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Examining The Boundary Conditions Between Cognitive Control And Interference Derived From Stimulus-Based And Response-Based Conflict, Jonathan D. Tall

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Cognitive control is a broad construct that defines a set of processes involved in maintaining task goals in response to interference. Working memory capacity (WMC) is a similarly defined construct that shares many overlapping functions with cognitive control. The studies presented used controlled forms of interference to identify limits, or boundary conditions, that could help clarify the relationship between cognitive control and WMC. Experiment 1 used context effects to manipulate how interference and cognitive control could overlap. A spatial Stroop/Simon task was used in which proportion congruency for each subset (e.g., Simon or spatial Stroop) was manipulated to produce a …

Sense Of Place, Place Attachment, And Rootedness In Four West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana Bars, John Winsor Mcewen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores place and the relationships that people have with place: sense of place, place attachment, and rootedness. These three concepts have each been researched and discussed on their own in journal articles, books, and book chapters, but the terms rarely appear in the same sentence let alone the same research article. In the United States, places of drink are historically linked to community and social interactions, and such establishments often possess a solid core of loyal patrons for whom going to their bar is a natural and routine part of their daily and weekly life. This research brings …

Protocol For Culturally Responsive Organizations: Literature Review And Standards For Performance, Marie-Elena Reyes, Ann Curry-Stevens

Center to Advance Racial Equity Publications and Reports

At the request of the Coalition of Communities of Color, the Center to Advance Racial Equity (CARE) was asked to assist in the development of a Protocol for Culturally Responsive Organizations (also called the Protocol) that it would use to improve the quality of services available to communities of color in mainstream health and human services. To achieve this, we have researched the literature available that provides evidence of the effectiveness of various interventions. Priority has been given to the literatures on culturally-responsive service delivery (which has been thin) and culturally-competent services (which while abundantly written about, relatively little exists …

Precarious Positions: Toward A Theory And Analysis Of Rhetorical Vulnerability, David Riche

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this project, I develop a framework for treating rhetoric as a system for managing vulnerabilities to and through discourse. I contend that, through rhetoric, we are all put into a fundamentally precarious position, an unavoidable state of exposure to material, social, institutional, and rhetorical forces that work to condition us as both agents and audiences. Rhetoric is not simply something we use; it is also something that we respond to, something to which we are continuously exposed, whether we like it or not. There is, in other words, a necessary concern for vulnerability at the heart of rhetorical theory …

Structuring Language And Community In An Online Space, Christopher Linder

LSU Master's Theses

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) present an interesting area for linguistic and social research, being a setting for of computer-mediated communication (CMC) that is task-oriented in nature and often requires high level of cooperation between players. This study investigates how Spanish-speaking players of the MMO Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn use the linguistic phenomena of discourse markers, laughter and politeness to structure their communication and their community. Through analysis of in-game conversations gathered from a community of said players, this study demonstrates how each of these phenomena work together to build a community based on inclusive language and positive …

The Effects Of Concurrent Driving And In-Vehicle Tasks: A Multivariate Statistical Analysis Of Driver Distraction In A High-Fidelity Driving Simulator, Julius A. Codjoe

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Distracted driving continues to remain a cause of concern for a number of bodies, including government agencies, traffic safety advocacy groups and law enforcement agencies, because of its traffic safety risks. The driving simulator continues to be popular with researchers in collecting data on performance variables that provide scientific knowledge of the effects of distracted driving. Several of these performance variables can be used to quantify a single distracting effect, resulting in a multivariate dataset. A literature review of related studies revealed that researchers overwhelmingly use univariate (single and multiple) tests to analyze the resulting dataset. Performing multiple univariate tests …

"Mais, You Talk Like Me? /Ju Ra:/": Kindergarteners' Use Of Five Cajun English Phonological Features, Hannah Joy Smitherman

LSU Master's Theses

Cajun English (CE) is an understudied dialect that is spoken in and around the Acadian triangle of Louisiana. Of the studies that exist, almost all have been completed with adults. The purpose of the current study was to determine if children whose parents have identified their family as Cajun use five phonological features of CE (/t, d/ for /θ, ð/, nonaspirated /p, t, k/, heavy vowel nasalization, monophthongization, and glide weakening on vowels) more frequently than those identified as non-Cajun. The participants were 11 kindergarteners who were identified as Cajun or non-Cajun and who resided in Assumption Parish in rural …

“Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’S Essayistic Approach To Nothing, Dena Marks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, “Gathering Thinglessness”: Samuel Beckett’s Essayistic Approach to Nothing, responds to the dominant strand in Beckett criticism that figures the writer as a philosopher of “nothing” whether of Democritean, existentialist, or deconstructionist voids. In contrast, I argue that Beckett’s literary texts approximate philosophy in their essayistic style, characterized by the incorporation of multiple, contradictory sources in a fragmented form. While philosophical analyses are often designed to demonstrate that the literary texts are the equivalent of philosophical discourse, in the first chapter I argue that they actually serve to re-subordinate literature to philosophy since they depend on the pre-existing philosophical …

Hacia Una Anatomía Del Textum: Corporalidad Y Discurso En El Cine Contemporáneo Argentino., Guillermo Abel Severiche

LSU Master's Theses

En la introducción de su libro The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry afirma que “cuando uno escucha acerca del dolor físico de otra persona, los eventos que tienen lugar en el interior del cuerpo de esa persona parecen tener el carácter remoto de un hecho profundamente subterráneo” (3). Podríamos tomar este postulado y transportarlo a otras formas de la corporalidad: cuando el cuerpo se excita sexualmente, cuando el cuerpo se enferma. En parcial oposición al pensamiento de Scarry, el propósito fundamental del presente estudio es comenzar a darle forma a un concepto que encapsule la dimensión interna del cuerpo junto …

Raising The Black Flag : State Capacity, Geography, International Law, And The Resurgence Of Maritime Crime, Samuel Richard Rohrer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation I seek to answer the questions regarding why some coastal populations turn to maritime crime in domestic and international waters, and others do not. In this work I advocate that generalizable geographic, political, and economic conditions can explain a significant portion of maritime crime. Broadly speaking these conditions are classified into geographic opportunity and a political and economic willingness to act. Through a qualitative analysis of historical outbreaks of maritime crime and international law, as well as a quantitative analysis of acts of maritime crime spanning from 1991 through 2007, I find that a global level of …

Body Language: Pain In Victorian Literature, Laura Jane Faulk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature” argues that Victorian authors use the readable sign system of the body and pain to emphasize their characters’ physical features to the reader. As characters physically manifest emotions or experience violence, their appearances change, and these differences depend on physical descriptions. Marks on the body give it texture and depth, creating a layering that encourages the reader to envision and remember it. Character interactions, particularly when they read others’ somatic signs and experience or cause brutality, further flesh out characters, emphasizing their physical presences in the reader’s mind. The somatic sign system depends upon …

Pragmatics, Prosody, And Social Skills Of School-Age Children With Language-Learning Differences, Janet Lynn Bradshaw

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Social skills are an important aspect of child development that continues to have influences in adolescence and adulthood (Hart, Olsen, Robinson, & Mandleco, 1997). Interacting in a social world requires an integration of many abilities that include social skills and emotional understanding of oneself and other persons. Children who have difficulties with interpreting social cues (e.g., identifying basic emotions and responding to cues in speech) have immediate and progressive consequences in both academics and social living. Children with typical language skills are successfully interacting with peers and acknowledging social rules for different environments (e.g., playing at school vs. playing at …

El Futuro Es Perifrástico: Un Análisis Sociolingüístico De La Expresión De Futuridad En Dos Comunidades Mexicanas, Kendall Lamar Kyzar

LSU Master's Theses

In this comparative study of the expression of futurity in the Spanish of Mexicans in the United States and the sociolinguistically understudied city of Xalapa, Mexico, I explore the distribution of the variants of futurity: the morphological future (MF), the periphrastic future (PF) and the simple present (SP) and the constraints conditioning their occurrence. The data were extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with two socially stratified groups of consultants from each community under study. I conducted statistical regression analyses to test the effects of five social and nine linguistic constraints. The results indicate that the PF registers the highest rate of …

Evaluating The Effects Of Dialect On Kindergartners' Use Of Three Grammatical Structures In Narratives, Andromeda Patrice Love

LSU Master's Theses

The aim of this study was to determine if dialect status has an effect on the frequency at which kindergarteners produce nonmainstream English markings for regular third person, IS and ARE, and regular past tense when producing oral narratives. Specifically, I wished to determine if child speakers of African American English (AAE) and child speakers of Southern White English (SWE) mark these structures with nonmainstream English forms at different rates. The narrative data came from language samples that had been previously collected from twenty kindergarten speakers of AAE and twenty kindergarten speakers of SWE. All of the children were recruited …

British Cultural Narrative In Winston Churchill's Political Communication, Andres L. Faza

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study uses Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" speech, delivered to the House of Commons following the evacuation of Dunkirk, France in June 1940, as a source text by which to examine Churchill's use of British cultural narratives in political communication. Narrative and heuristic theories are proposed as means by which listeners process such messages. A number of rhetorical devices are defined, in order to inform a discussion of the narratives identified, particularly the means by which those narratives were rhetorically embedded in the text. After a careful examination of the source text, the narratives of knighthood …

What Jurors Want To Know: Motivating Juror Cognition To Increase Legal Knowledge & Improve Decisionmaking, Sara Gordon

Scholarly Works

What do jurors want to know? Jury research tells us that jurors want to understand the information they hear in a trial so they can reach the correct decision. But like all people, jurors who are asked to analyze information in a trial—even jurors who consciously want to reach a fair and accurate verdict—are unconsciously influenced by their internal goals and motivations. Some of these motives are specific to individual jurors; for instance, a potential juror with a financial interest in a case would be excluded from the jury pool. But other motivations, like the motive to understand the law …

Disparities In Accessibility To Pharmacies: A Case Study In East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, Samina Zahid Ikram

LSU Master's Theses

Accessibility is a term used to define the relative ease by which activities or services, such as work, recreation, shopping, education or healthcare, can be accessed from a given location. It is an important locational amenity for residents. This study examines accessibility to over 100 pharmacies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2010. Accessibility to a pharmacy is critical for a community as it is the prime source to get medication and other health services. First, two Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based methods, namely the proximal area method and the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method, are used to measure the …

Change In Developmental Quotient In Toddlers Assessed For Autism Spectrum Disorder, Lindsey Willis Williams

LSU Master's Theses

ASD is marked by significant delays in social and language development, while development in other areas, such as cognitive functioning, can be highly variable from person to person. Though preschool-aged children with ASD often exhibit a profile of developmental delays similar to children with other developmental disorders at a discrete moment in time, few studies have investigated possible differences in rate of skill acquisition in developmental domains in children with different disorders. Sensitive periods of development are marked by less stability in performance of developmental skills. Results of prior studies suggest that if appropriate early interventions are applied during sensitive …

The Appeal Of Narrative In Research, Colette Daiute

Publications and Research

"I saw the bird flattened on the ground outside my door . One of the kindergarten child walked toward me slowly, crying. That's when I knew it was time to act."

The very brief narrative above occurs amid myriad spheres of social relations. These relations are not all apparent, but understanding narrative meaning requires understanding narrating as an interactive process. As researchers we enhance our Methods if we know how to read narratives as complex social processes. This openi11g narrative expresses a sequence of two past events.1 The narrative involves action ("walked," "act") and consciousness ("saw," "crying," "knew"). From the …

For The Hard Of Hearing: A Catholic Novelist Confronts Modernity, Louis Benjamin Maltese

University Honors Theses

In the early part of the 20th century German Catholic theologian and cultural critic, Romano Guardini, published The End of Modernity, outlining the conceptual shift of self-identity and cosmology from Antiquity to Modernity. Characterizing modernity as turning upon a false self-identity termed “mass man.” This false image of life furthers the individual person’s fragmentation, and deafens their ability to hear the Catholic voice. Walker Percy’s familiarity with Guardini is most explicit in The Last Gentleman where Percy represents the difficulty of hearing the call of Catholicism. Recently, Paul Elie and Dana Gioia have pointed out the lacking literary presence …

Network Analysis-Based Psychoeducation For Gad, Corinna Scott

University Honors Theses

Psychoeducation, providing essential information for a client about psychological and physiological processes, is typically the first step in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) but its content and implementation is currently underdeveloped. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a prevalent mental disorder in the United States. Often, persons with GAD and their primary care providers and family do not recognize or understand the meaning of their symptoms because of the diffuse and imprecise nature of the diagnosis. This thesis aims to investigate a systems network analysis of generalized anxiety disorder to explore suggestions for enhancing psychoeducation as an initial intervention for GAD clients. A …

Fragments Of Struggle : Five Short Stories By Kobayashi Takiji, Benjamin Robert Burton

University Honors Theses

Fragments of Struggle is a collection of five English translations of short stories by Kobayashi Takiji, the hero and martyr of prewar Japan's proletarian literary movement. The short works in this project showcase the breadth of Takiji's style, and bolster the argument that he may have been a much more complex, and experimental, writer than he is often given credit for. Furthermore, this collection may feature some of the first English translations of wall fiction (kabe shōsetsu), a sub-genre of the Japanese proletarian literary movement that thrived in the early 1930s.

Social Constructs In Film Culture: The Effect Of It On The Performing Arts, And The Destroyed Association Of Signs To Enhance Meaning, Eileen W. Tom

University Honors Theses

Semiotics is the study of signs and how they produce meaning in society. How can the lens of semiotics (specifically the components and the relationship between the signifier and the signified) reform the audience and performer systems? This thesis serves as an examination of the relationship between the audience and performer, how each play a part in creating meaning within a given performance piece. This project provides a method on how to rebuild the world of the film to enhance a theme. The primary evidence consists of statistics gathered from a viewing of a staged reading that was written specifically …

Affect Perception In Computer Mediated Communication, Rachel E. Townsend

University Honors Theses

The perception of affect influences the subjective perception of an individual’s environment (Isbell & Burns, n.d.). Accurate affect perception leads to increased resilience and positive coping mechanisms when faced with daily life stressors (Robinson, Moeller, Buchholz, Boyd, & Troop-Gordon, 2012). Communication technologies have revolutionized the ways in which individuals connect to one another professionally and socially (Joseph B. Walther, 1992). This study investigated accurate affect perception in computer mediated communication (CMC) from a multidisciplinary perspective. One hundred fifty four research participants ( = 26.84, = 9.66) responded to a self-report questionnaire hosted by Qualtrics.com. A multiple linear regression was conducted, …

Américo Castro, Saint James, And Spain: The History Of A Belief, Daniel Blanchard

University Honors Theses

The present essay is broadly interested in the problem of writing history, and the way different manners of confronting this problem are received and represented in the modern day as our historiographical compass increases in depth, scope, and capacity. Within the breadth of this theme, my case study is centered on the Spanish historian Américo Castro (1885–1972), an author whose work embodies not only the Spanish intellectual trends of his day, but also a substantial swath of Western philosophy and academic scholarship. I demonstrate the influence of existential philosophy on Castro, as well as the myopic filter of nationalism through …

Music And Acculturation: Using Culture-Focused Music Therapy To Address The Adverse Effects Of Acculturative Stress, Christopher A. Arnold

University Honors Theses

More than any other demographic in the United States, Native American populations experience the highest rate of suicide proportional to population size. This is just one of numerous statistics indicative of the overall status of Native American psychological health. There has been increasing research demonstrating that Native American suicide rate and depression is positively associated with acculturative stress, and negatively associated with traditional heritage cultural integration. Because an increased amount of acculturative stress for Native Americans is correlated with high suicide rate and occurrence of depression, while increased traditional culture integration may be linked to lower suicide rate and occurrence …

Adoption And Child Trafficking: Structural Violence In The International Adoption System, Vanessa Virgiel

University Honors Theses

In the United States there exists as part of the institution of international adoption a hegemony of “saving” orphans from developing or economically devastated nations. This hegemony is a factor contributing to an adoption “market” in orphans, leading to incidences of the trafficking of children as part of the intercountry adoption system. This study's purposes are thus twofold. First it is a preliminary attempt within the academic realm to determine the emergence of this hegemony by delineating the US history of intercountry adoption from its origins in the mid-1940s as a response to humanitarian crises, to its current status as …

Nancy Huston's Danse Noire, Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Adaptation Of Native Language Construal Patterns In Second Language Acquisition, Loraine Obler, Eve Higby

Publications and Research

First language attrition occurs when a bilingual’s native language shows evidence of language change due to the predominant use of a second language. Recent research in first language attrition has shown that lexical retrieval and word choice are more vulnerable to reduced native language use than are grammatical constructions. However, some research has shown that grammar can also be affected, especially for constructions which exist in both languages but have different distributions in their usage. Taking concepts from cognitive linguistics, we attempt to describe how this research may provide insight into how language construal from the second language can affect …

Effect Of Age, Education, And Bilingualism On Confrontation Naming In Older Illiterate And Low-Educated Populations, Sameer Ashaie, Loraine Obler

Publications and Research

We investigated the effects of age as well as the linked factors of education and bilingualism on confrontation naming in rural Kashmir by creating a culturally appropriate naming test with pictures of 60 objects.We recruited 48 cognitively normal participants whose ages ranged from 18 to 28 and from 60 to 85. Participants in our study were illiterate monolinguals (� = 18) and educated Kashmiri-Urdu bilinguals (� = 30). Hierarchical multiple regression revealed that younger adults performed better than older adults (� < 0.01) and the age effect was quadratic (age²). It also showed Age X Education and Age X L2 Speaking interactions predicted naming performance.The Age X …