Efficacy of modified parent training to facilitate expressive language of children with an expressive language delay

This study aimed to study the efficacy of a modified parent-training program on parents’ use of language facilitative techniques. The training method employed a handout and discussion of the facilitative techniques and how they could be incorporated into play time with the children. Participants included 4 parent-child dyads recruited from a school for children with language delays. Effectiveness of the training was determined by taking data on parent and child behaviors from tape recordings of parent-child play interactions that occurred in each family’s home. Results showed that parents were able to use the procedures during baseline and maintained relatively stable levels of use throughout the study. Teaching of specific target skills (i.e. predetermined target words) did not increase until weekly feedback was provided. Children’s use of the target skills increased as parents’ use increased. Future directions and limitations of the study are discussed

Accessing, integrating and inhibiting word meaning in poor comprehenders

This study examined three processes crucial to reading comprehension (semantic access, integration, and inhibition) to identify causes of comprehension impairment. Poor comprehenders were compared to chronological-age controls and vocabulary-age (VA) controls. When listening to homonym primes (“bank”) versus unrelated primes, controls were faster to name pictures related to dominant (money) and subordinate (river) meanings at 250 ms interstimulus interval (ISI) but only showed dominant priming at 1,000 ms ISI, whereas poor comprehenders only showed dominant priming. When listening to subordinately biased sentences ending in homonyms (“John fished from the bank”) versus control sentences, all groups showed priming when naming subordinate (appropriate) pictures at 250 ms ISI: VA controls and poor comprehenders also showed priming when naming dominant (inappropriate) pictures. At 1,000 ms ISI, controls showed appropriate priming, whereas poor comprehenders only showed inappropriate priming. These findings suggest that poor comprehenders have difficulties accessing subordinate word meanings, which can manifest as a failure to inhibit irrelevant information

Predicting performance on high stakes testing: validity and accuracy of curriculum-based measurement of reading and writing

The purpose of the current investigation was to determine which curriculum-based measures of written expression demonstrated adequate technical characteristics and provided useful information towards predicting performance on a state-standardized assessment. Data collected from 124 third grade students was used for the study. Curriculum-based measures of reading and writing collected three times within the school year were utilized as the independent variables for predicting the dependent variables. Writing samples were scored using 9 indices of writing. Results from a state standardized assessment (iLEAP) were used as the dependent variables. The study found reliability coefficients for writing indices to be consistent with previous investigations. Principle components analysis revealed a consistent three component solution for the writing indices across benchmark periods. Regression analyses revealed percent correct word sequences, fall words spelled correctly, and winter complete sentences to be significant predictors; however, only fall words spelled correctly and winter complete sentences contributed to fall oral reading fluency for predicting the passing status of students

Extending abelian groups to rings

For any abelian group G and any function f : G &rarr; G we define a commutative binary operation or `multiplication\u27 on G in terms of f. We give necessary and sufficient conditions on f for G to extend to a commutative ring with the new multiplication. In the case where G is an elementary abelian p-group of odd order, we classify those functions which extend G to a ring and show, under an equivalence relation we call weak isomorphism, that there are precisely six distinct classes of rings constructed using this method with additive group the elementary abelian p-group of odd order p2. <br /

When Does Stress Help or Harm? The Effects of Stress Controllability and Subjective Stress Response on Stroop Performance

The ability to engage in goal-directed behavior despite exposure to stress is critical to resilience. Questions of how stress can impair or improve behavioral functioning are important in diverse settings, from athletic competitions to academic testing. Previous research suggests that controllability is a key factor in the impact of stress on behavior: learning how to control stressors buffers people from the negative effects of stress on subsequent cognitively demanding tasks. In addition, research suggests that the impact of stress on cognitive functioning depends on an individual’s response to stressors: moderate responses to stress can lead to improved performance while extreme (high or low) responses can lead to impaired performance. The present studies tested the hypothesis that (1) learning to behaviorally control stressors leads to improved performance on a test of general executive functioning, the color-word Stroop, and that (2) this improvement emerges specifically for people who report moderate (subjective) responses to stress. Experiment 1: Stroop performance, measured before and after a stress manipulation, was compared across groups of undergraduate participants (n = 109). People who learned to control a noise stressor and received accurate performance feedback demonstrated reduced Stroop interference compared with people exposed to uncontrollable noise stress and feedback indicating an exaggerated rate of failure. In the group who learned behavioral control, those who reported moderate levels of stress showed the greatest reduction in Stroop interference. In contrast, in the group exposed to uncontrollable events, self-reported stress failed to predict performance. Experiment 2: In a second sample (n = 90), we specifically investigated the role of controllability by keeping the rate of failure feedback constant across groups. In the group who learned behavioral control, those who reported moderate levels of stress showed the greatest Stroop improvement. Once again, this pattern was not demonstrated in the group exposed to uncontrollable events. These results suggest that stress controllability and subjective response interact to affect high-level cognitive abilities. Specifically, exposure to moderate, controllable stress benefits performance, but exposure to uncontrollable stress or having a more extreme response to stress tends to harm performance. These findings may provide insights on how to leverage the beneficial effects of stress in a range of settings

Taming Power: The Effects of Perspective Taking on Behavioral and Verbal Power Tactics.

Social power can yield both positive and negative outcomes, but which factors contribute to these different outcomes is unclear. Drawing from previous research showing that power is related to decreased perspective taking behaviors (Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, & Gruenfeld, 2006), my dissertation turns this causal relationship around to examine how perspective taking affects power. Using multiple methodologies, the current studies explore how perspective taking relates to the recognition of power and the exercise of power. Two correlational studies found that dispositional perspective taking was positively associated with inclusive power recognition (Study 1) and soft/relational power tactics (Study 2), but negatively associated with the use of harsh/coercive power tactics. A quasi-experimental study found that dispositional perspective taking was positively associated with polite verbal power tactics, but only under conditions of high power (Study 3). Findings for Studies 2 and 3 were replicated in both student and working adult samples. Two experimental studies manipulated perspective taking to assess its direct effects on power tactics, and found that perspective taking yielded less harsh sanctioning decisions for individuals in the high power condition (Study 4); and perspective taking yielded more polite verbal tactics in email communication (Study 5). Interactions between perspective taking and power were consistent across business (Study 3) and academic settings (Study 4), and across verbal power tactics (Study 3) and behavioral power tactics (Study 4). Together, my dissertation findings demonstrate that perspective taking is associated with more inclusive power recognition and the use of more relational power tactics that consider the needs and feelings of others. By manipulating perspective taking in addition to measuring it as a stable individual difference, these studies show that perspective taking is malleable—perspective taking processes can be changed to facilitate more positive, relational power outcomes. Furthermore, interactions between perspective taking and power suggest that perspective taking is especially important in a high power context. These findings have significant implications for supervisor-subordinate relationships, organizational dynamics, and interventions; perspective taking may be one psychological process with the potential to mitigate harsh power tendencies and channel them into more socially constructive actions in organizational settings.PHDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97953/1/melmarie_1.pd

Imposing Relation Structure in Language-Model Embeddings Using Contrastive Learning

Though language model text embeddings have revolutionized NLP research, their ability to capture high-level semantic information, such as relations between entities in text, is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework that trains sentence embeddings to encode the relations in a graph structure. Given a sentence (unstructured text) and its graph, we use contrastive learning to impose relation-related structure on the token-level representations of the sentence obtained with a CharacterBERT (El Boukkouri et al.,2020) model. The resulting relation-aware sentence embeddings achieve state-of-the-art results on the relation extraction task using only a simple KNN classifier, thereby demonstrating the success of the proposed method. Additional visualization by a tSNE analysis shows the effectiveness of the learned representation space compared to baselines. Furthermore, we show that we can learn a different space for named entity recognition, again using a contrastive learning objective, and demonstrate how to successfully combine both representation spaces in an entity-relation task.Comment: To be presented at CoNLL 202