A magical world that will captivate fans of Kate DiCamillo and Diana Wynne Jones. Marah Levi is a promising violinist who excels at school and can read more languages than most librarians. Even so, she has little hope of a bright future: she is a sparker, a member of the oppressed lower class in a society run by magicians. Then a mysterious disease hits the city of Ashara, turning its victims’ eyes dark before ultimately killing them. As Marah watches those whom she loves most fall ill, she finds an unlikely friend in Azariah, a wealthy magician boy. Together they pursue a cure in secret, but more people are dying every day, and time is running out. Then Marah and Azariah make a shocking discovery that turns inside-out everything they thought they knew about magic and about Ashara, their home. Set in an imaginative world rich with language, lore, and music, this gripping adventure plunges the reader into the heart of a magical government where sparks of dissent may be even more deadly than the dark eyes.

A captivating fantasy about the bond between twins, and the power of children to stand up for what's right. Rivka is one of the magical elite and the daughter of an important ambassador. But she harbors a deep secret: She once had a twin brother, Arik. When Arik failed to develop his own magical abilities, the government declared him a wilding, removed him from his home, placed him with non-magical adoptive parents, and forbade him any contact with his birth family. Now it is as if he never existed at all. But Rivka refuses to forget her twin brother. Even though she knows she could lose everything—her father, her friends, even her freedom—she sets out to find Arik. She has nothing to go on except her still-new magical powers and her love for her brother. Can that possibly be enough to bring them together again, when all of society believes they belong apart?

An ongoing debate in phonology concerns the extent to which the phonological typology is shaped by synchronic learning biases. The two best-studied types of synchronic bias are complexity bias, a bias against formally complex patterns, and substantive bias, a bias against phonetically unnatural patterns. While most previous work has focused on bias in the learning of phonological alternations, this dissertation tests for substantive bias and complexity bias in phonotactic learning. Four artificial grammar learning (AGL) experiments tested whether learners reproduce phonetically-motivated phonotactic implicationals from the typology. The implicationals concern the distribution of place of articulation and voicing contrasts in stops across positions. If a language has place or voicing contrasts in stops word-finally, it also has those contrasts word-initially, but if a language has such contrasts word-initially, it does not necessarily have them word-finally. These implicationals are phonetically motivated: stop place of articulation and voicing are less perceptible word-finally than word-initially. If place or voicing contrasts exist in a position where they are hard to perceive, they should also exist in positions where they are easier to perceive. My experiments exposed participants to place or voicing contrasts in word-initial or word-final position and then tested whether they extended the contrast(s) to the other word-edge position. Perception-based substantive bias predicts greater extension from word-final to word-initial position than vice versa. This prediction was not borne out in the place experiments but was borne out in one voicing experiment. The voicing experiments thus provide partial support for substantive bias. Due to the phonemic inventories of the artificial languages, the voicing experiments could also test for complexity bias. Effects of complexity bias emerged in both experiments. A fifth AGL experiment tested the relative learnability of final voicing alternations. The experiment failed to find support for articulation-based substantive bias: final devoicing, which increases articulatory ease, was not learned better than final voicing. The results did provide additional support for complexity bias. Based on the results of this dissertation's experiments and a review of the literature, I argue for distinguishing between perceptually-rooted and articulatorily-rooted substantive bias and claim that only perceptual naturalness biases phonological learning.

A journal of long-form literary genre fiction published three times a year. Featuring thirteen tales of the speculative, the strange, the peculiar, and the curious that don't quite fit in with the mainstream.In this Issue: In "I Called to Say You're Dead," after the mob approaches him to collect on his deadbeat twin's debt, a man comes up with what seems like a simple scheme to resolve the trouble. Then his assortment of misfit accomplices decides to make things difficult.In "The Haunted Fleshies," a young girl's past trauma and the stories from her brother's favorite horror series complicates a murder investigation.In "What Waits For Thee," a discontent woman is at the center of a sordid tale of infidelity, murder, and the undead set in the aftermath of the Civil War.These stories and others await