Derek Walcott est né en 1930 à Sainte Lucie, petite île perdue dans l’archipel des Caraïbes. Son œuvre poétique et théâtrale est à la conjonction de deux influences majeures : l’une est héritée du colonialisme britannique, la seconde lui vient de son ascendance africaine.J’ai essayé, dans mon travail, de toujours garder en mémoire cette ambivalence, voire cet écartèlement, que Walcott revendique puisqu’il se définit comme le divided child. L’œuvre de Walcott est multiple. Néanmoins, c’est son rapport au Temps, à l’Histoire et à la création picturale qui m’ont paru essentiels. Dans le premier chapitre de mon étude, j’ai réservé une large part au long poème de Walcott, Another Life, où Walcott se livre à une véritable reconstruction autobiographique. C’est le déchirement du poète qui constitue le nœud central de Another Life : balancement entre hier et aujourd’hui, le dedans et le dehors, l’art et la vie, sur cette terre meurtrie par l’esclavage. Dans la seconde partie, j’ai tenté d’analyser la perception walcottienne de l’Histoire, à travers deux poèmes essentiels, The Schooner Flight et Omeros. Sur le mode de l’épopée, Walcott y raconte la vie des habitants de Sainte Lucie, leurs odyssées intérieures, et leur quête d’Histoire. Il en résulte une vision protéiforme de l’Histoire, proche de celle de Walter Benjamin et en totale opposition avec celle des historiens classiques. La dernière partie est consacrée à l’analyse des liens entre la poésie de Walcott et l’art pictural. L’influence est évidente dans Another Life, Midsummer et Tiepolos’s Hound. J’ai choisi d’étudier Tiepolo’s Hound, non seulement parce que cet hommage à Pissaro, Veronèse et Tiepolo ressemble à une grande fresque, mais aussi pour mettre en exergue la filiation que s’invente Walcott avec le peintre impressionniste. / Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in Saint Lucia, a small island lost in the Caribbean archipelago. His poetry has been deeply influenced by two main strains : one is marked by British colonialism, the other is rooted in his African ascendancy.I have tried to keep in mind this duality, which Walcott is still claiming for since he defines himself as a “divided child”. Walcott’s works are complex and multi-faced. However, I choose to study more particularly his relations to time, history and artistic creation. I have reserved a large part of the first chapter to the analyse of Another Life, which can be compared to the experiment of an autobiographical reconstruction, on Walcott’s behalf. The narrator’s splitting is at he core of the poem. Another Life’s hero is constantly balanced between present and past, home life and outdoor life, art and reality. In the second part of this thesis, I have tried to scrutinize Walcott’s perception of History, through two main poems, The Schooner Flight and Omeros. Walcott adopts the epic pattern to describe every day life in Saint Lucia, giving a new birth to homeric myths. Because of the closeness between past and present, we are given another vision of History, quite similar to Walter Benjamin’s theories, and far from classical issues.The last part is focused on the ties which link Walcott’s poetry to the art of painting. These connections are obvious in such poems as Another Life, Midsummer or Tiepolo’s Hound. I choose to examine Tiepolo’s Hound for two main reasons: on the one hand, the poem could be compared to a large frescoe; on the other hand, it enlightens Walcott’s personnality, because of the fictional parallel introduced beween the poet and the painter.

Bifurcated by a demilitarized United Nations Buffer Zone since 1974, Nicosia is the only divided capital city in Europe. In 1979, its dual municipalities devised a radical, bicommunal Master Plan to mitigate some of the buffer zone’s divisionary effects and to revitalize the city center. This thesis examines the role of historic preservation within the Nicosia Master Plan, investigating the development of the plan’s preservation element and evaluating how the rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of historic buildings on either side of the barrier have promoted peaceful interaction and spurred economic growth and resettlement in the central city. Population growth, the booming heritage tourism industry, and the proliferation of bicommunal cultural events all indicate the successful implementation of these strategies. Of interest to preservationists, planners, and policymakers faced with divisive and nontraditional planning challenges, this is a timely topic that reveals the potential for preservation strategies to effect lasting urban revitalization.

This study examined how different background noise conditions affected the spoken language production of young (18-25) and older (60-85) adults when performing a story retell task. Participants included 10 female and 10 male young adult (YA) participants, as well as 10 female and 10 male older adult (OA) participants. Participants retold stories in a silent baseline and five background noise conditions (conversation, monologue, phone call, cocktail, pink noise). Speech fluency and language production measures (cohesive and coherent utterances, lexical-phonological errors, grammatically correct words, Moving Average Type Token Ratio (MATTR), speech rate, and disfluent words) were compared between groups and across conditions. Results reveal that background noise led to an increase in speech rate for the OA compared to the YA group. A main effect was also found for disfluent words, specifically between the phone call and conversation condition, as well as the pink noise and phone call conditions. The OA also experience background noise benefits in relation to speech fluency (conversation and phone call conditions) and lexical production (conversation condition). The YA group experience background noise costs in relation to speech rate in the phone call condition. These findings suggest that background noise benefits discourse more for OA and interferes more for YA.

This study investigated the impacts of dual task and time pressure conditions on the speech fluency of 60 neurotypical adults between the ages of 26 and 85. Participants retold short stories in baseline, time pressure, dual task, and combined dual task and time pressure conditions. Dependent variables included five measures of speech fluency: words per minute (WPM), fillers per verbalization, false starts and repetitions per verbalization, extended pauses per utterance, and speech naturalness. Each of these variables was compared between age groups of younger, older, and elderly adults and across conditions. Results reveal that time pressure causes speech rate to increase across age groups but combining time pressure with a dual task condition mitigates this effect in elderly speakers. Additionally, younger adults are perceived to have more natural speech compared to older and elderly adults. Speakers across age groups perform similarly in all other variables of speech fluency, with notable changes in fluency under the combined dual task and time pressure condition compared to other conditions. These findings suggest that while speakers do not always become less fluent as attentional demands increase, the combination of dual task and time pressure conditions can cause attentional demands to surpass capacity and/or resource allocation thresholds for fluent speakers. Future research should continue investigating the effect of time pressure and other divided attention conditions on typical speakers and those with communication disorders to establish methods for optimizing conditions for effective communication in everyday situations.

Dual task performance and the interaction of tasks has been the subject of much research. When tasks are performed together they affect each other to varying degrees depending upon such factors as the similarity of the tasks, their difficulty, and whether one task is given preference over another. In this study, task preference was investigated under divided attention conditions in order to determine what effect preference had on task performance. Twenty young adults took part in this study and were randomly assigned into two groups. Each group was experimentally motivated to favor one of the two tasks – either speaking a "tongue-twister" or tracking a moving target on a screen with a computer mouse. Each participant performed the tasks in both an isolated and combined conditions. The measurements of task performance (tracking scores, utterance duration, lower lip and jaw displacement, lower lip and jaw velocity, upper lip-lower lip correlation, spatiotemporal index, and sound pressure level) were then analyzed to determine how task preference affected the participant's performance. It was expected that the preferred task's performance would not suffer when performed in the dual task situation. Although some trends were noted in the predicted direction, no statistically significant results were found as a function of task preference. There were, however, some gender effects. Men were found to have significantly higher intensity than women during the speaking tasks in both the dual and isolated task conditions, and they were also found to perform better than women on the motor tracking task in both the dual and isolated task conditions.

This study evaluated the possible influence of linguistic demands on speech motor control by measuring articulatory movement stability during conditions of increasing grammatical complexity. There were 60 participants in three age groups: 20-30 years, 40-50 years, and 60-70 years, with equal numbers of men and women in each group. These speakers produced 10 repetitions of five different sentence or phrase conditions. These five conditions included two baseline measurements and three sentences of varying complexity. Each complexity condition had an MLU count of 23, word length of 17, syllable length of 25, and contained the phrase open boxes of pompoms. Complexity was measured by node-count and grammatical structure. Lower lip movements during production of the target phrase were used to compute the spatiotemporal index (STI), a measure of lip movement stability over 10 repetitions. It was predicted that STI would be lower (indicating greater stability) in the baseline and low complexity conditions. Comparison of complexity conditions against the baseline-counting condition demonstrated significant differences in the upper lip's STI, displacement, and velocity, as well as in vocal intensity. Speech motor differences between the grammatical complexity levels were minimal and could be attributed to several factors, such as speaking rate or semantic differences. An unexpected finding of this study was the influence of age on speech production. Participants from the 60 year-old group had significantly longer utterance duration, while those from the 20 year-old group had the highest lower lip and jaw STI values. These findings suggest that speech motor control matures even beyond young adulthood and that linguistic complexity does not appear to have a consistent effect on speech movement variables.

This study examined the effects of concurrent speech and computer tasks on each other and on measures of physiologic arousal in 30 young adults. Physiologic measures included galvanic skin response, heart rate, and heart rate variability. Participants completed a speech-only task, two computer-based tasks, and combined speech and computer-based tasks. Participants spoke for 60 seconds on a procedural discourse prompt. Acoustic measures included the mean and standard deviation of intensity and fundamental frequency as indices of prosody, speaking time ratio to reflect pausing, and speech rate. The primary computer task (with two levels of difficulty) involved making formatting changes to a paragraph with a word processor. The secondary computer task involved data entry (typing items from a shopping list into categories in a spreadsheet). Errors were tallied for each computer task. Statistical analysis revealed a significant decrease in words per minute in both the data entry and the easier formatting tasks; the proportion of speaking time decreased for all three concurrent computer tasks. Performance on all computer tasks was negatively impacted by speech. There was a significant decrease in the number of words correctly sorted and the number of correct formatting changes. The physiologic changes were limited; it remains unclear whether the heart rate increases during combined computer task and speaking conditions resulted from the addition of cognitive load or the respiratory changes inherent in speaking compared to silent task performance. Findings reflect bidirectional interference between speech and computer-based tasks while multitasking. These findings can help speech-pathologists to create therapy activities that are more like what patients will be experiencing in their everyday lives, such as practicing speech during computer tasks.

Quantitative studies of the presidential use of executive orders have attempted to determine whether presidents are more prone to resort to unilateral action when faced with legislative opposition. To date, the results have been mixed however, with studies demonstrating that the type of executive order is an important factor in understanding the conditions under which presidents will resort to unilateral action. Despite this advancement in theory, there has been little consensus regarding the actual conditions under which presidents will issue the different types of executive orders that have been identified in the literature. This thesis addresses this puzzle through an empirical analysis that engages the "Two Presidencies Thesis," which argues that presidential decision-making, action and success is conditioned by policy area (foreign and domestic) and executive order type (major, routine, or symbolic). An original dataset was constructed by coding all executive orders issued between 1953 and 2008 as related to either foreign or domestic policy. Thus, an analysis is undertaken of major executive orders, minor executive orders, foreign policy-based executive orders, domestic policy-based executive orders, and major and minor categories of each policy area. A multivariate analysis is completed using negative binomial regression given that the dependent variables are overdispersed count variables. The effects of divided government and ideological distance are the primary independent variables examined. The ideological distance variable consists of the absolute distance between the president's ideology and the ideology of the median member of the Senate. Various other control variables are included, including presidential party, election year, and approval ratings. The findings indicate that executive order type does matter in predicting presidential use of executive orders and that the prevailing political climate does influence the president's use of executive orders.

This study examined the effects of computer tasks on speech acoustic measures and the effects of speaking on computer task performance in 30 younger and 30 older adults. Participants completed a speech only task, two computer tasks, and simultaneous speaking and computer tasks. Stimulus sentences included the four corner vowels and two diphthongs embedded between voiceless consonants. Acoustic measures of speech included diphthong transition extent and rate as well as vowel space area (VSA) and vowel articulation index (VAI). A text formatting task included two levels of difficulty. A data entry task included sorting items from a shopping list into categories. Statistical analysis revealed that the dual-task conditions led to a significant decrease in diphthong formant transition extent and rate. Speaking while completing the computer tasks led to an increase in diphthong duration. There was also a significant decrease for VSA and VAI for each dual-task condition compared to speaking alone. Diphthong transition extent, diphthong duration, and VAI were higher in the older adult group. Performance on all computer tasks significantly decreased when simultaneously producing speech. Overall, the findings reveal significant bidirectional interference between concurrent speech and computer tasks. The results also suggest older adults have poorer performance in divided attention computer tasks. The older adult participants were found to speak with longer vowel durations and more expansive articulation than the younger adults. The findings from this study may pave the way for future clinical work that may result in assessment and treatment approaches involving divided attention scenarios.

This study examined interference between three non-speech tasks and concurrent speech performance. The non-speech activity consisted of computer-based mathematical, language, and visuospatial tasks. The speech tasks included a procedural discourse monologue and a conversation. Participants included 60 adults in two age groups with 30 participants each. The younger adults were aged from 18 to 30 years and older adults from 55 to 82 years. Each participant completed the non-speech tasks in isolation, the speech tasks in isolation, and then each of the speech tasks concurrently with each of the three non-speech tasks. Speech acoustic measures included the mean and standard deviation of intensity and fundamental frequency as indicators of prosody, speaking time ratio to reflect speaking versus pausing time, and speech rate. Non-speech measures included total responses, correct responses, and accuracy. Statistical analysis revealed significant divided attention effects on speech, with increases in fundamental frequency and decreases in speaking time ratio, speech rate, and intensity. Performance on all non-speech tasks was negatively impacted by speech, as there was a significant decrease in total responses and total correct responses overall. There was a significant age effect for intensity and fundamental frequency variability, in that the younger group had less prosodic variation compared to the older group. The present findings provide some evidence that the effects of divided attention increase with age, as older adults gave fewer responses than younger adults overall. However, results indicate older adults prioritize accuracy over speed compared to younger adults. These findings suggest that bidirectional interference occurs between speech and mathematical, language, and visuospatial tasks. The results expand what is known about bidirectional interference between speech and other concurrent tasks, as well as the effects of age on divided attention.