MARS
MARS is a repository service of Mason Publishing and the Data and Digital Scholarship Services (DDSS) at the George Mason University Libraries. MARS provides enduring, stable, well-indexed access to a wide range of scholarship from the Mason community, such as Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), articles, presentations, reports, and creative work. Learn more about publishing, sharing, and preserving research data with the George Mason University Institutional Dataverse, and our other repository services.
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Recent Submissions
"With Eloquent Fingers He Preached": The Protestant Episcopal Mission to the Deaf
(2021-05) Legg, Jannelle; Mullen, Lincoln
This dissertation traces the development of the Protestant Episcopal Ministry to the deaf in the United States between 1850 and World War I. From the classroom to the churchhouse, members of this organization transformed the practices of worship to suit deaf linguistic and sensory ways of being.
During this period the forces of normalization, strengthened by nativism and eugenics, exerted considerable pressure on deaf people to conform to linguistic and cultural forms which diminished the outward appearance of difference and encouraged assimilation. Religious spaces, as with other places of social, political, and legal import, were similarly imbued with these ideas about bodies and language. The auditory delivery of prayers, lessons, and hymns was central to public worship within the Protestant Episcopal Church, as it was with many other religious groups. The formation of the deaf ministry disrupted these practices. From the administration of services and sacraments in sign language, to the elevation of deaf men to the ministry, and the rearrangement or construction of deaf church spaces, deaf community members reordered the spaces and practices of worship
to suit their sensory and social worlds. Over time, a growing network of church workers and community members navigated these systems of institutional power to negotiate for autonomy in expression and spatial organization. They formed missions and churches in major cities across the country, serving as essential gathering sites within broader deaf geographies.
In exploring the ways in which deaf people made sense of their lives and their worlds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I draw on multiple fields of inquiry including histories of sense, space, religion, deaf people, disabled people, and the digital humanities to interpret and visualize the spread and influence of this ministry.
Glottal Stop Deletion in Farasani Arabic: An Acoustic-Phonetic Investigation
Modaffar, Hussain
This study provides the first acoustic-phonetic analysis of glottal stop ([ʔ]) deletion in Farasani Arabic (FA), an under-described dialect of the Farasan Islands (Saudi Arabia). Speech from three native speakers producing ten [ʔ]-initial words in careful and fast speech was analyzed in Praat for glottal presence, closure duration, and aperiodicity. Three [ʔ] realization types emerged: full realization, gradient reduction, and complete deletion. Across 120 tokens, 42.5% were fully realized, 31.7% reduced, and 25.8% deleted; deletion occurred almost exclusively in fast speech. Acoustic measures showed a clear weakening continuum, with closure durations averaging ≈100 ms (realized), ≈50 ms (reduced), and 0 ms (deleted). These patterns parallel rate-dependent glottal variability described in Lindblom’s [8] H&H model and Kasim’s [7] findings for Arabic. Overall, FA exhibits a gradient pathway of [ʔ] reduction shaped primarily by speech rate and lexical frequency, offering new empirical evidence for Arabic phonetics and the dynamics of glottal weakening.
Perception of Reductions by English Language Learners
(2025-10-30) Dayili, Shaima
This study investigates the extent to which English language learners (ELLs) struggle with perceiving lexicalized reduced forms compared to their full-form counterparts in spoken English and evaluates the relative effectiveness of explicit training and implicit exposure in improving this perceptual skill. Grounded in Skill Acquisition Theory (SAT), the study examines how learners’ transcription accuracy reflects the development of perceptual skill, shifting from limited declarative awareness of these forms toward more proceduralized listening abilities. Pre-intervention results confirmed that learners experienced significantly greater difficulty recognizing reduced forms than full forms, demonstrating the persistent challenge these variants pose due to their divergence from the canonical forms emphasized in classroom instruction. Following intervention, both explicit and implicit groups showed improved accuracy; however, the statistical comparison revealed no significant difference between the two instructional approaches. Although the explicit group demonstrated a modest numerical advantage, this trend was not robust, suggesting that while explicit focus on the phonetic properties of reduced forms may offer some benefit, the present evidence does not clearly establish its superiority over implicit exposure.
Preventing Missed or Delayed Diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder in the Primary Care Setting
(2025-07-30) Onyejekwe, Elizabeth
Age-Related Differences in Brain Response to Biological Motion Stimuli in a Sex-Balanced Sample of Autistic and Typically-Developing Youth
(2022-05-06) Gerson, Emily Linda; Jack, Allison
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition which affects social behaviors; yet, limited research has addressed the neurodevelopment of social processing systems in ASD. Furthermore, despite documented sex-related differences in social behaviors in ASD samples, age-by-sex interactions in social processing within these samples is not yet understood. The present study used a point-light display paradigm of biological motion to explore brain activation in response to social stimuli in a balanced sample of ASD and typically-developing (TD) male and female individuals aged 8 to 17. We tested for effects related to age, sex, diagnosis, and social symptoms, as well as interactions between these variables. Age was negatively correlated with activation of the action observation network in TD females, and positively correlated with activity in the right anterior insula in TD males. Diagnostic, age, and behavioral effects did not survive non-parametric permutation-based corrections.