Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2018, Speech Language Pathology

Speech comprehension in multitalker backgrounds is particularly challenging for non-native listeners. Previous studies have shown that although native listeners consistently outperform non-native listeners in listening comprehension tasks, both native and non-native listeners are sensitive to dialectal cues in target and masking speech when targets are presented in background babble of varying intensities. The present study examined the listening comprehension skills of 24 Korean-English bilingual listeners who were presented with sentence stimuli in two-talker babble. Stimuli and babble were comprised of two dialects, General American English (GAE) and Southern American English (SAE), which were systematically varied throughout testing at three signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). In a previous study by Fox, Jacewicz, and Hardjono (2014), the nonnative (Indonesian-English bilingual) pattern of responses was highly similar to that of native GAE listeners in the +3 and -3 dB SNR conditions, but differed at the 0 dB condition. The present study aimed to determine whether or not these results are replicable in a comparable group of non-native bilinguals with a different L1 (Korean). Results revealed that the pattern of responses matched that of Fox et al. (2014) in all conditions; like both Indonesian listeners and monolingual GAE listeners, Korean listeners performed best when target sentences were in SAE at the +3 dB and -3 dB SNR conditions. However, like Indonesian listeners, the Korean listeners demonstrated no benefit from the acoustic features of SAE targets at the 0 dB SNR condition. These findings suggest that bilinguals are consistent in their comprehension of target sentences in masking speech irrespective of their L1 background; unlike at +3 dB and -3 dB conditions, at 0 dB SNR, nonnative listeners exhibit a decreased ability to attend to phonetic details of regional dialects.

Committee: Robert Fox (Advisor); Ewa Jacewicz (Advisor) Subjects: Acoustics; English As A Second Language; Speech Therapy

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2006, Speech Pathology and Audiology

This study examined the attitudes and perceptions of African American college students regarding African American English (AAE) and codeswitching between AAE and Standard American English (SAE). The study included a survey that was distributed to students at Miami University (Oxford, OH), as well as an empirical language analysis of African American students during a speech and during an informal interview. Results of the survey revealed that students value the ability to codeswitching for social mobility. The empirical language analysis of codeswitching was determined to be unsuccessful. Limitations for the study are also presented as well as implications for future research.

Committee: Alice Kahn (Advisor) Subjects:

EdD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Education : Curriculum and Instruction

Lower socio-economic African-American students are at-risk in the area of literacy in academics. This may come from a disconnect between the discourse of the student and the discourse of academics. It is a teacher's responsibility to make a connection between these discourses to support academic success. The purpose of this study was to ascertain what knowledge European-American teachers in an urban district brought to the literacy education of their African-American students. Using one-on-one interviews, the participants responded not only to questions to determine experience and professional knowledge, but also to scenarios that incorporated African-American culture and language communication techniques. The results revealed that four European-American teachers who were interviewed had a foundational knowledge of African-American culture. However, the participants might benefit from a more in-depth knowledge of African-American communication techniques to support connections between the students' personal discourse and the academic discourse. The study also found that the European-American teachers interviewed did reveal knowledge of culturally relevant teaching. Despite this knowledge, the participants did not incorporate culturally relevant teaching in its entirety. By incorporating a more comprehensive approach to the implementation of culturally relevant teaching, the student might be better supported in the academic setting.

Committee: Helen Meyer (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2006, English (Arts and Sciences)

The Divine and Miss Johanna is a novel that began as a first-person tale of a spiritual woman who fell in love with someone else and left her husband. Her parents took the husband's side in the messy break up. Its title has varied from Blue to Runaway Wife to The Silver Lake. Should a reviewer classify the book as it was in its early stages, it would have been classified as “women's literature.” The author's journey as a writer has been at least as profound as the influences that created an entirely different novel—the study of modernism, postmodernism, gothic, magic realism, and the sublime as well as the effect professors' and writers' comments had on the author and her writing. The Divine and Miss Johanna evolved into a novel that blurs the boundaries between the American gothic tradition and the lush, lyrical world of magic. It is a book that questions what it means to be a Christian and the meaning of spirituality. Told in different voices, all of the characters move in spaces that a reader might interpret as real, as a projection of the character's unconscious, or, perhaps, as a space of deep denial. In turn, The Divine and Miss Johanna is negotiating the territory between American gothic and Latin American and African magic realism in a uniquely American way. The novel also explores the hypocrisy of Christianity and the import of faith. The author believes that the book now is literature—not “women's literature.” The critical introduction establishes the context in both the author's life and her readings and scholarly research for such hybridity.

Committee: Zakes Mda (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1921, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1925, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Allied Health Sciences: Communication Sciences and Disorders

This dissertation investigated the accuracies of Google's Speech-to-Text, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, in recognizing the speech of children aged 4–9 years who speak African American English (AAE) and/or Mainstream American English (MAE). ASR speech recognition accuracies were investigated across the various levels of linguistic complexity, considering AAE dialectal density, to determine its impact on ASR transcription accuracies. An investigation was then conducted to determine of the relationship between acoustic measures and Google's Speech-to-Text accuracies in recognizing phrase level final voiced plosive variations of AAE speaking children. Audio recordings were collected from 22 AAE and/or MAE speaking children across the word, phrase, and continuous speech levels. Dialect was determined based on parent identification. Dialectal density of AAE use was measured using target data from the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation Language Screener. Recordings were transcribed using Google's Speech-to-Text application and compared to researcher extracted transcriptions via Word Error Rate (WER) and word accuracy (accurate vs. inaccurate). Acoustic parameters were measured via Praat and a semi-automated algorithm in MATLAB. A mixed-effect regression model showed dialect density (p < .039) and level of speech (p < .001) were significant. Post hoc analysis revealed that word level had significantly higher WER compared to both phrase and continuous speech. Moderate positive correlations between WER and AAE dialect density across all levels of speech and strong negative correlations between age and WER were found. Moderate correlations for WER and dialect density were also significant at the word level for both AAE (rs =.601) and MAE (rs =.705) speakers individually, as well as MAE at the continuous speech level (rs =.749). A nonlinear mixed-effect model was conducted to analyze the relationships between acoustic measures of vowel dur (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Victoria McKenna Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Kimmerly Harrell Ph.D M.A B.A. (Committee Member); Amy Pratt Ph.D. (Committee Member); Amy Hobek Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Speech Therapy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Speech and Hearing Science

This dissertation explores the relationship between quantitative phonetic measurements and listener identification of accents of English, focusing on phonetic distance and its perceptual correlates across various English accent varieties. The Levenshtein distance (LD) measure, which quantifies string similarity by calculating the minimum cost of transforming one string into another, is used to compare phonetic differences across accents. This study begins by investigating the diverse applications of LD across disciplines, emphasizing its significance in dialectology. Evaluation of different LD approaches and algorithms reveals that simpler methods often yield analogous or superior results compared to more complex ones. Insights from analyzing LD trends inform the selection of the algorithm chosen for the current experiment. Subsequently, carefully selected low- and high-pass filter cutoffs enable investigation of target phonetic features. Four English accent varieties are included in this research: Midland American (control), British/Australian, Hindi-influenced, and Mandarin-influenced. Hypotheses and predictions are formulated based on the documented correlations between LD and listeners' perception ratings of native-likeness and intelligibility. For monolingual American English-speaking listeners, frequent confusion is predicted between Midland American and British/Australian accents due to their similarly low LDs, amplified by filtering conditions altering vowel and consonant cues. Conversely, higher LDs are hypothesized for Hindi- and Mandarin-influenced English due to the influence of various first languages (L1s). It is expected that these two varieties will be more frequently confused with each other in unmodified identification tasks due to their relatively high LDs. The impact of filtering conditions on confusion is predicted to differ for each variety, with high-pass filtering affecting Hindi-influenced English due to consonant substitutions and low (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ewa Jacewicz (Advisor) Subjects: Acoustics; Cognitive Psychology; Linguistics

Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 1954, Communication Studies

Committee: Martha M. Gesling (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Rhetoric

Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 1954, Communication Studies

Committee: Martha M. Gesling (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

When a children's recital piece from the nineteenth century opens with the interrogation, “Well, Dolly, what are you saying, / When you blink and wink your eyes?” the implication is clear: the doll's silence speaks volumes. Articulating Dolls means to anatomize Dolly's cryptic body, to decipher dolls not just as articulated figures of parts but as articulated figures of speech. Dolls in the Victorian popular imagination are saying something, and this dissertation designs to find out what. Speaking the Victorian pediolect that molded Woman like a statue, played her for a puppet, transacted her like a doll, or took her for a dummy (a sororal synonymy that contemporary Dolls Studies is only just beginning to elaborate), this project dissects the doll-inflected discourse framing femininity to anatomize how true womanhood was made to share the mold with ideal sculpture and other dolliform bodies of man-ufactured perfection. Following an introductory etiology that historicizes definitions of Pygmalionism--a paraphilia that to the Victorians inscribed a desire not for the simulated woman who comes alive but for the Gal(atea) who (re)turns to stone--chapter one emphasizes how the desire for women who were statues(que) compels their decease as the feminine form was sartorially and semiotically impressed into a fashion for mortification. Showing that the sculptural was intrinsically sepulchral, chapter two analyzes the intrinsically (nec)romantic idioms of dollification in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. More expressly executed female bodies are the subject of chapter three, in which ventriloquial phonodolls are made of the morbid (and thus more biddable) “Venuses” in Du Maurier's Trilby and Villiers's The Future Eve. The still(ed) lifes of statues (non) vivants are the focus of Carroll's narrative photography in chapter four, while chapter five filters his Alice books through the author's “photographic memory” of a lost Liddell doll. Decoding the crypsis of girls, or “dolls, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michelle Abate (Advisor); Patricia Enciso (Committee Member); Clare Simmons (Committee Member); Victoria Ford Smith (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; Literature

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), University of Findlay, 2019, Education

The achievement gap between African American students and their White peers in language arts has prompted researchers to identify teachers' perceptions of the language of African American Vernacular English-speaking students as a contributing factor. The persistence of the achievement gap has created a social justice issue that is addressed with the transformative mixed methods paradigm by including the historically disenfranchised, their historical truths, and the issues of power that impact their current conditions. This study uses data from a Language Attitude survey on a 4-point Likert scale administered to ten teachers of African American Vernacular English-speaking students in grades K-5 and 14 African American Vernacular English-speaking students in grades 4-5 to examine how language bias impacts student achievement and motivation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and coded to identify prominent themes. The study found participants have negative perceptions of African American Vernacular English and prefer Standard English in all communication. These findings suggest that students and teachers can benefit from culturally responsive teaching.

Committee: Christine Denecker (Committee Chair); Allison Baer (Committee Member); Erin Laverick (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Black History; Education; Education History; Educational Tests and Measurements; Language Arts; Literacy; Multicultural Education; Multilingual Education; Teacher Education; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Teaching and Learning

Through this study, I sought to better understand the relational nature of literacy events and practices in schools. I specifically focus on the relationships between love and literacies. During the 2017-2018 school year, I conducted a literacy ethnography at Ross High School, a semi-rural public high school outside of a southern city. I drew on a range of theoretical perspectives including African American Literacies, New Literacy Studies, and Black Feminism to understand literacies and love as a situated phenomenon. I primarily constructed data through being a participant-observer in a 10th grade English class of a teacher, Ms. Henning, who is in her 7th year of teaching English. Data included fieldnotes, audio and video recorded classroom sessions, documents (e.g. student work, curricular texts) and interviews with students, adult teachers, and both school and district administration. This research considers the dimensions of love present in a “labeled” 10th-grade English classroom and the ways students and their teacher interrupt the school and district culture of surveillance and standardization through these dimensions of love.

Committee: Linda Parsons (Advisor); Mollie Blackburn (Committee Member); Caroline Clark (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Literacy; Teacher Education; Teaching

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Music Performance/Instrumental Performance

Traditionally, oboists have learned and performed standard oboe concerti by European composers. While learning these concerti is important to understand the foundations of the instrument, it can be a great benefit to classical music and the performer to begin to perform lesser-known concerti. This document may provide a resource for oboists to discover and locate concerti written by American composers. Information will be provided on how to locate the sheet music and recordings as well as ranking the difficulty of these concerti and providing program notes written by the composer.

Committee: Nermis Mieses DMA (Advisor); Susan Nelson DMA (Committee Member); Elizabeth Menard Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, EDU Teaching and Learning

Black women have a legacy of excellence as teachers, administrators, colleagues, and community members in the field of English language education. However, their expertise, perspectives, and voices continue to be underappreciated, under-researched, and therefore, too often unheard. Furthermore, given the ongoing impact of racism as a systemic force shaping U.S. society and the world, due to the global reach of U.S. culture and economy, Black women's personal and professional lives are necessarily affected. More specifically, Black women are regularly stereotyped and regarded as intellectually, professionally, and aesthetically inferior to their White and male counterparts. Therefore, this dissertation highlights the experiences of Black women teachers of English to speakers of other languages as counternarratives that can “shatter complacency, challenge the dominant discourse on race, and further the struggle for racial reform” (Solorzano and Yosso, 2002, p. 32). Researchers have published important work on the experiences of teachers of color who are Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), and of Black women in education, but there is scant literature specifically centering the experiences of Black women in TESOL. Therefore, this dissertation attends to the following research questions: How do race, gender, and racism impact the personal and professional lives of Black women educators in TESOL? How can their counternarratives enrich the existing literature that examines relationships among race, gender, and racism for women of color, generally, and Black women educators, specifically? My research is grounded in Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Epistemology—intellectual traditions that definitively center Black and Black women ways of knowing and coming to know and understand the world, and that are unapologetically oriented toward racial equity and justice for all people. Critical race methodology guided my process of collecting, analyzin (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Carlotta Kinloch (Advisor) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Education; English As A Second Language; Gender Studies; Multicultural Education

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

"All Dressed Up, Nowhere to Go" is the story of Jonah Huang, an Asian American man in DC who is obsessed with fashion. The novel follows him through the six years of his life when he faces the choice of following his passion at the cost of financial stability and coping with a love that is unavailable to him.

Committee: Michelle Herman (Advisor); Lee Martin (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1987, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1987, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1985, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1981, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education