Digital Commons Network^™

Children's Use Of Accent As A Cue For Cooperative Potential, Rachel Stevens

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, several studies have shown that 5- and 6-year-old children make social judgments based on accent, consistently displaying a social preference for individuals who speak with a native accent. One theory hypothesizes that this preference to favor individuals who speak like us stems from our evolutionary history, during which accent and other language variations would have been strong, salient cues to group membership, and thus, cues to ones likelihood of cooperative behavior. The current study aimed to test this theory by determining if 5- and 6-year-old children use accent to make judgments about an individual’s cooperative potential. Participants …

Shakespeare In The Eighteenth Century: Algorithm For Quotation Identification, Marion Pauline Chiariglione

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Quoting a borrowed excerpt of text within another literary work was infrequently done prior to the beginning of the eighteenth century. However, quoting other texts, particularly Shakespeare, became quite common after that. Our work develops automatic approaches to identify that trend. Initial work focuses on identifying exact and modified sections of texts taken from works of Shakespeare in novels spanning the eighteenth century. We then introduce a novel approach to identifying modified quotes by adapting the Edit Distance metric, which is character based, to a word based approach. This paper offers an introduction to previous uses of this metric within …

The Strategic Disclosure Of Currency Headwinds And Tailwinds, Kevin Butler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I examine whether companies are more likely to disclose revenue growth adjusted to remove the effects of foreign currency fluctuations (constant-currency revenue growth rates) when currency fluctuations decrease revenue growth (i.e., there is a currency headwind) than when currency fluctuations increase revenue growth. Public companies increasingly cite non-GAAP performance metrics when announcing earnings. While regulators see value in non-GAAP reporting, they continue to express concern that it is carried out inconsistently and in a misleading manner. Because the disclosure of constant-currency revenue growth is discretionary, companies have an incentive to strategically disclose it only when it benefits …

Examination Of Language Skills In Children Who Attend Head Start Programs, Madilyn Littlefield

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Socioeconomic status and poverty can greatly affect child development and have lasting impacts throughout life. Children who are raised in a low socioeconomic status homes may experience limited parent sensitivity, limited parental engagement, and limited access to stimulating materials. These factors may also limit opportunities to experience rich language and literacy experiences which can negatively impact development of emergent literacy skills and later educational growth. To reduce the effects of poverty on school readiness, income-based childcare programs allow families access to affordable early school readiness opportunities that are developmentally appropriate. Head Start programs are designed to facilitate child development, provide …

Born-Again On Sundays: Exploring Narratives Of Belief And Performances In A Belizean Methodist Church, Katharine Serio

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

If you are only at church services on Sunday and do not actively practice your religious faith every day, are you “born again” every day? Reverend Rebecca Lewis of Wesley Methodist Church in a small town in Belize preaches active participation in the church and encourages her congregation to attend all religious events, pray rigorously, and read the Bible actively, but how does the congregation listen to her and react to her sermons? “Born-Again on Sundays” is an ethnographic account that draws on anthropological theories of belief and vernacular religion, performance and narrative, and poverty and reflexivity to explore the …

Development Of The Caregiver-Child Auditory Skills Tracking (Cast) Scale: A Pilot Study On Caregiver Implementation Via International Telepractice, Elizabeth Ocampo-Roman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Parent engagement is a key component during early language development for all children, but particularly for a child with hearing loss. Through the application of technology-based models of service delivery such as telehealth, researchers have found an increase in parent-child engagement during auditory-verbal therapy (AVT) sessions due to the physical absence of the provider and parents becoming the primary language facilitators. However, current measures of parent-child interactions do not have a coding system to monitor facilitation of auditory skills. This present study will discuss the development of the Caregiver-Child Auditory Skills Tracking (CAST) Scale to track progress of caregiver implementation …

Self, Emily Aguayo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This is a translation of Dr. Erika Almenara’s complete published collection of poetry. The original publications span a period of over twelve years of work, with books published in 2006, 2008, and 2018. The first book of poetry in this series of translations, Reino Cerrado (Closed Kingdom), explores the profound contemplations of life and how to turn those thoughts into words and put them on paper. We see images of nature, hear faint religious overtones, and feel the distress of a woman searching for a healthy relationship, and having little luck. Para evitar los rastros (To Avoid All Traces), the …

Barriers To Integrated Primary Care And Specialty Mental Health Services: Perspectives From Latinx And Non-Latinx White Primary Care Patients, Elizabeth A. Anastasia

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

High need, low access, and rising health care costs reveal the inadequacies of the current mental health system in the U.S. Racial/ethnic minorities, including Latinxs, face substantial disparities in accessing mental health treatment compared with non-Latinx Whites. Integrated primary care (IPC) offers an alternate model for meeting mental health needs by providing care in a way that is accessible to the general population. Though it has been suggested that IPC may reduce health disparities by decreasing barriers to mental health treatment, empirical data relevant to this question are limited. A series of three studies were conducted using a mixed methodology …

Stigma And Disclosure Of Chronic Pain In Higher Education: A Qualitative Study, Jennifer K. Davenport

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Students with chronic pain represent an overlooked population in higher education institutions, due to the barriers their conditions present and the stigma associated with chronic pain. There is existing research examines treatment of elderly populations and best practices for university students with disabilities, facing discrimination. This study sheds light on a gap in the existing research, where a niche population of students in chronic pain navigated disclosure issues and stigma in the academic environment. The purpose of the qualitative research study was to examine how anticipated or experienced stigma associated with chronic pain conditions influenced disclosure of chronic pain for …

Under The Radar: The Everyday Resistance Of Anarchist Punks In Bandung, Indonesia, Steve Moog

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Amidst a current resurgence of hypernationalism across the globe, resistance movements and counterhegemonic ideologies are becoming increasingly visible and more common elements of broader socio-political discourses. While high-profile protests have ignited public interest in resistance movements—turning relatively unknown groups such as Antifa and Black Bloc into household names—little attention has been paid to the behind-the-scenes networks undergirding many of these organizations. Translocal do-it-yourself (DIY) punk rock networks are spaces in which alternative and subversive ideologies are enacted through the everyday implementation of anarchist philosophies and DIY ethics. Here, ‘under the radar’ modes of resistance are found in the lived realities, …

Gynocentric Apuleius: Female Agency In 'The Golden Ass', Kelsey Schalo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Through a close reading of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, I argue that characters such as Byrrhena, Photis, and Psyche function as positive examples of female sexual authority and autonomy and effectively challenge the phallocentric theories commonly applied to Greek and Roman gender and sexuality, the Penetrative Model associated with Foucault, and structuralism, associated in classics with French historians Marcel Detienne, J-P Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. While still penetrated, many of these women actively claim their agency in sex through pleasure and narrative. Additionally, in correlation with Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, while Apuleius’s female witches behave in horrific and chaotic …

Spatial Analysis Of Soil Creep Rates On Mount Sequoyah, Fayetteville Arkansas, Amy Suzanne Morris

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mount Sequoyah in Fayetteville, Arkansas, is a part of the Boston Mountains, which are considered a deeply dissected plateau. The area is prone to mass wasting, which is the general downslope movement of sediments, soils, and rock through different processes that cause instabilities along a hillslope, and in its soil and loose rubble mantle. For this study, we looked at soil creep, which is the small-scale movement of soil downhill because of gravity, wetting and drying cycles, and heating and cooling cycles.

By measuring the tilt of utility poles, we determined multiple causes of soil creep. The variables that are …

Empire Rules: Cultures Of U.S. Imperialism In Multi-Ethnic Literature Of The U.S., Luis Paganelli Marin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation concerns contemporary multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. (MELUS) and empire. Namely, contemporary MELUS invites a reckoning with U.S. Empire, an amalgamation of settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, which works through ahistorical and transhistorical cultural narratives. In turn, contemporary multi-ethnic writers uncover our obscured colonial and imperial histories and legacies that racialize, criminalize, and otherize people of color in the U.S within our present moment. This dissertation, then, analyzes recent novels and poetry collections by African American, Native American, Latinx, and African diasporic writers to unmask the efforts of empire-building with the material effects on colonized, marginalized peoples. Reckoning …

Extracting Social Network From Literary Prose, Tarana Tasmin Bipasha

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis develops an approach to extract social networks from literary prose, namely, Jane Austen’s published novels from eighteenth- and nineteenth- century. Dialogue interaction plays a key role while we derive the networks, thus our technique relies upon our ability to determine when two characters are in conversation. Our process involves encoding plain literary text into the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) XML format, character name identification, conversation and co-occurrence detection, and social network construction. Previous work in social network construction for literature have focused on drama, specifically manually TEI-encoded Shakespearean plays in which character interactions are much easier to track …

A Phenomenology: Teachers Lived Experiences With Workplace English As A Second Language (Esl) Programs, Odilia Lineth Mitre Marciaga

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative phenomenological study was designed to understand in-depth teachers lived experiences with workplace ESL programs. This study provides strategies and recommendations to improve the overall logistics of workplace ESL programs which can benefit the employer, the students, the institution, and the teachers. Strengthening the partnership and communication of all the parties can strengthen the program as whole as well. Data collection of the methodological process included in-depth face-to-face interviews with seventeen teachers during the summer of 2019.The data was managed and analyzed through initial and axial coding from which main themes emerged. Six key findings emerged from themes as …

The Anonymous Web In Adichie’S Americanah, Michelle Jude Gibeault

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Adichie’s Americanah is a novel that elevates anonymous blogging into black cultural performance. The novel follows a young Nigerian, Ifemelu, who arrives in the United States on a student visa and depicts her stressful confrontation with racism in post-slavery America. Through beginning a blog, Ifemelu voices her experiences as a black woman and immigrant in ways that renew the concerns of James Baldwin, an author whom she studies closely. Like Baldwin, her style blends humor and techniques of persuasion that trace to traditional oral folklore. Ifemelu’s success rests partly on Adichie’s construction of her as a character of good ethos, …

American And Iraqi Prose Fiction Of The Iraq War: Traumas Of The Self, Traumas Of The Nation, Ghyath Manhel Alkinani

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

War is so omnipresent in our contemporary world that the story of war is too important to be left to fiction writers to frame and give meaning for. This dissertation provides an analysis of two dominant patterns in contemporary Iraqi and American prose fictional representations of the Iraq War: the individualistic trauma hero narrative and the nationalistic, collective narrative. I argue that the trauma hero myth that dominates American representations of the Iraq War psychologizes and de-politicizes war experience alienating the victim of trauma by decontextualizing their experience and negating the Other. On the other hand, the sweeping nationalistic narrative …

Female Experience Of Trauma And Mourning In Two Postconflict Novels Of El Salvador And Peru: Roza, Tumba, Quema By Claudia Hernández, And La Sangre De La Aurora By Claudia Salazar, Raquel Castro Salas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how literature approaches the Salvadoran and Peruvian armed conflicts and contributes with perspectives of the female experience while offering illustrations of mourning processes. It is based on a close analysis of two postconflict novels that emerged after the publication of the corresponding truth commissions final reports. These novels are Roza, tumba, quema (2017) by Claudia Hernández from El Salvador, and La sangre de la aurora (2013) by Claudia Salazar from Peru. The contributions studied in this analysis focus on two areas: (1) a problematization of the female experience of the armed conflicts, and (2) a focus …

"It Takes Less To Be A Man Nowadays": Exploring Persistence And Change In Masculinity Narratives Among College-Aged Men, Shelby Lynn Clark

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the last several decades, a growing field of scholarship unpacks the concept of masculinity and its implications for gender and social hierarchy. Of particular interest are the ways in which hegemonic masculinity is perpetuated through the media and social discourse. The current study uses content analysis to highlight themes in the commodification of masculinity depicted in a series of Playboy Magazine’s “What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?” ads throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Conducting focus groups, I then use responses to these historical images and a contemporary equivalent to explore the persistence and evolution of portrayals of masculine ideals …

Representations Of Domestic Workers In Modern Arabic Fiction, Samaher Aldhamen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I have examined the representations of domestic workers in a number of Arabic mid-century and contemporary novels, using feminism and intersectionality as my overarching framework. I employed several scholarships of feminism such as Marxist and postcolonial feminism to examine the discourse on working-class women. The initial assumption of this study is that there is a noticeable invisibility of domestic workers in Arabic novels. If these characters manage to find their way into a text, they are typically ahistorical figures whose subjectivity is not centered.

Among the Arabic novels I have examined, I found that the tradition of …

The Relationship Between English Language Learners’ Mathematics Problem Solving Strategies And The Mathematics Register, Sarah Reeves Frederickson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This case study followed three Hispanic and three Marshallese students’ participation in a seventh grade pre-algebra unit over the course of four weeks. Pre-assessment items indicated that the students had difficulty with aspects of the mathematics register. Their teacher employed an interpretation of the gradual release model of instruction in which direct strategies for translating word problems into equations with unknowns were modeled prior to students doing similar problems on their own. In these situations, students showed some success in solving similar problems. However, post-assessment results indicated that none of the six students were able to successfully solve open response …

Positioning Of English Language Learners And Its Power On Classroom Learning Opportunities And Interactions, Hawraa Nafea Hameed Alzouwain

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this qualitative study, the researcher investigated four aspects of positioning used by teacher and ESL students in a mid-south state of the United States. This study was based on the Positioning Theory of Davies and Harré (1990). The study aimed to explore various types of positioning used by the participants and how they impacted social interactions among the students and between them and their teacher. The researcher used four questions to outline the scope of the research, focused on: 1) how ELLs’ different positioning in the ESL classroom promoted or limited their learning opportunities; 2) how the ELL teacher …

“A Woman’S Story”: Lady Macbeth And Performing Femininity In The Early 1600s – Late 1900s, Phyllis Lebert

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper uses gender studies to understand the themes of gender performance further, and more specifically, femininity, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It also explores the many ways feminine gender performance has changed as society has changed. Thus, proving gender is performative rather than innate. It does this by examining first the text within the context of Elizabethan society. Moreover, by examining three pivotal performances of Lady Macbeth through history within the context of their social structures as well. The three performances are that of Sarah Siddons in the Late 18th Century, Ellen Terry in the 19th Century, and Judy Dench in …

Music, Language, And Rhythmic Timing, Rhimmon Simchy-Gross

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Neural, perceptual, and cognitive oscillations synchronize with rhythmic events in both speech (Luo & Poeppel, 2007) and music (Snyder & Large, 2005). This synchronization decreases perceptual thresholds to temporally predictable events (Lawrance et al., 2014), improves task performance (Ellis & Jones, 2010), and enables speech intelligibility (Peelle & Davis, 2012). Despite implications of music-language transfer effects for improving language outcomes (Gordon et al., 2015), proposals that shared neural and cognitive resources underlie music and speech rhythm perception (e.g., Tierney & Kraus, 2014) are not yet substantiated. The present research aimed to explore this potential overlap by testing whether music-induced oscillations …

Russian University Efl Students’ Perceptions Of A Two-Week Online Academic Writing Course, Nataliia Borozdina

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This case study analyzes Russian university EFL students’ perceptions of a two-week online academic writing course. The researcher investigated 13 students’ attitudes towards an online academic English writing class offered at Kursk State University, Kursk’s oldest higher education institution, founded in 1934. In 1994 it was transformed into Kursk State Pedagogical University, and in 2003 it became Kursk State University. Along with the two-week online course assignments, the students completed pre- and post-questionnaires, reflections about the course, and participated in individual and group interviews. The findings of the study indicate that all of the participants had positive perceptions about the …

The Finnish Line: Verbal Tactics Of Small States In Immature Anarchy, Christopher Main

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rules-based international system which has steadily emerged over the last century is in decline. Realists fail to realize that the fundamental anarchy of the international system can mature into a rules-based system which constrains geopolitics. Liberals fail to realize that it can regress in the opposite direction, towards the self-help system described by the realists. Small states stand to lose the most in this regression and are least equipped to fight it by material means. Finland is an ideal example of such a small state, and its foreign policy is articulated by President Sauli Niinistö. This paper will analyze …

They Soon Forgot Their Words - Documentary, Karen Paulk

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This documentary film, They Soon Forgot Their Words, is about the language issues that threaten the Kaqchikel Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. It is one of 21 Mayan languages spoken in the country and is one of the most widely used with more than 500,000 speakers. Unfortunately, however, scholars have noticed that Kaqchikel is in a state of “shift” a process where one language combines with another in speech. As is the case with many Mayan languages in Guatemala, Kaqchikel is often combined with Spanish in speech. The colloquial name used for the combining of these two languages is “kaqchinol.” …

Effect Of Consistent Singing On Maintenance Of Speech Intelligibility Following Lsvt®: A Retrospective Longitudinal Case Study, Rachel Ricca Beck

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Parkinson’s Disease is a common neurodegenerative disease affecting one’s ability to hone and refine volitional movement. Many with Parkinson’s report significant effects on voice and communication. Speech-language pathologists have long targeted the achievement of increased vocal volume through intensive voice therapy, with the most common program being Lee Silverman Voice Treatment® (LSVT®) (Ramig et al., 1994). While LSVT® is the most prominent type of voice therapy for individuals with Parkinson’s, other researchers have begun investigating therapeutic singing because of the similar functions it employs (e.g., increased breath support, utilization of entire vocal range).

The current project is a retrospective, longitudinal …

On The Variations Of 'Occupatio' In "Richard Ii", William Kelly Reeder

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent scholarship of Shakespeare’s Richard II has been interested in or preoccupied with its historical relations. Particularly the plays association with the Essex Rising of 1601, and the censorship of the deposition scene, both of which seem to resonate for history with Elizabeth’s enigmatic comment expressing her identification with Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard II.

This paper proposes to resolve the question of the play’s censorship by interpreting the deposition scene as a dramatization of transubstantiation, perhaps triggering Elizabethan censors.

Transubstantiation is the doctrine by which the Catholic Church interprets the Eucharist using the distinction between substance and accidens (eternal and …

Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia: Crossing Borders And Proposing A New Concept Of Indonesian Domestic Workers, Tri Murniati

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, Indonesian migrant women who seek employment as domestic workers in foreign countries have caught the Indonesian reading public’s attention with their novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction writings. Creative work by migrant domestic workers was established as a genre when Denok Kanthi Rokhmatika, a domestic worker who works in Hong Kong published her collection of short stories Negeri Elok nan Keras dimana Kami Berjuang (Beautiful and Tough Country where We Struggle) in 2002 (Insani and Raihan iii). The publication marks the birth of a new genre, which has become known as “Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia” (Indonesian migrant …