Digital Commons Network^™

The Role Of Emotions And Beliefs In Developing Language Teacher's Professional Identity, Dalia Adel Mahmoud

Theses and Dissertations

Many studies have investigated different positive and negative emotions that teachers experience in their work place, in addition to their teaching beliefs. However, none of these studies addressed the role of these emotions in formulating teaching beliefs and how both emotions and beliefs shape teacher’s professional identity; particularly in an Egyptian context. The current study addresses this gap. The participants are seven female experienced teachers who work in different private institutions, under different instructional settings. The study uses semi -structured interviews, narratives and focus group discussion as data collection tools. Lazarus psychological theory of emotions (1991) was used to analyze …

The Matrimonial Culture In Cairo's Upper Middle Class: Capital, Collective And Consumption, Mariam Al-Mokadem

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on discourses and practices relating to the journey to matrimony in Cairo's upper middle class. In other words, I will focus on how members of this social class communicate and perform their beliefs about matrimony. It is a journey to matrimony in Cairo's upper-middle class, with reference to the temporalities a bride undergoes in order to actualize the new ordinary of marriage through suitor selection, matrimonial practices, and consumption patterns. I will investigate the basis on which a bride selects her suitor and the extent to which a bride and groom involve their parents (and in-group members) …

Apply Liberally: Towards A Model Of Liberal Management Education, Howard Thomas

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Howard Thomas argues the case for integrating the liberal arts into management education so that the existing curricula emphasis on technological and analytical acumen is balanced with skills of critical thinking and ethical intelligence necessary for managerial judgment.

The Hispanic-Serving Designation And Educator Preparation, Patricia Alvarez Mchatton, Janine M. Schall, Eugenio Longoria Sáenz

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

The creation of the Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) designation resulted from decades of advocacy efforts to ensure access to resources and recognition as institutions that served many Latinx students. Texas was at the forefront of efforts to create the HSI designation due to long-term lack of access to quality education, and negative stereotypes about the Latinx population, and an expectation for individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to assimilate into the dominant culture. Given that institutions of higher education achieve the HSI designation based on meeting a predetermined threshold, HSIs are highly diverse and serve a variety of missions. In …

Speech Motor Control In Younger And Older Adults: The Effect Of Age And Individual Differences On Speech Error Production, Katherine M. Dawson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates three main issues in speech motor control, all of which are explored through the lens of speech error production. The speech error elicitation task used is the alternating onset, identical coda (e.g. ‘top cop’) paradigm, which in this incarnation is executed in time to a rate-increasing metronome. The first experimental chapter asks why some speakers may be more prone to the production of speech errors than others, from an individual differences perspective. A number of speaker attributes are taken into account, including age (older and younger adults), performance on a subset of cognitive tasks, as well as …

The Language Of Exploitation: A Sociolinguistic Analysis Of How Employers Use Bilingualism In New York City Job Ads, Guadalupe R. Hernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Abstract

In this globalizing world, bilingualism is increasingly being treated as a commodity, another skill to put on a resume that will increase one’s chances of landing a lucrative job. However, in the case of Spanish, which is wrapped up in prevailing anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx sentiments and thus increasingly devalued, this is hardly the case: People who speak Spanish rarely receive additional compensation for possessing such language skills. Prior research has been conducted on resumes and interviews as sites of discrimination in the job market, but this study turns to the beginning of process, job advertisements. Specifically, it draws on …

Testing The Perceptual Magnet Effect In Monolinguals And Bilinguals, Michael C. Stern

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research has demonstrated an apparent warping of the perceptual space whereby the best exemplars or ‘prototypes’ of speech sound categories minimize the perceptual distance between themselves and neighboring stimuli in the same category. This phenomenon has been termed the ‘perceptual magnet effect’ (PME). The present study extends work on the PME to a speech sound category previously unstudied in this paradigm (American English /æ/), and to bilingual speech sound representation and perception. American English monolinguals and Turkish-English bilinguals completed identification tasks, category goodness rating tasks, and same-different discrimination tasks with synthesized vowel sounds from the American English /æ/ category—not …

Analysis Of Pro-Drop Errors In L2 English By L1 Spanish Speakers, Marcos R. Ynoa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although educators and linguists have described and studied L2 learner errors, often from the perspective of positive and negative transfer (Krashen, 1981), there is relatively little empirical data on the frequencies of L2 error types. Learner error rankings do exist (Donahue, 2001) (Cambridge learner corpus; (Nicholls, 1999)), but these rankings are often too general and may overlook specifics when it comes to particular language learner groups. The goal of our work is to develop a tool that can be used to explore error patterns, address educator needs, and help answer research questions in L2 language learning. The tool we have …

The Interplay Between Interference Control And L2 Proficiency In L2 Auditory Sentence Comprehension In The Presence Of Verbal And Non-Verbal Masking, Jungna Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Speech perception and comprehension in the presence of interfering auditory stimuli is a challenge for bilingual listeners (e.g., Ezzatian, Avivi-Reich, & Schneider, 2010; Krizman, Bradlow, Lam, & Kraus, 2017). How efficiently and skillfully listeners manage auditory interference may also be closely related to their ability to pay attention to a target and suppress irrelevant information. Based on Friedman and Miyake’s (2004) framework of interference control, this dissertation investigated the underlying mechanisms of late Korean-English bilingual individuals’ auditory interference control in the presence of auditory verbal and nonverbal masking and evaluated the potential interaction between L2 proficiency and interference control.

Two …

Metaethical Intentionalism And The Intersubjectivity Of Morals, Kyle Ferguson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I defend a thesis called metaethical intentionalism, according to which deontic moral judgments (“ought” judgments) are intersubjective intentions or verbal expressions of intersubjective intentions. They have the form, “We shall any of us do A in C,” or are derivable from such practical commitments. They are universalizable by virtue of their content (“… any of us …”) and sharable by virtue of their form (“We …”). My account of the moral “ought” is inspired by the moral writings of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989). While I draw on his work and offer interpretations, my primary aim is to develop and refine Sellars’s …

Ghost Peppers: Using Ensemble Models To Detect Professor Attractiveness Commentary On Ratemyprofessors.Com, Angie Waller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In June 2018, RateMyProfessors.com (RMP), a popular website for students to leave professor reviews, removed a controversial feature known as the “chili pepper” which allowed students to rate their professors as “hot” or “not hot.” Though past research has rigorously analyzed the correlation of the chili pepper with higher ratings in other categories (Felton, Mitchell, and Stinson, 2004; Felton et al., 2008), none has measured the effect of the removal of the chili pepper on the text content submitted by students. While it is a positive step that the chili pepper has been removed, text commentary on teacher attractiveness persists …

A Heavy Rain Has Fallen Upon My People: Sindhi Sufi Poetry Performance, Emotion, And Islamic Knowledge In Kachchh, Gujarat, Brian E. Bond

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of the use and contestation of Sindhi-language Sufi poetry performance as a means of Islamic knowledge transmission and ethical self-formation in rural Muslim communities in Kachchh, a border district in the western Indian state of Gujarat adjacent to Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research with Muslim performers and enthusiasts of Sindhi poetry between 2014-2018, I first examine an ecology of performative and interpretive practices revolving around the musico-poetic repertoire of the poet-saint Shāh ʿAbdul Lat̤īf Bhiṭā’ī (1689-1752 CE). I argue that the pedagogical efficacy of Sufi poetry performance is undergirded by its …

Glotopolítica De La Desigualdad: Ideologías Del Mapudungun Y El Español En Chile (2009–2019), Gabriel E. Alvarado Pavez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Glottopolitics of Inequality: Ideologies on Mapudungun and Spanish in Chile (2009-2019) by Gabriel Alvarado Pavez Advisor: José del Valle This dissertation is an attempt to analyze contemporary discourses on Mapudungun and Spanish and their development within the political and economic context of Chile between 2009 and 2019. The object of analysis is the diverse array of linguistic ideologies displayed on both the hegemonic press (newspapers of nationwide circulation) and on Facebook, which helps provide a sociolinguistic profile of Chile from a glottopolitical perspective. This entails a point of view focused on power structures and their modes of (re)production and perpetuation, …

Postcolonial Urban Vernacular Narratives In Contemporary Britain, Kathryn N. Moss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the ways in which three postcolonial writers in Britain (Samuel Selvon, James Kelman, and Suhayl Saadi) have used the vernacular as a medium for third person narrative fiction. In doing so, they have emphasized the legitimacy, beauty, and utility of languages sometimes considered debased and ugly even by their own speakers. I argue that this shift from the margins to the center of dialect or minority language in fiction is a radical—and relatively recent—one, beginning in the mid-twentieth century. By utilizing the vernacular as a medium for third person narratives, these authors are bringing non-prestige vernacular voices …

Direct And Indirect Treatment Effects In Multilingual People With Aphasia, Aviva Lerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Successfully assessing and treating aphasia in multilingual people requires a detailed understanding of the mechanisms underlying language processing in the multilingual population, and the potential impairments to those mechanisms. The balance between spreading activation of language processes via treatment and controlling interference of competing items within the lexico-semantic networks appears to be a key factor in determining whether treatment effects generalise within and across languages in multilingual people with aphasia (Kiran, Sandberg, Gray, Ascenso, & Kester, 2013).

This balance can be exploited through treatment, which, if carefully chosen, should maximise potential within- and cross-language generalisation. One treatment that has …

Continuity As Crisis: Two Traditions Of Theorizing About Animal Minds, Adam See

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary philosophers and scientists remain largely resistant to attributing humanlike capacities to non-human animals, particularly great apes, for reasons that are not based on compelling empirical or theoretical grounds. Mental faculties such as reason, agency, and theory of mind are widely seen as differing in kind from functionally analogous abilities in other extant species. This dissertation appraises the current state of the animal minds literature by means of a critical genealogy charting the development of skepticism about animal cognition throughout the history of philosophy. In doing so, this project addresses the sedimentation of epistemic, linguistic, ontological, and methodological impasses that …

Robust Neural Machine Translation, Abdul Rafae Khan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims for general robust Neural Machine Translation (NMT) that is agnostic to the test domain. NMT has achieved high quality on benchmarks with closed datasets such as WMT and NIST but can fail when the translation input contains noise due to, for example, mismatched domains or spelling errors. The standard solution is to apply domain adaptation or data augmentation to build a domain-dependent system. However, in real life, the input noise varies in a wide range of domains and types, which is unknown in the training phase. This thesis introduces five general approaches to improve NMT accuracy and …

A Narrative Inquiry To Explore The Connection Between Gender And Discipline In Grades Pre-K–8, Nicole Salazar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Because behavioral discipline can impact children’s development, it is important to ensure that educators work in fair and unbiased ways with all children, across gender, race, and other groups. Biased disciplining of children’s behavior in classrooms can occur as micro-aggressions (McCabe, 2009), sometimes counter to what educators may believe about their own behavior. As a means of raising awareness of gender-biased treatment in classrooms, this thesis involved narrating – a dynamic activity that elicits accounts of events – and thus as a means of reflecting on behavior in everyday practices. Educators anonymously completed a questionnaire requesting narratives of various disciplinary …

Two Cello Works Of Pēteris Vasks: Structure, Symbolism, And Identity, Caroline Bean Stute

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents analyses of two compositions for cello by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks: Grāmata Čellam (1978), for solo cello, and Concerto No. 2, “Klātbūtne” (“Presence,” 2011–2012), for cello and string orchestra. It acquaints readers with defining elements of Vasks’s musical language and relates his music to the concurrent stylistic classifications of Baltic Minimalism and Neoromanticism. The paper also discusses the significance of Vasks’s national identity in his creative process and provides historical context on Latvia.

Beyond Exposure: Markers Of English Proficiency In School-Aged French–English Bilinguals, Erin Quirk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingual children show more variation in their language development than monolingual children, a fact that has been linked to their experience with their languages. Bilingual language experience also varies more than monolingual children's, both in terms of how much they hear the language spoken around them (exposure) and how much they speak the language themselves (production). This dissertation investigates the following aspects of the relationship between bilinguals’ language experience and development which are not well-understood: how children’s language production relates to their proficiency in that language, how children’s language exposure relates to receptive versus expressive and lexical versus grammatical skill, …

Out Of Home: Social Class In Women’S Writing, 1950–2016, Lisa M. Karakaya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Out of Home: Social Class in Women’s Writing 1950 – 2016 employs an intersectional feminist and critical race theory methodology to examine social class in relation to gendered and racial subjugations in the work of selected French and francophone women authors across diverse regions. This dissertation features Annie Ernaux’s texts in the introduction, and then the colonial societies of French Indonesia and Algeria as depicted by narrators in the position of colonizers in the first two chapters. In the last two chapters, post-colonial or settler societies of Guadeloupian and Québécois texts are shown as depicted by colonized or marginalized narrators. …

Logical Pluralism And Vicious Regresses, Daniel Boyd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This material in this dissertation will be divided into two parts. The first part is a preliminary discussion of vicious regress arguments in the philosophy of logic in the 20th century. The second part will focus on three different versions of logical pluralism, i.e., the view that there are many correct logics. In each case an argument will be developed to show that these versions of logical pluralism result in a vicious regress.

The material in part one will be divided into three chapters, and there are a few reasons for having a preliminary discussion of vicious regress arguments in …

The Picturesque And Its Decay: The Travel Writing And Journals Of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, And Mary Shelley, Gabrielle Kappes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project puts forth the argument that when the late eighteenth century’s taste for nature and picturesque tourism had peaked, writers following in the picturesque tradition grappled with the limitations and confines of these aesthetic categories. In the chapters that follow, I present three authors, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley, who are all dissatisfied with the conventions of the picturesque. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal (1798) demonstrates the nuances of the picturesque instability where distinctions between nature and the cultural production of nature have become muddied. I then examine three tour narratives in order to draw attention to how …

Computational Approaches To The Syntax–Prosody Interface: Using Prosody To Improve Parsing, Hussein M. Ghaly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prosody has strong ties with syntax, since prosody can be used to resolve some syntactic ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguities have been shown to negatively impact automatic syntactic parsing, hence there is reason to believe that prosodic information can help improve parsing. This dissertation considers a number of approaches that aim to computationally examine the relationship between prosody and syntax of natural languages, while also addressing the role of syntactic phrase length, with the ultimate goal of using prosody to improve parsing.

Chapter 2 examines the effect of syntactic phrase length on prosody in double center embedded sentences in French. Data collected …

Legend Has It: Tracking The Research Trope In Supernatural Horror Film Franchises, Deirdre M. Flood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will analyze how information about monsters is conveyed in three horror franchises: Poltergeist (1982-2015), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984-2010), and The Ring (2002- 2018). My analysis centers on the changing role of libraries and research, and how this affects the ways that monsters are portrayed differently across the time periods represented in these films. These franchises, which span a number of decades, and encompass sixteen films in total, offer a good wealth of information to study because they are all films centered around monsters that haunt. These monsters, while aesthetically in opposition to each other, are all …

Tonal Adaptation Of Loanwords In Mandarin: Phonology And Beyond, Zhuting Chang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the tonal adaptation of English and Japanese loanwords in Mandarin, and considers data collected from different types of sources. The purpose overall is to identify the mechanisms underlying the adaptation processes by which tone is assigned, and to check if the same mechanisms are invoked regardless of donor languages and source types. Both corpus and experimental methods were utilized to survey a broad sampling of borrowings and a wide array of syllable types that target specific phonetic properties.

To maximally rule out the effect of semantic tingeing, this study examined English place names that were extracted from …

An Affective Events Theory Analysis Of Conflict Perception Emergence, Michael J. Covell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Popular conceptualizations of conflict conflate conflict perception with other discrete constructs such as disagreement and emotions. This makes research using those conceptualizations difficult to interpret. I invoke affective events theory to describe how constructs conflated with conflict perception, as well as negative prescriptive expectancy violations (EVs), may collectively serve as antecedents to conflict perception. By reconceptualizing conflict perception as an evaluative judgment and distinguishing between episodic (short-term) and global (long-term) conflict perceptions, my model describes how episodic conflict perceptions cumulatively influence global conflict perceptions over time. Two types of events (disagreements and negative prescriptive EVs) were proposed to predict episodic …

Finding Love: A Relational Psychoanalytic Reading Of Charlotte Bronte's "Villette," George Eliot's "Middlemarch," And Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse", Jerry B. Finkel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I apply contemporary relational psychoanalytic, trauma and field theories to three novels, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and offer a new psychoanalytic understanding of the relationship between fictional characters, author and reader useful for literary criticism. These theories are based on the assumption that the primary human motivation is the desire for relatedness and intimacy, a co-constructed, intersubjectivity characterized by mutuality, recognition and respect. The dissertation reviews core concepts of these theories including the phenomena of dissociation, enactments and intersubjectivity. In my analysis of the novels I demonstrate the …

The Police And The State, Brandon Del Pozo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a systematic account of the relationship between the police and the democratic state. It describes the role of the police, the powers the police use to discharge the requirements of their role, and the means by which they should justify the exercise of their powers. I argue that the role of the police is to produce a type of substantive, practical justice, and that it involves the exercise of three powers: (1) to protect and rescue third parties from harm, (2) to collect people and evidence and present them to the magistrate for adjudication, and (3) to …

Investigating The Modulatory Effect Of Expectations On Memory Retrieval During Sentence Comprehension, Luca Campanelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Memory retrieval and probabilistic expectations are recognized factors in sentence comprehension that capture two different critical aspects of processing difficulty: the cost of retrieving and integrating previously processed elements with the new input words and the cost of incorrect predictions about upcoming words or structures in a sentence. Although these two factors have independently received substantial support from the extant literature, how they interact remains poorly understood. This study investigated memory retrieval, more specifically retrieval interference, and lexical-semantic expectations in three reading experiments, pitting these factors against each other to observe how they interact. Overall, results showed that retrieving and …