Digital Commons Network^™

Maturation Of Speech Discrimination And Attentional Requirements In Late Childhood, Judith Ann Iannotta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability to perceive speech sounds and contrasts continues to be refined throughout the course of development. While emerging models suggest that development is characterized by shifts from an attentionally demanding mode of processing speech sounds to one that occurs relatively automatically, the specific developmental time-course of these changes remains unclear. The present work reports the findings of two experiments that aimed to provide insights into the time-course by which neural processes underlying speech discrimination in children and adolescents becomes automatic. The experiments used event-related potentials (ERP) measures, with a particular focus on mismatch negativity (MMN) - a developmentally-sensitive index …

Do Cultural And Perceptual Factor Matter?: An Investigation Of Factors Impacting Intelligence Test Scores Of Latinos/Hispanics In The United States, Mary E. Ignagni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examined societal and cultural explanations regarding the score differences seen between Latinos/Hispanics and Whites on intelligence tests through focusing specifically on possible explanations for the scores obtained by Latino/Hispanic test-takers. In this paper, it was argued that additional unique factors may impact the test scores of Latino/Hispanic test-takers. Specifically, racial and ethnic self-identification, ethnic centrality, acculturation, cultural distance, test perceptions, and ethnicity were explored as possible unique factors. In addition, an attempt was made to explain within group differences. A non-experimental study was utilized in which a final sample of 194 participants completed an intelligence test and measures …

Densidad Léxica En La Prensa Hispana De Ee.Uu. E Hispanoamérica: Un Estudio Comparativo, Luana Ferreira

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on a quantitative and comparative analysis of lexical density in Spanish print news in the United States and Latin America. Lexical density is the statistical measure that calculates the percentage of terms in relation to the total number of running words contained in a text. Within the context of Spanish in the United States, questions arise pertaining to the level of lexical compatibility and variability in contact situations, as well as in situations where the convergence of different varieties of the Spanish language coexist. Because most existing lexical density studies of Spanish media are descriptive, there is …

Effects Of Native Language On Perception And Neurophysiologic Processing Of English /R/ And /L/ By Native American, Korean, And Japanese Listeners, Lee Jung An

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The perception of English liquids /r/ and /l/ is challenging for native Korean and Japanese adult speakers because these sounds are not phonemic in these languages. The Korean language has a partial phonetic model (intervocalic [ɾ]-[11]) that could potentially facilitate processing of English /r/ and /l/ but the Japanese language does not. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of native language on the neurophysiologic processing of English intervocalic /r/ and /l/ by native American, Korean and Japanese listeners using several event-related evoked potentials (ACC, MMN, & P3a) along with behavioral identification and discrimination. Three specific aims …

Teaching Community College Students Strategies For Learning Unknown Words As They Read Expository Text, Leslie Craigo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study reported here investigated methods that enable college students to learn the meaning of unknown words as they read discipline specific academic text. The ability to read and comprehend text is known to be positively correlated with academic success. However that ability is challenging to college students in part because of the sophisticated vocabulary encountered in academic text. The study reported here utilized an experimental design. Forty one participants read specific passages aloud during three sessions. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four intervention groups to investigate alternative methods of learning the meaning of unknown words. In the …

The Spark That Lit The Flame: The Creation, Deployment, And Deconstruction Of The Story Of Mohammed Bouazizi And The Arab Spring, Elizabeth Ann Cummings

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The story of Mohammed Bouazizi is credited with being the "spark that lit the flame," first of the Tunisian Revolution, then the Arab Spring as a whole, creating a domino effect that brought down the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan and Yemeni leaders, and threatened to topple still more. In this thesis I explore the narrative structure of the Tunisian revolution, how the story of Mohammed Bouazizi represented that structure and how the narrative sparked the Arab Spring. I also ask how narrative is created and what role social media played in allowing this particular story to become a part of the …

Black Migrant Literature, New African Diasporas, And The Phenomenology Of Movement, Christopher Ian Foster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black Migrant Literature, New African Diasporas, and the Phenomenology of Movement examines immigration, diaspora, and movement in late twentieth and twenty-first century African literature. "Migritude" describes the work of a disparate yet distinct group of contemporary African authors who critically focus on migration within the context of globalization, emphasizing that the "past" of immigration is irreducibly entangled with colonial processes. These writers often refashion the politics or discourses of earlier movements within the black radical tradition, such as Négritude or pan-Africanism, as a way to engage immigration in the present. I argue that although immigration as a system developed as …

A Syntactic Treatment Of Adjectival Non-Intersectivity In English, Alexander Funk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Natural language has long been observed to be rife with apparently 'non-intersective' modification constructions (false teeth, huge flea, heavy smoker, etc.), whose apparent non-compositionality poses difficulties for formally-articulated theories of language. Bolinger's (1967) demonstration of the extent and significance of the issue ushered in several lines of investigation, first in semantics (most notably Kamp 1975, Siegel 1976, Partee 2009), but more recently in syntax as well, with the insights of Larson (1998) and Bouchard (2002) informing approaches to the nominal domain such as that in Cinque (2010). However, 'semantics-only' accounts of non-intersectivity phenomena have limited explanatory …

Roman Tragedy And Medicine: Language And Imagery Of Illness In Seneca And Celsus, Michael Patrick Goyette

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the language and imagery of illness in selected tragedies and, to a lesser extent, the philosophical prose of the first-century CE Roman tragic poet and philosopher Seneca, reading these works with and against De Medicina, a nearly contemporary encyclopedic Latin prose text on medical theory and practice by the Roman encyclopediast Celsus. Inspired by previous studies of classical Greek tragedy together with the largely contemporary body of Greek prose writings on medicine known as the Hippocratic Corpus, my dissertation moves the discussion to Latin literature and is the first extended study to do so. I aim not …

Beyond Information: College Choice As A Literacy Practice, Jeremy Samuel Greenfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Every year more than two million high school seniors prepare for and apply to college. These students visit college websites, write college admission essays, complete online application forms and use digital literacy tools to elicit and share knowledge about college. These literacy practices are central to the college choice process. Nonetheless, few scholars have examined how these practices are experienced by students or framed by the schools these students attend. Guided by Gee's Discourse theory, this study examines how a group of 14 high school seniors who attended a high poverty high school in the Bronx, New York developed the …

Obstruent Voicing And Tone In Siklis Gurung, Danielle Ronkos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines proposals for the tone system of Gurung, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nepal, in light of data collected from a speaker of Siklis Gurung. Although Gurung is widely acknowledged to be a tonal language, existing descriptions of Gurung disagree as to how these tone categories should be defined and whether word-initial obstruent voicing is phonemic or allophonic. The data presented in this paper suggests that, despite claims otherwise, voicing is phonemic in some dialects of Gurung. It also suggests that Siklis Gurung is best analyzed as having three tone categories: a low tone that occurs with breathy …

Object Categorization In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asd), Jaime Vitrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to investigate hierarchical object categorization in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), examining three levels of category inclusiveness (superordinate, basic, subordinate) across three tasks (sequential touching task, generalized imitation task, sorting task) in three domains (animals, tools, kitchen utensils) in the same group of children with ASD. Previous research on the categorization abilities of children with ASD has shown mixed results. This study was designed to clarify past discrepancies in the literature.

Ten children with ASD participated in this study (mean CA = 4 years, 10 months; range 3 to 6 years; mean VMA …

Adonis' Poetics Of Vision And Modernity, Rasha Arabi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Syrian poet and cultural critic Ali Ahmad Said (1930 - ) (Adonis) is one of the most influential Arab poets of the 20th century. His poetry represents a radical rupture with what was established before. Adonis’ poetry is associated with innovation and revolution, and his language is characterized by mysticism and hermeticism. While living in Beirut, he co-founded the influential literary journal Shi'r (1956-63) with the Lebanese poet Yusuf al-Khal (1917-1987), and a few years later he founded his own journal, Mawaqif (1968-1998). Both journals served as a prominent literary platform for cultural modernity and radical criticism of the …

Black Like Me? A Narrative Study Of Non-Anglophone Black U.S. Immigrant Selves In The Making, Yvanne Joseph

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished discriminatory national origin quotas that favored European immigrants. The U.S. has since experienced steady flows of immigrants of color. These diverse groups have brought their racial, social, cultural and historical experiences, which adds greater complexity to the existing Black/White and ingroup/outgroup models that shape group relations, and psychological theorizing about identity. This dissertation focuses specifically on the smaller, less visible, yet growing segments of these immigrant populations. It presents a study of the lives of ten individual immigrants of African descent originating from a non-Anglophone country within Africa, Latin America …

Mental Discipline And Musical Meaning, Alice Harriet Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Musical meaning, or what a musical experience communicates to a listener, is predicated on a shared habitus of listening between the musical creator (i.e., composer, performer, or improviser) and the listener. The meaning a listener takes away from a musical experience is partly dependent on the vessel transmitting it (i.e., who is performing, the quality of performance, or the visual aspects of performance), and a musical creator's actions are the result of his or her training, past experiences, enculturation, attentional focus, and bodily control in the heightened mental state in which creativity occurs. Even in traditions that consider the musician …

Proust's Medusa: Ovid, Evolution, And Modernist Metamorphosis, Gregory John Mercurio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ovid's Metamorphoses has served as an indispensable text for Modernism, not least for such foundational Modernists as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. This dissertation examines how these writers characteristically employ Ovidian metamorphoses with a specifically evolutionary inflection, particularly in a post- Darwinian world informed by varying -often authoritarian- notions of biological adaptation, as well as an increasing emphasis on Mendalian genetics as the determining factor in what would become known as the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary theory. Using the theoretical platforms of both Queer Theory and Object Ontology, this dissertation proposes that a more pluralized, less authoritative …

The Domain Of Finiteness: Anchoring Without Tense In Copular Amalgam Sentences, Teresa Elizabeth O'Neill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The central thesis of this work is that a clause consisting only of left-peripheral functional structure can be fully finite. Generative models of clause structure typically assume that a finite clause must be tensed, including a projection of T and a temporal relation between the proposition and the utterance context. In light of evidence from tenseless languages, this assumption has come under scrutiny in recent years. This dissertation offers a new body of evidence from English, a tensed language, in support of the claim that finite clauses can lack the projection of T.

Drawing on the results of formal acceptability …

Playing Dead: Staging Corpses, Ghosts, And Statues In Early Modern Drama, Sarah Outterson-Murphy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Semi-animate corpses, physically powerful ghosts, and natural looking statues serve a powerful metatheatrical purpose in early modern drama. Such liminal bodies, which I define as figures caught between the fictional body and the living actor, model the relation between playgoer, actor, and playwright as they work together to produce theatrical fictions. The dramatized impact of liminal bodies on their onstage spectators draws playgoers' attention to their own experience of the liminally present theatrical world. Such displays of the power and pleasure of artifice paradoxically free theater from the constraining obligation of so-called accurate representation and highlight the pleasure playgoers and …

Representation Without Thought: Confusion, Reference, And Communication, Elmar Geir Unnsteinsson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Philosophy of mind has been dominated, since Frege, by a puzzle-driven methodology. This tradition aims to provide a coherent system for describing specific semantic features of all conceivable cases where the speaker is confused about the identity of an object. The first chapter develops a theory on which confused identity is a mental state of an agent who either believes falsely that a = b or believes falsely that a ≠ b. Many influential arguments in philosophy are puzzle-driven; Kripke on semantic and speaker reference, Reimer and Kaplan on demonstratives. I show in detail how these and other arguments …

An Exploratory Study Of The Role Of Cooperating Teachers In Preparing Teacher Candidates For Academic Success With Students Of Color In High-Need Schools, Audra Michelle Watson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the teaching practices, attitudes, beliefs, and expectations, cooperating teachers hold and model for teacher candidates preparing to work in high-need schools with significant populations of students of color. Using a culturally relevant and critical race theory lens, I argue that the clinical placements in which many teacher candidates are placed provide limited opportunities for them to see and engage in the full spectrum of culturally relevant pedagogical practices.

The data for this study were captured from participants in a nationally-administered, state-based teacher preparation program through surveys, interviews, and observations over a period of four months. Using a …

The Incidence And Evolution Of Palatalized Consonants In Latvian, Linda Zalite

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis traces the evolution of the palatalized rhotic /r^j/ in Baltic languages with focus on the continuation of this segment in Latvian and its recent neutralization with /r/. Historical, phonological, phonetic, and synchronic data is gathered as evidence to further our understanding of the Latvian palatalized rhotic and its near-disappearance in the 20^th century. Previous typological works of Endzelīns (1922, 1951), Dini (1997), Rūķe-Dravņia (1994) and Ābele (1929) were considered intending to answer three central questions. Was the Latvian palatal rhotic a palatalized segment or a true palatal? What factors played a role in the depalatalization …

Generalized Event Representation In Pre-School Children With Mild- To High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asd) And Children With Cognitive And Linguistic Delays (Cld), Tashana S. Samuel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently establish rigid routines and have difficulties flexibly applying what they have learned. Three experiments were conducted to examine generalized event representation in 34 pre-school children. In Experiment 1, children diagnosed with varying kinds of cognitive and language delays (CLD: n = 14) were tested with the generalized imitation paradigm, a reliable measure of representational capacity. Two sets of perceptually dissimilar objects with similar functions were used to perform the same task: one set consisted of modeling props and the other set was the generalization props. At the generalization assessment, children observed actions modeled …

Dramatic Form And Embodiment: Robert Browning And The Epistemology Of Romantic Drama, Laura Helen Wallace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Browning's famous distinction between the subjective and the objective poet, Shelley and Shakespeare, as well as his own abandonment of the lyric in favour of dramatic poetry, has been commonly interpreted as an epistemological demarcation that separates Browning, as a Victorian poet, from his Romantic predecessors. Defining Shelley as the subjective poet who looks through the individual soul toward "not what man sees, but what God sees--the Ideas of Plato" (283), and Shakespeare as the objective poet who looks, not to his own soul, but upon the material world, choosing "to produce things external" and to "deal with the doings …

Counting The Blades Of Grass: Series, Punctum, And The Averted Gaze In W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Lane Glisson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

W. G. Sebald's novel The Emigrants presents an oblique view of the suppressed history of the Nazi era, through the lives of four emigrants from Germany. Sebald's unique manner of weaving biographical material, evidence, and photographs into his fiction, creates a misty world, neither fact nor fiction, in which the reader is never certain what is true or counterfeit. A series of recurring motifs and visual themes run through all the stories. This work examines how new forms of understanding arise in the spaces between The Emigrants' themes, punctuated by recurring imagery. It examines the nineteenth and twentieth century …

The City Meditations, Nicholas Grosso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This portrait develops a new understanding of how and why cities function and their importance to humanity. Past attempts at understanding cities have focused on their economic roles or cultural centers but have overlooked their great ability to engage conversation and spark new ideas. Drawing upon ideas and theories of architectural layout such as Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities, city planning (Lewis Mumford's What is a City? and Samuel Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue), and social landscape (Jürgen Habermas), this project will develop a theory that considers how the city functions as …

What The Tortoise Said To Kripke: The Adoption Problem And The Epistemology Of Logic, Romina Padro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In chapter 1 I introduce the main topics to be addressed and provide a summary of the dissertation. In chapter 2 I summarize Lewis Carroll's famous note "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" and briefly review some of its most influential interpretations. The rest of the chapter is devoted to Kripke's unpublished interpretation of Carroll's note and the moral he draws from it: in section 2.2 I present and discuss what I call the "adoption problem" and in section 2.3 I clarify certain aspects of it. In chapter 3 I consider a modification of the original set up of the …

Where's The Staying Power? Factors Influencing Dropping Out Among Black Students, Judy Touzin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Statistics show that the odds of transitioning from school before graduating are much higher for Black students than their white counterparts (NCES, 2011). In 2006, the national high school graduation rate for Black students was 51% with females at 58% and males at 44%. Such dismal figures speak to the need to study the various factors that influence the likelihood that Black students will drop out of school. This study considers several demographic, aspirational, and school culture variables and their value in predicting whether Black students will drop out.

The data used in this study are taken from the Educational …

Ecological Aspects Of The Music Of John Luther Adams, David Arie Shimoni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The composer John Luther Adams envisions his role as one who re-imagines and re-creates relationships with other human and non-human beings through music. This dissertation consists of an examination of songbirdsongs, Earth and the Great Weather, In the White Silence, Strange and Sacred Noise, The Place Where You Go to Listen, and Inuksuit to determine whether, and how, Adams succeeds in re-creating these relationships.

In the Introduction various means of connecting music and the natural world are reviewed, a semiotic and ecomusicological framework for analysis is established, and a listening typology is suggested. In the following chapters, analysis of …

Techniques For Automatic Normalization Of Orthographically Variant Yiddish Texts, Yakov Peretz Blum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Yiddish is characterized by a multitude of orthographic systems. A number of approaches to automatic normalization of variant orthography have been explored for the processing of historic texts of languages whose orthography has since been standardized. However, these approaches have not yet been applied to Yiddish.

Using a manually normalized set of 16 Yiddish documents as a training and test corpus, four techniques for automatic normalization were compared: a hand-crafted set of transformation rules, an off-the-shelf spell checker, edit distance minimization with manually set weights, and edit distance minimization with weights learned through a training set.

Performance was evaluated by …

The Philosophical Side Of Contemporary Art Forms, Kristina Bodetti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project is to show that contemporary art forms, specifically popular music, film and comics/graphic novels, are capable of, and do in many cases work as philosophical pieces. I believe that an analysis of these mediums will reveal instances in which the works of art explicate established philosophical theories, expand upon them, and in some cases invent new theories.

Each new medium of art gets examined by philosophy in its turn and its merits as a unique art form are debated. From these arguments it is possible to extrapolate the ways in which these works can become …