This dissertation proposes a principle of "economy of command", arguing that it provides a simple and natural explanation for some well-known properties of human language syntax. The focus is on the abstract combinatorial system that constructs the hierarchical structure of linguistic expressions, with long-distance dependencies…

Modern intelligent agents will need to learn the actions that humans perform. They will need to recognize these actions when they see them and they will need to perform these actions themselves. We want to propose a cognitive system that interprets human manipulation actions from perceptual information (image and depth data) and consists of…

Legislative initiatives have provided students with disabilities the opportunity to receive instruction and participate in the general education setting with their nondisabled peers. The content and frequency of professional development activities for the general education teachers in inclusion classrooms have often been overlooked. Consequently,…

Young adolescents should be able to write organized multi-paragraph compositions that develop a central idea and unfold in logical and sequential order, unified through the use of transitional words and phrases. In other words, the compositions should not just consist of a string of related sentences, but represent a dynamic text that has…

Natural language poses several challenges to developing computational systems for modeling it. Natural language is not a precise problem but is rather ridden with a number of uncertainties in the form of either alternate words or interpretations. Furthermore, natural language is a generative system where the problem size is potentially infinite.…

Teaching children to write successfully is an area of great concern to educators in the 21 st century. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, the writing skills of two-thirds of the students in elementary, middle, and high school are below grade level proficiency (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). In 2003, the…

The surface-level experience of hypertextuality as formless and unbounded, blurring boundaries among texts and between readers and writers, is created by a deep structure which is not normally presented to readers and which, like the ultrastructure of living cells, defines and controls texts' nature and functions. Most readers, restricted to…

A detailed grammar of Buem, one of the Togo-Remnant Languages spoken in Ghana's Volta region, describes the major structures and many minor structures occurring in informal and semi-formal speech. The phonetics and much of the phonology are described in taxonomic terms, and the vowel harmony system, syntax, and morphology are described in a…