Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children

This study investigates the production and on-line processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty nine 6-9-year-old L2 children and 28 typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person –s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 1996) and participated in an on-line word-monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person –s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive –ing, possessive ‘s) morphemes. The L2 children’s performance on the on-line task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery & Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997)

Understanding analogical reasoning : viewpoints from psychology and related disciplines

Analogy and metaphor have a long history of study in linguistics, education, philosophy and psychology. Consensus over what analogy is or how analogy functions in language and thought, however, has been elusive. This paper, the first in a two part series, examines these various research traditions, attempting to bring out major lines of agreement over the role of analogy in individual human experience. As well as being a general literature review which may be helpful for newcomers to the study of analogy, this paper attempts to extract from these literatures existing theories, models and concepts which may be interesting or useful for computational studies of analogical reasoning

Distributed situation awareness in dynamic systems: Theoretical development and application of an ergonomics methodology

The purpose of this paper is to propose foundations for a theory of situation awareness based on the analysis of interactions between agents (i.e., both human and non-human) in subsystems. This approach may help promote a better understanding of technology-mediated interaction in systems, as well as helping in the formulation of hypotheses and predictions concerning distributed situation awareness. It is proposed that agents within a system each hold their own situation awareness which may be very different from (although compatible with) other agents. It is argued that we should not always hope for, or indeed want, sharing of this awareness, as different system agents have different purposes. This view marks situation awareness as a 1 dynamic and collaborative process that binds agents together on tasks on a moment-by-moment basis. Implications of this viewpoint for development of a new theory of, and accompanying methodology for, distributed situation awareness are offered

Metaphor Aptness And Conventionality: A Processing Fluency Account

Conventionality and aptness are two dimensions of metaphorical sentences thought to play an important role in determining how quick and easy it is to process a metaphor. Conventionality reflects the familiarity of a metaphor whereas aptness reflects the degree to which a metaphor vehicle captures important features of a metaphor topic. In recent years it has become clear that operationalizing these two constructs is not as simple as asking naïve raters for subjective judgments. It has been found that ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated, which has led some researchers to pursue alternative methods for measuring the constructs. Here, in four experiments, we explore the underlying reasons for the high correlation in ratings of aptness and conventionality, and question the construct validity of various methods for measuring the two dimensions. We find that manipulating the processing fluency of a metaphorical sentence by means of familiarization to similar senses of the metaphor (“in vivo conventionalization”) influences ratings of the sentence\u27s aptness. This misattribution may help explain why subjective ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated. In addition, we find other reasons to question the construct validity of conventionality and aptness measures: for instance, we find that conventionality is context dependent and thus not attributable to a metaphor vehicle alone, and we find that ratings of aptness take more into account than they should

Towards a debugging tutor for object-oriented environments

Programming has provided a rich domain for Artificial Intelligence in Education and many systems have been developed to advise students about the bugs in their programs, either during program development or post-hoc. Surprisingly few systems have been developed specifically to teach debugging. Learning environment builders have assumed that either the student will be taught these elsewhere or thatthey will be learnt piecemeal without explicit advice.This paper reports on two experiments on Java debugging strategy by novice programmers and discusses their implications for the design of a debugging tutor for Java that pays particular attention to how students use the variety of program representations available. The experimental results are in agreement with research in the area that suggests that good debugging performance is associated with a balanced use ofthe available representations and a sophisticated use of the debugging step facility which enables programmers to detect and obtain information from critical momentsin the execution of the program. A balanced use of the available representations seemsto be fostered by providing representations with a higher degree of dynamic linkingas well as by explicit instruction about the representation formalism employed in the program visualisations

Assessing the effect of topic interest on two measures of incidental vocabulary learning : can dictionary look-up behavior be a factor?

Tesis (Profesor de Inglés para la Enseñanza Básica y Media y al grado académico de Licenciado en Educación)Throughout the years, several studies have been conducted in order to analyze the effect of topic interest on incidental vocabulary learning. It has been stated that being interested in a topic is a mental resource that enhances learning, which then leads to better performance and achievement (Hidi, 1990). This type of interest has been classified as individual, situational and topic interest (Renninger, Hidi and Krapp, 1992; Schiefele, 1999; Hidi, 1990; Ainley, Hidi and Berndorff, 2002). In order to provide more insights regarding topic interest and incidental vocabulary learning, the purpose of the present study is to explore the effect of topic interest on incidental vocabulary learning in two topic interest conditions, high and low, as well as the effect of topic interest on dictionary look-up behavior. For this purpose, a quantitative study was conducted. The study was divided into two main sessions, and the participants were 23 intermediate level students at a private university in Santiago. These participants were asked to read two texts with topics previously identified by them as having high and low topic interest. Twenty target words in the texts were selected in order to assess vocabulary depth and quantitative gains in both conditions, by means of a vocabulary knowledge scale (Paribakht & Wesche, 1993, 1996) and a passive recognition (Laufer & Goldstein, 2004) respectively. Results suggest that topic interest had a significant effect on the incidental vocabulary learning achieved by the participants in terms of vocabulary depth, and also in terms of quantitative gains. In addition, when dictionary look-up behavior was taken into account, vocabulary gains were kept. Discussion of the results, conclusions and implications for pedagogy are presented in the corresponding chapters.A través de los años, se han realizado diferentes estudios con el fin de analizar el efecto de interés de tópico en el aprendizaje incidental de vocabulario. Se ha dicho que estar interesado en un tema realza el aprendizaje, lo cual conduce a un mejor desempeño académico (Hidi, 1990). Este tipo de interés ha sido clasificado como interés de tópico, situacional e individual (Renninger, Hidi and Krapp, 1992; Schiefele, 1999; Hidi, 1990; Ainley, Hidi and Berndorff, 2002). A fin de proporcionar más información con respecto al interés de tópico y al comportamiento de búsqueda en un diccionario, el propósito de este estudio es explorar el efecto del interés de tópico en el aprendizaje incidental de vocabulario en dos condiciones (Alta y Baja), así como también el efecto del interés de tópico en el comportamiento de búsqueda en un diccionario. Para conseguir dicho propósito, se realizó un estudio cuantitativo. El estudio se dividió principalmente en dos sesiones, y los participantes fueron 23 estudiantes de una Universidad privada de Santiago con un nivel de Inglés intermedio. Dichos participantes tuvieron que leer dos textos que habían sido identificados por ellos previamente como el más y menos interesante. Veinte palabras fueron seleccionadas de los textos con el fin de evaluar el progreso en la profundidad del vocabulario y ganancias cuantitativas de vocabulario en las dos condiciones, por medio de una escala de conocimiento de vocabulario (Paribakht & Wesche, 1993, 1996), y una prueba de reconocimiento pasivo (Laufer & Goldstein, 2004) respectivamente. Los resultados indican que el interés de tópico tuvo un efecto significativo en el aprendizaje incidental de vocabulario logrado por los participantes en relación al progreso en la profundidad del vocabulario, y en relación a las ganancias cuantitativas de vocabulario. Además, cuando el comportamiento de búsqueda en el diccionario es tomado en cuenta, las ganancias cuantitativas de vocabulario se mantienen. La discusión de los resultados, conclusiones e implicancias para la pedagogía están presentadas en sus capítulos correspondiente

Microgenesis, immediate experience and visual processes in reading

The concept of microgenesis refers to the development on a brief present-time scale of a percept, a thought, an object of imagination, or an expression. It defines the occurrence of immediate experience as dynamic unfolding and differentiation in which the ‘germ’ of the final experience is already embodied in the early stages of its development. Immediate experience typically concerns the focal experience of an object that is thematized as a ‘figure’ in the global field of consciousness; this can involve a percept, thought, object of imagination, or expression (verbal and/or gestural). Yet, whatever its modality or content, focal experience is postulated to develop and stabilize through dynamic differentiation and unfolding. Such a microgenetic description of immediate experience substantiates a phenomenological and genetic theory of cognition where any process of perception, thought, expression or imagination is primarily a process of genetic differentiation and development, rather than one of detection (of a stimulus array or information), transformation, and integration (of multiple primitive components) as theories of cognitivist kind have contended. My purpose in this essay is to provide an overview of the main constructs of microgenetic theory, to outline its potential avenues of future development in the field of cognitive science, and to illustrate an application of the theory to research, using visual processes in reading as an example

A framework for the simulation of structural software evolution

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 ACM.As functionality is added to an aging piece of software, its original design and structure will tend to erode. This can lead to high coupling, low cohesion and other undesirable effects associated with spaghetti architectures. The underlying forces that cause such degradation have been the subject of much research. However, progress in this field is slow, as its complexity makes it difficult to isolate the causal flows leading to these effects. This is further complicated by the difficulty of generating enough empirical data, in sufficient quantity, and attributing such data to specific points in the causal chain. This article describes a framework for simulating the structural evolution of software. A complete simulation model is built by incrementally adding modules to the framework, each of which contributes an individual evolutionary effect. These effects are then combined to form a multifaceted simulation that evolves a fictitious code base in a manner approximating real-world behavior. We describe the underlying principles and structures of our framework from a theoretical and user perspective; a validation of a simple set of evolutionary parameters is then provided and three empirical software studies generated from open-source software (OSS) are used to support claims and generated results. The research illustrates how simulation can be used to investigate a complex and under-researched area of the development cycle. It also shows the value of incorporating certain human traits into a simulation—factors that, in real-world system development, can significantly influence evolutionary structures