Digital Commons Network^™

Statistical Learning In Songbirds: From Self-Tutoring To Song Culture, Olga Fehér, Iva Ljubičić, Kenta Suzuki, Kazuo Okanoya, Ofer Tchernichovski

Publications and Research

At the onset of vocal development, both songbirds and humans produce variable vocal babbling with broadly distributed acoustic features. Over development, these vocalizations differentiate into the well-defined, categorical signals that characterize adult vocal behaviour. A broadly distributed signal is ideal for vocal exploration, that is, for matching vocal production to the statistics of the sensory input. The developmental transition to categorical signals is a gradual process during which the vocal output becomes differentiated and stable. But does it require categorical input?We trained juvenile zebra finches with playbacks of their own developing song, produced just a few moments earlier, updated continuously …

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Implications For Educational Justice, Magnus O. Bassey

Publications and Research

Educational justice is a major global challenge. In most underdeveloped countries, many students do not have access to education and in most advanced democracies, school attainment and success are still, to a large extent, dependent on a student’s social background. However, it has often been argued that social justice is an essential part of teachers’ work in a democracy. This article raises an important overriding question: how can we realize the goal of educational justice in the field of teaching? In this essay, I examine culturally responsive teaching as an educational practice and conclude that it is possible to realize …

Neutrality, Autonomy, And Power, Eldar Sarajlic

Publications and Research

This paper critically examines Alan Patten’s theory of neutrality of treatment. It argues that the theory assumes an inadequate conception of personal autonomy, which undermines its plausibility. However, I suggest that the theory can resolve the problem by developing and reinterpreting its conception of autonomy and introducing an additional strategy for addressing the power imbalances that result from the market-based interactions between individuals and their conceptions of the good.

Policy Brief: Expanding Food Benefits For Immigrants: Charting A Policy Agenda For New York City, Anabel Perez-Jimenez, Nicholas Freudenberg

Publications and Research

This policy brief explores the eligibility of various categories of New York City’s immigrant populations, from those who have become citizens to permanent residents (Green Card holders) to those who lack legal immigration status, for SNAP, WIC and School Food, the nation’s main food benefit programs. We also examine factors that facilitate or block immigrants’ enrollment in these programs. Our larger goals are to encourage more systematic study of immigrant access to food benefits and identify opportunities for improving access. We hope to widen a public conversation among immigrants and their organizations, food security groups, food justice advocates and policy …

On The Hispanophone Caribbean Question, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario

Publications and Research

This essay introduces the special section “The Idea of Hispanophone Caribbean Studies” with a focus on hispanopone Caribbean literature and how it is situated in the region and in the diaspora. The essay suggests the need for creating spaces of dialogue and communication, translation and multilingualism, that are interdisciplinary and intertextual, if we are to deepen our critical frames of reference and complicate and invigorate new creative and analytic discourses.

Sex And Seasonal Differences In Diet And Nutrient Intake In Verreaux's Sifakas (Propithecus Verreauxi), Flávia Koch, Joerg U. Ganzhorn, Jessica M. Rothman, Colin A. Chapman, Claudia Fichtel

Publications and Research

Fluctuations in food availability are a major challenge faced by primates living in seasonal climates. Variation in food availability can be especially challenging for females, because of the high energetic costs of reproduction. Therefore, females must adapt the particular demands of the different reproductive stages to the seasonal availability of resources. Madagascar has a highly seasonal climate, where food availability can be extremely variable. We investigated the seasonal changes in diet composition, nutrient and energy intake of female and male sifakas (Propithecus verreauxi) in a dry deciduous forest in western Madagascar. We examined how females adjust their diet to different …

Traversing The Triangulum: The Intersection Of Tobacco, Legalised Marijuana And Electronic Vaporisers In Denver, Colorado, Emily Anne Mcdonald, Lucy Popova, Pamela M. Ling

Publications and Research

Objective: To explore the intersection of tobacco, legalised marijuana and electronic vaporiser use among young adults in the ‘natural laboratory’ of Colorado, the first state with legalised retail marijuana.

Methods: We conducted semistructured interviews with 32 young adults (18–26 years old) in Denver, Colorado, in 2015 to understand the beliefs and practices related to the use of tobacco, marijuana and vaporisers.

Results: We found ambiguity about whether the phrase ‘to smoke’ refers to the use of tobacco or marijuana products. Smoking marijuana blunts (emptied cigarillo or tobacco wrap filled with marijuana) was common, but few interpreted this as tobacco use. …

The Epic Of Gilgamesh: Selected Readings From Its Original Early Arabic Language. Including A New Translation Of The Flood Story, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

This book introduces the earliest known literary and mythology work in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh, in its actual language: early Classical Arabic. It provides a more accurate translation and understanding of the important story of the flood, one of the key stories of the monotheistic religions. In this book, the author was able to decipher the actual meanings and pronunciations of several important names of ancient Mesopotamian gods, persons, cities, mountains, and other entities. He was able to uncover the evolution path of the concept of god and the background themes behind the rise of the monotheistic religions. …

Virtual Meatspace: Word Formation And Deformation In Cyberpunk Discussions, Matt Garley, Benjamin Slade

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Dialogic Faiths: Multi-Genre Expression In Religious Narrative, Rosemary L. Demos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As persuasive or expository texts, religious conversion narratives tend towards monologic language, and texts that advocate one particular creed or institution often reflect the unity of faith through linguistically totalizing methods. This study, however, examines the dialogic interactions found in certain religious narratives. The texts included in this analysis recount unusual conversion outcomes: not to formally established church institutions, but rather to a heightened religious experience and in some cases a call to leadership in establishing new social orders. In these texts, the dynamic between personal and communal religious experience is tense, sometimes precarious; the difficulties of engaging in social …

Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications And The Poetics Of Altered States, Jason Ciaccio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intoxication as a poetic principle is often identified with the romantic imagination. The literature of the intoxicated reverie is commonly thought of as synonymous with works such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” DeQuincey’s accounts of numerous nightmares and reveries, a number of Keats’ odes, Novalis’ hymns, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories, and Poe’s oneiric Gothic tales. Each of these, in part through their opiation or the incorporation of various other draughts, evokes a realm of dreams and visions of various sorts that are commonly associated with romantic poetic practices. The ecstatic trance, the sense of passing into another domain that is …

Mad Men Of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, And The American Postmodern Novel, Jennifer Chancellor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I account for the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the American postmodern novel that has long puzzled scholars by arguing that the genre must be understood as an expression of dominant masculinity threatened, not by women or people of color, but rather changes in postwar business and consumer culture. I support this claim by examining works by some of the founding American postmodern novelists—Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon—through the lens of historicism and biography. As advertising and publicity professionals in the postwar period, these men were positioned to offer a “complicitous critique” of …

Talk Shows And Language Attitudes: A Sociolinguistic Investigation Of Language Attitudes Towards Taiwan Mandarin Among Chinese Mainlanders, Chun-Yi Peng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the effects of media exposure and language ideologies on Mandarin speakers’ acceptability judgments. Although there is a long-standing tradition against citing media exposure as a source of language variation, I show that 1) media exposure to a non-local perceptually salient variant can make people more likely to rate non-local linguistic features as grammatically acceptable, and 2) media exposure shapes people’s language attitudes—a new alignment of attitudes is emerging among the millennials on the mainland.

Data were collected through an online survey consisting of grammaticality judgments, matched-guise tasks, open-ended attitudinal questions, and demographic questions. The data show …

Social Cognitive Processes In The Priming Of Mental Illness Stereotypes By The Media, Ginny Chan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In high-profile violent incidents, there appears to be a disproportionate focus on the perpetrator’s mental health status in relation to the incident (Angermeyer & Matschinger, 1996). Several studies have highlighted the biased nature of the media in reporting news on mental illness and its negative impact on general consensus (Corrigan et al., 2013; Wahl, 1992, 2003). Researchers have also suggested that the media is a significant source of knowledge for the public (Jorm, 2000; Wahl, 2003). Based on a social cognitive perspective, pragmatic inference and stereotype priming provide a framework to understand the reader’s comprehension. The current studies aimed to …

Building In Public: Critical Reconstruction And The Rebuilding Of Berlin After 1990, Naraelle Hohensee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reconstructing Berlin’s ruined contours after 1990 was one of the most important ways that reunified Germany made a public display of its relationship to the violence wrought by both the Nazis and East Germany during the twentieth century. By integrating historical forms into new buildings in the city’s commercial center, Berlin’s urban planners hoped to show the world that the nation had transcended totalitarianism and was worthy of a prominent place in the new global order. In order to achieve this vision, they adopted an approach called “Critical Reconstruction,” which required architects to follow rigid design standards based on traditional …

El Español En Estados Unidos Y La Academia Norteamericana De La Lengua Española: Una Historia Glotopolítica, Lorena Hernandez Ramirez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The North American Academy of the Spanish Language (henceforth ANLE, from the Spanish Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española), and more specifically, the discourses about Spanish in the US that emerge in certain moments of this institution’s history, will constitute the object of this study. ANLE was founded in 1973 and in 1980, after some controversial episodes, was finally accepted into the network of academies known as Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (henceforth ASALE), led by the main normative institution for Spanish, the Spanish Royal Academy (henceforth RAE, from the Spanish Real Academia Española). Through an …

Help-Seeking Latina Victims Of Domestic Violence And The Programs That Serve Them In New York City, Yolanda Ortiz-Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Domestic violence has impacted, and continues to impact the lives of many women. Although impacted by domestic violence, all women may not experience domestic violence in the same way.

The purpose of this research was to explore differences that may exist between help-seeking foreign-born Latina and help-seeking U.S-born Latina victims of domestic violence. Using a purposeful sample of 32 help-seeking Latinas who were actively receiving services in one of the many domestic violence programs in New York City, the researcher set out to explore differences in use of services, experiences with domestic violence, perceptions of domestic violence, and satisfaction with …

An Evaluation Of Pos Taggers For The Childes Corpus, Rui Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project evaluates four mainstream taggers on a representative collection of child-adult’s dialogues from Child Language Data Exchange System. The nine children’s files from Valian corpora and part of Eve corpora have been manually labeled, and rewrote with LARC tagset. They served as gold standard corpora in the training and testing process. Four taggers: CLAN MOR tagger, ACOPOST trigram tagger, Stanford parser, and Ver. 1.14 of Brill tagger have been tested by 10-fold cross validation. By analyzing what kinds of assumptions the tagger made about category assignment lead to failing, we identify several problematic cases of tagging. By comparing the …

How To Be A French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant, Paul J. Fadoul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation I use Auerbach's insights developed in his Mimesis to demonstrate that in A la recherche, Proust captures the political and racial concerns of his times, proposing as a solution a heterogeneous French society where cultural, ethnic, and religious groups live together in mutual respect and understanding. In his novel, Proust echoes ideas developed by Bernard Lazare in Le Nationalisme Juif (1897) as well as in the literary output of the first French Jewish Renaissance (early1900’s to the mid1930’s). These authors responded to the portentous mix of Nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by urging the creation of a separate …

Educational Histories Of Newcomer Immigrant Youth: From Countries Of Origin To The United States, Joanna Yip

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation details the educational histories and linguistic portraits of newcomer immigrant youth in their countries of origin, and provided accounts of their academic trajectories after arrival in the United States. The data provide evidence of poor quality instruction, particularly in literacy, and educational environments in low-income sending countries. The study shows that prior schooling experiences in the country of origin have an impact on school readiness, the degree to which immigrant youth are prepared for education in secondary classrooms in the U.S. The dissertation also provides an analysis of how pre-migration education interacts with educational performance after immigration, leading …

Boundaries Of Home And Work: Social Reproduction And Home-Based Workers In Ahmedabad, India, Natascia Boeri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation critically questions the use of women’s labor in international development and global capitalism by examining women’s participation in the informal economy, a significant source of work for women in the Global South. Based on ten months of fieldwork in Ahmedabad, India, this study considers women’s experiences with informality when they participate in home-based work, the production of goods for the market in one’s own home. I ask how women’s place-based activities redefine their roles and positions across three spheres of social life: the family, the economy, and civil society (through their participation in a non-governmental organization, or NGO). …

An Escape From Language Into Language: The Internal Exile Of Louis Wolfson, Antoine N. Rideau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper aims to show how the life and work of American francophone author Louis Wolfson - who suffered from schizophrenia and underwent a self-imposed exile from his own mother tongue - might serve to illuminate European émigré writers' relationships to multilingualism.

Performing El Rap El ʿArabi 2005-2015: Feeling Politics Amid Neoliberal Incursions In Ramallah, Amman, And Beirut, Rayya S. El Zein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is about politics in Arabic rap. Specifically, it is about affective dynamics and material negotiations during rap concerts in three cities in the Levant. I analyze Arab hip hop culture in the context of three different but related histories of cosmopolitan, middle class growth, and gentrification. Using an ethnomusicological framework rooted in participant observation and performance theory, I compare concert conditions, audience behavior, and accessibility of music production in Ramallah, Amman, and Beirut.

In Chapter One, I elaborate the discursive and theoretical frameworks that have pinned the political valences of Arab youth, Arab artists, and Arab rappers in …

Processing Filler-Gap Dependencies In Mandarin Chinese: An Effect Of Language Exposure?, Stanley Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin Chinese process filler-gap dependencies in potentially ambiguous fronted wh-questions. The study recruited native speakers of Mandarin with different degrees of English proficiency. In the experiment, participants were first presented with a wh-in-situ question and then a wh-ex-situ alteration of it that has the wh-phrase fronted to the beginning of the sentence. Participants were asked to judge and rate whether the two sentences could express a similar meaning or not. The results show that the movement of the wh-phrase zai nali (‘where’) is generally accepted by Mandarin speakers, despite Mandarin being a wh-in-situ language …

Consciousness, Perception, And Short-Term Memory, Henry F. Shevlin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dissertation Abstract: Consciousness, Perception, and Short-Term Memory

When we engage in almost any perceptual activity – recognizing a face, listening out for a phone-call, or simply taking in a sunset – information must be briefly stored and processed in some form of short-term memory. For philosophers attempting to develop an empirically grounded account of perception and conscious experience, it is therefore crucial to engage with scientific theories of the kinds of short-term memory mechanisms that underlie our moment-to-moment retention of information about the world. To that end, in this dissertation I review recent scientific evidence for a new form of …

Ethnic And National Identity Of Third Generation Koreans In Japan, Haruka Morooka

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite Japan’s emphasis on its ethnic homogeneity, there actually are ethnic minorities in Japan. Most of foreign residents in Japan came recently, but a group of Koreans, which is called Zainichi, has been living in Japan before World War II. “Zainichi”, literally means “residing in Japan,” with a connotation of impermanence. It could be Zainichi Chinese or Zainichi Americans, but the term almost exclusively refers “to a population of colonial-era migrants from the Korean peninsula that settles in the Japanese archipelago and their descendants” (Lie, 2008, x). After decades of living in Japan, over 90% of the Zainichi population is …

Semantic Holism Revisited, Chun-Ping Yen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I defend semantic holism, the view that the meaning of an expression is determined by its relations to every other expression in the language of individual competent users. I argue that, once properly understood, most disadvantages attributed to holism can be dissolved and suggest that the core division between the holist and the non-holist is on the question whether invariant meanings shared across all possible occasions where the corresponded expressions are uttered are necessary for the explanation of meaning sharing. I give reason why the answer is negative and demonstrate how to explain our linguistic interaction without such invariant meanings.

Power And Proximity: The Politics Of State Secession, Elizabeth A. Nelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

State secession is a rare occurrence in the international system. While a number of movements seek secession, the majority fail to achieve statehood. Of the exceptional successes, many have not had the strongest claims to statehood; some of these new states look far less like states than some that have failed. So what accounts for these secessions? I argue that the politics of regional actors drive the process. If a secessionist movement does not have the support of actors in the region, it will not achieve statehood. There are three mechanisms through which regional actors can determine outcomes: (1) they …

The Discursive Functioning Of Knowledge Claims In Research Studies On Children’S Conceptual Knowledge Of Number, Patrick D. Byers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Researchers interested in the development of conceptual knowledge of number have studied children’s behavior in various tasks or other contexts in order to draw conclusions about what they know. The guiding assumption of this work is that the presence or absence of a given form of knowledge is typically reflected in the ability/inability to perform certain types of behavior. Researchers complicate this assumption when they claim that (1) the ability to perform a given behavior may also reflect simple imitation or rote learning in the absence of understanding, and/or (2) that the inability to perform a certain behavior may reflect …

Seeing And Perceptual Content, Ben S. Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There are two widely held assumptions about perception: ascriber-independence (the view that the facts regarding what a subject perceives, as well as what her perceptual states represent, are independent of the interests of those attributing the relevant states to her), and determinacy (the view that perceptual content is relatively determinate). I challenge both of these assumptions, and develop a new approach to perceptual content, with implications for theories of mental content more broadly. In chapter one, I address the question of whether, in addition to low-level features, vision represents ordinary objects. I argue that there is just no fact of …