Digital Commons Network^™

Una Entrevista Con José Plácido Ruiz Campillo Sobre La Gramática Operativa Y Cognitiva Y Su Estado En La Enseñanza Del Español Como Lengua Extranjera, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

An Exploratory Study Of Mobile Messaging Preferences By Age: Middle-Aged And Older Adults Compared To Younger Adults, Alexis Kuerbis, Katherine Van Stolk-Cooke, Frederick Muench

Publications and Research

Introduction: Mobile technologies, such as short message service or text messaging, can be an important way to reach individuals with medical and behavioral health problems who are homebound or geographically isolated. Optimally tailoring messages in short message service interventions according to preferences can enhance engagement and positive health outcomes; however, little is known about the messaging preferences of middle-aged and older adults.

Methods: Utilizing secondary data, global messaging preferences were examined to inform the development of short message service interventions for adults of all ages. Two hundred and seventy-seven adults were recruited through an online labor market. They completed an …

From Deficit To Diversity: How Teachers Of Recently-Arrived Emergent Bilinguals Negotiate Ideological And Pedagogical Change, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno

Publications and Research

Although the number and diversity of emergent bilingual students is rising, this population is viewed as homogeneous rather than vibrant and eclectic. This case study explores how two secondary English as a New Language (ENL) teachers uncover the diversity of their recently-arrived emergent bilingual population through implementing translanguaging pedagogy, a strength-based vision of student language development. The findings indicate that teachers’ shifts in how they conceive of their students are intertwined with meaningful pedagogical changes.

Language Attitudes [Linguistics], Leigh Garrison-Fletcher, Bede Mccormack, Walter Sistrunk

Open Educational Resources

This scaffolded assignment in two parts aims to engage students with the topic of how language and society are related. Framed by the global learning core competency and written ability in its entirety, Part I asks students to focus on their own language/dialect or variety and consider the kinds of attitudes that exist towards students’ language/dialect. Part II asks students to choose a language /dialect they are not familiar with and research the attitudes that exist about that language/dialect.

LaGuardia’s Core Competencies and Communication Abilities

Main Course Learning Objectives:

Explain ways in which language and society are related

Community Law Clinics In The Neoliberal City: Assessing Cuny's Tenant Law And Organizing Project, John Whitlow

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taverns, Theaters, Publics: The Intertheatrical Politics Of Caroline Drama, Allison Deutermann

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Musicalization: Early Childhood Music Access, Discourse, And Praxis In Nyc Charter Schools, 2014-2015, Andrew Aprile

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past two decades, charter schools have become a hallmark of education reform in the United States. Concurrent with this movement is the increasing prominence of high stakes testing. While much research has sought to compare the effectiveness of charter schools and traditional public schools in terms of standardized assessments, scant attention has been paid to the role of arts and music in charter schools, and little has been done to distinguish the distinct strands of the charter school movement. Given what we know about the importance of music education and the growth of charter schools, it was the …

Syntax And Semantics Of Perceptual Representation, James K. Quilty-Dunn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a defense of perceptual pluralism, the thesis that perceptual systems deliver multiple types of representations including those used in thought. In particular, it argues that perceptual systems output iconic (i.e., image-like, analog) representations as well as discursive (i.e., language-like, digital) states. A central thesis is that perceptual representations of objects are propositional and composed of concepts. It also develops a compositional syntax of iconic representation called the coordination model, according to which icons are sets of primitive parts, each of which determines values along multiple analog feature dimensions simultaneously. The dissertation supports the conclusion that perceptual …

Creating An Unbroken Line Of Becoming In Live Music Performance, Bonnie B. Mcalvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation provides an approach to the pedagogy of musical expression in applied music study. Exercises are provided which support a student’s mastery of the mechanics of grouping, and this mastery is put to work in an adaptation of the work of the great Russian acting teacher, Constantine Stanislavski. Mapping of embodiment schema in the manner of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) is asserted as a useful interface between grouped pitch objects and meaning; mappings are utilized by the instrumental music performer in the same manner as Stanislavski taught his acting students to utilize given circumstances. The discourse situates all of …

Evil And The Ontological Disproof, Carl J. Brownson Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a revival of the ontological disproof, an ontological argument against the existence of God. The ontological disproof, in its original form, argues that God is impossible, because if God exists, he must exist necessarily, and necessary existence is impossible. The notion of necessary existence has been largely rehabilitated since this argument was first offered in 1948, and the argument has accordingly lost much of its force. I argue that the ontological disproof ought to be combined with the problem of evil, and that the resulting synthesis of the two arguments is far more powerful than either …

Motivating Morphological Constituents: A Learning-Based Analysis Of Hebrew, Navajo, And Spanish, Ignacio Lorenzo Montoya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In both description and theory, a variety of linguistic structures have been posited to account for a multitude of linguistic patterns. In the sub-field of morphology, such units include roots, stems, and morphemes. Previous research that has explored the motivation for linguistic structures and constructs in phonology and syntax has raised questions about the nature of these linguistic structures and constructs. Such work, however, has not focused on morphological constituent structure, a gap which the present dissertation addresses through a focused examination of the evidence motivating morphological constituents in Hebrew, Navajo, and Spanish.

The theoretical framework of this dissertation follows …

A Discussion Of Delimitative In Mandarin Chinese, Qi Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates how delimitative marking in Mandarin Chinese is better considered as an instance of verb-phrase modification instead of aspect marking. The study investigates data with verb reduplication cases caused by delimitative marking from both syntactic and semantic points of view. Through observations and analyses, it is found that delimitative marking does not have the same distribution as other aspect markers, but rather shows resemblance to temporal modifiers syntactically. Semantically, instead of providing a viewpoint as other aspect markers do, delimitative indicates the temporal length (shortness) of the event. In addition, it is found that delimitative marking has strict …

A New Approach To The Analysis Of Timbre, Megan L. Lavengood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two distinct approaches to timbre analysis exist, each with complementary strengths and limitations. First, music theorists from the 1980s adopt a positivist mindset and look for ways to quantify timbral phenomena, often using spectrograms, while avoiding any cultural dimensions in their work. Second, writings of the past five years focus on the cultural aspects of timbre but make no use of spectrograms. This dissertation builds upon these two approaches by synthesizing them: discussion is grounded in spectrogram analysis, but situated within a broad cultural context, through interactions with listener experience and ethnographic study of music periodicals and other published interviews. …

Transferring Paremias. Cultural, Linguistic, And Literary Transitions Of Proverbs And Proverbial Phrases By Vincenzo Brusantino, Pompeo Sarnelli, And John Florio, Daniela D'Eugenio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation demonstrates how literary paremias, i.e. proverbs and proverbial phrases, constitute a rich archive of considerable historical, cultural, and linguistic significance. As discursive phenomena, paremias are usually studied in the context of oral traditions, but this study examines them in terms of what they reveal about the literary works in which they appear. Specifically, it analyzes the context in which they are employed and, through them, it extracts the author’s perspectives, references to and borrowings from previous works, responses to the social and cultural conditions of the time, and effects on the narrative. The exploration of paremias in literary …

Scientifically Responsible Metaphysics: A Program For The Naturalization Of Metaphysics, Amanda Bryant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There has been much recent work calling for the naturalization of metaphysics, including most famously James Ladyman and Don Ross’ polemic, Every Thing Must Go. But much work remains to adequately articulate and motivate the call to naturalize metaphysics. My dissertation contributes to that work. Its central questions are: What relationship should metaphysics have to current science? Must good metaphysics be responsive to current science, and if so, how? Why should metaphysics be naturalized and what should its naturalization consist in?

I argue, first, that for that for epistemic purposes, as opposed to heuristic or pragmatic purposes, theories should …

Exploring The Internal Statistics: Single Image Super-Resolution, Completion And Captioning, Yang Xian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Image enhancement has drawn increasingly attention in improving image quality or interpretability. It aims to modify images to achieve a better perception for human visual system or a more suitable representation for further analysis in a variety of applications such as medical imaging, remote sensing, and video surveillance. Based on different attributes of the given input images, enhancement tasks vary, e.g., noise removal, deblurring, resolution enhancement, prediction of missing pixels, etc. The latter two are usually referred to as image super-resolution and image inpainting (or completion).

Image super-resolution and completion are numerically ill-posed problems. Multi-frame-based approaches make use of the …

Morpho-Phonemic Analysis Boosts Word Reading For Adult Struggling Readers, Susan H. Gray, Linnea C. Ehri, John C. Locke

Publications and Research

A randomized control trial compared the effects of two kinds of vocabulary instruction on component reading skills of adult struggling readers. Participants seeking alternative high school diplomas received 8 h of scripted tutoring to learn forty academic vocabulary words embedded within a civics curriculum. They were matched for language background and reading levels, then randomly assigned to either morpho-phonemic analysis teaching word origins, morpheme and syllable structures, or traditional whole word study teaching multiple sentence contexts, meaningful connections, and spellings. Both groups made comparable gains in learning the target words, but the morpho-phonemic group showed greater gains in reading unfamiliar …

Can Squirrel Monkeys Learn An Abna Grammar? A Re-Evaluation Of Ravignani Et Al. (2013), Stefano Ghirlanda

Publications and Research

Ravignani et al. (2013) habituated squirrel monkeys to sound sequences conforming to an ABnA grammar (nD1;2;3), then tested them for their reactions to novel gram- matical and non-grammatical sequences. Although they conclude that the monkeys ``consistently recognized and generalized the sequence ABnA,'' I remark that this conclusion is not robust. The statistical significance of results depends on specific choices of data analysis, namely dichotomization of the response variable and omission of specific data points. Additionally, there is little evidence of generalization to novel patterns (n D 4;5), which is important to conclude that the monkeys recognized the ABnA grammar beyond …

Is It All Relative? Relative Pitch And L2 Lexical Tone Perception/Tone Language Comprehension By Adult Tone And Non-Tone Language Speakers, Sloane C. Von Wertz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Languages generally use musical pitch variation of the voice as part of their sound systems (Maddieson, 2011)—pitch variations that can be somewhat reminiscent of music. Music ability and/or training may influence language processing (e.g., Bidelman et al, 2011; Delogue et al, 2010). In particular, studies have concluded that there may be a relationship between absolute pitch and tone language acquisition (e.g., Lee, Lee, and Shi, 2011; Tillmann et al., 2011; Pfordresher and Brown, 2009). Other research has shown that fundamental frequency (F0) and F0 slope are crucial elements upon which native tone language speakers rely in tone perception (Guion and …

Combined Mnemonic Strategy Training And High-Definition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation For Memory Deficits In Mild Cognitive Impairment, Benjamin M. Hampstead, Krishnankutty Sathian, Marom Bikson, Anthony Y. Stringer

Publications and Research

Introduction: Memory deficits characterize Alzheimer’s dementia and the clinical precursor stage known as mild cognitive impairment. Nonpharmacologic interventions hold promise for enhancing functioning in these patients, potentially delaying functional impairment that denotes transition to dementia. Previous findings revealed that mnemonic strategy training (MST) enhances long-term retention of trained stimuli and is accompanied by increased blood oxygen level–dependent signal in the lateral frontal and parietal cortices as well as in the hippocampus. The present study was designed to enhance MST generalization, and the range of patients who benefit, via concurrent delivery of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Methods: This protocol describes …

Semantic Attention: Effects Of Modality, Lexicality And Semantic Content, David Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the discovery of the Stroop Effect in 1935 questions about the role of language vs. non-lexical stimuli in selective attention remain. Early researchers attributed the powerful distracting influence shown in the Stroop task, naming the color in which a spelled word is printed when incongruent with the color name the word spells, to an automaticity of language that gives it privileged access to meaning, but many others since have shown various ways to reduce or even reverse this distracting effect of an incongruent word. This study addresses this by using EEG to record neural activity along with reaction time …

Pirandello Proto-Modern: A New Reading Of L’Esclusa, Bradford Masoni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Luigi Pirandello’s first novel, L’Esclusa, written in 1893, but not published in its definitive edition until 1927, straddles two literary worlds: that of the realistic style of the Italian veristi, and something new, a style and approach to narrative that anticipates the theory of writing Pirandello lays out in his long essay L’Umorismo, as well as the kinds of experimental writing that one associates with early-20^th-century modernism in general, and with Pirandello’s later work in particular. The novel’s living in both worlds, however, makes it an interesting and problematic text. First, it gives readers insight into …

Thule Iron Use In The Pre-Contact Arctic, Eileen Colligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the use of iron by the Thule people, a Neoeskimo culture that lived in the North American Arctic between approximately 1000 AD and 1400 ̶ 1500 AD. The study takes a pan-Arctic perspective to bring together research that has usually been done on a more-limited geographical scale. This viewpoint shows the Thule culture from a view that corresponds to their world.

The study focuses on: (1) revisions in the accepted chronology of the Thule and how these have affected the explanations for the Thule Migration from Alaska to Greenland; (2) new understandings about the iron that was …

A Playful Context Enhances Bilingual And Monolingual Preschoolers’ Mastery Motivation And Private Speech, Jeremy Sawyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children’s private speech (audible self-talk) has been studied primarily as a cognitive tool for thinking, planning and self-regulation. This study investigated whether private speech may also function as a tool for motivation. Vygotskian and self-determination theory suggest that children can develop to become agentic and inspired, or conversely disengaged and alienated, based largely on their social conditions of development. Thus, it is important to investigate children’s motivational processes in social and educational contexts that are central to child development. U.S. preschool enrollment is expanding, accompanied by a decline in play-based pedagogy and growth of didactic, teacher-centered approaches. To illuminate the …

A Sentiment Analysis Of Language & Gender Using Word Embedding Models, Ellyn Rolleston Keith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since Robin Lakoff started the conversation around language and gender with her 1975 essay “Language and Woman’s Place,” extensive work has been done on analyzing sociolinguistics associated with gender. While much work has been done on the differences between how men and women use language, there is less research to be found on language about women as opposed to language about men. In this work, I build a word embedding model from a corpus of Wikipedia film summaries and use this model to create lists of words associated with men and words associated with women. I then use sentiment analysis …

Genre, Representation, And Memory In Spanish Civil War Texts By Women From Spain And The United States, Jennifer Prince

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to addresses a lacuna in the androcentric Spanish Civil War literary canon by recovering women’s voices writing about the war from the 1930s to the present. It also examines the war stories women tell and how they represent themselves and others when writing about the Spanish Civil War. All of the seven authors examined here write through the lens of some distance—either as American citizens observing the war or as the descendants of the war’s survivors—but each with an intimate connection rooted in biology or ideology. The foundation of this dissertation is close reading and textual analysis …

Examining School Leadership In New York City Community Schools, Stacey Campo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The community school model is rooted in John Dewey’s (1902) conceptualization of the public school as a hub for the community. The model has recently been identified as part of New York City’s school turnaround strategy and continues to gain prominence nationally, because of this, it is essential to identify the key components of an excelling leadership partnership. This dissertation describes findings and recommendations from interviews with principals and community school directors in ten New York City community schools. These interviews were triangulated with analysis of the New York City school environment survey utilizing both faculty and parent responses. This …

The Varieties Of Tone Presence: On The Meanings Of Musical Tone In Twentieth-Century Music, Aaron Harcus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about tone presence, or how musical tone shows up for experience in twentieth-century music. In exploring the subject of tone presence, I rethink notions of “pitch structure” in post-tonal theory and offer an alternative that focuses on the question of what it is to be a musical interval for experience, drawing on a wide range of research from social theory, semiotics, theories of emotion, African American studies, literary theory, usage-based linguistics, post-colonial theory, and phenomenology. I begin by offering a critique of three basic assumptions that constrain understandings of what we mean by pitch structure in post-tonal …

The Mystery Of The Schubert Song: The Linked Data Promise, Kimmy Szeto

Publications and Research

Linked open data promises global interconnectedness of a vast amount of data. Web technologies promise to lower the barriers to accessing information and to enable knowledge production of massive scale. But can the web of data answer a music reference question? Starting with a seemingly impossible search for a Schubert song, this article describes how linked data technologies could overcome some limitations of catalog searching. However, technical and conceptual challenges are intertwined in the library community’s effort to publish linked data. Through an analysis of contrasting data models, this article offers a linked data reading of medium of performance and …

Critical Conversations With Children’S Literature: How Cultural And Political Vignettes (Cpvs) Support Young Readers, Jacqueline Darvin

Publications and Research

This article will discuss ways that teachers of young students can address sensitive or controversial issues in their classrooms through reading children’s literature and responding to Cultural and Political Vignettes (CPVs). First, it provides a brief overview of a four-stage pedagogical model that was designed to help teachers address controversial or sensitive issues in their classrooms (author, 2015) and briefly discusses two of the theoretical frameworks that support the model and its accompanying teaching strategies. The article then provides two detailed examples of how teachers of young children successfully addressed sensitive issues with their students. These examples contain descriptions of …