Thesis (doctoral)--University of Halle-Wittenberg, 1910. / "Ex Dissertationum philologicarum Halensium vol. XVIII [1911], 4 seorum expressum": t.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references (p. [366]-369).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1993. / Title from title page screen, viewed March 14, 2006. Dissertation Committee: John R. McCarthy (chair), James Palmer, Sally B. Pancrazio, David L. Tucker. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-80) and abstract. Also available in print.

The rise in popularity of women's history and the history of letter writing has ensured much debate on these subjects in recent years. However, little research has been conducted on the letter writing of unmarried women and networks shown in their letter writing. From courtship to widowhood, the relationships created and sustained through the medium of letter writing are manifested, and the detail of their lives makes for compelling reading. Through largely case based studies, I have sought to show the types of support systems women had in place, not only from men, but from friends and relatives. Their lives are documented through analysis of both manner and content, examining style, rhetoric and expression. I have sought to include not only examples of women who have already been examined, such as Dorothy Osborne, and Anne Newdigate, but lesser known sources, such as Isabella Strutt and the correspondents of Jane Stringer. This adds a new depth to the work already conducted on the lives of early modern women. Single women were able to create agenda and autonomy through their letter writing, employing a variety of rhetorical devices and personas subject to their stage in the life cycle. Through their letters, they were able to maintain bonds with men and women, cutting across gender and class barrier, broadening their experiences and enriching their lives.

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The purpose of this study is to attempt to determine what influence configuration and/or letter sequence have on the recognition thresholds of words. It is felt that low configuration and/or rare letter sequences will result in lower recognition thresholds, while high configuration and/or common letter sequence will result in higher recognition thresholds when stimulus words are presented to subjects by means of a tachistoscope.

The abolitionists were a community of wordsmiths whose political movement took shape in a sea of printed and handwritten words. These words enabled opponents of slavery in the nineteenth-century United States to exert political power, even though many of them were excluded from mainstream politics. Women and most African Americans could not vote, and they faced violent reprisals for speaking publicly. White men involved in the antislavery cause frequently spurned party politics, using writing as a key site of political engagement. Reading and writing allowed people from different backgrounds to see themselves as part of a political collective against slavery. “The Politics of Correspondence” examines how abolitionists harnessed the power of the written word to further their political aims, arguing that letter writing enabled a disparate and politically marginal assortment of people to take shape as a coherent and powerful movement. “The Politics of Correspondence” expands the definition of politics, demonstrating that private correspondence, not just public action, can be a significant form of political participation. The antislavery movement’s body of shared political ideas and principles emerged out of contest and debate carried on largely through the exchange of letters. People on the political fringes and disfranchised persons, especially African Americans and women, harnessed the medium of letters to assert themselves as legitimate political agents, claiming entitlements hitherto denied them. In doing so, they contested the presumed boundaries of the body politic and played key roles in advancing demands for immediate emancipation, civil rights, and equality to the forefront of national political discussions. “The Politics of Correspondence” argues that correspondence was a flexible medium that abolitionists used throughout this period in efforts to both shape and respond to the changing conditions of national politics. A vast and dispersed archive documents the antislavery movement and serves as the basis of research for the dissertation. Scholars of antislavery have used the extensive manuscript collections of prominent abolitionists and print archives of antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, and circulars to investigate the movement’s ideas and organization. But this is the first project to focus on letter writing itself and its role in the movement. Rather than view letters as transparent windows into the past, “The Politics of Correspondence” examines them as tools that ordinary people and unexpected political agents used to advance the antislavery cause. Abolitionists relied upon conventions associated with handwritten letters, which they creatively manipulated to achieve political ends. Writing a letter was an act of composition that involved self-reflection, imagined discussion, and staking a claim to one’s beliefs. Correspondents drew upon shared cultural understandings, ranging from the anonymity of the postal system to the sense of physical intimacy associated with handwritten letters. They inventively employed these understandings to make political statements that simultaneously relied upon and subverted letter-writing conventions.

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This dissertation used letter detection and masked priming to address four questions: Are graphemes or letters more fundamental in low-level reading processes? How does alphabetic-processing knowledge manifest in different languages? Do bilinguals transfer such knowledge across languages? And do young children also show such effects?Some researchers have recently revived an old hypothesis in which graphemes, not letters, are the fundamental, perceptual reading unit. This can be tested by looking at congruency effects in a letter-detection task with masked priming. Six groups participated: Spanish and English monolingual adults; Spanish- and English-dominant bilingual adults; Spanish-dominant bilingual children; and English monolingual children. The experiments with adult monolinguals tested the letter- against the grapheme-as-percept hypothesis. The experiments with developing bilinguals examined whether they would transfer alphabetic-processing knowledge from L1 to L2. And the experiments with English monolingual children probed how early congruency effects with masked primes might occur.Participants responded YES or NO depending on the presence of letters in targets. Both congruent and incongruent masked primes preceded the targets. Among the congruent primes, some contained double vowels, and others single vowels. Assuming letters are fundamental, single- and double-vowel primes in both languages should facilitate and inhibit reactions equally. Assuming graphemes are fundamental, single-vowel primes in English, but not Spanish, should facilitate and inhibit more because double vowels are digraphs in English, and should therefore conceal the identity of their component letters. Bilinguals should show L1-like effects in L2 if they transfer alphabet-specific processing knowledge. Young children should simply show congruency effects if they are able to process letter information automatically.The results with Spanish and English monolinguals suggested that graphemes do exert an effect on the task, but only after letters are perceived. This has major implications for models of proficient reading. The results also suggest that Spanish readers do not construct graphemes from letters, but rather syllables and abstract syllable structure. Bilinguals showed evidence of L1-L2 transfer at low levels of L2 proficiency. This has implications for transitional bilingual education programs. And young children showed congruency effects, which provides another link in establishing the connection between literacy development and proficient reading.