Digital Commons Network^™

Finding The Words: The Impact Of Voca On Language Acquisition, Sarah Aldrich

Open Access Master's Theses

The current study researches the impact of voice output communication aids (VOCA) on the language acquisition of toddlers and school-aged children with developmental disabilities. There are a wide variety of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices available to nonverbal individuals, making the decision of parents, teachers, and speech pathologists of which to use and implement a substantial task, one that needs the guidance of research based evidence. SPSS software was used to conduct a series of analyses with secondary data from Nancy Brady’s study Language Development of Non-verbal Children Age 3 Years through 7 Years, 2007 to 2012, looking specifically …

Computer Science Education With English Learners, Samantha M. Armenti

Open Access Master's Theses

The Computer Science For All initiative intends to teach computational thinking and programming skills to all levels of students with varying background and experience in computer science. This includes English Learner (EL) students. There should be a concentrated effort to narrow the achievement gap among EL students and non-EL students especially in computer science courses that can lead to economic prosperity and social mobility in the digital society. With the growing number of EL students joining the student population in public schools across the United States, it is critical that these students are provided with equitable access to computer science …

Sentiment Features For Yelp Not-Recommended Online Reviews Study, Na Li

Open Access Master's Theses

Nowadays, online reviews have become an important source of opinions that people refer to while making decisions. For instance, there are more and more people who refer to Yelp reviews to judge the quality of services that are provided by local businesses. Due to the popularity and guidance of online reviews, many reviews have been imposed for the purpose of either promoting or downgrading target services. Yelp develops its own automatic review recommendation algorithm, which has marked many suspicious reviews as Not-recommended Reviews. Yelp has automatically grouped its online reviews in two different categories, and it is a common …

A Network Based Analysis Of The International Refugee Crisis Using Gergms, Katherine E. Abramski

Open Access Master's Theses

The world is currently facing the worst migration crisis on record. Violent conflicts around the globe have forced over 65 million people to flee their homes, and receiving countries are struggling to support the massive influx of refugees. Lack of preparation and disorganization have only worsened the situation, and there is a pressing need to better understand refugee migration patterns in order to inform policy decisions and improve humanitarian efforts. In previous migration research, gravity models have been one of the classical methods for investigating determinants of migration, however this approach fails to take into account the interdependent nature of …

Behavior Of Frp Pedestrian Bridges Under Human Induced Excitation, Laura Schmidt

Open Access Master's Theses

The prediction of the dynamic response of pedestrian bridges under human-induced excitation is a challenge in the design of pedestrian bridges, caused by the wide range of variables and the complex interaction effects. The use of new, lightweight materials, like FRP, and the trend to design long span and slender constructions lead to structures more sensitive to dynamical impact, which caused some vibrational problems at newly built bridges in the recent past. This brought increased attention to this topic.

The present thesis aims to analyze the dynamic properties of the new material fiber reinforced polymer (FRP), to estimate the changes …

Exploration Of Classifying Sentence Bias In News Articles With Machine Learning Models, Martha Bellows

Open Access Master's Theses

Sentiment analysis within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field is an active area of research that attempts to classify pieces of text in terms of the opinions expressed. A sub-specialization in this area focuses on classifying or identifying biased text and is growing more important in the era of “fake news.” There are many methods used across researchers so it can be difficult to find a entry point into the field. Not only are there different machine learning methods applied, text embedding techniques have grown in recent years making it difficult to determine the correct avenue to use in research. …

Hanky Panky: The History And Cultural Impact Of The Hanky Code, J. Raúl Cornier

Open Access Master's Theses

For centuries, homosexual men and women incorporated ways of covertly communicating sexual orientation and/or sexual identity into behavior, language, and dress. In the twentieth century, a series of embedded sartorial codes used by queer men communicated sexual orientation and availability. As fashion and representations of masculinity changed, so did the use of various clothing items to represent distinct sartorial codes for communicating same-sex desire.

One such sartorial code, known as the hanky code, was used by queer men in the 1970s and continued into the 1980s. The hanky code consisted of the placement of a colored bandana in one’s rear …

Perspectives From Select Women Working In Alaskan Commercial Fisheries, Berenice Yang Gonzalez

Open Access Master's Theses

Women have a long history of being actively involved in fisheries worldwide. Despite this fact, the popular image of fishers still assumes a male identity. An understudied yet important factor is women’s involvement in the commercial fishing beyond the family unit. This research was exploratory in scope, taking a thematic analysis approach, which allowed for the identification of patterns and themes within the qualitative data. Through eighteen interviews with women who have experience working in various sectors and segments of the Alaskan commercial fisheries, this thesis identifies: some of the women’s roles; the unique challenges that women face to break …

The Study Of Multicultural Students Perception Of Professors’ Nonverbal Behavior In The Classroom, Jacqueline Britto

Open Access Master's Theses

This study examined Nonverbal communication which consists of construction of meaning via non-word codes that are comprised of various forms such as intrinsic, iconic, and arbitrary. Intercultural communication occurs when there is communication within cultures. When considering environment, culture can have an influence. However, culture is not principally geographical, political, or racial. Culture is behaviors, perceptions and values that are learned and passed on from one group to another. Higher education is essential when it comes to producing economic growth and stability. In the US, the multicultural student population in higher education has been challenged with student affective learning and …

"This Sacred Land Is Our Shield": Deploying The Sacred In Indigenous Art And Activism, Charlotte Jones

Scripps Senior Theses

My art historical and sociological thesis will take Cheyenne-Arapaho artist Edgar Heap of Birds’ Defend Sacred Mountains print series as the point of departure for examining the interventions of Native artists and grassroots activists in their decolonizing campaigns. Heap of Birds’ exhibition of sixty-four mono-prints, to be exhibited at Pitzer College Art Galleries in January 2018, calls attention to the ongoing injustices committed against four indigenous sacred sites across the United States: Bear Butte, South Dakota; Bear’s Lodge, Wyoming; San Francisco Peaks, Arizona; and Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Heap of Birds’ monoprints address and allude to indigenous struggles to undermine insensitive …

Exchanging Deficit For Affordance: Developing Preservice Teachers’ Capacity To See Emergent Bilingual Students’ Resources, Aaron T. Wilson, Hyung Won Kim, M. Alejandra Sorto

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

We present a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research project aimed at helping pre-service teachers to grasp the importance of their emergent bilingual students' bilingualism and cultural backgrounds as resources to serve them in apprehending mathematics instruction and explaining their mathematics to others.

Orality In Joyce: Food, Famine, Feasts And Public Houses, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Books/Book Chapters

Some common themes within the history of food and literature include starvation, famine, gluttony, feasting, commensality, hospitality, religion, gender, and class, and indeed food also functions as a complex signifier of national, racial, and cultural identity. Despite the growing international scholarship of food in literature (Bevan 1988; Schofield 1989; Ellmann 1993; Applebaum 2006; Piatti-Farnell 2011; Gilbert and Porter 2015; Boyce and Fitzpatrick 2017; Piatti-Farnell and Lee Brien 2018), until recently, Ireland appeared “as only the smallest of dots on the map of high gastronomy” (Goldstein 2014, xi). Most international collections discuss the canonical Irish writings of James Joyce and of …

Strategies To Address The Complex Challenge Of Improving Regional And Remote Children’S Fruit And Vegetable Consumption, Stephanie L. Godrich, Christina R. Davies, Jill Darby, Amanda Devine

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Fruit and vegetables (F&V) are imperative for good health, yet less than one per cent of Australian children consume these food groups in sufficient quantities. As guided by Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), this paper aimed to: (i) understand key informant perspectives of the amount, types and quality of F&V consumed by rural and remote Western Australian (WA) children; and, (ii) determine strategies that could increase F&V consumption among rural and remote WA children. This qualitative study included 20 semi-structured interviews with health, school/youth and food supply workers, focusing on topics including: quantity and type of F&V consumed and strategies to …

Preliminary Findings Of A Phenomenological Study Of Middle Eastern Women’S Experiences Studying Engineering In Ireland, Shannon Chance, Bill Williams

Conference papers

This paper reports analysis of phenomenological interviews conducted with eight women studying engineering, all Arabic speakers and practicing Muslims, and all from the countries of Oman and Kuwait. Data were collected as part of a larger study of women’s experiences learning engineering in institutions of higher education in Poland, Portugal, and Ireland. The eight women contributing data for the analysis for this paper were all enrolled on engineering degree programs in Dublin, Ireland, where they studied together. The larger study involves conducting longitudinal data via interviews with 47 women around Europe to understand what their undergraduate experiences in STEM have …

Tolkien’S Phonoprint In Character Names Throughout His Invented Languages, Bruce L. Brown, Brad Wilcox, Wendy Baker-Smemoe, Timothy G. Morrison

Faculty Publications

J. R. R. Tolkien claimed to create names based on sound symbolism and invented languages. Previous studies revealed that Tolkien had his own phonoprint (tendency to use the same phonemes repeatedly for character names) regardless of his claims that they reflected different language origins. However, this research examined phonemes and syllables rather than names as whole units. This study compared 183 names from Tolkien’s works and 100 names from the nineteenth Century Us Census. The name recognition software linked names with known languages or provided a “generic” category when no match was found. Results showed no significant differences between the …

Polysyllabic Shortening In Speakers Exposed To Two Languages, Todd A. Gibson, Connie Summers

Faculty Publications

Polysyllabic shortening is used to maintain stress-timed rhythm in English, but used negligibly in Spanish. It is unknown how polysyllabic shortening is influenced when individuals are exposed to one language that employs it and one that does not. We calculated polysyllabic shortening for 35 functionally monolingual English-speaking adults and 19 relatively balanced Spanish–English bilingual peers who repeated English and Spanish nonwords. Results showed that speech motor patterns learned early in life might be sufficient to block cross-linguistic transfer of polysyllabic shortening despite limited language proficiency, and bilingual speakers appear to signal membership in the majority language by increasing polysyllabic shortening.

Nurturing ‘Buds Of Development’: From Outcomes To Opportunities In Early Childhood Practice, Noirin Hayes, Katarina Filipovic

Articles

The current future-focused, outcomes driven early childhood policy climate presents a danger that early years pedagogy will lose sight of the ‘present’ child. Increasingly policy support for early childhood education is built around an emphasis on preparing children for school and positioning it as a key element in enhancing society through preparing future citizens to become productive members of society. The measurable outcomes discourse, in emphasising product, renders invisible the critical contribution of the processes of everyday practice to children’s development. To challenge and counteract the strong outcome discourse early years professionals must have confidence in their pedagogy. However, research …

A Subword-Based Deep Learning Approach For Sentiment Analysis Of Political Tweets, M Pota, M Esposito, Ma Palomino, Gl Masala

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

From Babies To Robots: The Contribution Of Developmental Robotics To Developmental Psychology, A Cangelosi, M Schlesinger

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

© 2018 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. The latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and the parallel advances in robotics, have contributed recently to a shift in the scientific approach to modeling human intelligence. These innovations, accompanied by the new emphasis on embodied and grounded cognition in AI and psychology, have led to the establishment of the field of developmental robotics. This field features an interdisciplinary approach, built on collaboration between cognitive robotics and child psychology, to the autonomous design of behavioral and cognitive capabilities in artificial cognitive agents, such as robots, which is …

Demonstration And Damnation: William Blake's Eternal Death Of Unbelief, Joshua Schouten De Jel

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

In Blake’s mythopoeia, as well as his personal eschatology, belief is the source of life itself; all creative acts, all visionary episodes, stem from an individual’s belief. “Eternal Death,” which is the cycle of Generation, is the result of unbelief. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke were, for Blake, the triumvirate of culpable votaries for the propagation of rational reductionism which had led to the reification of “Natural Religion” in the form of Deism and Rational Dissent in England and, with the addition of Rousseau and Voltaire, of the apotheosis in France of the Cult of Reason. The French …

Guidelines For Designing Social Robots As Second Language Tutors, T Belpaeme, P Vogt, Den Berghe R Van, K Bergmann, T Göksun, Haas M De, J Kanero, J Kennedy, Ac Küntay, O Oudgenoeg-Paz, F Papadopoulos, T Schodde, J Verhagen, Cd Wallbridge, B Willemsen, Wit J De, V Geçkin, L Hoffmann, S Kopp, E Krahmer, E Mamus, J-M Montanier, C Oranç, Ak Pandey

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

In recent years, it has been suggested that social robots have potential as tutors and educators for both children and adults. While robots have been shown to be effective in teaching knowledge and skill-based topics, we wish to explore how social robots can be used to tutor a second language to young children. As language learning relies on situated, grounded and social learning, in which interaction and repeated practice are central, social robots hold promise as educational tools for supporting second language learning. This paper surveys the developmental psychology of second language learning and suggests an agenda to study how …

Impact Of Aging On The Auditory System And Related Cognitive Functions: A Narrative Review, Dona M.P. Jayakody, Pete L. Friedland, Ralph Martins, Hamid R. Sohrabi

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL), presbycusis, is a chronic health condition that affects approximately one-third of the world's population. The peripheral and central hearing alterations associated with age-related hearing loss have a profound impact on perception of verbal and non-verbal auditory stimuli. The high prevalence of hearing loss in the older adults corresponds to the increased frequency of dementia in this population. Therefore, researchers have focused their attention on age-related central effects that occur independent of the peripheral hearing loss as well as central effects of peripheral hearing loss and its association with cognitive decline and dementia. Here we review the …

The Effects Of Enactment On Communicative Competence In Aphasic Casual Conversation: A Functional Linguistic Perspective, Rimke Groenewold, Elizabeth Armstrong

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Background: Previous research has shown that speakers with aphasia rely on enactment more often than non-brain-damaged language users. Several studies have been conducted to explain this observed increase, demonstrating that spoken language containing enactment is easier to produce and is more engaging to the conversation partner. This paper describes the effects of the occurrence of enactment in casual conversation involving individuals with aphasia on its level of conversational assertiveness. Aims: To evaluate whether and to what extent the occurrence of enactment in speech of individuals with aphasia contributes to its conversational assertiveness. Methods & Procedures: Conversations between a speaker with …

Empowering Parents To Encourage Children To Read Beyond The Early Years, Margaret K. Merga, Saiyidi Mat Roni

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Enjoyment of reading books is related to reading proficiency, and fostering students’ enjoyment of reading is imperative to support continued reading engagement. However, not all students understand that reading is important, and not all students are regularly engaged in recreational reading. Children typically read for pleasure less often as they age, leading researchers to seek effective ways that social influences can support them to be lifelong readers beyond the early years. Parents can play an important role in communicating the continued importance of reading and fostering positive attitudes toward reading. However, after independent reading skill acquisition, parents may become a …

The Equivocation Of Codes, Mark Schofield

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics Theses

EQUIVOCATION was introduced by Shannon in the late 1940’s in seminal papers that kick-started the whole field of information theory. Much ground has been covered on equivocation’s counterpart, channel capacity and in particular, its bounds. However, less work has been carried out on the evaluation of the equivocation of a code transmitted across a channel. The aim of the work covered in this thesis was to use a probabilistic approach to investigate and compare the equivocation of various codes across a range of channels. The probability and entropy of each output, given each input, can be used to calculate the …

Contesting Early Childhood Professional Identities: A Cross-National Discussion, Sonja Arndt, Mathias Urban, Colette Murray, Kylie Smith, Beth Swadener, Tomas Ellegaard

Articles

In this collective article, the authors explore constructions of early childhood practitioners and how they disconnect and reconnect in a global neo-liberal education policy context. The contributions to the conversation provide windows into shifting professional identities across five national contexts: New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia and Denmark. The authors ask who benefits from the notion of distinct professional identities, linked to early childhood education as locally and culturally embedded practice. They conceptualize teachers’ shifting subjectivities, drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical conception of identity as constantly in construction, open and evolving. Arguments for the urgency to counter the global uniformity machine, …

Taxation For Whom?:A Diachronic Analysis Of Taxation In Ireland And The United Kingdom From 1970-2015., Ewan Macdonald, John Hogan, Brendan O'Rourke

Other

This paper explores the discursive development of taxation within budget speeches in two countries, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, from 1970 to 2015 by means of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. We ask the following questions; how have discourses of taxation developed diachronically in both countries, what are the similarities and differences in the observable discourses across both countries, and for whom and how are these discourses legitimised? In answering these questions, this paper makes use of Corpus linguistics, a methodological approach which utilises computational analysis of large bodies of text to draw statistically significant conclusions about the …

Towards A Conceptual Framework For The Development Of Immersive Experiences To Negotiate Meaning And Identify In Irish Language Learning, Naoise Collins, Brian Vaughan, Keith Gardiner, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

The onset of virtual reality systems allows for new immersive content which provides users with a sense of presence in their virtual environment. This paper provides the conceptual framework for a larger study examining how designed virtual reality experiences can be utilised to transform Irish language meaning making and a user's personal Irish language identity.

Athraitheach: Who Do You Think You Are?, Declan Behan, Clare Bell

Books

Athraitheach: Who do you think you are?

Athraitheach: changeable; changing; fluctuating; shifting; varying.[1]

Conceptually informed by, and materially embedded in, the latest technological developments and innovation in typeface design, this project, ‘Athraitheach: Who do you think you are?’, takes the form of a ‘variable font’[2] that, via the visual representation of language, aims to capture and engage with current public discourses around linguistic diversity and national, cultural and social identities active in the jurisdiction of Northern Ireland.

It also aims to demonstrate how language and identity can, within particular contexts, become inextricably bound together, often being absorbed into, …

Recognizing Food As Part Of Ireland’S Intangible Cultural Heritage, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

Drawing on evidence from across a range of disciplines (literature, folklore, history, sociology, etc.), this paper explores the lack of an iconic link between Ireland and food, explaining the reasons why Ireland and food are not immediately linked in the popular imagination. It argues for recognition of foodways as a significant element in Ireland’s intangible cultural heritage. It highlights and interrogates constructs, such as ‘national’ and ‘regional’ cuisines, charting the growing scholarship around Irish food history from the ground breaking work of A.T. Lucas and Louis Cullen to a recent emerging cluster of doctoral researchers. The paper identifies the potential …