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Full Issue Nov 2021

Full Issue

Newsletter of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

No abstract provided.

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Vowel Pronunciation As An Ethnic Marker: Pacific Islander Teens In Utah, Lisa M. Johnson Oct 2021

Vowel Pronunciation As An Ethnic Marker: Pacific Islander Teens In Utah, Lisa M. Johnson

Faculty Publications

Despite the growing numbers and visibility of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (NHPIs) in the U.S., these Americans are generally overlooked in the research on language variation. American dialectology tends to focus on speakers of European descent, and most research on minority ethno-racial groups has concentrated on larger demographic groups, such as African American and Latinx American groups. This combination of research deficits limits our understanding of linguistic variation and the social forces that influence it. In addition, it may reinforce stereotypes of “ethnolects” as nonstandard and wholly separate from regional and stylistic influence. (See Eckert, 2008.) Many of …

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An Investigation Of The Neuronal Signature Of Word Order Effects In Russian, Jeffrey Jack Green, Anastasia Stoops Oct 2021

An Investigation Of The Neuronal Signature Of Word Order Effects In Russian, Jeffrey Jack Green, Anastasia Stoops

Faculty Publications

Language comprehension proceeds by the activation of specific words (e.g. Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016) and graded prediction of upcoming word features (Luke & Christianson, 2016; Stoops & Christianson, 2017; 2019)

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Agency: What Does It Mean To Be A Human Being?, Richard N. Williams, Edwin E. Gantt, Lane Fischer Sep 2021

Agency: What Does It Mean To Be A Human Being?, Richard N. Williams, Edwin E. Gantt, Lane Fischer

Faculty Publications

This paper will look at the results of what has been termed “the crisis of modernism” and the related rise of postmodern perspectives in the 19th and 20th centuries. It concentrates on what is arguably the chief casualty of this crisis – human agency – and the social science that has developed out of the crisis. We argue that modern and postmodern social science ultimately obviate human agency in the understanding of what it means to be a human being. Attention is given to the contemporary intellectual world and the way in which it has been deeply informed by neo-Hegelian …

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The Gedda Technique, Carl Lawrenz Sep 2021

The Gedda Technique, Carl Lawrenz

Journal of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

When Nicolai Gedda died on January 1st 2017, the world of Opera and Classical Music lost one of the most accomplished, and certainly most versatile tenors of the 20th Century. His linguistic, vocal, and musical skills gave him the ability to master a remarkable number of musical styles. Included in Gedda’s stage, concert, and recorded repertoire are Oratorios by Bach and Handel, Operas by Gluck, Weber, Adam, Bizet, Massenet, Gounod, Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, Flotow, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Barber; Operettas by Strauss and Lehar; German, French, Russian, Swedish, and English Art Songs, and Russian Folk …

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Indigenous Population Displacement In Indonesia, Katelyn Covey Sep 2021

Indigenous Population Displacement In Indonesia, Katelyn Covey

Ballard Brief

Indigenous peoples in Indonesia continue to be displaced from their customary lands at high rates, with lands turned over to government and corporate entities. This continued displacement is due to legal barriers to securing recognition as indigenous peoples and indigenous land, deforestation and land degradation. and gaps between the implementation of laws and actual practices. Consequences for indigenous peoples include physical. social. economic. and political marginalization. a nutrition transition away from traditional food systems. and disconnection to traditional cultural. spiritual. and linguistic practices. Some possible alleviations to this issue include enacting laws and policies to ensure indigenous land tenure. as …

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Reducing The Manual Annotation Effort For Handwriting Recognition Using Active Transfer Learning, Eric Burdett Aug 2021

Reducing The Manual Annotation Effort For Handwriting Recognition Using Active Transfer Learning, Eric Burdett

Theses and Dissertations

Handwriting recognition systems have achieved remarkable performance over the past several years with the advent of deep neural networks. For high-quality recognition, these models require large amounts of labeled training data, which can be difficult to obtain. Various methods to reduce this effort have been proposed in the realms of active and transfer learning, but not in combination. We propose a framework for fitting new handwriting recognition models that joins active and transfer learning into a unified framework. Empirical results show the superiority of our method compared to traditional active learning, transfer learning, or standard supervised training schemes.

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Full Issue Aug 2021

Full Issue

Studia Antiqua

No abstract provided.

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Hedgehogs And Hyenas: Peculiar Animals Of Ancient Egypt, Elliotte Thurtle Aug 2021

Hedgehogs And Hyenas: Peculiar Animals Of Ancient Egypt, Elliotte Thurtle

Studia Antiqua

This essay discusses archeological information gained from the study of Egyptian artifacts, specifically focused on hedgehogs and hyenas. The aim of this paper is to expand our understanding of these animals in the day-to-day lives of Egyptians from this period, and further clarify the symbolism that they hold. Understanding the importance of less common animals within ancient Egyptian religion and symbolism is vital to understanding how the average person lived and interacted with the world around them.

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Mendacia In Minucius Felix: The Charged Rhetoric Of A Latin Apologist, Alexander Christensen Aug 2021

Mendacia In Minucius Felix: The Charged Rhetoric Of A Latin Apologist, Alexander Christensen

Studia Antiqua

Most scholars agree that Minucius Felix’s Latin Christian Octavius offers a sympathetic view toward Greco-Roman tradition. This consensus has been reached largely from work on the setting, date, and sources of the text, but no one has substantially investigated its rhetorical features and what they might reveal about Minucius’s view of Greco-Roman tradition. This paper sets out to do this work. After pointing out why previous conclusions are unsatisfactory, I look at rhetorically charged words and phrases from the text and how they behave elsewhere in the corpus of Latin literature. When investigated, these expressions give a clearer picture of …

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Modern Archaeology And The Brass Plates, Noel B. Reynolds Aug 2021

Modern Archaeology And The Brass Plates, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

Contemporary Palestinian archaeology has produced two major threats to traditional interpretations of the history of ancient Israel. Scientific discomfort with the exodus story as an explanation for the sudden population expansion in southern Palestine at the beginning of the Iron Age (c.1200 BCE) has led to a wide variety of theories about how these Israelites could have been drawn from existing populations in the general area. And a glaring mismatch between the biblical glorification of David and Solomon’s “empire” and disparagement of the northern kingdom combined with the archaeological finding that the cities of the northern kingdom were far larger …

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An Everlasting Witness: Ancient Writings On Metal, Noel B. Reynolds Aug 2021

An Everlasting Witness: Ancient Writings On Metal, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

After reviewing and updating the best studies of writing on metals in the ancient world, the paper examines scholarly and scriptural texts that explain what writing on metal meant to ancient scribes. Finally, the paper turns to what writing on metal meant to the Nephites.

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Lehi And Nephi As Trained Manassite Scribes, Noel B. Reynolds Aug 2021

Lehi And Nephi As Trained Manassite Scribes, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

This paper brings contemporary ANE scholarship in several fields together to construct an updated starting point for interpretation of the teachings of the Book of Mormon. It assembles findings from studies of ancient scribal culture, historical linguistics and epigraphy, Hebrew rhetoric, and the history and archaeology of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant, together with the traditions of ancient Israel to construct a contextualized perspective for understanding Lehi, Nephi, and their scribal training as they would have been understood by their contemporaries. Lehi and Nephi are shown to be the beneficiaries of the most advanced scribal training available in 7th century …

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Turn Of Phrase: Contrastive Pre-Training For Discourse-Aware Conversation Models, Roland Laboulaye Aug 2021

Turn Of Phrase: Contrastive Pre-Training For Discourse-Aware Conversation Models, Roland Laboulaye

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding long conversations requires recognizing a discourse flow unique to conversation. Recent advances in unsupervised representation learning of text have been attained primarily through language modeling, which models discourse only implicitly and within a small window. These representations are in turn evaluated chiefly on sentence pair or paragraph-question pair benchmarks, which measure only local discourse coherence. In order to improve performance on discourse-reliant, long conversation tasks, we propose Turn-of-Phrase pre-training, an objective designed to encode long conversation discourse flow. We leverage tree-structured Reddit conversations in English to, relative to a chosen conversation path through the tree, select paths of varying …

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First And Second Language Use Of Case, Aspect, And Tense In Finnish And English, Torin Kelley Aug 2021

First And Second Language Use Of Case, Aspect, And Tense In Finnish And English, Torin Kelley

Theses and Dissertations

Important to understanding bilingualism and second language (L2) learning are L2 morphological processing and acquisition of tense and aspect. This study used narrative elicitation to examine the expression of boundedness and definiteness in Finnish and English by first language (L1) Finnish speakers who speak English as an L2 and L1 English speakers who speak Finnish as an L2. In Finnish, boundedness and definiteness were largely portrayed by using partitive and accusative cases, though tense and aspect conjugation also played a role. In English, boundedness was largely conveyed through tense and aspect conjugation and definiteness through article usage. Both L1 speaker …

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On The Relationship Of Diabetes And Sleep Apnea: Evolution And Epigenetics, Nancy Wilson Aug 2021

On The Relationship Of Diabetes And Sleep Apnea: Evolution And Epigenetics, Nancy Wilson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis gives an overview of the relationship between diabetes, sleep apnea, obesity, and heart disease. It then addresses evidence that the traditional understanding of this relationship is incomplete or misleading. In the process, there is a brief discussion of the evolutionary rationale for the development and retention of sleep apnea in light of blood sugar dysregulation, as an adaptive mechanism in response to environmental stressors, followed by a brief overview of the general concepts of epigenetics. Finally, this paper presents the results of a literature search on the epigenetic marks and changes in gene expression found in sleep apnea …

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Effects Of Background Noise On The Speech Acoustics Of People With Aphasia, Kirsten Dixon Aug 2021

Effects Of Background Noise On The Speech Acoustics Of People With Aphasia, Kirsten Dixon

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the effect of hearing six background noise conditions (silent baseline, pink noise, monologue, lively conversation, one-sided phone call, and cocktail noise) on acoustic measures of speech production during story retells in people with aphasia. Eleven individuals with aphasia and 11 age- and gender-matched control participants took part in the study. Participants heard the background noise conditions through open-back headphones while they retold six short stories. The examiner calculated mean and standard deviation of intensity, mean and standard deviation of fundamental frequency (F0), and speech rate in words per minute. A Matlab application that identified pauses (i.e., periods …

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Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions As Applied To Motivation In L2 Vocabulary Acquisition, Lindsay Michelle Stephenson Aug 2021

Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions As Applied To Motivation In L2 Vocabulary Acquisition, Lindsay Michelle Stephenson

Theses and Dissertations

Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) is a self-regulation method shown to increase goal achievement through a combination of positive visualization and planning to overcome anticipated obstacles, specifically in time management, physical fitness, smoking cessation, dieting, social interaction, and classroom performance (Duckworth et al. 2013; Oettingen & Reininger 2016) Because second language (L2) acquisition is highly influenced by learner motivation, this study investigated whether MCII could be applied to motivation to acquire L2 vocabulary in beginning Arabic classes. A control group was compared to two treatment groups, one receiving vision-oriented MCII training that asked them to recall what first motivated …

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Humor Production And Coping On Distress And Help-Seeking Attitudes Among Polynesian Americans, Augusto D. Gancinia Ii Aug 2021

Humor Production And Coping On Distress And Help-Seeking Attitudes Among Polynesian Americans, Augusto D. Gancinia Ii

Theses and Dissertations

There is a need for more psychological studies that inform culture-specific adaptations in psychotherapy among Polynesian Americans. The use of humor has been identified as a potential adaptation in psychotherapy. Humor can be a catalyst for building and strengthening a healthy working alliance between counselor and client. The utilization of humor in therapy has significantly reduced mental health-seeking stigma. Evidence of the use of humor exists among Polynesian people prior to western colonization of Polynesia which suggests humor to be a culturally salient practice. The current study explored attitudes of seeking mental health counseling among Polynesian Americans while investigating the …

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The Brass Plates In Context: A Book Of Mormon Backstory, Noel B. Reynolds Aug 2021

The Brass Plates In Context: A Book Of Mormon Backstory, Noel B. Reynolds

Faculty Publications

This paper brings contemporary ANE scholarship in several fields together with the ancient scriptures restored through Joseph Smith to construct an updated starting point for interpretation of the teachings of the Book of Mormon. It assembles findings from studies of ancient scribal culture, historical linguistics and epigraphy, and the history and archaeology of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant, together with the traditions of ancient Israel and the ancient scriptures restored to Joseph Smith, to construct a contextualized perspective for understanding Lehi, Nephi, and the Brass Plates as they would have been understood by their contemporaries—as prominent bearers of the Josephite …

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The Impact Of Background Noise On The Spoken Language Of People With Mild To Moderate Aphasia: A Preliminary Investigation, Brenna Delyn Scadden Aug 2021

The Impact Of Background Noise On The Spoken Language Of People With Mild To Moderate Aphasia: A Preliminary Investigation, Brenna Delyn Scadden

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined how different background noise conditions affected the spoken language production of people with aphasia (PWA) when performing a story retell task. Participants included 11 adults with mild to moderate aphasia and 11 age- and gender-matched controls. Participants retold stories in a silent baseline and five background noise conditions (conversation, monologue, phone call, cocktail, pink noise). Dependent measures of speech fluency and language production measures (correct information units, lexical errors, lexical diversity, and cohesive utterances) were compared between groups and across conditions. Results reveal that background noise results in significantly lower communication efficiency (i.e., correct information units) for …

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Linguistics Of Russian Media During The 2016 Us Election: A Corpus-Based Study, Devon K. Terry Jul 2021

Linguistics Of Russian Media During The 2016 Us Election: A Corpus-Based Study, Devon K. Terry

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to perform a linguistic analysis of Russian mass media focused on its coverage of the 2016 US presidential election. It will be a corpus-based study, using a corpus as a foundational source for quantitative and qualitative data. This study will use a collection of keywords from the corpus and analyze their contexts as they pertain to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This study uses corpus linguistic research tools such as sentence tokenization, Key Words in Context (KWIC), sentiment analysis, word embedding visualization, word-vector math, word frequency lists, and collocate analysis as part of the …

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The Perceived Effect Of Pause Length And Location On Speaker Likability And Communicative Effectiveness, Julia M. Price Jul 2021

The Perceived Effect Of Pause Length And Location On Speaker Likability And Communicative Effectiveness, Julia M. Price

Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies have examined the effect of atypical speech pause on conversational fluency and how the conversational listener perceives the speaker. The present study investigated the effect of pause duration of increasing length and in differing sentential locations on listener perceptions of communicative effectiveness and speaker likability. One neurotypical male and one neurotypical female speaker recorded three sentences from the Quick Aphasia Battery, and artificial pauses of varying lengths (250 ms, 400 ms, 550 ms, 700 ms, 850 ms, and 1 sec) were inserted before the subject, verb, and object of each sentence. The six baseline (unmodified) sentences were also …

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Text-To-Speech Systems: Learner Perceptions Of Its Use As A Tool In The Language Classroom, Joseph Chi Man Mak Jul 2021

Text-To-Speech Systems: Learner Perceptions Of Its Use As A Tool In The Language Classroom, Joseph Chi Man Mak

Theses and Dissertations

Text-to-speech (TTS) systems are ubiquitous. From Siri to Alexa to customer service phone call options, listening in a real-world context requires language learners to interact with TTS. Traditionally, language learners report difficulty when listening due to various reasons including genre, text, task, speaker characteristics, and environmental factors. This naturally leads to the question: how do learners perceive TTS in instructional contexts? Since TTS allows controls on speaker characteristics (e.g. gender, regional variety, speed, etc.) the variety of materials that could be created--especially in contexts in which native speakers are difficult or expensive to find--makes this an attractive option. However, the …

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On The Relationship Between Frequency, Features, And Markedness In Inflection: Experimental Evidence From Russian Nouns, Jeffrey R. Parker Jul 2021

On The Relationship Between Frequency, Features, And Markedness In Inflection: Experimental Evidence From Russian Nouns, Jeffrey R. Parker

Faculty Publications

Markedness has a long tradition in linguistics as a way to describe linguistic asymmetries. In this paper, I investigate an argument about the necessity of markedness as a tool for capturing the structural distribution of inflectional affixes and predicting the behavioral consequences of that distribution. Based on evidence from German adjectives, Clahsen et al. argue that the number of specified features of inflectional affixes (which I argue represents a type of markedness) affects reaction times in lexical access. Affixes’ features, however, overlap with how frequently they occur. Clahsen et al. investigate only three affixes in German, leaving open questions about …

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Plot Extraction And The Visualization Of Narrative Flow, Michael A. Debuse Jul 2021

Plot Extraction And The Visualization Of Narrative Flow, Michael A. Debuse

Theses and Dissertations

In order to facilitate the automated extraction of complex features and structures within narrative, namely plot in this study, two proof-of-concept methods of narrative visualization are presented with the goal of representing the plot of the narrative. Plot is defined to give a basis for quality assessment and comparison. The first visualization presented is a scatter-plot of entities within the story, but due to failing to uphold the definition of plot, in-depth analysis is not performed. The second visualization presented is a graph structure that better represents a mapping of the plot of the story. Narrative structures commonly found within …

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Understandings Of The Relationship Between Grace And Works, Terryl L. Givens Jul 2021

Understandings Of The Relationship Between Grace And Works, Terryl L. Givens

BYU Studies

No debate more thoroughly sunders the Christian world into competing factions than the simple question, Are we saved by grace or by works? It needs to be stated at the outset, however, that the framing of the debate in such terms is not truly accurate. Sola gratia, or salvation by grace alone, is one of the pillars of Protestantism. No one, on the other hand, affirms a doctrine of salvation by works. (Pelagians might have in the fifth century, but they are no longer alive to be part of the conversation.) The debate is really over the question, Are …

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Shards Of Combat: How Did Satan Seek To Destroy The Agency Of Man?, Philip L. Barlow Jul 2021

Shards Of Combat: How Did Satan Seek To Destroy The Agency Of Man?, Philip L. Barlow

BYU Studies

Human beings in other guise lived before the creation of our world. This belief is at once controversial and durable, pervading the history of Western thought and bearing analogues elsewhere.1 That gods, angels, or other celestial beings rebelled against their superiors or engaged in cosmic conflict prior to earth’s creation is a related concept, widespread in the ancient world. Depictions or allusions to such contests appear in the myths, lore, art, literature, and sacred texts of Babylon, Egypt, Israel, Persia, Greece, Rome, far-flung tribal religions, and elsewhere. In certain cases, the older traditions endure even to the present, as …

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The Book Of Mormon Translation Process, Grant Hardy Jul 2021

The Book Of Mormon Translation Process, Grant Hardy

BYU Studies

Joseph Smith did not offer many details about the translation process for the Book of Mormon, other than affirming that it was done through “the gift and power of God.”1In 1831, at a Church conference where he was invited to share more information, he declined, saying that “it was not expedient for him to relate these things.”2 Along with the golden plates, he had been given a set of Nephite “interpreters” (Mosiah 8:13; Ether 4:5), which he described as “two stones in silver bows” (JS–H 1:35), apparently looking something like a pair of glasses or spectacles. According …

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Full Issue Jul 2021

Full Issue

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

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