UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Language Outcomes of the Play and Language for Autistic Youngsters (PLAY) Project Home Consultation model—An Extended Analysis
    (2016) Catalano, Allison; Bernstein-Ratner, Nan; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The current study is a post-hoc analysis of data from the original randomized control trial of the Play and Language for Autistic Youngsters (PLAY) Home Consultation program, a parent-mediated, DIR/Floortime based early intervention program for children with ASD (Solomon, Van Egeren, Mahone, Huber, & Zimmerman, 2014). We examined 22 children from the original RCT who received the PLAY program. Children were split into two groups (high and lower functioning) based on the ADOS module administered prior to intervention. Fifteen-minute parent-child video sessions were coded through the use of CHILDES transcription software. Child and maternal language, communicative behaviors, and communicative functions were assessed in the natural language samples both pre- and post-intervention. Results demonstrated significant improvements in both child and maternal behaviors following intervention. There was a significant increase in child verbal and non-verbal initiations and verbal responses in whole group analysis. Total number of utterances, word production, and grammatical complexity all significantly improved when viewed across the whole group of participants; however, lexical growth did not reach significance. Changes in child communicative function were especially noteworthy, and demonstrated a significant increase in social interaction and a significant decrease in non-interactive behaviors. Further, mothers demonstrated an increase in responsiveness to the child’s conversational bids, increased ability to follow the child’s lead, and a decrease in directiveness. When separated for analyses within groups, trends emerged for child and maternal variables, suggesting greater gains in use of communicative function in both high and low groups over changes in linguistic structure. Additional analysis also revealed a significant inverse relationship between maternal responsiveness and child non-interactive behaviors; as mothers became more responsive, children’s non-engagement was decreased. Such changes further suggest that changes in learned skills following PLAY parent training may result in improvements in child social interaction and language abilities.
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    The Dialectical Theory of Art in Kenneth Burke's Essays and Book Reviews of the Early 1920s and its Combination of the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss
    (2014) Clarkson, Bruce T.; Harrison, Regina; Lin, Jing; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    I argue that a dialectical theory of art is developed by Kenneth Burke in the first half of the 1920s that brings together through its own terms and principles two opposing philosophies that would not come into existence in themselves until the 1940s and 1950s respectively: the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. The development of this dialectical theory of art begins in 1920 with several of Burke's book reviews, including his first, "Axiomatics." It then continues with further book reviews and then essays, also including his first, through the middle of 1925, when it is completed by the twin essays "Psychology of Form" and "The Poetic Process." The dialectical theory of art that emerges from this series of works possesses four main parts. These are consciousness, intentionality, action, and true art. Each part, in turn, consists of two opposing subdivisions that are meant to be combined and transcended. They are, in line with the four parts above, creativity / form, originality / communication, art-emotion / artistry, and art's advancement / beauty. These divisions and subdivisions are highly integrated and function to explain Burke's major position on how true art is produced and why it possesses an absolute value for universal judgment. My goal in establishing this dialectical theory is fourfold: to provide a framework for better understanding the early essays and book reviews as a coherent and unified whole, to revalue the 1920s as Burke's first important theoretical period, to provide good reason for bringing existentialism and structuralism forward into studies about Burke, and to offer the dialectical theory itself as the foundation of Burke's later theoretical developments and, hence, as a theory and model that may be useful for acquiring a fuller understanding of his theories after the 1920s, which span over half-a-century and have become of interest to multiple fields of study.