Digital Commons Network^™

Almost Again: On The Semantics And Acquisition Of Decomposition Adverbs, Ting Xu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the adverbs ‘again’ and ‘almost’. These adverbs can “look inside” a predicate and modify just the result state. Sentence-final again modifying a complex predicate is ambiguous between a repetitive and a restitutive reading; almost modifying a complex predicate is ambiguous between a counterfactual and scalar reading. Chapter 2 examines you ‘again’ in Mandarin Chinese. Many researchers have argued that the repetitive vs. restitutive ambiguity is derived structurally, with a single ‘again’ attaching to different structural positions. This account is difficult to maintain in Mandarin, however. The adverb you ‘again’ can only occur pre-verbally, which suggests that it …

Overcoming Violations Of Real-World Knowledge In A Fantasy-World Text, Erinn K. Walsh

Doctoral Dissertations

Fantasy-text is a genre in which events routinely violate the rules we know to be true in the real-world. In six experiments I explored the inherent conflict between unrealistic fictional events and general world knowledge (GWK) to examine these competing sources of information within the context of extended fantasy-narrative. Experiments I-III demonstrated that fantasy-unrelated violations caused measurable disruption to the comprehension of an extended fantasy narrative despite an abundance of contextual support for real-world impossible events that violate GWK. Experiments IV and V demonstrated that fantasy-related violations caused measurable disruption when they occurred at the local level and the fantasy-context …

Players, Consumers And Creators: Literacy Orientations Among Adolescents Attending A Small, Rural School, Christina Marie Robison

Doctoral Dissertations

This phenomenological study identifies three distinct literacy orientations among ten eighth and ninth grade students who attend a small, rural school in Northern New England: Game Players, Critical Consumers, and Aspirational Creators. In order to understand ongoing challenges for rural students in post-secondary life, students’ literacy practices, values and beliefs are examined within the context of students’ lived experiences and analyzed through the lens of literacy sponsorship. Their literacy practices, which are superficially uniform, are shown to have varying significance depending upon their literacy orientations. These underlying philosophies represent the purpose students perceive their literacy practices serve: to further their …

What Is Self-Potential And How Does It Relate To Personal Intelligence?, Bonnie Ann Barlow

Doctoral Dissertations

Intelligence is an important ability that we use in our everyday lives to understand people, such as choosing the best partner to work with on a project. Personal intelligence is the ability to “reason about personality and its processes, as applied to one’s self and others” (Mayer, Panter & Caruso, 2012). The Test of Personal Intelligence (TOPI) was developed to test this important ability. If the TOPI measures people’s ability to understand their own and other’s personality, as personal intelligence increases so should a person’s level of self-potential. This idea was tested in two studies by conducting correlations between the …

Effect Of Mindfulness Training On Interpretation Exam Performance In Graduate Students In Interpreting, Julie E. Johnson

Doctoral Dissertations

Many graduate interpreting students struggle because the real-time, interactive nature of interpreting dictates that they be able to regulate their attention across different parallel cognitive activities and manage the inherent stress and unpredictability of the task. Within the framework of Cognitive Load Theory, this mixed-methods study explored the effect of short-term mindfulness training on consecutive interpreting exam performance using a quasi-experimental repeated-measures design. It also examined the relationships among mindfulness, stress, aspects of attention, and interpreting exam performance. The sample included 67 students (age M = 26.9 years; 82% female) across seven language programs (Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, …

The Adjustment Of First Year African American Women To Predominately White Institutions: Implications For Best Practices, Maisha Beasley

Doctoral Dissertations

Currently, both scholarly literature and educational practice are lacking depth and scope about the lived experience of African American (AA) female students, and, as a result, they lack effectiveness for this population of students. In particular, they do not address the varying ways AA female students adjust to the university during their first year, the most critical year for student retention and persistence in the college experience (Pike & Kuh, 2005), nor do they recognize how intersectionalities of identities in AA women are salient to successes and challenges at PWIs. This study addresses this gap in the research by not …

“Leadership Means Moving A Community Forward”: Asian American Community College Students And Critical Leadership Praxis, Melissa Ann Loredo Canlas

Doctoral Dissertations

Asian Americans are underrepresented in both formal leadership positions and leadership research (Foldy & Ospina, 2009) and rarely are Asian Americans viewed as leaders, activists, or agents of social change. Leadership development programs, particularly those focused on social and racial justice, are largely absent from the curriculums and educational experiences of Asian Americans (Omatsu, 2006), and few leadership development programs focus specifically on the needs of Asian Americans (Chung, 2014; Liang, Lee, & Ting, 2002), particularly at the community college level.

This study addressed the need for critical leadership development for Asian American community college students, focusing specifically on leadership …

Nuancing Human Rights Discourse And Practice: Perspectives From Myanmar, Amy Marie Argenal

Doctoral Dissertations

Through a participatory action research project with human rights activists in Myanmar, this study builds on discourse around inherent power imbalances in international human rights work by highlighting voices often left out of the human rights discourse. Using postcolonial and third world feminist frameworks, this research offers analysis of ten research participants’ narratives on their relationship with human rights discourse and a discussion of their practice. By looking at questions of how community activists from Myanmar engaged in a human rights discourse, the study offers nuanced understandings and critical analysis of how and why certain activists will embrace or reject …

Arabic Teachers' Perception Of An Integrated Approach For Teaching Arabic As A Foreign Language In Colleges And Universities In The United States, Abeer Al-Mohsen

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the perception of Arabic teachers on whether an integrated approach is critical for students’ communicative competence in Arabic. Additionally, the study attempts to uncover what might be potential barriers to the integrated-approach program-wide implementation in the field of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language in higher education institutes in the United States. Although many studies investigated students’ perception of learning Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) only, few studies focused on teachers’ perceptions of the issue and understanding of what communicative Arabic instruction should entail.

Using a mixed-method study, the researcher conducted the study in two sequential phases: a …

Resilience And Resistance: How First Generation College Students Leverage Community Cultural Wealth And Social Capital To Successfully Transfer From A Community College To A Selective Four-Year Institution, Christina Teller

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of how first generation college students leverage both traditional forms of social capital and community cultural wealth in the process of transferring from a California community college to a selective four-year institution, using a Critical Race Theory (CRT) paradigm, and a framework including Stanton-Salazar’s (1997) network analytic theory and Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth. The current study adds to the literature by critically analyzing the post-secondary education experiences of first generation community college transfer students, focusing on the students’ strengths and gaining a better understanding of what institutional and …

Exploration Of Soka Education Principles On Global Citizenship: A Qualitative Study Of U.S. K-3 Soka Educators, Mahi Takazawa

Doctoral Dissertations

The globalized world continues to be wracked by environmental, economic, sociopolitical, and spiritual crises (Earth Council, 2002; Laszlo, 2009). Education for global citizenship holds the key to resolving these problems (Andrzejewski & Alessio, 1999; Ikeda, 2005). Unfortunately, U.S. K-12 education for global citizenship is predominantly driven by hegemonic neoliberal interests with the sole aim of producing human capital for global economic competition instead of developing socially responsible global citizens (Andrzejewski & Alessio, 1999; Giroux, 2012). Fostering a mindset for global citizenship urgently requires an alternative form of education that is ethical in its orientation (Noddings, 2005). One such model is …

Building Communicative Competence: An Evaluation Of The Effectiveness Of An Intensive Japanese-Language Program, Yukiko Konishi

Doctoral Dissertations

Even though language-program evaluations provide educators with various types of information on teaching practices and the programs in which they work, insufficient literature discusses issues related to language-program evaluation. This mixed-methods study examined the effectiveness of a Japanese-language program offered at a government-sponsored Institute located in northern California on language-program evaluation and developing communicative competence at postsecondary schools.

Data comprised two sets of surveys, six individual interviews, and one group interview. Survey respondents were 35 former students of the institute and 12 Japanese instructors who are currently teaching Japanese or have taught Japanese at the Institute. Of the 35 students, …

A Domain Independent Method To Assess System Of System Meta-Architectures Using Domain Specific Fuzzy Information, Louis Edward Pape Ii

Doctoral Dissertations

"This research proposes a domain independent method to build and assess systems of systems (SoS) architecture models. A simplified meta-architecture containing each component system's participation and a first order, binary, system-to-system interface is proposed. The method describes how to elicit desired SoS attributes from stakeholders. Measures of the attributes depend on systems' participation and interfaces, that is, on the SoS architecture. The goal is to model a realizable SoS configuration, optimized over multiple attributes. Key attribute measures are combined in a fuzzy inference system to assess an overall fitness measure for any SoS in the meta-architecture. A genetic algorithm is …

American Cosmologies: Race And Revolution In The Nineteenth Century, Gordon D. Fraser

Doctoral Dissertations

“American Cosmologies” brings together the study of nineteenth-century print culture and the study of metaphor by examining how revolutionary political groups distributed, circulated, and serialized cosmological language in order to materialize political action. Challenging cultural histories that present revolutionary ideals as part of a genuinely universal discourse, this project demonstrates that writers and political actors throughout the nineteenth century deployed the language of cosmic movement – of celestial revolution as political revolution, for instance – as a means of legitimizing and materializing acts of political violence. In attributing political transformation to cosmic forces, writers and revolutionaries rendered in print their …

The Perceived Relationship Of Leadership Behaviors To Teacher Preparedness For Implementing Connecticut’S Core Standards In Mathematics And Use Of Math Practices Aligned With Key Shifts In The Common Core, Angela Rossbach

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the relationship between specific leadership behaviors (i.e. the extent to which principals establish goals and expectations; plan, coordinate and evaluate teaching and the curriculum; and promote and participate in teacher learning) and teachers’ self-reported sense of preparedness and self-reported use of practices that align with the key shifts in the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM). Data for this quantitative study are from a teacher survey that was distributed electronically to all K-8 certified Connecticut teachers in fall, 2015.

Linear regression analysis shows significant relationships between the variables. Specifically, teachers who reported higher levels of principal …

Skilled Linguistic Action In English As A Second Language Learners’ Play Of World Of Warcraft (Wow): A Distributed View, Kristi J. Newgarden

Doctoral Dissertations

This research provokes an action-oriented understanding of second language (L2) learning, as illustrated in the dynamics of World of Warcraft (WoW) gameplay. L2 learners picked up affordances for learning to take skilled linguistic actions in authentic interactions with meaningful outcomes. Agency, orientation to sociocultural norms and pragmatic competence were distributed in real-time languaging as learners coordinated actions using embodied, material and linguistic resources. Two studies examined data from a course in which English as a Second Language learners and native English speaking (NES) college students played WoW and explored its culture. Frames of ecological psychology and distributed language were applied …

Parallel Read-Alouds: A Bilingual Repeated Read-Aloud And Retelling Intervention For Kindergarten Ells, Darci Melchor

Doctoral Dissertations

Teachers working with young ELLs at risk for literacy underachievement lack research-based practices to maximize the use of picture book read-alouds to accelerate language comprehension outcomes. This study investigated the effects of 8-22 weeks of small group, bilingual repeated read-aloud and retelling intervention, the parallel read-aloud intervention, on Vietnamese ELL kindergarteners’ retelling skills, focusing on the use of story grammar elements and language complexity and productivity. The study was conducted using a multiple-baseline single subject design with 5 subjects. Students’ growth in the overall quality of narrative retelling was assessed weekly using the Test of Narrative Retell (TNR) and their …

Feature Mismatches: Consequences For Syntax, Morphology And Semantics, Peter W. Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I investigate the nature of grammatical features and propose that a grammatical feature is split into two halves: one half (uF) that is legible to the morphological component and one half (iF) that is legible to the semantic component. Though these halves in general match up, the values can be distinct or one can be missing altogether. Throughout the dissertation, I investigate various phenomena where the values of the two halves of the feature do not line up, looking at the mass/count distinction, collective nouns in (British) English, and quantified noun phrases in Russian, among others.

I …

Phonetic Adaptation To Foreign-Accented Speech, Xin Xie

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past few decades, there has been considerable effort to find the mechanisms through which adult listeners can accommodate the rampant phonetic variation in natural speech. My dissertation concerns one source of variability: phonetic variation in speech produced by individuals with foreign accents. Mounting evidence shows that listeners not only adapt to specific speakers by adjusting acoustic-phonetic mappings, they also sometimes generalize the remapping to novel talkers. In this dissertation, I present a series of experiments examining the mechanism of rapid phonetic adaptation and its generalization across talkers. I tested native-English listeners’ adaptation to Mandarin-accented English words, focusing on …

Domains On The Border: Between Morphology And Phonology, Beata A. Moskal

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I show that a difference in structure between functional and lexical items has a restricting effect on both the morphology and the phonology. Morphologically, we observe two asymmetries: (i) in lexical nouns, number-driven root-suppletion is common whilst case-driven root-suppletion is virtually unattested; (ii) in contrast, pronouns commonly supplete for both number and case. By and large, we see the same pattern in verbs, observing a contrast between lexical verbs and auxiliaries with regard to suppletion for aspect and tense. In order to account for these asymmetries, I appeal to structural differences between lexical and functional material, combined …

‘Misticall Unions’: Clandestine Communications From Tristan To Twelfth Night, George W. Eggers

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that important modes of self-definition in the Renaissance draw on the linguistic uncertainty in medieval literary constructions of lovers. Just as in Renaissance texts, medieval lovers such as Tristan and Isolde fashion themselves as a “misticall union”: a conglomerate self that shares one mind and erases all distinctions between sender and receiver as well as grammatical subject and object. This unity expresses itself in the lovers’ inexplicable ability to interpret correctly the most arbitrary of messages from one another while misleading those around them. Considering Shakespearean lovers in this context suggests how deeply this model of self-definition …

Traumatic Modes: Sentiment, Sympathy, And The Sublime, Laila Khan

Doctoral Dissertations

This study argues that the prevalent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary-historical modes of sentiment, sympathy, and the sublime act as foundations for trauma theory by anticipating, and perhaps even offering a fuller view of traumatic experiences and their impact on individuals and communities. Through these modes, authors and philosophers conceptualize the emotional lives of individuals as part of larger and complex narratives of subjectivity—bringing together theories of economics, education, class, and philosophy. In other words, their holistic approach views the individual’s emotional, physiological, and psychological health within a social context. Sentiment, sympathy, and the sublime therefore prime us for reading trauma’s …

The Good Behavior Game For Latino English Language Learners In A Small Group Setting, Jennifer Ortiz

Doctoral Dissertations

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is a group contingency intervention that has effectively reduced disruptive behavior and improved classroom management in many replications, for various settings and populations. The student composition of American public schools is changing, leading to culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms with unique psychoeducational needs. The present study used a single-subject, delayed multiple baseline design to evaluate the GBG as a targeted intervention for third grade Latino English Language Learners (L-ELLs) who participated in a small group for behavior support. Results suggest the intervention had a moderate effect on the interrupting behavior of the target students. The …

United States Security Alliances In The Asian Pacific: A Pivot From Bi-Lateral To Multi-Lateral In The 21st Century, Kevin M. Evringham

Doctoral Dissertations

The United States maintains several military alliances with states in the Asian Pacific in support of national defense and stable regional security. In the post-Cold War period the region has witnessed a significant rise in interstate disputes as China attempts to expand its regional influence utilizing the states larger, ever more modern military. This research examines the existing regional military alliances of the United States to determine if alternations should be made in the context of a rising and belligerent China. Utilizing an analysis of each allied states military capabilities, spending on defense, and public support for United States regional …

Community Development And Its Socioeconomic Impact On A Latino Enclave: A Case Study Of The Frog Hollow Neighborhood In Hartford, Connecticut, Reinaldo Rojas

Doctoral Dissertations

The topic of low-income neighborhoods and the different approaches to community development dominate the national discussion on urban revitalization and poverty reduction. The debate is ongoing, regardless of whether economic development models serve the broader interests of the community or the narrow interests of proponents and benefactors. This study analyzes the impact of urban revitalization projects in the Frog Hollow neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, an impoverished but vibrant Latino enclave in the city. Frog Hollow underwent a highly publicized series of revitalization projects during the 2000s, where business owners, community organizations and local government were involved in both development and …

An Embedded Planning Tool For Tier Three Reading Instruction, Yan Wei

Doctoral Dissertations

Reading, as a foundational skill for adolescents to have in order to compete in the labor market, has received great attention in the K-12 and postsecondary education research. The T-TIP (The Tier Three Instructional Planning Tool) is designed in alignment with the critical components of reading content and pedagogy for adolescents with reading difficulties in multi-tiered system of support. In the study, a single-subject AB multiple-baseline design across subjects will be utilized to investigate the effectiveness of T-TIP on teacher lesson planning, with a focus on corrective and elaborative feedback within Tier Three literacy instructional settings in secondary schools. Findings …

Pleonastic Merger, Tsuyoshi Sawada

Doctoral Dissertations

The thesis examines the structure of Japanese between tense and the main predicate, focusing on the order of the heads of the relevant phrases, appearing at the right edge of the sentence. This part of structure is superficially rather chaotic, and appears to raise serious problems for the assumption that there is a fixed universal phrase structure hierarchy, i.e. the phrases between tense and the predicate in Japanese appear to have a more complicated distribution than what can be readily explained merely by adopting fixed, universal selectional properties for the heads in question. This thesis shows that once certain factors …

Transnationalism, Mobility And Identity: The Making Of Place In Flushing, New York City, Shaolu Yu

Doctoral Dissertations

'Archival abstract submitted'

Alien Comforts: The Languages And Foodways Of Chinese Americans And Hawaiian Locals In U.S. Popular Culture, Jared Demick

Doctoral Dissertations

My project deals with how the grotesque and simplifying distortion of Chinese American and Hawaiian Local languages and foodways has been used to promote facile multiculturalist encounters and the ways in which contemporary writers from those ethnic groups have attempted to articulate other ethnic formulations free from what I call minstrel gestures. These writers instead valorize innovation and transformation over an adherence to past traditions already pillaged and stereotyped by hegemonic interests. This strategy—which I dub the creole relational mode—has worked to varying degrees of success in creating the possibilities for oppositional cultural formations. While these oppositional cultural …

Exploring Syntax From The Interfaces, Yoshiyuki Shibata

Doctoral Dissertations

Based on the scope of negation in Japanese, the dissertation establishes a generalization that all vP-internal phrases move out of NegP in Japanese. The main argument concerns reconstruction, which allows a moved element to be interpreted at the original site rather than the surface position. It is shown that reconstruction applies to moved elements quite generally except for those that occur with adjoined focus particles in both Japanese and English. A semantic explanation for this is provided on the basis of Fox’s (2003) trace conversion, an interpretive mechanism that serves to interpret movement chains. Given the mechanism, it is shown …