Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item HOW BILINGUALS' COMPREHENSION OF CODE-SWITCHES INFLUENCES ATTENTION AND MEMORY(2024) Salig, Lauren; Novick, Jared; Slevc, L. Robert; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bilinguals sometimes code-switch between their shared languages. While psycholinguistics research has focused on the challenges of comprehending code-switches compared to single-language utterances, bilinguals seem unhindered by code-switching in communication, suggesting benefits that offset the costs. I hypothesize that bilinguals orient their attention to speech content after hearing a code-switch because they draw a pragmatic inference about its meaning. This hypothesis is based on the pragmatic meaningfulness of code-switches, which speakers may use to emphasize information, signal their identity, or ease production difficulties, inter alia. By considering how code-switches may benefit listeners, this research attempts to better align our psycholinguistic understanding of code-switch processing with actual bilingual language use, while also inspiring future work to investigate how diverse language contexts may facilitate learning in educational settings. In this dissertation, I share the results of three pre-registered experiments with Spanish-English bilinguals that evaluate how hearing a code-switch affects attention and memory. Experiment 1a shows that code-switches increase bilinguals’ self-reported attention to speech content and improve memory for that information, compared to single-language equivalents. Experiment 1b demonstrates that this effect requires bilingual experience, as English-speaking monolinguals did not demonstrate increased attention upon hearing a code-switch. Experiment 2 attempts to replicate these results and establish the time course of the attentional effect using an EEG measure previously associated with attentional engagement (alpha power). However, I conclude that alpha power was not a valid measure of attention to speech content in this experiment. In Experiment 3, bilinguals again showed better memory for information heard in a code-switched context, with a larger benefit for those with more code-switching experience and when listeners believed the code-switches were natural (as opposed to inserted randomly, removing the element of speaker choice). This suggests that the memory benefit comes from drawing a pragmatic inference, which likely requires prior code-switching experience and a belief in code-switches’ communicative purpose. These experiments establish that bilingual listeners derive attentional and memory benefits from ecologically valid code-switches—challenging a simplistic interpretation of the traditional finding of “costs.” Further, these findings motivate future applied work assessing if/how code-switches might benefit learning in educational contexts.Item Essays on the Cognitive Foundations of Economics(2024) Yegane, Ece; Masatlioglu, Yusufcan; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Chapter 1, I model a decision maker who observes available alternatives according to a list and stochastically forgets some alternatives. Each time the decision maker observes an item in the list, she recalls previous alternatives with some probability, conditional on those alternatives being recalled until this point. The decision maker maximizes a preference relation over the set of alternatives she can recall. I show that if every available alternative is chosen with strictly positive probability, the preference order and the list order must coincide in any limited memory representation. Under the full support assumption, the preference ordering, the list ordering and the memory parameters are uniquely identified up to the ranking of the two least preferred alternatives. I provide conditions on observable choice probabilities that characterize the model under the full support assumption. I then apply our model to study the pricing problem of a monopolist who faces consumers with limited memory. I show that when the probability of forgetting is high, the monopolist is better off charging a lower price than the optimal price in the perfect memory case. In Chapter 2, Yusufcan Masatlioglu and I study how the allocation of attention to different options and the accessibility of options from memory affect decision making. To distinguish between attention and memory, we propose a two-stage stochastic consideration set formation process. An alternative enters the decision maker’s consideration set if it is investigated in the initial attention stage and is remembered in the subsequent recall stage. In the initial attention stage, the decision maker investigates each available alternative with some alternative-specific probability. In the recall stage, the decision maker recalls each alternative that she investigated in the attention stage with some probability. The probability of recalling an alternative depends on the memorability of the alternative and its position in the order of investigation in the attention stage. Investigating an alternative more recently enhances the probability of recalling it. The decision maker chooses the option that maximizes her preference relation over her consideration set. Under the assumption that the investigation of alternatives is observable, we provide testable implications on choice behavior and show that the revealed preference, attention parameters and memory parameters can be uniquely identified from observable repeated choices.Item A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal(2020) Storti, Anna; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops the concept of racial hosting to conceptualize mixed-raceness as an embodied palimpsest of past, present, and future. A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal argues for the importance of uncovering the disavowed, residual, and violent conditions of racial mixture. The project situates queer theories of temporality and feminist theories of situated knowledge in relation to Asian Americanist critiques of memory. I contend that the Asian/white subject is both an index to track the colonial condition across time, and a host that harbors the colonial desires we have come to name as hybridity, multiracialism, and post-racism. Each chapter builds towards a methodology of memory to, on the one hand, track the sensorial life of mixed-raceness, and on the other hand, document how the discourse of multiracialism obscures mass violence and the colonial ideology of racial purity. Chapter one advances the framework of white residue through an examination of the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Japanese/white police officer serving 263 years in prison for assaulting 13 Black women. I then narrate the life of Elliot Rodger, the Chinese/white mass shooter and involuntary celibate. Opening the study in this way dispels the notion that racial mixture renders racism’s past obsolete. I then shift to mixed race artists whose performances of desire, memory, and time include a fervent belief in queer and feminist possibility. Chapter two illuminates how a femme aesthetic of retribution surfaces as a response to racial fetish. This chapter spotlights performances by Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Maya Mackrandilal. Chapter three forwards the concept of muscle memory to study how the accumulation of history is deposited into the body and enacted through movement. Here, I contemplate the queer and trans dance of Zavé Martohardjono. Chapter four de-idealizes hybridity through the oeuvre of contemporary artist Saya Woolfalk. To end, I refer to the photography of Gina Osterloh to force a reckoning with the pressures to remember and claim ancestry. Mixed race subjection, I conclude, is an embodied phenomenon with reverberating implications for the structure of racial form writ large.Item Archives in the Attic: Exile, Activism, and Memory in the Washington Committee for Human Rights in Argentina(2019) Pyle, Perri; Rosemblatt, Karin; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Spurred by the human rights violations committed by the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), exiled Argentines in Washington, D.C. formed the Washington Committee for Human Rights in Argentina (WCHRA) to facilitate the transnational exchange of information between those under threat in Argentina and political actors in the United States. This thesis outlines the story of the WCHRA through the records they created - kept for nearly forty years in an attic - and oral interviews with former members. The collection consists of letters, testimonies, petitions, and notes that reflect the group’s extensive network and provide insight into how Argentine exile groups inserted themselves into the larger human rights movement. By critically examining how one small group of activists came together, I explore how archival records enhance, challenge, and reveal new insights into the politics of exile, activism, and memory, as seen through the lens of the records they kept.Item Early Life Stress Predicts Decreased Total Brain Volume, Cortical Thickness, and Cognitive Functioning in School-Age Children(2018) Chad-Friedman, Emma; Dougherty, Lea R; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Severe early life stress (ELS) (e.g., maltreatment/institutionalization) is associated with atypical neurological and cognitive development. Few studies have prospectively examined the neurological mechanisms underlying the cognitive deficits associated with less severe and more common forms of ELS. The current study examined the impact of common forms of ELS assessed during early childhood on children’s brain volume, cortical thickness, and memory and executive functioning assessed three years later in school age children, controlling for current stress. Participants included 63 children (50.8% female) assessed during preschool (Wave 1 age: M=4.23 years, SD=.84) and three years later (Wave 2 age: M=7.19 years, SD=.89). ELS included low socioeconomic status, single parent household, low parental education, child exposure to parental depression, and child exposure to high parental hostility. Children’s current life stress, cognitive abilities, and brain structure were assessed at Wave 2. ELS predicted reduced total gray volume, cortex volume, right inferior parietal thickness, and right superior parietal thickness, controlling for covariates and current stress. ELS also predicted poorer memory and attention shifting, controlling for current stress. Right superior parietal thickness mediated the effects of ELS on story recall memory. Results highlight the possible consequences of less severe forms of ELS on brain volume and cognitive functioning, suggesting potential neural mechanisms to further explore. Early childhood may be a particularly important time for intervention efforts to mitigate the neural and cognitive risks associated with early stress exposure.Item Grounding Judgment Phenomena in Memory: Examining the Role of Retrieval in the Estimation of Events(2018) Nguyen, Rosalind; Dougherty, Michael; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Suppose you were running late to work and had to decide which route to take that would give you the best chance of getting to work on time. How do you come up with the various routes to consider? How do you assess which route will give you the best chance of getting to work on time? In order to make that decision, you may think about all the prior routes you’ve taken and then evaluate each one with some probability of getting the desired outcome. On the surface, the act of generating choices and evaluating their likelihood may seem to have little in common. However, one may be surprised to learn that these processes are closely intertwined. The findings from this project suggest that judgments of likelihood may be constrained by one’s ability to retrieve from semantic memory. In experiment 1, we demonstrate that one’s general ability to retrieve from long-term memory (LTM) may play a critical role in judgments of likelihood and that the nature of the retrieval may relate differentially to different types of event estimation. In experiment 2, we assess different measurement models of memory and find that the type of relation between memory and judgment changes as the function of the type of memory model that one adopts. Finally, combined data across both experiments reveal that how the to-be-judged items are distributed plays a role in judgments and that retrieval ability, specifically, semantic memory, is predictive of probability judgments. Taken together, we argue that the ability to retrieve from LTM plays a critical role in judging the likelihood of an event occurring.Item MARKET BEHAVIOR IN THE POST-TRANSITIONAL NARRATIVE OF RAFAEL CHIRBES AND BELÉN GOPEGUI(2018) Giller-Wilde, Anne; Naharro-Calderon, Jose Maria; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation attempts to identify pertinent literary strategies found in the Spanish capitalist contemporary narrative. Having traced patterns like the stock market’s pendular movements in the Spanish post-Franco Transitional narrative of Rafael Chirbes and Belén Gopegui, this thesis considers similar thematic and stylistic repetitions deriving from the 19th Century Spanish Realist and Naturalist Novel and the Post-War period of the Civil War (1939-1975), characteristics which manifest themselves cumulatively in the novels of Chirbes and Goegui. Taking into account economic and market theories, and borrowing R.N. Elliott’s wave theory terminology for charting of market data and analysis of numerical data over time, the thesis considers qualitative literary fluctuations analogous to the temporal structures of stock market prices which occur through the history of trading. Due to differing experiences in the aforementioned periods, male and female authorship are considered separately in the two periods anterior to the post-Franco Transition. The dissertation also relies on theories of memory, history and group psychology, concepts close to formulations found in theories such as those of Prechter, Frost, Ortega y Gasset, Ricoeur, etc. It proposes that the novels of Chirbes and Gopegui, because of their discernible temporally ascending intertextual articulation, are analogous to the fifth wave of Elliott’s five-wave market cycle, which he termed social movement and whose momentum was stimulated by collective social emotion or Prechter’s social mood. In Chirbes and Gopegui, the underlying social mood is one of indignation and resentment whose manifestation can be traced from the late 19th-Century, to the Post-War period under the dictator Francisco Franco, culminating in the Post-Transitional novel, in which a generational rift rooted in socio-economic inequality is indicative of the unhealed wounds from the Spanish Civil War. The novels from the three time periods are also of an economic nature, treating human engagement with money and its consequences. Chirbes’ and Gopegui’s protagonists are theoretically a return to the universal protagonist in the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós, but who embody the socio-economic concerns of the 21st Century, completing a literary social movement.Item "The other side of the picture": Social History, Popular Culture, and the Idea of the Sand Creek Massacre(2015) Tanner, Kerry; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Competing schools of thought regarding American imperialism, American constructions of race, Native American experiences, and white settlers’ place within the American West can be seen in non-fiction and fictional accounts of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre in what is now eastern Colorado. Due to a range of factors including the emergence of social history methodology and Cold War politics, a shift in both American historiography and fictional representations of Native Americans and the West can be observed in certain scholarly works and Western films and novels during the period 1945-1970. Debates over the meaning of Sand Creek, often inspired by film representations, also reveal Coloradans’ and Americans’ attempts to reckon with shameful and embarrassing events of the past by contesting notions of race and imperialism presented by Western fiction.Item The Democratic Self: Gender, Memory, and Human Rights under the Augusto Pinochet Dictatorship and Transition to Democracy in Chile, 1973-2010(2015) Townsend, Brandi Ann; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Democratic Self asks how ideas about gender shaped the ways that Chileans reconstructed the affective, social, and political bonds the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) sought to destroy. It intervenes in debates about the degree to which right-wing military regimes in Latin America eroded social ties during the Cold War. Torture targeted gendered and sexual identities and compelled victims to re-assess their roles as men, women, militants, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers. This dissertation argues that to reconnect the individual to collective struggles for democracy, survivors and their allies drew on longstanding, heteronormative gender ideologies within the left. Those ideologies gradually changed over the course of the dictatorship, and in turn, influenced memories during the subsequent transition to democracy (1990-2010). The dissertation draws on government and non-governmental documents and oral interviews with survivors, their families, and human rights workers. Between 1978 and 1990, mental health professionals working within human rights organizations provided psychological therapy to approximately 32,000-42,000 Chileans to help them work through their traumatic experiences as part of a collective project to repair the social connections that state violence ripped apart. These professionals translated psychoanalytic concepts of “the self” into the language of pre-1973 frameworks of citizenship grounded in the heterosexual, male-headed nuclear family. By the mid-1980s, Chile’s feminist movement changed the terms of the debate by showing how gendered forms of everyday violence that pre-dated the dictatorship shaped political violence under the dictatorship, as well as the opposition’s response. Slowly, mental health professionals began to change how they deployed ideas about gender when helping survivors and their families talk about state violence. However, the narratives of violence that emerged with the end of the dictatorship in 1990 and that were enshrined in three separate truth commissions (1990, 2004, and 2010) only partially reflected that transformation. The democratic governments’ attempts to heal Chile’s painful past and move forward did not always recognize, much less dislodge, entrenched ideas that privileged men’s experiences of political militancy. This dissertation shows how Chileans grappled with their memories of state violence, which were refracted through gendered discourses in the human rights movement.Item MEMORY AND PREDICTION IN CROSS-LINGUISTIC SENTENCE COMPREHENSION(2014) Lago, Maria S.; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the role of morphological and syntactic variation in sentence comprehension across languages. While most previous research has focused on how cross-linguistic differences affect the control structure of the language architecture (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) here we adopt an explicit model of memory, content-addressable memory (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, 2006) and examine how cross-linguistic variation affects the nature of the representations and processes that speakers deploy during comprehension. With this goal, we focus on two kinds of grammatical dependencies that involve an interaction between language and memory: subject-verb agreement and referential pronouns. In the first part of this dissertation, we use the self-paced reading method to examine how the processing of subject-verb agreement in Spanish, a language with a rich morphological system, differs from English. We show that differences in morphological richness across languages impact prediction processes while leaving retrieval processes fairly preserved. In the second part, we examine the processing of coreference in German, a language that, in contrast with English, encodes gender syntactically. We use eye-tracking to compare comprehension profiles during coreference and we find that only speakers of German show evidence of semantic reactivation of a pronoun's antecedent. This suggests that retrieval of semantic information is dependent on syntactic gender, and demonstrates that German and English speakers retrieve qualitatively different antecedent representations from memory. Taken together, these results suggest that cross-linguistic variation in comprehension is more affected by the content than the functional importance of gender and number features across languages.
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