Statistical Learning Abilities and Language Acquisition

Humans’ high sensitivity to the structure in their environment is explained as statistical learning. During the past few decades, there have been many discussions on how humanity, including infants, use their ability to extract the structure in their surrounding which is often referred as statistical learning and how it can impact language acquisition. This article aims at investigating the way humans acquire regularities along with different levels of language and integrate them into different situations. Current directions in linguistics require to study statistical learning within a context, first observing within language comparing it within the infant learner and within the whole environment

Microdevelopment of co-construction of knowledge during problem solving : puzzled minds, weird creatures, and wuggles

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1993.Includes bibliographical references (p. 431-442).by Nira Granott.Ph.D

Attaining automaticity in the visual numerosity task is not automatic

This experiment is a replication of experiments reported by Lassaline and Logan (1993) using the visual numerosity task. The aim was to replicate the transition from controlled to automatic processing reported by Lassaline and Logan (1993), and to examine the extent to which this result, reported with average group results, can be observed in the results of individuals within a group. The group results in this experiment did replicate those reported by Lassaline and Logan (1993) ; however, one half of the sample did not attain automaticity with the task, and one-third did not exhibit a transition from controlled to automatic processing. These results raise questions about the pervasiveness of automaticity, and the interpretation of group means when examining cognitive processes

A dynamic theory of personality and emotions

This dissertation presents a dynamic theory of personality and emotions. The theory offered is explicit in its incorporation of an evolutionary-functionalist perspective and suggests that personality and the emotions are dynamic within the limits imposed by the functions of each. The dissertation begins by discussing the ubiquity of goals and goal-organising constructs in living systems. Personality, it is argued, is most validly conceptualised as being a complex goal-organising construct. Specific attention is then given to the consideration of innate motives in a motivational model of personality, the process by which innate motives become representational goals the place of emotions in the elaboration of innate motives, and the place of consciousness in goal, developmental and emotion processes. Following this, a functional conceptualisation of emotions and conscious emotional experience consistent with the motivational model of personality is developed. Empirical attention is devoted to the relationships between goals and emotions, the nature and measurement of conscious emotional experience, and the place of emotion in generating adaptive behaviour. Overall, the dissertation suggests that emotions and personality are necessarily related phenomena, each contributing to, and reflecting the other in the process of human striving

Implicit Statistical Learning in Naturalistic and Instructed Morphosyntactic Attainment: An Aptitude‐Treatment Interaction Design

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining the relationship between age of onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie implicit learning (phonological short-term memory and implicit statistical learning), and performance on an auditory grammaticality judgment test (GJT). Participants were 71 Polish-English long-term bilinguals with a wide range of AoOs (1–35 years) who differed in their context of learning and use (immersed vs. instructed). In immersed learners, we observed a growing dissociation between performance on grammatical and ungrammatical sentences as AoO was delayed. This effect was attenuated in those with better phonological short-term memory and statistical learning abilities and is consistent with a decline in the ability to learn from implicit negative evidence. In instructed learners, GJT performance was subject to additive effects of AoO and grammaticality and was not associated with either cognitive predictor, suggesting that implicit learning mechanisms were not involved

Physical manifestations of ungrammaticality

Master of ArtsDepartment of Modern LanguagesMajor Professor Not ListedThis study investigates the processing and perception of German gender agreement by non-native speakers. Specifically, this study seeks to gather information on physical discomfort felt by non-native speakers when confronted with violations in gender agreement in German. The variables examined are the frequency of the lexical items (high or low frequency), modality (reading silently versus out loud), and grammaticality (correct or incorrect). The results suggest that L2 German learners at an intermediate proficiency level can experience physical discomfort when confronted with ungrammatical language like native speakers. Furthermore, the data suggests that non-native speakers are more likely to notice violations in gender agreement when speaking out loud, and that the physical discomfort is stronger with more familiar lexical items. The data from this study is the first of its kind, offering insight into how language modality affects grammaticality judgments in the second language. With less frequent lexical terms participants expressed another sense of discomfort related to uncertainty. This feeling presented itself differently from the physical discomfort felt when confronted with violations of gender agreement

Effects of emotional experience in abstract and concrete word processing

Theories of grounded cognition (Basalou, 2005 Vigliocco, Meteyard, Andrews, & Kousta, 2009) suggest that emotion is a dimension of knowledge important for processing abstract concepts, and to a lesser degree, concrete concepts. Emotional experience (EE) is a variable that has been shown to facilitate the processing of abstract words and inhibit the processing of concrete words in semantic categorization (SCT Newcombe, Campbell, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2012). The present work extends these findings by examining the effects of EE on abstract and concrete words in lexical decision (LDT), SCT, and semantic lexical decision (SLDT). In LDT, EE exerted facilitatory effects on response latencies for both types of words. In SCT and SLDT, EE exerted facilitatory effects on response latencies and errors for abstract words, but exerted inhibitory effects for concrete words. The results suggest that effects of EE (i.e., emotion knowledge) are dependent on both the nature of the stimuli and task demands. --Leaf ii.The original print copy of this thesis may be available here: http://wizard.unbc.ca/record=b214135

Knowledge restructing and the development of expertise in computer programming

This thesis reports a number of empirical studies exploring the development of expertise in computer programming. Experiments 1 and 2 are concerned with the way in which the possession of design experience can influence the perception and use of cues to various program structures. Experiment 3 examines how violations to standard conventions for constructing programs can affect the comprehension of expert, intermediate and novice subjects. Experiment 4 looks at the differences in strategy that are exhibited by subjects of varying skill level when constructing programs in different languages. Experiment 5 takes these ideas further to examine the temporal distribution of different forms of strategy during a program generation task. Experiment 6 provides evidence for salient cognitive structures derived from reaction time and error data in the context of a recognition task. Experiments 7 and 8 are concerned with the role of working memory in program generation and suggest that one aspect of expertise in the programming domain involves the acquisition of strategies for utilising display-based information. The final chapter attempts to bring these experimental findings together in terms of a model of knowledge organisation that stresses the importance of knowledge restructuring processes in the development of expertise. This is contrasted with existing models which have tended to place emphasis upon schemata acquisition and generalisation as the fundamental modes of learning associated with skill development. The work reported here suggests that a fine-grained restructuring of individual schemata takes places during the later stages of skill development. It is argued that those mechanisms currently thought to be associated with the development of expertise may not fully account for the strategic changes and the types of error typically found in the transition between novice, intermediate and expert problem solvers. This work has a number of implications for existing theories of skill acquisition. In particular, it questions the ability of such theories to account for subtle changes in the various manifestations of skilled performance that are associated with increasing expertise. Secondly, the work reported in this thesis attempts to show how specific forms of training might give rise to the knowledge restructuring process that is proposed. Finally, the thesis stresses the important role of display-based problem solving in complex tasks such as programming and highlights the role of programming language notation as a mediating factor in the development and acquisition of problem solving strategies

Drawing as thinking : an enquiry into the act of drawing as embodied extension of mind.

M.A. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2013.This thesis opposes the theory of ‘drawing as expression’ - the idea that a drawing is nothing but a post hoc exteriorisation of a prior mental process. A counter-hypothesis is investigated instead - that the physical act of sketching is itself a thought process and that the new thought processes which it facilitates would be impossible or severely impaired if it were absent. The conceptual framework for this investigation and the evidence for its hypothesis derive from three fields: firstly theories of the extended mind and embodied thinking from philosophy and cognitive science, secondly theories of drawing practice, and thirdly practitioners’ critical reflection on the significance of drawing in their own practice. The fluidity, multidimensionality and indeterminacy of the cognitive processes typical for openended domains like planning, design and the arts tend to flummox the dominant – computational – approach in cognitive science. Theories of the extended mind and embodied thinking present an alternative which can handle these features comfortably. Theories of embodied thinking, which hail from diverse disciplines – including philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence – argue that cognition is not independent of the body, but enabled by embodied activity embedded in the environment. Extended mind theory suggests that certain active features of the environment actually constitute integral parts of human cognition. In such cases, the human organism is inextricably linked with an external entity in a two way interaction, creating a coupled system of which each part counts as fully cognitive. Clark uses the term ‘scaffolding’ to denote a broad class of cases in which such external structure is co-opted, annexed and exploited, thereby allowing us to achieve some goal which would otherwise be beyond us. This leads to the central question of this thesis: can the act of drawing be understood with the help of theories of embodied thinking and the extended mind, and if so, how? A second, related question is how the example of drawing helps extend these theories. From this perspective design thinking and reasoning is to a large extent embedded in the act of drawing. Drawing, as a form of scaffolding, filters or guides perceptual, affective and cognitive attention and behaviour in ways only available to brains coupled with pencils and other drawing materials. (External representations can for instance be extended in space, rotated, manipulated, rearranged and interacted with in ways that internal representations cannot). The theories of drawing practice studied for this research came mainly from art theory, design theory and empirical studies of how drawing contributes to the cognitive process. Clark and Karmiloff- Smith suggest that knowledge stored in some proprietary representational format often needs to be redescribed in some other, more suitable format to become accessible to other types of representations and processes. A key role that drawing is found to play in multiple contexts (design, fine art, mathematics, etc.) is to draw to the surface implicit, previously unarticulated information for use by other procedures and the whole cognitive system. Sketching plays many other roles in promoting the cognitive operations needed to tackle design problems, which are often so complex that individual reason would quickly be overwhelmed in the absence of environmental offloading. Sketching can compensate for limitations in human memory and information processing capacity, can help identify aspects of concern, relationships and patterns, as well as help maintain focus and generate new knowledge. The South African artist William Kentridge’s critical reflections on the significance of drawing in his own practice support extended mind theory. His reflections alert us to the materiality of the creative process and dovetail with recent attempts by philosophers and other theorists to explain creativity. In drawing cognition appears as a dynamic, multidimensional phenomenon in which explicit, implicit and tacit information all work together in an ensemble distributed across brain, body and world while utilising variable physical, technological and social resources. Because drawing is an activity which emphasises ‘generic’ aspects of creativity, studying it sheds light on many other forms of problem solving by humans. This echoes Kentridge’s suggestion that drawing, as a slow motion form of thinking, offers a paradigm for illuminating thinking in general. Drawing proves to be a good context for exploring questions about where cognitive processes reside. By extending cognition beyond the brain and into the world, we come to appreciate that external drawing processes in a cognitive system are at least as important as ‘internal’ ones, and that the marks on paper form an integral part of the apparatus responsible for the shape and flow of thoughts and ideas