Traumatized Girlhood and The Uncanny: Studies in Embodied Life Writing

This dissertation explores the work of specific female autobiographers or memoirists who have written about their endured emotional or physical wounds inflicted by trauma. Throughout history, women’s writings and experiences have been commonly devalued or excluded from those autobiographical texts within the traditional canon. Further, traumatized women have traditionally been regarded as pathologically divided victims who suffer holes in their psyches. Their stories about traumatized childhood and adolescence are thus treated as insignificant or dangerous and are easily silenced. As a result, life stories of traumatized women have been commonly considered as unfit texts for students to read in class (especially because of concerns about possibilities of (re)traumatizing readers), and thus are commonly omitted from the English curriculum. Considering that the literary world still is dominated by white male writers, this study examines not only traumatized women writers but also women writers who represent “difference” as well as have suffered trauma. This dissertation’s analyzed authors and texts include: Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. These women writers variously demonstrate, through their embodied trauma writings, how easily a seemingly integrated/unitary self can be shattered, how unexpectedly the status quo can be destabilized by certain events in their life-writings, and how subversively the history of the female body can be rewritten. The life-writings by these women, who are non-heterosexual, non-white, and from the lower class, and/or who have lived with disabilities/illnesses, are far from that typical autobiographical writing that emphasizes tests of manhood, or beautifies the linear development of the masculine subject. In other words, they never emphasize their triumph over trauma, do not celebrate selfsufficiency or self-reliance, and are not interested in claiming any authority of their own personal experiences. Rather, they highlight the understanding of their own incompleteness, fragmentation, and self-contradiction, which serves to uncover the fictiveness or myths of self-control or self-mastery typically found in narratives by male and often white-only writers. In their life writings, the traumatized adolescent selves are continuously reshaped and discursively constructed, not as helpless victims of terrifying events, as is frequently assumed, but as those with rebellious, transgressive, and uncanny power, who can disturb patriarchal social norms or regulations in their life writing and come to terms with trauma in their own ways: Duras’s eroticizing trauma in The Lover, Menchú politicizing trauma in I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Kaysen’s depathologizing trauma in Girl, Interrupted, Satrapi’s and Bechdel’s visualizing unrepresentable trauma in The Complete Persepolis and Fun Home. This study employs poststructural theories that “challenge the unity and coherence of the intact and fully conscious ‘self’ of Western autobiographical practices and the limits of its representations” (J. Miller, 49) to examine traumatized girlhood. In particular, based on feminist poststructural critiques of modernist, Enlightenment assumptions about autobiographical perspectives and voices, the following questions are examined in this dissertation: What words or images do this study’s examined authors utilize as a way to (re- )construct a self out of trauma? What understandings or insights do these authors achieve — or not achieve — while working to come terms with their traumas? In what ways might — or might not — these authors’ memoirs or life writings serve or disrupt a palliative/therapeutic role in what often is termed the healing process? What places, if any, might such autobiographical works focused on women’s experiences of trauma have in the English curriculum within the secondary classroom? And lastly, what and who constitutes the English literature canon, and what debates continue to characterize efforts to expand this canon to include voices of the marginalized

Measuring Lexical Diversity in Adults with Aphasia

The cardinal deficit of people with aphasia (PWA) is anomia (Goodglass & Wingfield, 1997). This deficit is believed to be indicative of disruption of two cognitive processes: (i) accessing a semantic description of the target concept, and/or (ii) retrieval of a fully phonologically specified representation (e.g., Dell, 1986). During discourse, in addition to these core processes that serve word retrieval, production also depends on “…factors external to the lexicon…” (p. 169, Wilshire & McCarthy, 2002). The latter processes might influence the selection of lexical items based on syntactic, structural, and/or pragmatic criteria that can be either automatic or meta-cognitive

Sex differences in infant vocalization and the origin of language

Seeking to discern the earliest sex differences in language-related activities, our focus is vocal activity in the first two years of life, following up on recent research that unexpectedly showed boys produced significantly more speech-like vocalizations (protophones) than girls during the first year of life.We now bring a much larger body of data to bear on the comparison of early sex differences in vocalization, data based on automated analysis of all-day recordings of infants in their homes. The new evidence, like that of the prior study, also suggests boys produce more protophones than girls in the first year and offers additional basis for informed speculation about biological reasons for these differences. More broadly, the work offers a basis for informed speculations about foundations of language that we propose to have evolved in our distant hominin ancestors, foundations also required in early vocal development of modern human infants

The first case of abdominal mycotic aneurysm caused by K1 hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae in a healthy adult

Incidence of hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae (hvKp) infection has been steadily increasing in the Asia-Pacific rim. The characteristic of hvKp infection is its ability to cause multiple site infections and unpredictable metastatic spread in the community. We describe the first case of mycotic aneurysm caused by hvKp serotype K1 in a previously healthy man and review the literature. Of a total of 13 cases, including our case, three cases were related to hvKp. Among patients with hvKp, the level of mycotic aneurysm in most patients was the infrarenal aorta, and they underwent an aortic graft or coil embolization. All strains were susceptible to most antimicrobial agents, except ampicillin. Early detection of hvKp can help to prevent the metastatic spread of pathogens and be useful for optimal patient care and epidemiologic research

The Origin of Protoconversation: An Examination of Caregiver Responses to Cry and Speech-Like Vocalizations

Turn-taking is a universal and fundamental feature of human vocal communication. Through protoconversation, caregivers play a key role for infants in helping them learn the turn-taking system. Infants produce both speech-like vocalizations (i.e., protophones) and cries from birth. Prior research has shown that caregivers take turns with infant protophones. However, no prior research has investigated the timing of caregiver responses to cries. The present work is the first to systematically investigate different temporal patterns of caregiver responses to protophones and to cries. Results showed that, even in infants' first 3 months of life, caregivers were more likely to take turns with protophones and to overlap with cries. The study provides evidence that caregivers are intuitively aware that protophones and cries are functionally different: protophones are treated as precursors to speech, whereas cries are treated as expressions of distress

A pharmacokinetic study on red ginseng with furosemide in equine

Red ginseng (RG) is a popular ingredient in traditional Korean medicine that has various health benefits. It is commonly taken orally as a dietary supplement; however, its potential interactions with concomitantly administered drugs are unclear. In this study, we examined the pharmacokinetic interaction between furosemide and RG in equine plasma. Liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry analysis was performed to evaluate ginsenosides in the plasma of horses after feeding them RG and furosemide and validate the results. A single bolus of furosemide (0.5 mg/kg) was administered intravenously to female horses that had consumed RG (600 mg/kg/day) every morning for 3 weeks (experimental group), and blood samples were collected from 0 to 24 h, analyzed, and compared with those from female horses that did not consume RG (control group). Four (20s)-protopanaxadiol ginsenosides (Rb1, Rb2, Rc, and Rd) were detected in the plasma. Rb1 and Rc individually showed a high concentration distribution in the plasma. The Cmax, AUC0−t, and AUC0−∞ of furosemide was significantly increased in the experimental group (p < 0.05), while the CL, Vz, and Vss was decreased (p < 0.05, p < 0.01). These changes indicate the potential for pharmacokinetic interactions between furosemide and RG

Acoustic Correlates and Adult Perceptions of Distress in Infant Speech-Like Vocalizations and Cries

Prior research has not evaluated acoustic features contributing to perception of human infant vocal distress or lack thereof on a continuum. The present research evaluates perception of infant vocalizations along a continuum ranging from the most prototypical intensely distressful cry sounds (“wails”) to the most prototypical of infant sounds that typically express no distress (non-distress “vocants”). Wails are deemed little if at all related to speech while vocants are taken to be clear precursors to speech. We selected prototypical exemplars of utterances representing the whole continuum from 0 and 1 month-olds. In this initial study of the continuum, our goals are to determine (1) listener agreement on level of vocal distress across the continuum, (2) acoustic parameters predicting ratings of distress, (3) the extent to which individual listeners maintain or change their acoustic criteria for distress judgments across the study, (4) the extent to which different listeners use similar or different acoustic criteria to make judgments, and (5) the role of short-term experience among the listeners in judgments of infant vocalization distress. Results indicated that (1) both inter-rater and intra-rater listener agreement on degree of vocal distress was high, (2) the best predictors of vocal distress were number of vibratory regimes within utterances, utterance duration, spectral ratio (spectral concentration) in vibratory regimes within utterances, and mean pitch, (3) individual listeners significantly modified their acoustic criteria for distress judgments across the 10 trial blocks, (4) different listeners, while showing overall similarities in ratings of the 42 stimuli, also showed significant differences in acoustic criteria used in assigning the ratings of vocal distress, and (5) listeners who were both experienced and inexperienced in infant vocalizations coding showed high agreement in rating level of distress, but differed in the extent to which they relied on the different acoustic cues in making the ratings. The study provides clearer characterization of vocal distress expression in infants based on acoustic parameters and a new perspective on active adult perception of infant vocalizations. The results also highlight the importance of vibratory regime segmentation and analysis in acoustically based research on infant vocalizations and their perception

Early Emergence and Development of Protophones in the First Year of Life

Objectives: Speech-like vocalizations (i.e., protophones) are precursors to speech. Infants produce various types of protophones (e.g., squeals, vocants and growls), practicing phonatory control before mastering articulation. In order to better understand infant vocal development, it is important to systematically investigate production of protophones from the beginning of life. The purposes of this study were (1) to investigate early emergence of protophones, (2) to measure volubility for both cry and protophones across the first year of life, (3) to explore effects of age and types of vocalizations, and (4) to examine protophone volubility in circumstances where the caregiver did not speak to or in the vicinity of the infant. Methods: 16 typically developing Korean-learning infants participated in all-day LENA (Language Environment Analysis) recordings in their homes as part of a longitudinal study. We categorized infant protophones as either squeals, vocants, growls, or cries based on auditory/acoustic criteria. We calculated average numbers of each type of vocalization and average vocalizations per minute. Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE), t-test, and ANOVA were conducted to address the research questions. Results: Results showed that even in the first month of life, infants do not merely cry, but instead predominantly produce protophones. Infants also endogenously produced protophones from the beginning of life in the absence of caregiver language input. Conclusion: This study suggests that even in the first month protophones begin to occur, and may form a foundation upon which vocal category development and vocal interaction can proceed rapidly

The Origin of Protoconversation: An Examination of Caregiver Responses to Cry and Speech-Like Vocalizations

Turn-taking is a universal and fundamental feature of human vocal communication. Through protoconversation, caregivers play a key role for infants in helping them learn the turn-taking system. Infants produce both speech-like vocalizations (i.e., protophones) and cries from birth. Prior research has shown that caregivers take turns with infant protophones. However, no prior research has investigated the timing of caregiver responses to cries. The present work is the first to systematically investigate different temporal patterns of caregiver responses to protophones and to cries. Results showed that, even in infants' first 3 months of life, caregivers were more likely to take turns with protophones and to overlap with cries. The study provides evidence that caregivers are intuitively aware that protophones and cries are functionally different: protophones are treated as precursors to speech, whereas cries are treated as expressions of distress.</p