Digital Commons Network^™

Women And Ventriloquism In Early Modern English Drama, Ja Young Jeon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bringing together feminist and theater-centered readings, this dissertation examines the status of female vessels that foreign voices inhabit and animate in early modern drama, arguing that the Greek model of ventriloquism represented by the Pythia exerted a powerful influence on the period’s ideas about women’s speech. In feminist work on ventriloquism, despite highlighting theatrical performance’s dependence on citationality, ventriloquism has been largely understood as an analogue for exploring male poets’ authorial power to appropriate women’s voices. In these readings, the term ‘ventriloquist’ is mainly identified with the person who throws his voice into human or nonhuman objects, reminding us of …

Data-Centric Machine Learning For Speech And Audio, Ali Raza Syed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is growing recognition of the importance of data-centric methods for building machine learning systems. Data-centric methods assume a fixed model and iterate over the data to improve system performance. This is in contrast to traditional model-centric approaches, which assume a fixed dataset and iterate over models for the same ends. Data-centric machine learning is driven by the observation that, beyond the size of the training data, model performance depends on factors such as the quality of the annotations, and whether the data are representative of conditions in which models will be deployed. This is particularly of interest in the …

Towards Explaining Variation In Entrainment, Andreas Weise

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Entrainment refers to the tendency of human speakers to adapt to their interlocutors to become more similar to them. This affects various dimensions and occurs in many contexts, allowing for rich applications in human-computer interaction. However, it is not exhibited by every speaker in every conversation but varies widely across features, speakers, and contexts, hindering broad application. This variation, whose guiding principles are poorly understood even after decades of entrainment research, is the subject of this thesis. We begin with a comprehensive literature review that serves as the foundation of our own work and provides a reference to guide future …

What Do We Know About The Bilingual Advantage When The Executive Functioning Performance Is Tested Using Auditory Stimuli? A Systematic Review, Ina Selita

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Introduction: On a daily basis, people are required to selectively attend, perceive, process and respond to the stimuli around them as they conduct different tasks. Many of these tasks may require auditory perception and processing and involve verbal communication. For many of us, our verbal environment involves more than one language. Some researchers argue that those who speak more than one language experience enhanced abilities in cognitive and attention control However, there may be processing costs that come with bilingual exposure and proficiency the present review aims to examine studies that assess executive function skills in both monolinguals and bilinguals …

Linguistic Abstractions In Children’S Very Early Utterances, Qihui Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances; we use corpora to establish the development of multiword utterances and a probabilistic computational model to account for the quantitative change of early multiword utterances. We find that multiword utterances of different lengths appear early in acquisition and increase together, and the length growth pattern can be viewed as a probabilistic and dynamic process.

Chapter …

Retrieval Practice Promotes Learning Of Turkish As A Foreign Language: A Computer-Assisted Language Learning Study, Maya C. Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Adults generally find it difficult to learn a new language, yet exhibit remarkable individual differences in outcomes. Variation in second language (L2) learning is associated with input conditions (Morgan-Short et al., 2010) as well as learners’ aptitude (Dörnyei, 2005). Recent work has demonstrated benefits of retrieval practice in promoting L2 learning of grammatical patterns and vocabulary in both artificial and natural languages (Hopman & MacDonald, 2018; Keppenne et al., 2021). With that said, when retrieval practice is based on oral recall as opposed to a recognition test, it confounds potential benefits of repeated testing (Rowland, 2014) with those associated with …

A Study Of Entrainment In Speech As A Possible Predictor Of Perceived Trust, Mariana Graterol Fuenmayor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the possibility of using features of speech as possible predictors of perceived trust. It specifically focuses on entrainment, the tendency of participants in a conversation to unconsciously adapt their manner of talking to become more or less similar to each other. We compile a corpus of interviews conducted in English, with different levels of formality and discussing different topics. With it, we distribute a set of surveys to assess raters’ judgment of the participants, focusing on whether they believe the interviewee is trusted by their conversational partner, and whether they find the interlocutors themselves trustworthy. We also …

Cerebrovascular Impairment As A Potential Target For Neuromodulation Therapy In Moderate-Severe Traumatic Brain Injury, Naomi L. Gaggi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The main purpose of this dissertation is to characterize noninvasive neuroimaging biomarkers of neurovascular injury in moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (msTBI) as potential treatment targets for neuromodulation therapy. In Chapter 1, I aim to introduce msTBI and two known sequelae of neurovascular damage in msTBI: reduced cerebral blood flow (Ware et al., 2020; Julliene et al., 2016) and altered low frequency fluctuations in blood oxygen level-dependent signal (Zhou et al., 2021; Palacios et al., 2013). Chapter 2 aims to identify the regional pattern of altered resting cerebral blood flow from a cohort of 29 patients with msTBI assessed at 3, …

From Sesame Street To Beyond: Multi-Domain Discourse Relation Classification With Pretrained Bert, Isaac R. Raff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research efforts in transfer learning have gained massive popularity in recent years. Pretrained language models have demonstrated the most successful results in producing high quality neural networks capable of quality inference after training across domains via transfer learning. This study expands on the domain transfer introduced in \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} exploring neural methods for transfer learning of discourse parsing between a news source domain and a medical target domain. \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} specifically discuss transfer learning from news articles to PubMed medical journal articles. Experiments in transfer learning in the current work expand to include three domains: Wall Street Journal articles previously annotated with …

Purity, Exclusion, And Political Order In Colombia, Osha Smith-Gittelman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the relationship between purity and order, and the ways this relationship informs and reproduces exclusionary forms of governance. The starting point for this analysis is the puzzling use of the language of limpieza social [social cleansing] as a justification for violence in Latin America. Such language is publicly disseminated by vigilantes, criminal organizations, paramilitaries, and other extralegal armed actors as a frame for violence against those presumed to be criminals, drug users, sex workers, unhoused, LGBTQ, or mentally ill. Much has been written on criminal and political violence in the region, but there has been less emphasis …

Understanding Parental Engagement At The Nexus Of Race, Class, Gender, And Sexual Orientation: An Examination Through Anti-Black White Settler Colonialism, Alyssa P. Lyons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the great scramble to remedy the inequalities of American education, the term “parental engagement” has remained a stubborn fixture in political, educational, and public discourse since the 1960s. Parental engagement has been offered as a possible mitigation tool in the fight for educational justice. This has led to ample social science research exploring the significance and impact of parental engagement on a host of educational outcomes. With much of the sociological theorizing of education stuck in the 1960s, scholars need new ways of theorizing to better understand the role of parental engagement in not alleviating educational inequalities—but in maintaining …

Assembling The African City: Music Streets And Associational Life In Dakar's Médina, Brendan Kibbee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What can you understand about a city through its music? Most days and nights in Dakar’s Médina­­––a crowded quartier populaire adjacent to the city’s central administrative zone–– streetscapes are transformed by musical assemblies, including life cycle ceremonies and events produced by the neighborhood’s robust array of civic and religious associations. This dissertation examines how the confluence of music, public spaces (streets), and associational life shapes the possibilities of urban living in the contemporary African city. The musical assemblies that fill the neighborhood, I argue, spatialize social life in the city, organizing people’s movements, exposing them to a common sense-world, and …

Homotextualité Réaliste: Cryptosexualité Et Subculture Homosexuelle Masculine Chez Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Vincent Sallé

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse étudie les romans du canon réaliste français, en particulier Le Rouge et le noir et L’Éducation sentimentale, sous l’angle d’une textualité parallèle ancrée dans la langue érotique et les pratiques et les lieux de la subculture pédéraste. Principalement étudiée jusqu’ici dans des corpus identifiés comme érotiques ou dans des passages représentant l’homosexualité, cette homotextualité est ici inscrite dans la diégèse hétérosexuelle qu’elle permet de relire de manière située et historicisée.

La période de 1830 à 1870 est perçue par l’histoire et la littérature comme un hiatus sur le thème de l’homosexualité, pris entre son histoire moderne à …

Analyzing The Linguistic Features Of Standardized Math Items: A Text Mining Approach, Magdalen A. Beiting-Parrish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following is a five-chapter dissertation surrounding the use of text mining techniques for better understanding the language of mathematics items from standardized tests to improve linguistic equity of these items to support assessment of English Language Learners.

Introduction: The dissertation begins with an overview of the problem that English Language Learners are likely not able to demonstrate their full mathematical ability due to the construct irrelevant variance caused by these items being written in English. This introduction also introduces the idea of text mining as a methodology for use in exploring this test design issue.

Article 1: This article …

Does A Neural Network Inflect Spanish Verbs In A Human-Like Way?, Elizabeth Garza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How do children learn that a verb like negar-‘to deny’ / niego - ‘I deny’ diphthongizes the 1st person present indicative, while it’s near minimal pair, pegar-‘to stick’ / pego - ‘I stick’, does not? To pursue this question, three small experiments were conducted in Spanish, given its complex and rich morphology. The first experiment was conducted to determine whether the Tolerance Principle of the Rules & Competition model (Yang, 2018) can accurately determine the productivity of verb classes in Spanish, and whether any irregular verb classes are exhibit subregular productivity. The second experiment was conducted to determine …

The Relative Cost Of Codeswitching: An Electrophysiological Study Contrasting Language Switching Versus Lexical Predictability, Iris Strangmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neurophysiological sentence processing studies are inconsistent about the additional costs that language switching within sentences (i.e., codeswitching) may bring about (cf. Valdés Kroff et al., 2020; Yacovone et al., 2021). There is discussion about whether there are, in fact, additional costs and, if so, about the origins of those costs, since some findings are consistent with effortful processing when comprehending single-language (not switched) words observed in monolingual studies. Specifically, studies are divided on whether codeswitched words are more difficult to lexically access than single-language equivalents of similar semantic predictability, as indexed by an increased N400 effect. The same studies, however, …

Experiencing Sonic Change: Acoustic Properties As Form- And Meter-Bearing Elements In Popular Music Vocals, Kristi D. Hardman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes sound qualities in popular music vocals and examines the relationship between sound qualities and other musical structures, including beat, meter, and form. I use the term sound qualities to refer to those aspects of a sound that help us distinguish one sound from another. In this dissertation, I focus specifically on loudness, noisiness, brightness, and vowel quality. Listeners often attend to the vocals while singing along to their favorite popular song. Additionally, the voice is extremely malleable, which means that sound qualities regularly fluctuate in the vocals. This makes popular music vocals a good case study for …

Predicting Stress In Russian Using Modern Machine-Learning Tools, John Schriner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the Russian language, stress on a word is determined via often complex patterns and rules. In this paper, after examining nearly a century of research in stress rules and methods in Russian, we turn to see if modern machine learning tools can aid in predicting stress. Using A.A. Zaliznyak’s dictionary grammar and over 300,000 word forms, we derived stress codes to aid in predicting which syllable primary stress falls on. We trained an LSTM neural network on the data and conducted eight experiments with added features such as lemma, part of speech, and morphology. While the model performed better …

Petroleum, Health, And Power: The Anglo-Persian Oil Company And The Colonial Dimensions Of Company Medicine In Iran, 1902–1931, Arman Azimi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Petroleum, Health, and Power: The Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Colonial Dimensions of Company Medicine in Iran, 1902-1931” investigates the medical and public health work of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC, later Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), and today BP P.L.C., or British Petroleum) in southwest Iran in the period prior to the Iranian central government’s assumption of control over public health in the region. To ensure that its operations functioned without disruption, the British-owned oil company constructed an extensive and integrated medical infrastructure and carried out substantial public health programs. Based on archival material from the BP Archive and the …

Influence Level Prediction On Social Media Through Multi-Task And Sociolinguistic User Characteristics Modeling, Denys Katerenchuk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prediction of a user’s influence level on social networks has attracted a lot of attention as human interactions move online. Influential users have the ability to influence others’ behavior to achieve their own agenda. As a result, predicting users’ level of influence online can help to understand social networks, forecast trends, prevent misinformation, etc. The research on user influence in social networks has attracted much attention across multiple disciplines, from social sciences to mathematics, yet it is still not well understood. One of the difficulties is that the definition of influence is specific to a particular problem or a domain, …

Serial Position Effect Profiles And Their Neuroanatomical Correlates: Predictors Of Conversion To Alzheimer's Disease, Isabelle K. Avildsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current study was designed to determine whether targeted, premorbid, neuropsychological measures of the serial position effect (SPE) can detect and explain risk for later development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The study tested the utility of SPE measures in healthy controls (HC) and individuals already diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or AD. Aim 1 was to determine whether these sensitive, valid neuropsychological measures can explain disease risk. SPE of list-learning are highly sensitive cognitive markers that capture important elements of both linguistic and amnestic mechanisms of encoding, learning, and retrieval. Using the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT), we …

White Blinders: A Study Of Race Relations Theory In Britain, 1948–1988, Matthew T. Sherman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the early generation of scholars who developed the academic field of race relations in Britain from the 1940s into the 1980s. The research and methodology performed throughout this period was both innovative and problematic due to the approaches taken. Early scholars, such as Kenneth L. Little, Michael Banton, Sheila Patterson, and John Rex, provided the dominant schools of thought in the study of race relations in Britain up to the early 1970s. This dissertation studies the origins and development of an interdisciplinary field of study within the context of a nation and society coming to grips with …

Deception Detection Across Domains, Languages And Modalities, Subhadarshi Panda

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With the increase of deception and misinformation especially in social media, it has become crucial to develop machine learning methods to automatically identify deception. In this dissertation, we identify key challenges underlying text-based deception detection in a cross-domain setting, where we do not have training data in the target domain. We analyze the differences between domains and as a result develop methods to improve cross-domain deception detection. We additionally develop approaches that take advantage of cross-lingual properties to support deception detection across languages. This involves the usage of either multilingual NLP models or translation models. Finally, to better understand multi-modal …

The Storytelling Cure: Medicine And Narrative From Galen To Shahrazad And Rousseau, Ryan A. Milov-Cordoba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Are stories healing? This dissertation introduces and explores an idea that I call “the storytelling cure.” With this term I capture a set of related notions about the healing power of stories that span literary studies, intellectual history, philosophy, and medical practice. Through a comparative study I make the case for “the storytelling cure” as a cross-cultural, multiconfessional, and multilingual phenomenon of great age, complexity, and power, worthy of the most sustained attention by the contemporary field of Comparative Literature. Concretely, this dissertation presents three extended case studies of “storytelling cures” from three different kinds of texts (case history, frame …

Community College Faculty Perceptions And Use Of Pedagogical Translanguaging In The Academic Esl Classroom, Jennifer Talley

Dissertations

Low retention rates and poor progression have plagued academic ESL students for decades. While these students aspire to eventual matriculation into an academic or vocational program, the vast majority will fall victim to attrition. The time has come for administrators and faculty leaders to reject the status quo and advocate for programmatic changes that have proven, substantive positive impact on student outcomes. One strategy that has proven effective in other contexts is the adoption of a translanguaging approach to English instruction, yet this pedagogy is not yet widely accepted in postsecondary institutions. This study relies on frameworks developed by linguists …

Library Tautology: A Reenactment Of The One-Shot, Nora Almeida

Publications and Research

If there’s one thing you learn today, let it be this: keywords. Not specific keywords but the idea of them. If you whisper the correct keywords into the algorithm, you will achieve relevance. If you don’t achieve relevance on the first try (which is super common), imagine you’re an academic with a specialization in a super-niche disciplinary area who wrote a research article. Then imagine keywords you (they) would use and try those.

Designing Learning Spaces For Hispanic And Latino/A Knowledge To Emerge In Doctor Of Education Programs, Edward Cromarty, Simone Elias, Oksana Karapetian

Journal of Research Initiatives

Shifts in demographic and cultural change in American society, particularly the growth of the Hispanic and Latino/a population, have shed light on inequalities in education and revealed institutional barriers to Hispanic learning in doctoral education programs. This best practice paper contextualizes Hispanic and Latino/a Learners (HLL) within scholar-practitioner programs, specifically in Doctor of Education programs. It historically addresses potential factors that may impact this population within that context based on the scholarly literature, history, and practice. Most importantly, it sets the tone for designing positive inclusive spaces and improving conditions for HLL knowledge to emerge in Doctor of Education programs.

Exploring The Motivational Factors That Empower Military Spouses To Pursue Degrees In Higher Education, Veronica Gregg, Linda Wilson-Jones

Journal of Research Initiatives

This study aimed to explore the factors that motivate and empower military spouses to persist in pursuing degrees in higher education. The following research question guided this study? What do military spouses perceive as the factors that motivate and empower them to persist in earning college degrees? Fifteen military spouses participated in this study. The military spouses who participated in the study shared their experiences on motivating factors that empowered them to continue earning a college degree. The theory of Cultural Capital was used as the theoretical framework to guide the concept that the military environment is a culture within …

Synchronous Distance Language Learning And Critical Visual Literacy Practices In Greek Primary Education, Marianthi Oikonomakou, Emmanouil Sofos, Argyro Kontogianni

Journal of Research Initiatives

Our research, focusing on critical literacy practices in education, demonstrates the outcome of a teaching scenario applied in 2021 in a primary school e-class learning environment with the aid of distant learning tools. Having taken for granted that: (a) covid-19 pandemic has initiated important changes regarding our understanding of language teaching and (b) the extend we expose ourselves to modern multimodal environments, our teaching intervention attempts at displaying how the use of visual grammar can contribute to the critical understanding and production of multimodal texts by junior pupils in the language teaching framework. In the light of the above, through …

‘Lugger Language: 35 Years On’ Shinju Matsuri & Bargana Series, Tom Gannon, Thomas Saunders

Talking Heads Seminar Series

No abstract provided.