The present study was designed to assess the relationship between language disorders, maternal attachment, behavior problems, and parental stress. The mothers of the following four groups of children were studied: (a) language delayed children without behavior problems, (b) language delayed children with behavior problems, (c) non-language delayed children without behavior problems, and (d) non-language delayed children with behavior problems. Mothers completed three measures: (a) The Maternal Perceptions of Child Attachment, (b) The Maternal Gratification Scale, and (c) The Parenting Stress Index. Contrary to expectations, mothers of language delayed children reported more attachment to their children than did mothers of non-language delayed children. The presence of behavior problems did not seem to affect the mothers' perceived attachment but was associated with greater maternal stress. The results suggested that the child's needs associated with having a disability may actually enhance attachment while behavior problems not the disability itself contributed to maternal stress.

This thesis examines the rhetorical significance of visual metaphors as they occur in film. In particular, it provides a rhetorical analysis of Baz Luhrmann's film William Shakespeare's: Romeo + Juliet . The thesis analyzes how religious visual metaphors construct meaning by creating visual narratives that are just as powerful as spoken or written metaphors. The thesis relies on Gozzi's (1999) three levels of metaphors—surface, deep, and meta-metaphors—for the analysis of visual metaphors surrounding Father Lawrence and images of Christ that appear in Luhrmann's film. The analysis indicates that the visual surface metaphors of Father Lawrence depict a central character that is seedy, weak, and inactive. The visual surface metaphors of the images of Christ depict this religious figure as omnipresent yet impotent. The analysis indicates that the visual deep metaphors of Father Lawrence define this character as infirmed and culpable for the tragedy of the film. The visual deep metaphors of the images of Christ define him as infirmed and confined. Taken together, the surface and deep visual metaphors contribute to the development of a meta-metaphor in Luhrmann's film that depicts the Catholic religion as dark. Ultimately, the visual surface, deep, and meta-metaphors contained in Luhrmann's film contribute to the construction of meaning. They provide reasons for the character's inadequacies, establish narratives that are not part of the literal narrative as presented in Luhrmann's film and Shakespeare's original work, and provide a postmodern religious audience with substantial visual narrative with which they can identify.

Pastor Pete Peters is a minister in La Porte, Colorado. He operates a small church, an Internet website, a newsletter, and a worldwide cassette tape ministry. He teaches Christian Identity, the belief that the white race is Israel of the Bible. His rhetoric contains open derision of Jews, homosexuals, and racial minorities, although he never openly advocates violence toward any group. After tracing the roots of the Christian Identity movement and reviewing the literature on the movement, this thesis examines Peters' rhetoric at the metaphoric level, analyzing the metaphors in four of Peters' key works for their underlying meaning. Metaphoric criticism as a method of rhetorical analysis is introduced and then applied to the metaphors extracted from America the Conquered, Baal Worship, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, and Whores Galore. These books, all by Peters, employ his metaphor of Jews corrupting the United States government and attempting to destroy white Christians through media, courts, and banking, of which Peters asserts they control. Through extracting and analyzing the metaphors in the four books, it was found that Peters does more than warn against corrupt systems: through metaphor and Biblical parallels, he subversively condones and nearly commands violence against Jews, homosexuals, and the government.

This dissertation involves the research of lexical bundles, sequences of three or more words likely to co-occur in a register, or situational variety of English. Bundles vary by register. The research is grounded in the study of a corpus, a collection of texts. Essays written by both professional and student writers were analyzed for four-word bundles to determine how bundles might vary. Student essays were categorized by writing level, determined by the exam for which the students were writing the essays. Results suggest that both professional and student writers use bundles more associated with the academic than the conversational register and that both the professional writers as well as the college proficient writers, those scoring higher on the exam, were more likely to use bundles to structure discourse than nonproficient college writers. Results also indicate that the proficient college writers were more likely to quote and paraphrase the source material than the nonproficient college writers. Findings are limited due to the small corpora size. Included are implications for instruction and further research.

<p><italic>Bodily Trespass</italic> situates the fantastic as a discourse of spatial production in twentieth-century black American literature. Eruptions of the fantastic in realist and surrealist narratives index and ameliorate the spatial constriction that informs black American subjectivity from the Middle Passage up through to the contemporary carceral state. The black fantastic is a narrative response to a spatial crisis that is corporeal and ontological. As a literary mode, in the Todorovian sense, the fantastic identifies the real as a production of the "unreal" and calls attention to ideological and institutional apparatuses that sustain the dominant order. Taking Pauline Hopkins' turn of the twentieth-century serial <italic>Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self</italic> as a point of departure, this project examines the fantastic as a discourse of Pan-Africanism during a period Farah Griffin describes as the "nadir" of post-emancipation black life. Hopkins reaches outside of U.S. borders suturing Ethiopia to America in order to fashion a new and "rival" black geography that challenges the eradication of black legal, civic, and social space.</p><p>In the postwar years, the production of imaginative space extends to the task of recording and refuting the racial discourse that articulates urbanity. Chester Himes' <italic>The Real Cool Killers</italic>, Ann Petry's <italic>The Street</italic>, and Gwendolyn Brooks' <italic>Maud Martha</italic> depict racially encoded urban geographies as corporeally informed psychosocial "interfaces." These novels identify cartographic locution as a strategy for spatial occupation and psychic rehabilitation. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and Ralph Ellison's "The King of the Bingo Game locate in the sonic a blueprint for refashioning the space of the modern metropolis according to a logic of interiority. Baldwin and Ellison identify the fantastic as a discourse of aurality that alters the texture of space by channeling what I call "scalar consciousness," a heightened awareness of the ways in which one might manipulate scale in the service of spatial production. Meditations on belonging, displays of corporeal violence, discourses of Africanity, and the identification of the aural as a pathway for liberation illustrate, in all these works, the black fantastic's rootedness in spatial production, subject formation, and resistance to a dehumanizing social order.</p> / Dissertation

The purpose of this research was to investigate the nature of listeners' attitudes toward foreign-accented speech and the manner in which those attitudes are formed. This study measured 165 participants' implicit and explicit attitudes toward US- and foreign-accented audio stimuli. Implicit attitudes were measured with an audio Implicit Association Test. The use of audio stimuli as repeated tokens for their phonological attributes represents an innovation in IAT methodology. Explicit attitudes were elicited through self-report. The explicit task was contextualized as a fictional medical malpractice trial; participants heard the recorded audio testimony of two actors (one US-accented and one Korean-accented) portraying opposing expert witnesses. Four test conditions counterbalanced across participants were created from the recordings. Participants rated the experts on fourteen dependent variables ('traits'): believability, credibility, judgment, knowledge, competence, trustworthiness, likeability, friendliness, expertise, intelligence, warmth, persuasiveness, presentation style, and clarity of presentation. Participants were also asked for their attitudes toward the speakers relative to each other (i.e., Which doctor would you side with in this dispute?). The question of speaker preference was posed as a binary choice, an 11- point slider scale measure, and two confirmation questions asking participants to state how fair they thought an outcome for each party would be. This study's hypothesis that participants' implicit and explicit attitudes toward the same speech would diverge was confirmed. The IAT results indicated an implicit bias [ D =.33, p∠.05] in favor of the US-accented speaker, while the self-report results indicated an explicit bias [ F (2,121)=3.969, p=.021, η 2 =.062] in favor of the foreign-accented speaker in the slider scale and confirmation questions [ F (2,121)=3.708, p=.027, η 2 =.058, and F (2,121)=3.563, p=.031, η 2 =.056]. While the binary choice question showed a trend toward favoring the foreign-accented speaker, the result was not significant. No discernable pattern was found to exist in attitudes toward the speaker by trait. This study's findings argue for the recognition of both implicit and explicit attitude constructs and the integration of implicit attitudes measurement methodologies into future language attitudes research. Additional theoretical implications of these findings for future language attitudes research are also discussed, including implications for selecting an appropriate cognitive processing model.

Results of the three studies on the speech production of female-to-male transgender individuals (transmen) present phonetic evidence that speech produces the transmen by what I termed triple decoupling. Transmen successfully decouple gender from biological sex. The results of the longitudinal studies exemplified that speakers born and raised female do not necessarily need to have a female voicing source or filter function. Both qualitative changes can he achieved (to different degree) by bringing exogenous testosterone into the system that virilizes both source and filter over time. Moreover, the cross-sectional study showed that articulatory gestures can be modified to move the acoustic targets towards a gendered target one is striving to present. The acoustic manifestations of transmen with different partner attraction offers the next type of decoupling, that between sexual orientation and gender identity. The results of the cross-sectional study imply that female-born individuals attracted to men do not necessarily have to identify as women. They can opt out of this self-identification by selectively adopting features associated with the gay cismale speaking style. This is suggested by the fact that sexual orientation was found to have a significant effect on the durational and spectral quality of fricatives /s/ and /s/, formant values and sentential pitch range. Finally, the longitudinal studies provide evidence for the third type of decoupling, which comes in the form of gender breaking free from physiology. The recurring "reverse J-pattern" of both the transitioning source and filter, as well as the mean fundamental frequency raising above the pitch floor illustrate the fact that transmen do not feel obliged to sound as masculine (as low-pitched and "low-formanted") as testosterone enables them to. This final type of decoupling also serves to demonstrate that many transmen decidedly do not opt in to the binary system of sex / gender even though they are physiologically able to do so. Although LGB speaking styles have been investigated before, this dissertation is the first to discuss a number of acoustic descriptors specifically in transmen's speech and place them into the context of hormone treatment, sexual orientation and disclosure status.

This project considers the ways in which English authors and a diverse group of Japanese subjects co-produced literary representations of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that Anglo-Japanese encounters were defined by imbrication: by a number of overlapping phenomena that developed both coincidentally and as a result of contact between the two countries. Among coincidental developments, I include urbanisation and the development of a prosperous middle class in both Japan and England. Developments that appear to arise as a result of Anglo-Japanese contact include the prevalence of Social Darwinism in intellectual circles in both countries, as well as the growth of transnational bureaucratic networks. I refer to these phenomena collectively as "Japanglia," The literary implications of these overlaps--some highly ephemeral, others longer lasting--form the focus of this dissertation. In the four case studies presented here, I find that Japanglian phenomena compel us to adopt variously intertextual, inter-artistic, tropological, and somatically-focused approaches to our reading. My first chapter focuses on intertextuality in the work of Sir Christopher Dresser and Meiji bureaucrat Ishida Tametake. I find that the existence of Japanglian bureaucratic networks (formed in the overlap of English and Japanese bureaucracies) resulted in the publication of interpenetrative English and Japanese accounts of the same events. Japanglian texts may also be inter-artistic, using culturally blurred visual and decorative artforms as models for their own representations of Japan. This becomes apparent in my second case study, which considers the relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado and Japanese ukiyo-e prints . Tropologically focused reading is also of use when reading these texts, for common tropes circulated between writers of English and Japanese origins. This common tropology features in the work of Rudyard Kipling and Okakura Kakuzo ̄. Finally, as my study of the Japan writings of Marie Stopes suggests, blurring between the categories of Englishness and Japaneseness may register in the phenomenology of somatic experience.

This dissertation examines patterns of secondhand exchange in the Victorian novel as a critical counterpoint to the more frequently discussed literary representations of industrial production and consumption. Analyzing representations and transfers of well-used, secondhand, and even discarded objects as they change hands in the work of writers including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry Mayhew together with archival material, I argue that the secondhand economy reveals a cultural ambivalence toward the devaluation of material objects accompanying new modes of production, strongly tinged with a nostalgia for supposed precapitalist affective ties between persons and things. The significance of my exploration of the secondhand economy in literature is not limited to representations of material objects, however; it also facilitates a more nuanced understanding of Victorian class and especially class mobility as it relates to moments of exchange in the novel. While redirecting our attention to economically marginalized characters and the often neglected patterns of circulation that govern their social roles, it also problematizes rigid notions of class by tracing the mobility of both objects and persons as sellers and purchasers of all classes negotiate social position with the exchange of objects. Following an introduction that situates my project at the nexus of economic criticism and material culture studies, I argue that Victorian writers including Carlyle, Dickens, and Mayhew used the circulation of secondhand clothing to signify a rupture from the past and from sartorial social ties. The second chapter examines literary representations of the pawnshop in the work of Dickens and George Eliot; while the pawned object symbolizes the uncertain fate of fallen or endangered women, the site of the pawnshop itself stores forgotten history and facilitates the redemption of both persons and pledges. The third chapter examines auction narratives in the work of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot, identifying in these texts the narrators' efforts to guide readers toward a more acute perception of irony and proper feelings of sympathy in response to these spectacles of dispossession. The concluding chapter revisits Mayhew, Carlyle, and Dickens to examine profitable second lives of persons and things.

"Imagining Unity" investigates how an evolving concept of transcendence in early modern England, influenced by Reformation and counter-Reformation theology, created new ways of responding affectively and philosophically to emerging articulations of national identity in British devotional poetry. My project focuses on a series of politically disruptive moments in the seventeenth century--from the residual trauma of the Protestant Reformation to the Civil War of the 1640's--that troubled England's developing sense of national identity. In the shadow of these troubles, devotional poets reworked ideas of transcendence that they had inherited from medieval Catholicism to provide a sense of national cohesion in the midst of a changing political landscape. This dissertation explores transcendence as it is reconceived by four different authors: John Donne's work translates Catholic iconography to symbolize the ascension of a Protestant England; Aemelia Lanyer's poetry appeals to the exclusivity of religious esotericism as a palliative for the actual exclusion of women from political life; Richard Crashaw's writings reinterpret mystical union to rescue sovereignty from failure; and John Milton's work revises transubstantiation to authorize a new republic. By investigating how early modern poetry reimagines transcendence in response to political events, my project widens ongoing conversations in political theology and "the religious turn" of literary studies, which are often unilaterally focused on the influence that religion had on politics in the course of an inevitable secularization of culture. My contribution to this work, and the underlying premise to my argument, is that literature provides a forum for rethinking religious concepts at the heart of political organization despite the apparent impulse toward secularization. In doing so, literature serves as a cultural medium for testing the conceptual limits of transcendence--its viability as a tool for inspiring and maintaining social unity. This dissertation ultimately witnesses a concerted effort in the early modern period to extend the life of religious ideas within the political imagination through devotional poetry's insistent recasting of transcendence as central to the formulation of the body politic.