Digital Commons Network^™

Gender Differences In Personality: An Item-Level Analysis, Casey C. Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Personality is a social and organizational construct with a substantial history and discourse. One particular area in personality that is of interest is gender differences in personality. Gender differences have been found on scales measuring various aspects of personality, such as narcissism (Grijalva et al., 2014). While there are differences present in personality data, there hasn’t been a consistent explanation for why this occurs. This research looked specifically at the construction of personality items to begin to understand the differences in personality by gender. While social roles and social context are mostly referenced to inform the response patterns of men …

Mashing Through The Conventions: Convergence Of Popular And Classical Music In The Works Of The Piano Guys, Alina Kiryayeva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is dedicated to examining the symbiosis between popular music and Western classical music in classical/popular mashups––a new style within the classical crossover genre. The research features the works of The Piano Guys, a contemporary ensemble that combines classical crossover characteristics and the techniques from modern sample-based styles to reconceptualize and reuse classical and popular works. This fusion demonstrates a new approach to presenting multi-genre works, forming a separate musical and cultural niche for this creative practice.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter is further divided into two thematic discourses: genre and authorship. The research draws …

Eating The Heart Of Weetigo World: Decolonial Imaginaries In The Stories Of Louise Erdrich And Tomson Highway, Rebecca Lynne Fullan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation asks what the decolonial possibilities of fiction are in the context of the settler colonial imaginaries particular to the United States and Canada. The ongoing process of settler colonialism demands various forms of conversion from Indigenous people: ecological/land based, religious, educational, legal, familial, but the construct of “conversion” obscures Indigenous worldviews, and indeed worlds, which function according to different principles. I interpret Erdrich and Highway's work in the context of Anishinaabe and Cree narratives and story-structures. These offer examples of what can constitute broader decolonial imaginaries, through which perception and creation of other, more liveable worlds is possible. …

Does The Word "Chien" Bark? Representation Learning In Neural Machine Translation Encoders, Emily Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents experiments with using representation learning to explore how neural networks learn. Neural networks which take text as input create internal representations of the text during their training. Recent work has found that these representations can be used to perform other downstream linguistic tasks, such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging. This demonstrates that the neural networks are learning linguistic information and storing this information in the representations. We focus on the representations created by neural machine translation (NMT) models and whether they can be used in POS tagging. We train 5 NMT models including an auto-encoder. We extract the …

Traditions And Transformations In The Work Of Adál: Surrealism, El Sainete, And Spanglish, Margarita J. Aguilar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Nuyorican movement was a cultural and intellectual movement beginning in the late 1960s through the 1970s that coincided with the era of civil rights struggle in the United States. The artists, writers, poets, and others in the movement were of Puerto Rican descent and resided in New York neighborhoods such as El barrio or Spanish Harlem, Loisaida or the Lower East Side and the South Bronx. The term “Nuyorican” was embraced as a badge of honor and pride by New York’s Puerto Rican community. It was during this time that cultural-specific institutions such El Museo del Barrio, Taller Boricua, …

The Medium Of Liberation: Kurdish Language And Education Activism In Turkey, Demet Arpacik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic study examines the Kurdish language and education activism, which I argue, is an anti-colonial movement generating decolonial forms of practices as responses. Prohibited to be spoken even in private spaces until 1991 in Turkey, the Kurdish language has been an intense object of struggle between the Turkish state and the Kurdish population. What historical, political, and sociocultural forces have contributed to colonial language governmentality in Turkey against the Kurdish language and its speakers? How do Kurdish activists challenge the linguistic hegemony in their semi-formal spaces and in what ways are their practices, discourses and policies decolonial? My study …

Northwest Coast Native Art Beyond Revival, 1962–1992, Christopher T. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Histories of “primitivism” in the avant-garde show that Euro-American modernism was always engaged in the appropriation of nonwestern and Indigenous art, with particular interest in Northwest Coast Native art forms by the Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Indian Space Painters. However, there has been little consideration for how Northwest Coast Native artists chose to engage with the styles and tenets of Western modern art. To date, the history of post-war Northwest Coast Native art has been dominated by what is known as the Renaissance, a narrative in which artists pursued a neo-traditional style in modern times through the recovered and revival …

Cot In The Act: Ethnicity And Age Affects Phonemic Perception Of The Low-Back Merger In New York City English, Omar Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

This paper is an experimental study on how perceptions about a speaker’s age and ethnicity may influence whether listeners perceive the THOUGHT / LOT distinction. The macro-categories of age and ethnicity have been found to correlate with the lowering of raised THOUGHT (Wong 2012, Becker 2010) and the favoring of the merged vowels in perception (Haddican et al. 2016). This thesis examines whether images of faces associated with different age and ethnicity categories condition perception of auditory stimuli as belonging to either the LOT or THOUGHT class. This thesis builds on previous results suggesting that non-linguistic information influences speech …

The Grammatical Systems Of Attentionworthiness: Positional Signals And Invariant Meanings In Spanish Word Order, Eduardo Ho-Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a Columbia School analysis of word order phenomena in Spanish. The data was sourced from a corpus of manually collected utterances extracted from six volumes of Latin American short stories written in the twentieth century. The study employs various qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to test the various hypotheses offered as explanations of the distributional problems selected for the study. The observations roughly correspond to word orders that the grammatical tradition describes as having to do with either verbs with one argument (SV, VS, OV, VO) or verbs with two arguments (SVO, OVS, VSO, VOS, SOV, …

Processing Coercion In A First, Non-Dominant Language: Mandarin-English Heritage Bilinguals, Christina N. Dadurian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent work in heritage language grammars has shown variability in L1 competence, despite high proficiency in both languages. While sources of variation have been debated, little attention has been given to the role of language dominance. This thesis uses a self-paced listening task to explicitly investigate the roles of language dominance and pragmatic competence in how heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese process aspectual coercion in their non-dominant home language, as compared to late bilinguals. Specifically, constructions that vary in acceptability and salience in input between Mandarin and English are tested: Iterative coercion, complement event coercion of entity NPs, and perfective …

A Plan For Democratic Public Schooling, Diana Concepcion

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project addresses concerns within inner-city public schools while restructuring how we facilitate learning in our school buildings. It provides an overview of continued research on challenges faced in public schools including reform policy (testing and curricular changes), privatization, day-to-day structures and how they impact the academic and social-emotional development of our students. By examining our current designs and policies, we are able to identify why and how these systems have not been beneficial to our students, and we are able to find basic solutions in supporting the holistic needs of our students. This project proposes a school plan which …

The Berbers: Constructed Identities By Foreigners On African Soil, Zineb Askaoui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the textual evidence pertaining to the identity of the local North African population of Morocco. In examining the literature about North Africans and the inscriptions in North Africa, I wish to determine who their authors were. Since North Africa has been invaded and colonized multiple times throughout history, the available literature written by both the foreigners who colonized it and the locals yielded interesting and sometimes contrasting results.

The names that address the local North Africans are pertinent expressions of identity or of forceful submission. This study examines four different terms that have been used to describe …

Lengua, Identidad Y Poder: Ideologías Lingüísticas En La Prensa Hispana De Los Estados Unidos (1980–2007), Evangelia-Lydia Manatou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Esta tesis estudia las ideologías que articulan los tres periódicos hispanófonos de distribución más amplia, en los Estados Unidos, desde finales del siglo XX, al reproducir los debates vinculados a la lengua española y los valores asignados a distintas prácticas lingüísticas producidas por los hispanohablantes que residen en EE. UU. En particular, nos ha interesado por fenómenos tales como el monolingüismo, el bilingüismo y el espanglish, y por las propuestas normativas articuladas tanto por los periódicos como por instituciones españolas dedicadas a la promoción internacional de la lengua. En este trabajo hemos analizado artículos y viñetas de los tres periódicos …

Locke’S Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology And Ethics Of Leopardi’S A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this study I reconstruct a genealogy of the a-dialectic materialism that defines the production of 19^th-century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi and with which he criticizes canonical metaphysical stances. In this regard, I consider John Locke as the first instance of a philosophical outlook that stands as an alternative to the anthropocentrism demanded by traditional metaphysics. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its significant influence on Leopardi’s philosophical and aesthetic work, I emphasize how Locke’s system finds a synthetic formulation in the hypothesis, at the time highly contested yet groundbreaking, that matter might be endowed …

Affect, Behavior And (Dys)Regulation: Integrating Youth's Projective Tests And Self-Reports, Laurel Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Past and current research indicates that unconscious processes (e.g., outside the realm of conscious awareness) contribute to aspects of adaptation and development, such as emotion regulation, adaptability, interpersonal flexibility and overall identity formation. Further, unconscious processes including: Defense Mechanisms (DMs), Affect Maturity (AM) and Object Relations (OR), can be operationalized and scored using valid and reliable psychodynamic instruments (e.g., Rorschach Inkblot Method), with theoretical and empirical links to underlying emotion regulation processes. Currently however, emotional dysregulation and its sequelae (e.g.,depression and ADHD symptoms) are most often assessed based on one’s conscious awareness, using standardized self-report measures or structured clinical interviews. …

Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an examination of how authors of the late Victorian and early Twentieth Century describe the embodied and mental effects of the nature of women’s clothing through works of fiction and nonfiction. Through this analysis, I argue that clothing serves as a mechanism to oppress women by eliminating concrete and philosophical access to wealth and necessities as well as by instigating acts of violence upon a developing body through stricture and hygiene. I examine the ways that feminine dress, from youth through adulthood, shapes the way women view themselves, and in turn has a reciprocal effect on how …

Rewriting The Oeuvre: Raymond Queneau And The Art Of Translation, Christopher Clarke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the literary oeuvre of French author Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) has been extensively studied, his work as a literary translator has been largely overlooked. Queneau was a prominent member of the French literary avant-garde, but also a literary translator for two decades (1934-1953), and his writing was greatly influenced and impacted by his readings and translations of Anglophone writers. This dissertation provides insight into the role of translation in his conception of writing and language, and the inseparability of the different facets of his career as a writer, literary translator, and publisher. I examine his personal linguistic and literary history …

Landscape And Lore: River Acheron And The Oracle Of The Dead, Lashante St. Fleur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In order to explore the cultural relationships between people, landscape, memory and ritual, this master’s thesis focuses on the Acheron River in Epirus, Greece, long believed to harbor an entrance into Hades, the Greek underworld. Various entrances into the chthonic, or subterranean land of the dead, are peppered throughout Greece, with each tied to their own local myths, legends, folklore and cults. According to those traditions, Hades could be accessed from several terrestrial rivers thought to be connected to Oceanus, the primordial world-encompassing river surrounding all of creation. Flowing forth from River Ocean were all above- and underground rivers and …

On The Temporal Interpretation Of Epistemic Modals: Evidence From Palestinian Arabic, Alaa M. Sharif

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of temporal interpretation of epistemic modals in Palestinian Arabic (PA), and develop a cross-linguistic analysis. The epistemic necessity modal akeed and the epistemic possibility modal yimkin in PA exhibit similar temporal configurations to English epistemic modals must and might, respectively. We argue for a unified underlying structure to account for the temporal configurations. The linearized combination of the epistemic modal, a silent present tense morpheme and an aspectual head morpheme derive either a present-oriented reading when the aspectual head is empty, or a future-oriented reading in presence of a silent prospective …

Working Memory Training: Cognitive And Linguistic Implications In Adult English Language Learners, Deepti Wadhera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study used a cognitive training paradigm to explore whether the same mechanisms of working memory underly conflict resolution in non-verbal and verbal domains in adult English language learners.The association between an individual’s Working Memory (WM) performance and their success in skills such as interference control, decision-making and language processing has been repeatedly highlighted by researchers in cognitive psychology and linguistic fields. Particularly, acquisition and use of a second language is one life experience in which WM ability seems valuable. However, when this association is put to the test in studies that train participants’ WM and measure transfer of these …

An Empire Among Empires: America's Relationship To "The Other" In The Historiography Of Empire, Lynne C. Goldhammer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper outlines two different threads in the historiography of empires regarding their treatment of “the other.” The first thread begins with the early Chinese empires, the Qin and Han, which used diplomacy and tributes as well as repression to incorporate “others” under their imperial umbrellas. This thread was then picked up and modified later by the Mongols and Mughals, both of which showed a fair amount of flexibility and openness towards cultural difference. The second thread begins with the Romans (the Republic and Empire), who were largely flexible and inclusive towards “others” until the late Empire, when Christianity took …

The Political Aesthetic Of Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Judgment, And Culture, Quixote R. Vassilakis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The plan of this thesis is, first, to interpret Arendt’s critique of the modern age. Next, this paper outlines Arendt’s reconceptualization of Kant’s theory of judgment as the basis for a novel model of the public sphere in light of the conditions of modernity. Finally, this paper explores Arendt’s poetics as a means of activating the faculty of judgment in order to reconcile with the modern world. In order to address the political crises of modernity, Arendt develops a political aesthetic alive to the role of narrative and culture in reconstituting political communities. I argue that Hannah Arendt develops a …

Bilingual Reading Fluency And Prediction: Heritage Language Versus Second Language, Olga Parshina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The thesis presents the first comparative investigation of reading fluency and factors that affect it by examining eye movements in reading by Heritage Speakers (HSs) and L2 learners of Russian. The eye movements of bilingual participants are compared to two control groups, monolingual adults and monolingual children. Following the introductory Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 we present the study that establishes basic eye-movement characteristics in reading for Heritage Speakers and L2 learners in connection to proficiency and linguistics factors of word length and frequency. Contrary to our predictions, we found that all eye-movement characteristics of high-proficiency HSs are different from …

Tones In Shupamem Reduplication, Magdalena Markowska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents an analysis of reduplication in Shupamem, an Eastern Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. In this language nouns, verbs, and adjectives undergo full segmental reduplication. At the suprasegmental level, on the other hand, tones of the reduplicants are not entirely faithful to their bases. The tonal asymmetry of the reduplicted phrase also relies on the grammatical function of that phrase within a clause, as well as on the neighboring grammatical words, such as tense particles. This morphological process gives also an insight to an underlying tonal representations in Shupamem. Nominal reduplication, in particular, provides a proof of the …

Occitan Musicians, Immigration, And Postcolonial Regionalism In Southern France, Sarah E. Trouslard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in southern France, this dissertation analyzes contemporary Occitan musical expression in relation to postcolonial immigration. “Occitan” refers to a group of linguistic practices found in the south of France, including Provençal and Languedocien. Throughout this study, I discuss commonalities between postcolonial and regionalist history and theory, shedding light on notions of cultural citizenship that have defined French sociopolitics in recent decades. The historian Herman Lebovics (2004) coined the term “postcolonial regionalism” in reference to the impact of decolonization on regional protest movements in France during the 1970s. During that time, singer/songwriters of the nòva cançon …

Integrating Affect Perception Tasks From The New York Emotion Battery Into A Comprehensive Measure Of Neuropsychological Change Across The Lifespan, Melinda A. Cornwell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: The ability to perceive others’ emotions is a vital skill for social competency, impacting the success of personal and professional relationships (Brinton & Fujiki, 2011; Cassidy et al., 1992; Côté & Miners, 2006). According to Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST; Carstensen, 1991), human motivation develops to become more discerning in choosing milieus that yield the most gratifying return on the investment of personal resources (e.g., time, attention, and effort), perhaps explaining why some research findings indicate that older adults may demonstrate an affect perception (AP) bias described as a positivity effect (Reed et al., 2014). Moreover, AP predicts cognitive and …

Acquisition Orders And Instructional Sequences: A Case Study Of Russian Textbooks, Olga Ozhiganova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research on English as a second language has established the linguistic phenomenon of the natural order of morpheme acquisition in which grammatical features are acquired by learners in a specific order. The acquisition of Russian morphosyntax as an L2 had not been established until Gor’s (2019) research. The present study employs Gor’s (2019) findings to examine whether the order in which five Russian morphosyntactic features—case, impersonal sentences, location-direction, aspect, verbs of motion (VoM)—are acquired is reflected in second-year Russian instructional materials by investigating three commonly used textbooks. The results reveal that (1) the documented order in which Russian morphosyntactic …

Barriers To Health And Social Services Utilization For Immigrant Autistic Children In Canada, Fjoralba Xhaferri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The bulk of the literature on autistic immigrant children in Canada has been centered on Asian and African immigrant families. Based on a critical analysis of this body of work, findings helped us to better understand families and children’s specific needs and experiences of care. Limited perceptions of disability, low language skills and limited knowledge of service systems, along with experiences of discrimination and lack of financial means tend to create barriers to health care access among Asian and African families raising an autistic child. Stronger social support systems, including the intervention of a third person (e.g., social service worker, …

Searching For Pōhakuloa: A Citizen Scientist’S Journey In Aloha ‘Āina, Drake Logan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tells a story about the United States (US) military’s land occupation of two Indigenous Hawaiian wahi pana (sacred places), on O’ahu and Hawai’i Island, which have produced widespread health concerns regarding exposure to military toxins. I conducted six months of fieldwork in Hawai’i, in which I partnered with local communities in a Critical Participatory Action research process. Together, we formed and co-led a community-based science pilot study of contamination from Pōhakuloa Training Area, generating new citizen science methods capable of uncovering evidence on confirmed military toxics uses. These methods were developed in critical solidarity with international communities who …

Shamanic Performancesjoseph Beuys's Der Eurasier, Eurasia Siberian Symphony, And Auschwitz Demonstration, Caroline Rupprecht

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.