Research Day Program Thursday, May 25th, 2017

The Faculty of Arts and Social Science, alongside the Research Committee, are proud to host the 2017 Research Day on Thursday, May 25th from 9:30am to 2:30pm in V208. Huron greatly appreciates any and all faculty who are willing to share their 2016-2017 research with the larger community. We encourage staff, students, and faculty to join us throughout the day to learn more about some of Huron faculty’s latest research projects. Huron supports and encourages faculty to continue their research, as it brings a wealth of knowledge back into our community and classrooms.

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Faculty of Arts and Social Science Research Day Program Thursday, May 25th | V208

MORNING SESSION A

Start Time Research Presentation

Presenter

9:30am “Infants Can Categorize Singing and Speaking” Speaking and singing to infants are both part of normal caregiver-infant social interactions during the first year of life. Singing to infants is a universal caregiving practice, and may be able to regulate infant states, and facilitate bonding and dyadic coordination better than speech. Infant-directed speech and song share many functional and acoustic similarities, such that both utilize words and exploit similar acoustic features. However, adult listeners are easily able to categorize sung stimuli from spoken stimuli. It remains unclear whether infant listeners perceive speech and song as two different stimuli categories. Using previously recorded samples of native speaking Russian and native-speaking English mothers singing and speaking to their infants, we created a two different categories of stimuli in two different languages (i.e., Russian Song and Speech Stimuli/ English Song and Speech Stimuli). We tested another group of 6- to 10-month-old infants (N=66) from English-speaking households in southern Ontario in a head-turn preference paradigm to examine discrimination for speech and song stimuli in Russian and English. The results found that infants listened significantly longer to singing samples compared to spoken samples, regardless of the type of language. These results show that infant listeners are able discriminate and perceptually categorize sung and spoken stimuli, and furthermore, show greater attention to singing over speaking. These findings support the idea that ID-singing is an equally important vocal register as compared to ID-speech to foster communication, learning and well-being during infancy and early childhood.

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9:45am “How Much Do Your Friends Really Drink? The Effects of University

Students’ Misperceptions of their Natural Drinking Groups’ Alcohol

Consumption on their Own Drinking Over the School Year.”

The objective of this study was to examine the effect of university students’ misperceptions of their drinking groups’ alcohol consumption on their own drinking patterns. Participants were 118 Huron students recruited within 27 natural drinking groups (i.e., groups of peers who consume alcohol and attend social drinking events together). Group members completed three identical surveys over the school year, two months apart. They reported on their own heavy episodic drinking (HED; frequency of consuming 5+ drinks for men or 4+ drinks for women in one sitting) and their perception of their group members’ HED. Results demonstrated that, at baseline, 58% of participants overestimated their groups’ HED. Further, even after controlling for how much participants’ groups actually drank, multilevel growth curve modelling demonstrated within-person effects of overestimation on participants’ own HED: at time points when participants overestimated their groups’ HED more than usual, their own HED was also higher. Finally, between-person effects revealed that participants with higher average overestimation scores remained relatively stable in their HED. In contrast, participants with lower average overestimation scores decreased significantly in their HED over the school year. Results emphasize the importance of addressing university students’ misperceptions of peer drinking in prevention and intervention programming.

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10:00am “Is There Any Behaviour Left in Behaviour Therapy?” Behaviourists might be forgiven for having concerns that the increasing intrusion of cognitive and mindfulness treatments in behaviour therapy has diluted the fundamentals of this approach. The present research was undertaken to examine this issue. 59 basic textbooks, from 1960 to the present, and which included some reference to behaviour therapy in their titles, were examined. A qualitative analysis of the essential features of behaviour therapy outlined in these texts was then undertaken. In earlier texts, learning approaches were cited as the theoretical basis of behaviour therapy. This was later augmented with cognitive approaches, and still-more-recently by the philosophy of mindfulness, as underlying principles. Throughout, although some texts focused more than others on specific therapeutic approaches, clearly defined and transparent techniques remained an ongoing feature of behaviour therapy. Finally, right up to the present, there has been a strong focus on the importance, regardless of therapeutic technique, of measuring changes in behaviour. These results suggest that behaviourists can rest easy that the basic aims and objectives of behaviour therapy remain largely unchanged, and that the increasing presence of cognitive and mindfulness approaches in behaviour therapy poses little threat to these fundamental principles.

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10:15am “Media Naturalness and the Ability to Predict Generosity in a Give-Some – Get-Some Interaction.” Evolutionary psychologists believe the human mind evolved to solve adaptive problems present in our ancestral environment. Our hominid ancestors survived in face-to-face groups by assessing the cooperative intentions of other group members. Media naturalness theory postulates face-to-face is the most ‘natural’ communication medium. This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment examining the ability of student subjects to predict the generosity of a counter-party under two media conditions: Face-to-Face (FtF), the more natural condition; and Video-to-Video (VtV), the less natural, technology-mediated condition. After a five-minute interaction, subjects took part in a give-some–get-some exchange and then predicted the generosity of their counter party. Consistent with media naturalness theory, FtF subjects predicted generosity at a frequency greater than chance. Surprisingly, generosity predictions for the VtV condition were not significantly different from chance. Generosity prediction relates to important organizational behaviors such as cooperativeness, trust, and teamwork. Implications and future research opportunities are discussed.

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10:30am Coffee Break Question Period for Morning Session A Faculty

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MORNING SESSION B Start Time Research Presentation

Presenter

11:00am “How the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) Rebel Group Serves the Ugandan Government in the Congolese-Uganda Border Disputes.” The Congolese-Ugandan borderland is one that has been riddled with insecurity for the past several decades. Specifically in the Rwenzori area of this borderland, such insecurity has been partly derived from the actions and presence of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel group. The majority of analyses and commentaries on the group – including those from the Ugandan government – tend to focus upon the group’s radical Islamist nature. However, this interpretation of the ADF is one that is politically and economically expedient for Kampala. It is indeed convenient for the Ugandan government to have a (not entirely threatening, nor radical) rebel group in close proximity to its border. Politically, this provides Uganda with a ‘ready-made’ excuse to enter the DRC; economically, Kampala has found the ADF’s (questionable) terrorist links to be a fruitful tool for placing itself within the global war on terror, and thereby acquiring funding from the United States. When attempting to understand not only the ADF, therefore, but also the Rwenzori section of the Congo-Uganda border more generally, there needs to be greater recognition of the policies pursued by Kampala that have in many ways actually ensured the survival of this rebellion.

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11:15am “Allegory and Realism: The Coding and Decoding of Culture in Modern Narrative Forms.” This paper presents a brief summary and application of my current research project in literary and cultural theory on the ideas of “allegory” and “realism” and their relationship. This project has roots in my graduate work and previous publications, but also in the content of the just completed course English 3771E “Allegory and Realism” (FW 2016-17). In this paper, I will provide some historical context on the varied ways these terms have been used in the interconnected fields of philosophical aesthetics, literary criticism and cultural studies. I will explain how and why I define each term in a twofold way as a “discursive mode” and “narrative genre.” Furthermore, my own research follows the scholarly tradition of “periodization” in its focused attempt to situate the modes and genres of allegory and realism within an extended “modernist” epoch. In this periodization, I distinguish between an early modernist phase (pre-WWII) and a late modernist phase (post-WWII) that persists into the present on both sides of the Atlantic. To illustrate how allegory and realism function as discursive modes and narrative genres within the epoch of modernism, I will draw upon examples of such literary texts as Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote and such cinematic works as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorema.

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11:30am “Stoic Influences on Medieval Natural Law Thinking”

It is well known that the philosophy of the Greek and Roman Stoics had a significant influence on the early Church Fathers, but it is less clear how to pick out Stoic elements in medieval natural Law thinking. The first half of this paper will (a) sketch out some key elements of ancient Stoic thinking -- the existence of rational laws of nature, the providential ordering of the world, the existence of an immanent god, and the connection between reason and the unique status of virtue; and (b) consider the motivations that the Church Fathers may have had for adapting Stoic doctrines to Christian thinking, despite a certain poorness of fit. Particular attention be paid Richard Sorabji’s recent defence of the thesis that the doctrine of the seven deadly sins is a development of the Stoic treatment of the relation between reason and the emotions.

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11:45am Question Period for Morning Session B Faculty

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AFTERNOON SESSION C Start Time Research Presentation

Presenter

1:00pm “A lexicalist approach to verbal morphology: Syntax without head adjunction” English main verbs (MVs) and auxiliary be/have (ABH) behave differently from one another in negative, interrogative and imperative contexts. The former remain in-situ, and do-support applies, as in (1a/d/e), whereas the latter raise to the left of negation not, as in (1b/c). (1) a. John left *John leftn’t John didn’t leave *Left John? b. John has left John hasn’t left *John didn’t have left Has John left? c. John is leaving John isn’t leaving *John didn’t be leaving Is John leaving? d. Leave! *Leave not! Do not leave! *Not leave! e. Be careful! *Be not careful! Do not be careful. *Not be careful! Chomsky’s (1957) offers a generative analysis of English verbal morphology where all verbs are bare in lexicon: (2) a. S is the maximal projection of the inflectional morpheme I. b. I takes VP as its complement. c. When the head of VP is have or be it raises, and adjoins, to I. d. Otherwise, I lowers to V, or do adjoins to I. Chomsky (1993) discards lowering operations in syntax, making (2d) untenable; instead, he presents an analysis where all verbs are lexicalist – i.e., fully inflected in lexicon. This analysis suffers because it fails to properly distinguish MVs from ABH in a principled way (Lasnik 1995). Further, Chomsky (2000) eliminates head adjunction from syntax, thereby nullifying (2c/d). The present work in progress attempts to translate the core insights of (2) into the current theoretical framework of Chomsky (2013, 2015). The core proposals are summarized in (3). (3) a. Node labels of phrase structure are assigned by the Labeling Algorithm. (Chomsky 2013). b. Verbs enter into derivation with inflectional features. (Adapted from Chomsky 1993). i. ABH are lexicalist verb: <Inf, be> and <Inf, have>. ii. A MV is an operator-verb (Ô-verb) pair: e.g. speak = <<Inf, do>, speak>. c. Lexicalist verbs are subject to a set of Morpho-phonemic lexicalization conditions. i. Inf is realized at the highest commanding position of IP. ii. Main verbs are spelled out in a V-position. iii. Complementary lexicalization (a last resort operation) This analysis distinguishes itself from typical analyses of verbal morphology, due to its explicit incorporation of morpho-phonemic lexicalization process, an idea taken from Lasnik’s (1995) analysis. The relevant process is sensitive to string-adjacency, which is typically considered not as a syntactic property, but a morpho-phonemic one.

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1:30pm “Politics of Re-radicalising the Deracinated as Invasive Species: Human Displacement, Environmental Disasters of State Enclosure, and the Irradicability of Biodiversity” Historical enclosures that produce the modern sovereign state do so not simply in terms of the scoring of territorial divisions and policing of social/political gatherings and separations. State formations, as enclosures, establish particularised environments to which respective citizenry are enlivened and radicalised (rooted), as proper to a soil, versus a world of nature pitched to the outside wherein other environments are supposed possible. Consequently, as state-producing enclosures give rise to displacements of those to be excluded from radicalisation, these persons put on the move are not simply the exiled, migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers in conventional senses of law or politics. They are either the rootless or deracinated (uprooted) who are either of mere nature or must affirm their lives via transplantation in the plot of another state. Moreover, they appear to the state and its demos as invasive species carrying with them a politics of movement that may be equated to ecological disaster. The key question for the state, when faced with movements of the deracinated it conjures, is a matter of its own life. Those rendered as deracinated and invasive appear to threaten the ecology on which the state’s enclosure is cultivated, posing possible changes to the political ecosystem that would render its soil incapable of supporting the same environment and threatening the family of beings supposedly native to it. The prime contemporary example is found where the movements of the deracinated are prompted by changes and degradations to the natural world that are the direct result of historical enclosures to begin with. Where persons are prompted to move and seek the sustenance of their lives in environments to which they are not deemed proper, the logic of enclosures makes it difficult to see such movement as anything but disastrous deracination from the outside. And political responses involve little more than immunization against such perceived invasions. Those who are eradicated by the state, within the logic of enclosure, must become projects for re-radicalisation as domesticated invasives, akin to the controlled cultivation of exotic or heritage strains. However, the politics of re-radicalisation makes room also for a biodiversity that itself may be irradicable.

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2:00pm Question Period for Afternoon Session C Faculty