Digital Commons Network^™

Developmental Differences In The Influence Of Phonological Similarity On Spoken Word Processing In Mandarin Chinese., Jeffrey G Malins, Danqi Gao, Ran Tao, James R Booth, Hua Shu, Marc F Joanisse, Li Liu, Amy S Desroches

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

The developmental trajectory of spoken word recognition has been well established in Indo-European languages, but to date remains poorly characterized in Mandarin Chinese. In this study, typically developing children (N=17; mean age 10; 5) and adults (N=17; mean age 24) performed a picture-word matching task in Mandarin while we recorded ERPs. Mismatches diverged from expectations in different components of the Mandarin syllable; namely, word-initial phonemes, word-final phonemes, and tone. By comparing responses to different mismatch types, we uncovered evidence suggesting that both children and adults process words incrementally. However, we also observed key developmental differences in how subjects treated onset …

Derrida And Comparative Philosophy, Steven Burik

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article argues that Derrida’s thinking is relevant to comparative philosophy. To illustrate this, at various stages classical Daoism is compared with Derrida’s thought, to highlight Derrida’s “applicability” and to see how using Derrida can contribute to new interpretations of Daoism. The article first looks into Derrida’s engagement (or lack thereof) with non-Western thought, and then proceeds to his extensive work regarding language and translation, comparing this with views on classical Chinese language and translation of key Daoist characters. It then explores Derrida’s efforts at opening up philosophy to its outside, and argues that he was very much concerned with …

Online Dating Profile Analysis: The Intersection Of Identity, Gender & Religion, Sarah-Rose Marcus

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

According to standpoint theory, individuals experience the world based on the social groups that they belong to. Using this theoretical lens, my content analysis compared how gender and religion were conveyed on the user profiles of three online dating sites: JDate.com, ChristianMingle.com and OkCupid.com. In my initial reading of data, I used inductive thematic analysis to distinguish 7 categories of words and 7 categories of photographs that were relevant to portrayals of gender and religion. These categories were then analyzed through frequency counts by adding the total number of word types and photograph types used by men and women …

Reduction Vs. Expansion: The Conflicting Projects Of Kenneth Burke And Michel Foucault, Michael David Measel

Theses and Dissertations

This project is an intertextual study of the theoretical projects of Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault. It outlines their relationship in terms of points of cohesion and points of departure in their works. The similarities and differences between the projects of Burke and Foucault is described in terms of the relationship between language, knowledge, power, and society, then described in terms of the dichotomy of Reduction and Expansion. This dichotomy gives us a starting point from which to outline the commonalities and differences between these authors' projects. It also gives us a tool for other types of investigations concerning language …

Hrm As A “Web Of Texts”: (Re)Articulating The Identity Of Hrm In Sri Lanka’S Localized Global Apparel Industry, Dhammika Jayawardena

Organization Management Journal

This article examines human resource management (HRM) in Sri Lanka’s apparel industry vis-à-vis its role in the management of women shop-floor workers in the Global South. Informed by poststructuralist notions of language, it analyzes the rupture of HRM that appeared at the moment HRM emerged in the industry in the 1990s. The article suggests that this rupture led to the formation of two (apparently) antagonistic sets of labor management practices: “doing” and “undoing” HRM. Along with the language of HRM, the article examines these two practices, and shows that HRM in the apparel industry appears or unfolds a “web of …

Bilingual Typography: Study Of The Linguistic Landscape Of Jeddah, Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Abstract: With the rise of globalization and the spread of Western culture across the globe, the use of English as an “international” language is often represented in bilingual and multilingual typographic signage. Throughout the Middle East North Africa and the Gulf region, the integration of Arabic and Latin letterforms is commonly viewed within the signage of storefronts, street signs, advertising billboards, and informational materials. This paper explores the use of bilingual/multilingual typography within the linguistic landscape of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Voltaire's Victims And Us, Andrew J. Mckenna

Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Makers: Technical Communication In Post-Industrial Participatory Communities, John Timothy Sherrill

Open Access Theses

In the past few decades, web technologies and increasingly accessible digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printers and laser cutters have made it easier for individuals and communities to create complex material objects at home. As a result, communities of individuals who make things outside formal institutions, known as maker communities, have combined traditional crafts and technical knowledge with digital tools and web technologies in new ways. This thesis analyzes maker communities as post-industrial participatory design communities and examines them as participatory spaces where technical communication occurs between individuals with varying levels of expertise and sometimes drastically different knowledges. Ultimately, …

Chinese Undergraduate Students’ Preference For Chinese Tas And American Tas In The U.S. Context, Ruochen Li

Open Access Theses

This study researches and compares Chinese undergraduate students' (N=70) perceptions of and preferences for American TAs and Chinese TAs, and identifies factors that play significant roles in influencing Chinese students' perceptions and preferences. Multiple independent variables were measured, including age; gender; years at Purdue; years in the U.S.; GPA; overall TOEFL score; experiences with Chinese TAs; effectiveness of Chinese TAs; effectiveness of American TAs; English ability of Chinese TAs; and native speaker preference, ethnic identity, and level of acculturation, among which ethnic identity and level of acculturation are the major variables the current study aims to examine. Preference for Chinese …

Faut-Il Obéir À La Loi ? – Les Pensées Politiques Des Femmes Dans La Littérature Épistolaire Et Les Mémoires Choisis À L’Époque De La Révolution Française, Justyna Czader

Open Access Theses

L'écriture est un témoin qui est difficilement corrompu-Montesquieu, L'esprit des lois. Mémoires and lettres de prisons take us to places we haven't been: prisons in bloody revolutionary Paris and the deadly Place de la Concorde. Women with different social backgrounds fought for their rights denied officially by the revolutionary authorities. They fought back was through plays, mémoires or letters. According to Philippe Lejeune, since the 18th century autobiography has become a phenomenon of civilization. I argue that the lettres de prison present not only a form of epistolary communication, but also as many personal testimonies, recollections of events and emotions …

Disrupting Infrastructure: Social Media And Accessing Digital Publics, Carolyn K. Grant

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates infrastructural barriers to effecting change through social media participation. Though social media is said to hold "democratic potential" by enabling open access to the digital public sphere, in reality it is often still the most privileged voices that get heard. Even in success cases of the power of social media like the Arab Spring, situational contexts lead to particular infrastructural access points that are not universally transferable, and still tend to favor mainstream perspectives. Barriers to amplifying marginalized voices include inadequate systems for digital memory and sharing algorithms that promote the visibility of the already visible. These …

Die Widerspiegelung Von Abergläubischen Und Religiösen Glaubensvorstellungen Des Islams Anhand Von Beispielen In Emine Sevgi Özdamars Das Leben Ist Eine Karawanserei – Hat Zwei Türen – Aus Einer Kam Ich Rein Aus Der Anderen Ging Ich Raus, Shiva Rahmani Khanghahi

Open Access Theses

In the following work, I deal with the relationship of faith to superstition, and their reflection in German literature based on religious studies in a literary work.

First, there will be an introduction to this work and the topic and then the subject of superstition will be generally treated. After a description of superstition and beliefs is a discussion of their impact on culture and literature, illustrated by means of examples in a literary work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In the next chapter based on historical investigation, religion, its origin, its development and role is generally described, whereas the focus …

The Metaphor Of Battle In The Mysticism Of Teresa Of Avila, Ana Maria Carvajal Jaramillo

Open Access Theses

Study of the influence of chivalric romances in the language of Saint Teresa of Avila. Anaylisis of the metaphor of religion as the battle of a knight.

Relationships Between Lexical Proficiency And L2 Oral Proficiency, Yunjung You

Open Access Dissertations

Lexical proficiency is strongly correlated with L2 productive language ability (Crossley, Salsbury, & McNamara, 2011; Laufer & Nation, 1995). While many studies have investigated the relationship between lexical proficiency and L2 writing ability, not many studies have been conducted in terms of spoken language. Also, few studies have focused on how non-native English speakers with different L1 backgrounds differently or similarly develop lexical proficiency in L2 speaking. Based on this background, the present study is conducted with three purposes: 1) to compare the effectiveness of measures of lexical proficiency in terms of their ability to predict the quality of L2 …

Disentangling Fluency, Comprehensibility And Coherence: Toward A Better Understanding Of Oral Proficiency Profiles, Haiying Cao

Open Access Dissertations

This study is an empirical attempt to examine how removal of all possible disfluency markers can help disentangle proficiency components assessed by the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT) in order to help build empirical foundations for establishing OEPT profiles. Silent and filled pauses, false starts and repetitions were removed from 50 test recordings in WAVEPAD SOUND EDITOR. Five trained OEPT raters rated the original and edited speeches. Statistical analyses addressed three research questions: 1) do fluency, comprehensibility and coherence ratings significantly change after the disfluency manipulation; 2) do correlations between fluency, comprehensibility, coherence and coherence subcomponents change after the disfluency …

Una Perspectiva Del Despojo: Cuerpo, Lengua Y Espacio Desde El Discurso Lésbico/Queer En La Literatura Fronteriza/Chicana, Cynthia Meléndrez

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

Women writers on both sides of the US/Mexican border have rewritten Chicana-Fronteriza narratives by uncovering the individual memory of women and LGBTII communities along the US-Mexico Border. La tarima (2001) by Rosina Conde and Gulf Dreams (1996) by Emma Pérez reveal a consciousness of the social decay and domestic violence of urban border life. These authors deconstruct the identity of women and minorities by disassociating knowledge acquired through patriarchal structures. Moreover, Conde and Pérez break with established written patterns by mixing genres, and subverting traditional forms of language and notions of space. The dramatic and rapid changes on both sides …

Official Languages Inside And Outside The Institutions: An Analysis Of Recent Cases, Julian Currall

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Continuity, Constellation, And Unworking: An Exploration Of Language In Nietzsche, Alicen L. Beheler

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

This project is an investigation of language in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. The framing question is whether Nietzsche’s treatment of language as an explicit philosophical theme in published work and notes of the early 1870s is in fact only an early interest abandoned by the later work and notes in which the treatment of language as such does not assume such a central role. I suggest that if we consider language not as a unitary concept but as a constellation, a network of shifting thematic nodes, we find that language remains a chief interest throughout the Nietzschean corpus, but …

The Reality Of Role-Playing Games: How Players Construct Reality Through Language, Jessica Carlson

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Role-playing games have a unique structure and exist in multiple mediums. Although some research is available on communication in computer mediated role-playing games, little exists on communication practices in tabletop role-playing games. In my research, I reviewed existing scholarly literature on tabletop role-playing games, as well as theory on the role language plays in constructing reality. I conducted passive participant observation on a group of people playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. By applying theory to my ethnographic research, I demonstrated how players constructed a collective reality through communication. Players did this by demonstrating their own enthrallment with the game and …

Postmodern And Posthuman Literature, John P. Gallagher

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The thesis is an analysis and application of Posthuman theory. Beginning with a debate on societal progress between Slavoj Zizek and Francis Fukuyama, the thesis explores the possibility of a Posthuman ethics. The main theoretical contributors are Carey Wolfe, Corey Anton, and Benedict Anderson. The primary texts analyzed are Eric Blair's (George Orwell) 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and William Gibson's Neuromancer.

"Why Don't You Speak Ordinary English?" She Said Coldly: Linguistic Rebellion In "The Prussian Officer" And Lady Chatterley's Lover, Nicole R. Koroch

All NMU Master's Theses

Criticism of D. H. Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tends to focus on issues of sexual awakening, the natural world, and figurations of gender and power. However, little examination has been done on the instances of language as a rejection of authority through the character of Mellors, a returning soldier and a gamekeeper. In the novel, Mellors speaks both a “broad” vernacular as well as “proper” English and this linguistic variance reveals two significant aspects of Mellors’ character. Here, I will implement Jacques Derrida’s theory of differance to show that just as the “a” in differance, as a graphic …

Language Attitudes, Ideologies, Maintenance, And Spanish Heritage Learners In The South Texas Border, Hyanghee Lee

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Unlike the situations in Europe or Canada, the power of language exercised by the speakers in the U.S.A is centered on English. Considering the general perception of a language as an index of an ethnic identity, this circumstance clearly reflects a linguistic inequality in the multiethnic U.S. society. The primary objective of this study is to examine the language ideologies and attitudes that the Spanish Heritage Learners in South Texas adapt and exercise in their daily activities. This investigation also attempts to analyze the correlations between language attitudes and the intergenerational transmission of Spanish, which would significantly impact the maintenance …

The Phonetics And Phonology Of Bora Tone, Amy Roe

Theses and Dissertations

Bora is a Witotoan language spoken in Peru and Colombia. It has an unusual mixed tone/stress system in which L is the specified tone and H the unspecified tone. In this thesis, I describe the underlying tone patterns of noun and verb roots and show how their surface representations change in different phonological environments. I examine noun stems with seven different suffixes and one prefix and verb stems with thirteen different suffixes.

Disyllabic noun roots have three surface tone patterns: L∅, ∅L, and ∅∅. Additionally, Bora has a low boundary tone that associates to the right edge of noun phrases. …

The Pronominal Clitics Of Logar Ormuri, Jeremy Hawbaker

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a description of the system of pronominal clitics in the Logar dialect of Ormuri, an Iranian language of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Logar dialect is based in the Logar province of Afghanistan and is near to extinction. The thesis studies grammatical constraints on the occurrence of pronominal clitics in Ormuri sentences. It also investigates discourse factors that influence when a pronominal clitic is used to refer to an entity in the situation that is being talked about, rather than a noun, an independent pronoun, or zero anaphora. My analysis is based on a corpus consisting of fifty-five …

Mirrors Of Mechanized Man: Capitalism And Intertextuality As Represented In The Works Of Herman Melville, Franz Kafka And Don Delillo, Samantha J. Amberson-Dominguez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

It is contended that literature, as a product of the socioeconomic conditions in which it was generated, can be used to explore the relationship between individuals and technological advancement, as existing within specific stages of capitalism’s development. Using Marxist analysis to examine texts generated during the cultural eras of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, it is argued that physical, mental, and emotional state of characters, as represented within works written by Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, and Don DeLillo, respectively, reflect the increasing levels of human alienation as experienced by individuals under the constraining forces of market capitalism, imperialism, and late capitalism.

"But, Whatever The Reason, His Heart Or His Shoes, He Stood There On Christmas Eve, Hating The Whos": Dr. Seuss' The Grinch As The Racialized Other In American Culture, Marina Malli

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis analyzes Dr. Seuss’ the Grinch as a modern myth in US society that provides an imaginary resolution to the perceived encroachment of racial and cultural heterogeneity in the various time periods in which the text has circulated. Each chapter closely reads three different versions of the story, including Dr. Seuss’ children’s book published in 1957, the 1966 animated TV special directed by Chuck Jones, and the 2000 film directed by Ron Howard and starring Jim Carrey. In each chapter, I consider the racial politics prevalent in each time period in order to elucidate my claim that various media …

From “Acculturated Indians” To “Dynamic Amazonian Quichua-Speaking Peoples, Michael Uzendoski, Norman E. Whitten Jr.

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

No abstract provided.

Amazonian Quichua In The Western Amazon Regional Interaction Sphere, Mary-Elizabeth Reeve

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Ses And Asl For Literacy Success In Asl-English Bilinguals, Paul Twitchell

Linguistics ETDs

Research on spoken language bilinguals has shown that there is a significant relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and literacy outcomes. The mechanism of SES as a predictor of literacy success has two competing explanations. One assumes a direct impact of SES on literacy through expanded opportunities to read and better maternal mediation of literacy activities; the other assumes an indirect relationship because SES has been shown to influence first language (L1) and second language (L2) spoken language proficiency which impacts literacy development. American Sign Language-English deaf bilingual children exhibit a unique profile because L2 literacy is achieved without prior development …

Relationship Between Holistic Rating Of Chinese Esl Speakers' Monologue Responses To Question Prompts In Placement Testing And Their Lexical Frequency Profiles, Xiao Yang

Open Access Theses

The study examines the relation between the holistic scores of three groups of Chinese ESL speakers and their lexical frequency profiles, based on their monologue responses to testing prompts. The theoretical framework of vocabulary acquisition and word frequency in vocabulary testing are discussed, and several previous studies that use VocabProfile to assess second language vocabulary are analyzed. These serve as the theoretical and methodological basis for conducting the current study, which adopts two schema in VocabProfile to first profile the word frequency in the speakers' monologue responses, and then look into the offlist words that are not captured by the …