Digital Commons Network^™

Memory For Stimulus Sequences: A Divide Between Humans And Other Animals?, Ghirlanda Stefano, Johan Lind, Magnus Enquist

Publications and Research

Humans stand out among animals for their unique capacities in domains such as language, culture and imitation, yet it has been difficult to identify cognitive elements that are specifically human. Most research has focused on how information is processed after it is acquired, e.g. in problem solving or ‘insight’ tasks, but we may also look for species differences in the initial acquisition and coding of information. Here, we show that non-human species have only a limited capacity to discriminate ordered sequences of stimuli. Collating data from 108 experiments on stimulus sequence discrimination (1540 data points from 14 bird and mammal …

Persistent Pleasures: Agency, Social Power, And Embodiment In Women's Solitary Masturbation Experiences, Christin P. Bowman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Though sexuality has historically been a useful site for examinations of social power, looking at power through the lens of sexuality often involves interpersonal analyses. But social power can also inform solitary experiences through the internalization of social norms and discourses. In this dissertation, I move beyond explorations of how people interact sexually with one another, and instead investigate women’s solitary masturbation experiences throughout their lives as a means to better understand the intricate ways in which sexist, racist, and heterosexist ideologies weave themselves into women’s bodies and lives. Specifically, I ask the following research question in this dissertation: How …

Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art Of Claude Cahun And Hannah Weiner, Phillip L. Griffith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In its most common usage in the artistic context, collaboration refers to a practice of creation in which two artists work together to produce a single artwork or object. Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner focuses on the nexus of photography, writing, and performance in the work of six female avant-garde artists from the transatlantic twentieth century, informed by the important place of surrealism in that history, to reconsider this understanding of collaboration. Instead of the notion of collaboration as founded in the experience of two artists working together in each others’ presence, I examine …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Seeing And Being Seen: A Multimodal Inquiry Of Multilingual High School Newcomers And Their Contributions To Educational Communities, Ivana Espinet

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation research followed the experiences of seven high school newcomers who chose to participate in an internship program, assisting elementary school students, some of whom were also emergent bilinguals. This study used ethnographic and visual methodologies to explore young people’s evolving understanding of teaching, learning, and languaging as members of a community of practice within the internship.

The internship provided a space for the young people to make sense of schooling in their new country. The narratives that the interns shared highlight how the set of linguistic and cultural-historical repertoires of practice that they entered with shaped how they …

Aspects Of Quantifier Float In Thai, Khanin Chaiphet

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research on Thai Q(uantifier)-float attempts to manifest the problems for each of its analysis. For the adverbial analysis, the Japanese data show that the floating quantifiers can be associated with both distributive and plurality-of-events readings while Thai does not distinguish between these two readings. For the stranding analysis, the differences from English-Thai comparative data show that Thai floating quantifiers often occur in positions where their associated NPs could not have previously occupied or have been moved from, and thus cannot be analyzed as resulting from stranding. As a solution, Thai Q-float is postulated as an instance of rightward movement (extraposition) …

Between Speech & Song: Clarifying The Sprechstimme Of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Sara M. Paar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since its creation, the technique of Sprechstimme has fascinated the audiences, performers, and composers of twentieth century music. What is it? How is it done? How should it be notated? At the fore of investigations into these questions has been Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, the work in which Schoenberg debuted this new technique. Much has been written in regard to Schoenberg’s creation and use of Sprechstimme, as well as his own exploration of the speech/song continuum. Composers, conductors, and performers have all tried to make sense of the notation, instructions, and performances Schoenberg left behind. Despite this, confusion, …

Medical Student Knowledge Regarding Age Related Hearing Loss And Amplification, Max L. Rubin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this survey is to determine medical student knowledge regarding hearing loss, communication, audiology, treatment and diagnosis of age related hearing loss and the connection to health outcomes. A questionnaire was created, using Survey Monkey, to assess medical student knowledge of hearing loss, communication, audiology, treatment and diagnosis of age related hearing loss and the connection to health outcomes. The questions comprising the survey pertain to demographics, the profession of audiology, auditory system anatomy and physiology, hearing pathologies, and appropriate intervention and health outcomes associated with under-treatment of hearing loss. Questions were gathered from previous research studies attempting …

First And Second Generation New York City Bilinguals: What Is The Role Of Input In Their Collocational Knowledge Of English And Spanish?, Ingrid T. Heidrick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations typically used by speakers of English in the United States are make a decision, take a step, and have a coffee. Examples of collocations typically used by speakers of Spanish in Latin America and Spain are tomar una decisión ('make a decision', lit.: take a decision), dar un …

The Space Of Alterity: Language And National Identity In Theodor Adorno And W.G. Sebald, Agata Szczodrak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The German Romantic monolingual paradigm of national identity emerged in the late eighteenth century to establish a mother tongue as a national backbone. This paradigm portrayed multilingualism as destabilizing, impoverishing, and unsuitable for aesthetics. Radicalized by the Nazis and overlooked in postwar debates over German national identity, this paradigm persists in contemporary societies and continues to conceal, belittle, and discredit multilingualism. To oppose that paradigm, this dissertation unveils the enriching and nourishing qualities of foreign languages, presents translingualism as a viable alternative to monolingualism, and reveals how translingual literature creates transnational connectedness. The limitations of the paradigm are traced from …

Escribiendo Para Desahogarme: Release And Resistance In A Middle School Bilingual Writing Workshop, Carla Espana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a teacher’s language ideologies, their impact on curriculum modifications and bilingual Latinx middle schoolers’ storytelling, to understand how a bilingual pedagogy builds on their cultural and linguistic resources. This qualitative study was conducted in a sixth grade writing workshop class in New York City as the focus teacher taught the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Personal Narrative Unit of Study. The first two findings center on the factors that influence a teacher’s stance on language practices and bilingual pedagogy, and how these contributed to curriculum modifications that included using students’ full linguistic and cultural repertoires, integrating …

Language Ideologies And The Schooling Of Caribbean Creole English-Speaking Youth In New York City, Dale M. Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to illuminate the ways in which Anglocentric ideologies operate to marginalize and exclude the linguistic and cultural resources of Caribbean Creole English (CCE)-speaking in New York City’s education system. Data was gathered from youths and teachers, and then analyzed to identify the language practices and ideologies relating to both Standard English (SE)and Creole varieties and how they shape teaching and learning for these two groups.

Several broad themes were identified. First, CCE-speaking youths are homogenized as simply black students and as a result, their specific cultural and linguistic resources are rendered invisible and are not included in …

The Expansion Of The Mandarin Mind, Tyler Okney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will examine and contrast two periods of xenophobia and stagnation, late Qing dynasty China, and the PRC under Mao, with a genuine market place of ideas, Shanghai and the other foreign treaty ports in the period 1849 to 1949, and explain how this period of cosmopolitan ferment has had beneficial effects on China today. Countries that have shut themselves off from the outside world have frequently suffered first stagnation, and then decay. While this might appear a commonplace in the abstract, the application of this insight in the development of particular nations has been neither as thorough or …

Medical Transnationalism: Korean Immigrants’ Medical Tourism To The Home Country, Sou Hyun Jang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Korean immigrants’ barriers to formal U.S. healthcare, three distinctive types of healthcare behaviors that they exhibit, contributing factors to their medical tourism, and their experiences and evaluations of medical tourism. Analyzing survey data with 507 Korean immigrants and in-depth interviews with 120 Korean immigrants in the New York-New Jersey area, the study finds that more than half of Korean immigrants have barriers to healthcare in the U.S., the two biggest being the language barrier and not having health insurance. The study also finds that there are three distinctive types of healthcare behavior that Korean immigrants employ to …

Knowing Others, Or Not: Performing, Caring, Foreboding, And Acknowledging In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Meechal Hoffman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Knowing Others, Or Not makes two overarching claims about the nineteenth-century novel’s depictions of relations. First, they are overwhelmingly concerned with epistemological questions about knowing others, and second, more often than not, the problem of other minds is portrayed as productive of both pleasure and valuable negative affects. While much scholarship on the relational nineteenth century focuses on either sympathy or social responsibility within the framework of liberal individualism, I show instead that the authors in this study—Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot—repeatedly register doubt about the usefulness or possibility of authenticity, and posit the pleasure that …

"Marie Manje La Pom Nan." Examining The Cognitive Process Of Restructuring And Advantage Selection In The Definite Article System In Haitian Creole Among U.S. Born Heritage Speakers Of Haitian Creole, Marie-Michelle Monéreau-Merry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The distributional patterns of heritage speakers’ reanalyzed first language are often grammatically divergent from native speakers. Irrespective of the heritage language, there is converging evidence that the cognitive process of reanalysis of heritage languages is often evident in less salient properties of the language, such as inflectional morphology (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007). Therefore, Haitian Creole (HC) is a candidate for restructuring. In this investigation we compared the morphophonological patterns of the definite article system at the production and perception level between two groups of early learners of Haitian Creole (i.e. native speakers vs. United States (US) born heritage speakers).

The …

Region, Nation And Gastronomy: Regionalism In Gastronomic Texts Of The Early 20th Century (1900-1939), Lauren Reches

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

France is far from being a uniform culture and yet the food of French provinces is often subsumed into one universally known “French cuisine.” While 19^th-century haute cuisine ignored regional differences, gastronomes of the early 20^th-century, such as Curnonsky, Marcel Rouff, Austin de Croze, and Pampille, defined a new French culinary identity based on appropriating and incorporating the diversity of the regional cuisines. Regional cuisine at the time was, however, quite diverse. Some of the regions of France were newly added to the country, such as Savoie and Nice, while others had been in contention for …

Las Letras De Fernando De Pulgar, Nueva Edición, Estudio Preliminar Y Notas, Ana-Maria Zaharescu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis intends to be a new edition of a text widely read in its time judging by the number of manuscripts and editions that circulated between the last quarter of the 15th century and the next. They are epistles directed to historical personalities of the end of the 15th century who played an important role in the politics and in the society of Fernando de Pulgar’s time. Along with political and diplomatic matters, the Letters express author’s personal feelings and reactions to the political or social situation of the fifteenth century Castile.

A new edition of Fernando de Pulgar's …

"Resisting From Within": (Re)Imagining A Critical Translingual English Classroom, Kate Anna Seltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic case study of an urban, linguistically diverse English classroom explores what happened when space was made for students both to voice their experiences living amidst ideologies that marginalize their language practices and identities and to resist such ideologies through writing that pushed monoglossic boundaries. Intensive one-on-one work with a high school English teacher led to the creation of a year-long curriculum that emphasized metalinguistic inquiry and discussion, linked language, power, and identity, and modeled the ways that writers and other artists take linguistic risks in order to critique monoglossic language ideologies.

Over the course of the year, students …

The Economics Of American Higher Education, Robin Freedman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Economics of American Higher Education

by

Robin Freedman

Advisor: Anthony G. Picciano

American higher education is facing a perfect storm of converging issues and challenges which are threatening the demand for its product and the value proposition it offers. Many of these challenges, such as changing delivery models, rising student debt, lower government funding, growing economic inequality and job readiness concerns are all potential obstacles to a college degree, which continues to command a wage premium in the job market. Using a literature review methodology to examine the body of material that is available on this topic, a synthesis …

Becoming Ghosts: The Public Veiling Of Puerto Ricans In New York City, Samantha Pina Saghera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years Puerto Ricans in New York City have become difficult to locate in the public realm. This is a paradox given that Puerto Ricans make up the largest Hispanic subgroup in the larger metropolitan region. This study examines how, when, and why Puerto Ricans became publicly invisible in New York City.

Demographic, media-based, political, and cultural changes have all contributed to the decline in Puerto Rican ethnic visibility. The consequence is that although Puerto Ricans continue to be racialized (as evidenced by their socioeconomic indicators), their racialization cannot be seen in the public realm. Instead, Hispanic characteristics are …

Theatre Translation As Historiography: Projections Of Greek Self-Identity Through English Translations During The European Crisis, Maria Mytilinaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project focuses on theatre translation from Modern Greek into English through the examination of three plays translated in the early years of the ongoing Greek crisis (2012-2014). Currently Greek culture is received internationally through two important frames of reference: Hellenism, the admiration for the ancient Greek spirit, and the more recent negative associations with modern Greece provoked by the Eurozone crisis. The three translations I examine challenge these dual external projections onto Greek culture by promoting a more nuanced image that recontextualizes the Greek past. In their capacity to travel between cultures, often in bilingual iterations, these theatrical translations …

The Willfulness Of A Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki And The Politics Of Visual Resistance, Miriam M. Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ahmed Zaki (1949-2005) is one of Egyptian cinema’s most prominent leading actors, with work spanning three decades of critical films that informed a generation’s visual register of masculinity. However, the beginnings of his career were marked by public skepticism around his place as a leading actor due to him being “too dark” and “too poor”; as his career continued to flourish, those very markings of racing and classing Zaki because a foundation for increasingly stamping his public image with the “authenticity” of an Egyptian citizen. At a particularly neoliberal moment in the Egyptian economy, that of the early 80s, new …

Land Of Women: Basilicata, Emigration, And The Women Who Remained Behind, 1880-1914, Victoria Calabrese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1880 and 1914, millions of Italians emigrated to all corners of the globe in hopes of earning better wages and forging a better life for themselves and for their families. This dissertation examines the role of the women left behind in the Italian region of Basilicata when their husbands emigrated, and the political, social, economic, and legal changes they experienced in their absence. During the Liberal Period, women had few political rights, and married women were dependent on their husbands, but being left on their own put them in a unique position. I argue that the Southern Italian women …

The Role Of Language In The Development Of Temporal Cognition In 6- To 10-Year-Old Children, Danielle Denigris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability to represent and make sense of time requires the mental representations of the ordering of events and temporal relations, abstract time concepts, natural biological rhythms, the self and other through time, and causal relationships. This representational ability undergoes significant refinement in middle childhood concurrent with advances in children’s language and nonverbal skills. This study explored the representational development of temporal cognition, diachronic thinking, and behavioral prediction in relation to a battery of language and nonverbal abilities with the aims of confirming age-related improvements, exploring whether disparate measures are indices of an underlying ability, and examining the role of …

Exploring The Relationship Between Sequence Learning, Motor Coordination, And Language Development, Rita Obeid

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dual-route approaches to language acquisition posit separable mechanisms for acquisition of vocabulary and grammar (e.g., Pinker, 1998). Working within the dualistic framework, Ullman and Pierpont (2005) proposed the procedural deficit hypothesis, which proposes that impairments in rule-based aspects of language (e.g. grammar, phonology) observed in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) may be linked to neural deficits that govern procedural memory and are critical for the procedural/sequence learning of both, cognitive and motor skills. In support of this hypothesis, recent meta-analyses indicate significant deficits in sequence learning in children with SLI relative to controls (Lum et al., 2014). Further research …

Translanguaging Practices For Educational Equity: Moments In A Bilingual Middle School Classroom, Luz Y. Herrera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs in New York City largely follow a 50-50 model: half of the instruction is in English while the other half is in another target language. In NYC, as well as the rest of the country, these programs are typically English-Spanish due to the large Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. Bilingual programs also tend to strictly separate languages and often insist that teachers and students only use the designated language according to the school or district’s particular language allocation policy.

This qualitative case study challenges the strict separatist language model of some dual language bilingual …

Do Spellings Of Words And Phonemic Awareness Training Facilitate Vocabulary Learning In Preschoolers?, Robin O'Leary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine the contribution of phoneme awareness training and orthography to the learning of new vocabulary words by partial alphabetic phase readers. We hypothesized that four and five year old children taught to segment words with letters would outperform those trained with shape markers and those that received no segmentation training on an invented spelling task. We also hypothesized that students seeing the spellings of new vocabulary words (names) would learn the words in fewer trials, remember the names and features better and would be able to better recognize letter labels when presented alone. …

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing And Reception Of Catherine Of Siena, Lisa Tagliaferri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing and Reception of Catherine of Siena (https://caterina.io) affirms the 14th-century mystic Catherine of Siena as a writer through contextualizing her texts among the corpus of contemporary Italian literature, and studying her reception in the Renaissance period of Italy and England. Joining an increasing body of recent meaningful scholarship that has been making significant progress to recover many overlooked and peripheral female voices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this work serves to fully assert Catherine as a writer of work that is literarily significant and worthy of textual analysis alongside contemporary male Italian …

Perspectives On Emotional Climate Associated With Classroom Interactions, Hiro Komatsubara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is difficult for students to learn and teachers to teach in today’s classroom environment especially when events involving strong emotional contradictions occur in classrooms. Such events may elicit emotions that negative affect, teaching, learning and wellness. Various studies show that high levels of negative emotions create stressful classroom environments, and that a positive Emotional Energy (EE) in the classroom encourages attentiveness, enthusiasm and interest. Therefore, it is highly likely that creating calm learning environments by ameliorating classroom participants’ emotional intensity and increasing their mindfulness and awareness will produce positive outcomes. Using both quantitative and qualitative measures this study examines …