Research and Innovation

This research investigates the pivotal yet often overlooked role of Rumi’s children in the formation and institutionalization of the Mawlawi (Mevlevi) Order. While Rumi’s own charisma, poetry and spiritual influence are the foundation of this movement, its continuity and transformation into a lasting Sufi order depended heavily on the contributions, struggles and ambitions of his sons, especially Baha al-Din Sultan Walad and Ala al-Din. The study begins with a detailed analysis of Rumi’s correspondence (Maktubat) and Shams Tabrizi’s Maqalat, as well as hagiographical sources such as Aflaki’s Manaqib al-ʿArifin and Sepahsalar’s Risala. These sources shed light on the personal qualities, flaws, and challenges of Rumi’s children. Sultan Walad emerges as the dutiful yet ambitious son, committed to consolidating the Mawlawi Order through organizational structures, endowments, political ties and poetic works (Walad-nama, Rabab-nama, Enteha-nama). In contrast, Ala al-Din is depicted as restless and resistant, at times in conflict with Shams, Rumi, and even the ethos of Rumi’s household. The project highlights how Sultan Walad’s endeavors marked a shift from Rumi’s orientation toward a mystical “system of truth” to a system rooted in institutional power. While Rumi resisted sycophantic ties with rulers and emphasized inner transformation, Sultan Walad pragmatically sought political alliances, produced panegyrics, and created organizational continuity for the order. His poetic imitations of Rumi reveal both his literary limitations and his effort to legitimize himself as heir to Rumi’s legacy. Ultimately, this research argues that the Mawlawi Order was not solely the outcome of Rumi’s genius but also the product of negotiation, institutional creativity, and even ambition on the part of his children and successors. By situating these developments within the socio-political landscape of 13th-century Anatolia under Mongol rule, the study demonstrates how mystical charisma and worldly power converged to shape one of the most enduring Sufi traditions in Islamic history

“Another chisel for Rosetta. Spain and Spanish Language in Early Modern United States”, thoroughly documents that the history of Early Modern North America is strongly linked to late medieval and Early modern Spain’s literary, architectural and linguistic traditions. Benito-Vessels articulate a new beginning for the narrative of how Native American lands and histories became European lands and history in the 16th century.  She brings to light the history of the first Native American bilingual speakers of the Spanish and Algonquian Languages.  The author also documents the first steps of 16^th-17^th century Spanish Language on the East Coast of the United States through cartography, administrative forms, missionary catechisms and oral narratives (as transcribed by the most famous humanist of his times, Pedro Martir de Anglería, and a revered historian of the New World: Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo). The language used by Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes belongs to the same bracket period.

Benito Vessels proves that The Florida Poem by Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo (1599) is a Bridge Between the Castilian Middle Ages and the Early New World Modernity. Finally, in this book, Carmen Benito-Vessels contributes a new perspective to the “Neo-medievalism” field of study by focusing on:  the “antiquities topoi,” the lineage tradition in US society, literary works such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) by Mark Twain, and the architectural replicas of Gothic buildings and the so-called Romanesque renderings.

In second language (L2) acquisition research, understanding how learners process words across languages is crucial, with the translation priming paradigm consistently revealing that an L2 word can be processed significantly faster after a brief presentation of its translation equivalent in one’s first language (L1) but not vice versa. This study attempted to replicate Chen et al.’s (2014) investigation of translation priming asymmetry with Chinese-English bilinguals in an online environment using the Naodao crowdsourcing platform. We conducted three masked priming lexical decision experiments: two testing L1-to-L2 and L2-to-L1 priming with a 50-ms prime duration, and one examining L2-to-L1 priming with an extended 250-ms prime duration. Results showed that the classic asymmetry pattern was not fully reproducible in this online setting at 50-ms prime duration, with null effects in both directions. However, significant priming effects emerged with the extended prime presentation in the L2-to-L1 direction. These findings suggest that online implementation of timing-sensitive paradigms may require methodological adaptations.

In the past decade, researchers have been increasingly interested in understanding the process of language learning, in addition to the effect of instructional interventions on L2 performance gains (i.e., learning products). One goal of such investigations is to reveal the interplay between learning conditions, processes, and outcomes where, for example, certain conditions can promote attention to the learning targets, which in turn facilitates learning. However, the statistical modeling approach taken often does not align with the conceptualization of the complex relationships between these variables. Thus, in this paper, we introduce mediation analysis to SLA research. We offer a step-by-step, contextualized tutorial on the practical application of mediation analysis in three different research scenarios, each addressing a different research design using either simulated or open-source datasets. Our overall goal is to promote the use of statistical techniques that are consistent with the theorization of language learning processes as mediators.

We recruited a total of 209 in-person and 209 crowdsourced participants for comparison. Both groups completed the short versions of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and the Foreign Language Enjoyment Scale, provided their demographic and language learning background information, and completed the LexTALE test. Measurement invariance testing revealed that most (sub)constructs exhibited partial or full invariance, indicating stability in the measurement systems across both data collection settings. However, crowdsourced participants reported higher enjoyment and lower anxiety than in-person participants. These differences can be attributed to the more relaxed mental state of the crowdsourced participants who completed the survey outside of the classroom. 

Caleidoscopio es una ventana a los esplendores secretos del mundo de Carmen Benito-Vessels en 49 narraciones ––algunas cuentos, otras ejercicios de memoria, algunas más observaciones sobre lo que no se entiende del mundo, pero debería entenderse—. Esta colección es un fichero de historias, a menudo hilarantes y siempre agudas, en las que una mente curiosa y elegante medita sobre lo chico en lo grande, sobre lo que solo se puede encontrar entrelíneas, sobre lo que da claridad entre la opacidad de lo grandilocuente. Si leer ficción es siempre una necesidad crítica ––leyendo aprendemos maneras nuevas de pensar–– y una empresa estética ––ciertas escrituras nos dan placer––, en Caleidoscopio de Carmen Benito-Vessels el placer critico viene de la posibilidad de ver al mundo desde un lugar que hace brillar lo que muestra.

Grupo Editorial Círculo Rojo SL (December 30, 2024)

One challenge of learning a second or additional language (L2C) is learning to perceive and interpret its sounds. This includes acquiring the target language (TL) contrastive phonemic inventory, the sounds’ systematic behavior
in the TL phonology, and novel relationships between spelling and sound (GPCs; grapheme-phoneme correspondences). Many perception tasks require  stipulation of written labels for target speech sounds (e.g., phoneme detection). Listening for this target is not necessarily, or even frequently, an equivalent cognitive task between participant groups. The incongruence of phonological and orthographic domains and their GPCs poses a methodological challenge for L2C research. The author argues that phoneme detection tasks should avoid the phone of investigative interest (x) as the direct target of listener attention and redirect focus to an adjacent listening target (y). Ideally, this target should not trigger or otherwise be implicated in the phonological process or phonotactic
constraint under investigation. The careful choice of listening target (y) with both a familiar sound and a congruent orthographic label for both (or all) language groups of the experiment yields an equivalent task and better indicates implicit knowledge of the phenomenon under study. This approach opens up potential choices of phonological objects of interest (x). The two phoneme detection experiments reported here employ this novel adjacent-congruent listening target approach, which the author calls the Persean approach. Experiment 1 establishes baseline performance in two assimilation types and replicates processing inhibition in first-language (L1) German speakers in response to violations of regressive nasal assimilation. It also uses [t] as the Persean listening target to test sensitivity to preceding violations of progressive dorsal fricative assimilation (DFA). Experiment 2 investigates sensitivity to violations of DFA in both L1 German speakers and L1 English L2C German learners. Experiment 2 also uses the Persean method for the first phoneme detection investigation demonstrating sensitivity to violation of a prosodic/phonotactic constraint banning /h/ in syllable codas. The study demonstrates that phoneme detection with Persean listening targets is a viable instrument for investigating regressive and progressive assimilation, prosodic/phonotactic constraints, and prelexical perceptual repair strategies in different language background groups and proposes statistical best practices for future phoneme detection research.

This interactive guide intends to accompany Carmen Benito-Vessels’  research  about early modern Spain and the early modern United States (2018, 2022, and 2023). The primary goal of this project is to bring to light 16th-century colonial events that happened in the Eastern United States and shaped the history of both countries. 

Non-readers, who lack alphabetic literacy, may perform differently from alphabetically literate readers on tasks that draw upon phonological awareness, or may fail to perform them at all, despite their lexical and grammatical capabilities. But for alphabetically literate, reading adult learners of a second or subsequent language (L2+) in instructed foreign language (FL) settings, phonological representations typically entail both speech sound categories and orthographic labels, domains connected by grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) on a language-specific basis. A long tradition of auditory phonetic training research demonstrates benefits for aural perception of novel L2+ contrasts, but such training studies focus almost exclusively on gains in L2+ aural perception and articulatory production rather than connection to the orthographic domain. Our study investigates how phonetic training impacts the phonological and orthographic domains, including category perception and target-language (TL) GPCs, across the crucial differences between first language (L1) categories vs. L2+ categories and between naïve pre-learners in cross-language speech perception vs. L2+ learners in L2+ speech perception at early stages of exposure. The paper reports preliminary results on one novel vowel condition (represented by German Ü) and one novel consonant condition (represented by German CH). The L2+ Sound Learning Lab, led by Dr. John H.G. Scott (principal investigator) presented these findings at the 2023 Boston University Conference on Language Development. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

This chapter examines Larisa Shepitko’s harrowing war film, The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1976), in an attempt to address the following question: What are the consequences, on the level of meaning, of the film’s exploration of material experience? In terms of plot, the film is unusual in how it humanizes collaboration with the enemy, an act usually befitting only villainous characters in Soviet cinema. The film as a whole, and the first half in particular, emphasizes what Lucía Nagib calls the “realist mode of production”—in particular, through on-location shooting in which the actors endured conditions similar to those experienced by their onscreen characters. The “documentary” approach to the production of a historical film serves to recuperate a sense of contingency, in opposition to the teleological developmental narrative of Soviet History, a gesture that fits into the post-war, post-Stalin-era Soviet “counter-cinema” attempt to break with the entrenched norms of socialist realism. I argue that in rejecting the psychological development of the two main characters and in focusing, particularly in the first half of the film, on the materiality of experience under the extreme conditions of the war, the film exceeds the boundaries of its ostensible central ideological conflict and its engagement with the Soviet mythology of the Second World War. Rather, the film poses broader, universal questions of moral life under extreme circumstances, and provides the audience with the conditions for engaging those questions through their own experiences—and their experience of the film.