Psycholinguistic research aims to understand how people make sense of language in their everyday lives. However, most of this research studies language under experimental conditions in which people are instructed to specifically monitor (and indicate) when there is a breakdown in their understanding. Moreover, there is an assumption that people…

Personality has been found to have significant connections to language. Ranging from impacting narrative style, to informing expectations about others based on linguistic factors such as accent, personality affects both language comprehension and production (Oberlander & Gill, 2004; Van den Brink et al., 2012). However, research in this area…

The gap in supply (i.e., shortage) and demand of the STEM workforce have prompted extensive research on identifying factors that predict STEM outcomes and retention of students. Few studies, however, have examined the relationships between STEM outcomes and predictors in an integrated model, taking into account measurement errors in the…

This dissertation developed a new learner corpus of Japanese and introduced an error and linguistic annotation scheme specifically designed for Japanese particles. The corpus contains texts written by learners who are in the first year to fourth year university level Japanese courses. The texts in the corpus were tagged with part-of-speech and…

In conversation or during reading, we sometimes find ourselves making predictions about the identity of an upcoming word or phrase. This phenomenon has been reflected in the results of laboratory experiments that show changes in eye gaze patterns or the Electroencephalogram (EEG) "prior" to encountering a predicted word. However,…

There is a general consensus in theories of human speech recognition that humans engage in predictive processing during online speech processing. There are also claims that predictive processing indicates the operation of a predictive coding (PC) mechanism (Rao & Ballard, 1999). Formally, PC is a generative model where top-down signals consist…

In work-related, instrumental learning contexts the role of reflective activities is unclear. Kolb's (1985) experiential learning theory and Mezirow's transformative learning theory (2000) predict skill-adaptation as a possible outcome. This prediction was experimentally explored by manipulating reflective activities and assessing participants'…

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

Ensemble approaches have been shown to enhance classification by combining the outputs from a set of voting classifiers. Diversity in error patterns among base classifiers promotes ensemble performance. Multi-task learning is an important characteristic for Neural Network classifiers. Introducing a secondary output unit that receives different…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of the combination of word prediction and text-to-speech software on the writing process of translating. Participants for this study included 10 elementary and middle school students who had a diagnosis of disorder of written expression. A modified multiple case series was used to collect data…

This empirical study evaluates the document category prediction effectiveness of Naive Bayes (NB) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier treatments built from different feature selection and machine learning settings and trained and tested against textual corpora of 2300 Gang-Of-Four (GOF) design pattern documents. Analysis of the experiment's…

Writing is a multifaceted, complex task that involves interaction between physical and cognitive skills. Individuals with physical disabilities vary in terms of both their physical and cognitive abilities. Often they must overcome one or more significant barriers in order to engage in the task of writing. Minimizing or eliminating barriers is…