional prosody. This dissertation reports a series of behavioral and fMRI experiments investigating how native and non-native Chinese speakers perceive and process emotional prosody and semantics in words and sentences. Behaviorally, results …

Anthropomorphism In Language And Thought: The Effect Of Agentive Linguistic Framing On Readers’ Perceptions Of Ai Animacy, Dawson Petersen

Theses and Dissertations

Over the past decade, deep learning AI systems have gone from academic obscurity to near cultural centrality in the developed world. As these technologies become increasingly integrated into daily life, there is growing cause for concern about AI anthropomorphism—i.e., the perception of AIs as more human than they really are. Despite the potential risks, AI developers continue to market their technologies using agentive language that seems to be designed to encourage anthropomorphism. The current dissertation utilizes behavioral and eye-tracking methods to examine the relationship between agentive linguistic framing and AI anthropomorphism in both controlled judgments and automatic inferences. The results …

From Canterbury To The Conference: Chaucer’S First 18 Lines Reborn, Charles X. Li, Tony Liang, Anika Saphiloff

Journal of the Symposium of University Research and Creative Expression

Project Mentor(s): Charles X. Li, PhD

This presentation examines the phonological shift from Chaucerian Middle English to Modern English, focusing on the Great English Vowel Shift. Using the first eighteen lines of Chaucer’s “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales as a case study, we demonstrate how vowel sounds in Middle English transitioned to those in Early Modern and Modern English. By analyzing specific words from these opening lines, we illustrate the vowel changes that marked the shift and their impact on pronunciation. Our presentation will conclude with a recitation of Chaucer’s first eighteenth lines, intertwined couplet by couplet by their …

From Old English Genitives To Modern English Possessives: Tracing Grammar Evolution Through Biogrammar And Grammatical Biology, Charles X. Li

Journal of the Symposium of University Research and Creative Expression

Project Mentor(s): Charles X. Li, PhD

This paper presents a biologically grounded and historically informed framework, Biogrammar, as a means to explain grammatical evolution and cognitive processing. It compares Biogrammar with two foundational theories in the study of language: the Nature-Nurture Hypothesis and Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. As a case study, the paper examines the historical evolution of English plural and genitive constructions, focusing on morphological developments such as the -as/-es mergers, his-genitives, group genitives, and the rise of the of + noun phrase pattern. These diachronic changes are interpreted as evidence of grammar functioning as a biologically adaptive system shaped …

"Our River Is Full Of Trash And Many Fish Die" Children's Voices From Pasuruan, Indonesia: Discursive Strategies In Positive Discourse Analysis For Sustainability, Bambang Prastio, Ahsani Maulidina, Agung Rinaldy Malik, Achmad Tantowi Azis

The Qualitative Report

Addressing river pollution and understanding the role of children in environmental conservation are essential for maintaining ecosystem health and sustainability. This study used positive discourse analysis to explore children's discourse about river pollution in Pasuruan, East Java, Indonesia. Data were collected using walk-and talk ethnographic interviews with 15 children aged 7 to 11 years. The findings reveal that these children employed five discursive strategies: (1) nomination: metaphor, comparison, and cultural practices; (2) predication: positive attitude in the forms of disposition and behavior; (3) argumentation: contrast and parallelism; (4) perspectivisation, involving a type of religious representation that includes references to the …

Academic Dispositions Of Undergraduate Students: A Comparison Of Students With And Without Learning Disabilities, Gabriel Jones

McNair Scholars Research

Students with learning disabilities face complex emotional, psychological, and academic challenges, though prior research presents mixed findings. Some studies highlight negative outcomes, such as heightened shame, emotional distress, and diminished self-efficacy. In contrast, others identify positive traits, including resilience, higher achievement drive, and reduced stress compared to peers without learning disabilities (LDs). The present study aimed to clarify these inconsistencies by employing a mixed methods design to examine differences between undergraduate students with and without learning disabilities. Specifically, the study assessed shame-proneness, self-efficacy, hope, motivation style, and attribution style, while also exploring linguistic patterns through narrative analysis using the Linguistic …

The Georgian Of Heritage Speaker Children, Cass Lowry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents three research articles united in the goal of describing the Georgian language as it is spoken by heritage speakers in the Brooklyn diaspora. The Georgian heritage speaker subjects recruited for these studies were children due to immigration patterns at the time when experimental data was collected. Their production of morphosyntactic inflection and pronouns is compared to adult and child homeland speakers.

Heritage speakers of Georgian demonstrate the following divergences from homeland and standard language comparisons. Nominal case inflection is most affected in heritage production, as heritage speakers use a default case or collapse Georgian's split-ergative and inverse …

The Interaction Of Multilingualism And Depressed Mood On Cognitive Set-Shifting, Annalise Caviasco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although findings are mixed, many researchers believe there are cognitive benefits to multilingualism, a phenomenon dubbed the “bilingual advantage”. Of these apparent benefits, cognitive flexibility, or the ability to shift thinking styles based on the context or specific demands of a certain situation, is thought to be highly relevant. Current literature suggests that one aspect of multilingualism, the practice of “code-switching” between languages throughout their daily lives, is related to increased general cognitive flexibility compared to monolinguals. Another branch of research on cognitive flexibility investigating the role of affect in cognition demonstrates that clinical depression as well as transient negative …

Processing Of Diphthongs By Turkish English Bilinguals: An Erp Study, Ecem Kopuz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines how native phonological experience influences the brain’s response to speech sounds in Turkish-English late bilinguals and English monolinguals. We asked whether neural responses reflecting encoding of auditory information would be sensitive to language specific experience. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), and specifically, the Acoustic Change Complex (ACC) we measured neural responses to four stimuli, /u/, /ua/, /iu/, and /ia/, where vowel quality changes for three of these. A change from /u/ to /a/ or /i/ to /a/ within a syllable (as in [ua] and [ia]) represents a clear vowel quality shift. All participants were expected to show sensitivity …

Structured Discussions About Linguistic Diversity: Student Voices And Campus-Based Cultural Mapping, Adrienne Jankens, Nicole Guinot Varty, Anna Elise Lindner, Linda Jimenez, Marni Lorenz, K. M. Begian-Lewis, Colleen Hart, Anita Mixon, Ma'idah Shiekh, Lena Hakim

English Faculty Research Publications

The study presented in this chapter foregrounds student voice research and students as participants in identifying locations on our urban research campus where linguistic diversity can be acknowledged and developed as a tool for knowledge-making. Beyond acknowledging the presence of diverse languages and linguistic practices on our urban campus, this study takes steps toward ensuring that linguistic diversity is recognized by faculty and administrators as a rich and active feature of campus life that crosses academic boundaries.

The study asks the following questions:

● How do Wayne State University (WSU) students experience diversity on campus?

● How do they experience …

The Salience Of Function Words In Implicit Statistical Linguistic Learning: An Erp Investigation, Daniel M. Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research has indicated that children and adults can implicitly learn language patterns; however, questions still remain regarding the role and nature of implicit learning, particularly of sequential patterns. Implicit statistical learning is a type of unconscious learning of sequential patterns, which may be especially relevant to phrase structure learning. Prior studies have highlighted the differential processing of function words (FWs), such as determiners, relative to content and nonsense words and have also pointed to particular neural response patterns (specifically, Anterior Negativity, or AN) to early syntactic violations. To date, there is relatively little work directly investigating the role of FWs …

From Homeland To Hostland: Language Ownership Of Heritage Dialect And Narratives Of Third Culture Kids Of The Gulf, Maryam Aref

Theses and Dissertations

The main purpose of this study is to examine Arab Adult Third Culture Kids’ sense of heritage language ownership and their identity constructions in relation to their transnational Arab Gulf context. The present study has three main aims: to ascertain their sense of ownership towards their heritage dialects, to understand the basis for their claimed or denied ownership, and to investigate the positions they ascribed to themselves and others in relation to their belonging and transnational and linguistic experiences. The study aims to fill the gap where there is a scarcity of sociolinguistic research around Arab Third Culture Kids in …

Scientific Multimodal Summarization : Integrating Knowledge Across Textual, Visual And Auditory Content, Zusheng Tan

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

As scientific publications increasingly incorporate multimodal content, ranging from textual descriptions to figures, tables, presentation videos, and audio, there is a growing need for summarization systems that can effectively process and integrate information across these diverse modalities.

This work presents a comprehensive exploration of Scientific Multimodal Summarization, introducing a series of novel architectures and datasets aimed at advancing this emerging field. 1): We begin by introducing CMT-Sum, which integrates multimodal scientific source content (i.e., primarily paper text and figures) to generate high-quality textual summaries and identify representative graphical abstracts. We refer to this task as Scientific Multimodal Summarization with …

Some Puzzles Concerning Gujarati Nominalized Verbs In Before And After Sentences, Priya P. Patel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aspect, which relates events to time periods, interacts in complex ways with temporal operators. This complexity is exemplified in the Gujarati language, where certain imperfective nominalized verbal forms are considered unacceptable with the temporal operator pachi (after) but not with pehlaa (before). This paper aims to shed light on this semantic unacceptability by combining insights from prior studies relating to aspect in other Indo-Aryan langauages with previous work done on English before and after.

Dari Editor Vol. 15 No. 2 (Agustus) 2025, Rahayu Surtiati Hidayat

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Dengan gembira kami menerbitkan sepuluh artikel dan dua timbangan buku dalam edisi ini; terbitan rekor untuk jurnal ini. Kami berharap dapat menerbitkan banyak artikel dalam setiap edisi. Isi tulisan yang kami terbitkan juga meningkat mutunya baik dari segi penelitian maupun penyajian. Tiga artikel menarik perhatian dengan menunjukkan berbagai karya yang menjadi lambang kejayaan suatu negara dan keguyuban suatu komunitas (Titik Pudjiastuti, Muhamad Alnoza, Nur Aini Setiawati). Tiga artikel lain membahas kehadiran pendatang yang mengubah sistem dalam negara (Dien Rovita Rovita, Mela Maulina Putri, Rudi Ekasiswanto). Tidak kalah menarik empat artikel bertemakan karya sastra (Asri Pratiwi Wulandari, Raka Darmawan, Haikal Haikal) …

Serat Yusuf: Sastra Islam Populer Di Jawa Timur, Titik Pudjiastuti, Mamlahatun Buduroh, Mu’Jizah Mu’Jizah, Rias Suharjo, Turita Indah Setyani, Dwi Rahmawanto

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Serat Yusup is one of the popular Islamic literary works in Java, especially in East Java. This literary work is a handwritten ancient manuscript written in the form of tembang macapat, in Javanese language, and using Pegon or Javanese script. Serat Yusup which create by the students (santri) is inspired by Surah Yusuf, the 12th Surah of the Quran. As a literary work, its story differs significantly from its inspirational text, and there are so many of it. In relation to this, the question arises: what are the reasons behind the creation of Serat Yusup and why is it …