4,849 research outputs found
2023-2024 Boise State University Undergraduate Catalog
This catalog is primarily for and directed at students. However, it serves many audiences, such as high school counselors, academic advisors, and the public. In this catalog you will find an overview of Boise State University and information on admission, registration, grades, tuition and fees, financial aid, housing, student services, and other important policies and procedures. However, most of this catalog is devoted to describing the various programs and courses offered at Boise State
Linguística clínica
A Linguística Clínica reúne profissionais, investigadores e estudantes de diferentes graus académicos cujo foco de trabalho é a exploração da ponte entre a Linguística e a Fonoaudiologia (na tradição brasileira) ou a Terapia da Fala (na tradição portuguesa). Tem como objetivos centrais a construção de conhecimento sobre a natureza dos desempenhos linguísticos atípicos e a preocupação constante em tornar os processos de avaliação e de intervenção em contexto clínico cada vez mais rigorosos e eficazes. O presente volume destina-se a quem estuda ou investiga aspetos relacionados com desempenhos linguísticos atípicos em países lusófonos, nomeadamente a estudantes e docentes de cursos de graduação e pós-graduação nas áreas da Terapia da Fala/ Fonoaudiologia, da Linguística, da Psicologia e da Educação. Os capítulos que integram a presente publicação estão organizados em quatro blocos temáticos. O bloco inicial tem como objetivo central fornecer uma perspetiva histórica dos estudos em Fonologia Clínica e em Sintaxe Clínica. O segundo centra-se em aspetos fonológicos e sua relação com a dimensão fonética da língua. O terceiro bloco integra capítulos que exploram o módulo gramatical da sintaxe, a interface gramática-pragmática e o discurso. O último bloco reúne um conjunto de investigações sobre populações específicas
The automatic processing of multiword expressions in Irish
It is well-documented that Multiword Expressions (MWEs) pose a unique challenge
to a variety of NLP tasks such as machine translation, parsing, information retrieval,
and more. For low-resource languages such as Irish, these challenges can be exacerbated by the scarcity of data, and a lack of research in this topic. In order to
improve handling of MWEs in various NLP tasks for Irish, this thesis will address
both the lack of resources specifically targeting MWEs in Irish, and examine how
these resources can be applied to said NLP tasks.
We report on the creation and analysis of a number of lexical resources as part
of this PhD research. Ilfhocail, a lexicon of Irish MWEs, is created through extract-
ing MWEs from other lexical resources such as dictionaries. A corpus annotated
with verbal MWEs in Irish is created for the inclusion of Irish in the PARSEME
Shared Task 1.2. Additionally, MWEs were tagged in a bilingual EN-GA corpus
for inclusion in experiments in machine translation. For the purposes of annotation, a categorisation scheme for nine categories of MWEs in Irish is created, based
on combining linguistic analysis on these types of constructions and cross-lingual
frameworks for defining MWEs.
A case study in applying MWEs to NLP tasks is undertaken, with the exploration of incorporating MWE information while training Neural Machine Translation
systems. Finally, the topic of automatic identification of Irish MWEs is explored,
documenting the training of a system capable of automatically identifying Irish
MWEs from a variety of categories, and the challenges associated with developing
such a system.
This research contributes towards a greater understanding of Irish MWEs and
their applications in NLP, and provides a foundation for future work in exploring
other methods for the automatic discovery and identification of Irish MWEs, and
further developing the MWE resources described above
Investigating student engagement through English learning in a Saudi university Preparatory Year Programme
Student engagement is, today, a topic of importance in Higher Education research. Previous studies have mainly discussed the impact of student engagement on different aspects of the academic context. For example, Trowler (2010) states that universities should invest their resources and efforts in enhancing student engagement and improving the quality of learning outcomes. Zepke (2016) describes student engagement as an important research topic linked to student success and the quality of learning and teaching in Higher Education. Kahu and Nelson (2018), authors I shall draw on extensively in this thesis, state that student engagement has become important in discussions of student retention and success in Higher Education. However, research on promoting student engagement in language learning settings is relatively sparse, particularly with regard to Higher Education in Saudi Arabia. This PhD aims to add insights to enhance student engagement in Saudi Higher Education by exploring participants’ perspectives on the English learning in a Saudi Arabia university’s Preparatory Year Programme and it draws on Kahu and Nelson’s (2018) Conceptual Framework of Student Engagement as a theoretical framework to explore student engagement.
This study was built on qualitative research methods to address and answer the research questions. This approach explores responses from the study’s participants to investigate student engagement and its enhancement and to examine the main issues around student engagement and English learning in the Preparatory Year Programme (hereafter PYP) at Saudi University. Data was obtained through face-to-face semi-structured interviews as the primary tool to collect data from 30 participants: 18 students (PYP students and PYP graduates), and 12 teaching staff (from the English Centre and the College staff).
The responses from the data of this study revealed a number of factors that might influence student engagement. For example, students’ expectations are likely to affect student engagement and meeting these expectations might lead to several academic outcomes such as student motivation, knowledge, success, and retention. This study notes that learning and pedagogy practices are expected to impact student engagement in the PYP. The data revealed student motivation, curriculum and pedagogical issues, such as teaching methods, and these also may be key factors influencing student engagement.
The study’s data also pinpointed several challenges that may decrease student engagement in the PYP including issues related to promoting the learning environment in the PYP include a lack of involving students in making decisions about their learning and the lack of a thorough introduction to various university activities. Using English as a Medium of Instruction is another challenge highlighted in the data by the participants that may potentially affect student engagement. The responses from the data suggest that students’ low proficiency level and a lack of English learning supporting resources and environment are key factors that led to challenges in using English as the Medium of Instruction. Drawing on engagement theory of I suggest that these challenges might impact students’ self-efficacy, emotions, sense of belonging and well-being. As a result of this impact, students may experience difficulties improving self-confidence, communication skills and personal growth.
The participants in this study suggest various measures to enhance student engagement and English learning in the PYP. For student engagement, the data suggested that PYPs might need to encourage students to use self-learning, autonomous learning strategies, and that increasing student partnership might also promote student engagement. For English learning and teaching, the data suggested that the PYPs need to improve the curriculum, adding multiple learning levels and different learning paths and developing assessment methods in the PYP. Additionally, I propose a model to enhance student engagement in the PYP based on the study’s findings and informed by Kahu and Nelson’s (2018) student engagement conceptual framework. It is hoped that this might contribute to facilitating student engagement through English learning in the Saudi PYPs and similar educational programmes
Brain Computations and Connectivity [2nd edition]
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Brain Computations and Connectivity is about how the brain works. In order to understand this, it is essential to know what is computed by different brain systems; and how the computations are performed.
The aim of this book is to elucidate what is computed in different brain systems; and to describe current biologically plausible computational approaches and models of how each of these brain systems computes.
Understanding the brain in this way has enormous potential for understanding ourselves better in health and in disease. Potential applications of this understanding are to the treatment of the brain in disease; and to artificial intelligence which will benefit from knowledge of how the brain performs many of its extraordinarily impressive functions.
This book is pioneering in taking this approach to brain function: to consider what is computed by many of our brain systems; and how it is computed, and updates by much new evidence including the connectivity of the human brain the earlier book: Rolls (2021) Brain Computations: What and How, Oxford University Press.
Brain Computations and Connectivity will be of interest to all scientists interested in brain function and how the brain works, whether they are from neuroscience, or from medical sciences including neurology and psychiatry, or from the area of computational science including machine learning and artificial intelligence, or from areas such as theoretical physics
Elements of Ion Linear Accelerators, Calm in The Resonances, Other_Tales
The main part of this book, Elements of Linear Accelerators, outlines in Part
1 a framework for non-relativistic linear accelerator focusing and accelerating
channel design, simulation, optimization and analysis where space charge is an
important factor. Part 1 is the most important part of the book; grasping the
framework is essential to fully understand and appreciate the elements within
it, and the myriad application details of the following Parts. The treatment
concentrates on all linacs, large or small, intended for high-intensity, very
low beam loss, factory-type application. The Radio-Frequency-Quadrupole (RFQ)
is especially developed as a representative and the most complicated linac form
(from dc to bunched and accelerated beam), extending to practical design of
long, high energy linacs, including space charge resonances and beam halo
formation, and some challenges for future work. Also a practical method is
presented for designing Alternating-Phase- Focused (APF) linacs with long
sequences and high energy gain. Full open-source software is available. The
following part, Calm in the Resonances and Other Tales, contains eyewitness
accounts of nearly 60 years of participation in accelerator technology.
(September 2023) The LINACS codes are released at no cost and, as always,with
fully open-source coding. (p.2 & Ch 19.10)Comment: 652 pages. Some hundreds of figures - all images, there is no data in
the figures. (September 2023) The LINACS codes are released at no cost and,
as always,with fully open-source coding. (p.2 & Ch 19.10
Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research
This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research
Reading Comprehension in L2 Italian: Connecting Psycholinguistic Research and Pedagogical Practice
This dissertation explores reading comprehension abilities with a special focus on language minority bilingual children (LMBC). This population is often found to display lower scores than their monolingual peers and this gap in performance can negatively affect their future educational experience. Our goal was to shed light on the origins of these comprehension difficulties. To do so, we carried out an experimental study that involved 109 pupils attending 4th and 5th grade of primary school. The participants were 61 language minority bilingual and 48 monolingual students. We assessed their performance in reading comprehension and in a series of linguistic and non-linguistic abilities that are considered potential predictors of reading comprehension, i.e., general cognitive abilities, decoding skills, receptive vocabulary, and receptive grammar. We conducted an analysis to determine which ones were the best predictors for the two groups. The outcomes highlighted that while monolingual students relied primarily on their vocabulary knowledge during reading comprehension, for LMBC grammar knowledge, speed during decoding, and general cognitive abilities were also influencing their performance.
Moreover, using three Self-Paced Reading Tasks (SPRT), we explored on-line language processing to verify whether there were qualitative or quantitative differences between groups. The analysis of reading times revealed that both groups followed similar processing patterns, but monolinguals obtained significantly higher scores in terms of accuracy. These results seem to suggest that processing complex structures in Italian is cognitively more demanding for the LMBC.
The last part of the project was dedicated to the implementation of pedagogical practices that focused on teaching grammar and practicing the ability to make inferences using methods that aimed to stimulate the pupils’ metalinguistic awareness instead of using abstract rules.Questa tesi esplora le abilità di comprensione della lettura con una particolare attenzione ai bambini bilingui con background migratorio. Questa popolazione mostra spesso punteggi più bassi rispetto ai loro coetanei monolingui e questa discrepanza nei risultati può influire negativamente sulla loro esperienza scolastica. Il nostro obiettivo è quello di fare luce sulle origini di queste difficoltà di comprensione. Per farlo, abbiamo condotto uno studio sperimentale che ha coinvolto 109 alunni frequentanti il quarto e quinto anno di scuola primaria. I partecipanti includevano 61 studenti bilingui con background migratorio e 48 studenti monolingui.
Abbiamo valutato le loro capacità nella comprensione della lettura e in una serie di abilità linguistiche e non linguistiche considerate potenziali predittori della comprensione della lettura (abilità cognitive generali, abilità di decodifica, vocabolario recettivo e grammatica recettiva). Inoltre, abbiamo condotto un'analisi per determinare quali fossero i migliori predittori per i due gruppi. I risultati hanno evidenziato che, mentre gli studenti monolingui si affidavano principalmente alla loro conoscenza lessicale durante la comprensione della lettura, per i bilingui anche la conoscenza grammaticale, la velocità durante la decodifica e le abilità cognitive generali influenzavano i loro punteggi.
Con tre Self-Paced Reading Tasks (SPRT), abbiamo esplorato le loro capacità di processing on-line per verificare se ci fossero differenze di tipo qualitativo o quantitativo tra i gruppi. L'analisi dei tempi di lettura ha rivelato che entrambi i gruppi hanno seguito strategie di processing simili, ma i monolingui hanno ottenuto punteggi significativamente più alti in termini di accuratezza. Questi risultati sembrano suggerire che l'elaborazione di strutture complesse in italiano richieda maggiori risorse cognitive per gli studenti bilingui.
La parte finale del progetto è stata dedicata all'implementazione di pratiche pedagogiche incentrate sull'insegnamento della grammatica e sulla pratica dell'abilità di fare inferenze utilizzando metodi volti a stimolare la consapevolezza metalinguistica degli alunni invece di utilizzare regole astratte
Assessing the Effects of Illuminance and Correlated Color Temperature on Emotional Responses and Lighting Preferences Using Virtual Reality
This paper presents a novel approach to assessing human lighting adjustment
behavior and preference in diverse lighting conditions through the evaluation
of emotional feedback and behavioral data using VR. Participants (n= 27) were
exposed to different lighting (n=17) conditions with different levels of
illuminance and correlated color temperature (CCT) with a randomized order in a
virtual office environment. Results from this study significantly advanced our
understanding of preferred lighting conditions in virtual reality environments,
influenced by a variety of factors such as illuminance, color temperature,
order of presentation, and participant demographics. Through a comprehensive
analysis of user adjustment profiles, we obtained insightful data that can
guide the optimization of lighting design across various settings
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