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Ett fåtal tidigare studier har visat att barn med cochleaimplantat (CI) har sämre förmåga till såväl ordflöde som verbalt analogiskt resonerande jämfört med normalhörande barn. Det finns ett förhållande mellan språk och analogiskt resonerande, men förhållandet mellan ordflödesförmåga och förmågan till analogiskt resonerande har inte undersökts tidigare för varken barn med CI eller normalhörande barn, vilket motiverar föreliggande studie. Syftet var att undersöka huruvida det finns skillnader mellan barn med CI och normalhörande barn vad gäller ordflöde och analogiskt resonerande. Studien syftade även till att undersöka förhållandet mellan ordflöde och analogiskt resonerande hos barn med CI respektive normalhörande barn. Nio barn med CI i åldrarna 6;4–8;2 år och en kontrollgrupp av trettio normalhörande barn i åldrarna 6;1–7;1 år medverkade. Ordflödesförmågan undersöktes med det fonologiska ordflödestestet FAS och det semantiska ordflödestestet Djur. Visuellt analogiskt resonerande undersöktes med AnimaLogica och verbalt analogiskt resonerande undersöktes med deltestet Auditiv analogi från Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities-3 (ITPA-3). I föreliggande studie har barnen med CI sämre ordflödesförmåga och analogiskt resonerande än de normalhörande barnen. Det finns ett samband mellan semantiskt ordflöde och verbalt analogiskt resonerande hos normalhörande barn, med ett liknande mönster hos barn med CI. Förmågan till ordflöde och analogiskt resonerande samt sambandet mellan dessa förmågor har klinisk relevans för logopeden i och med att detta blir ännu en aspekt att ta hänsyn till vid språkliga utredningar och behandlingar hos såväl normalhörande som barn med CI. / Previous studies have shown that children with cochlear implant (CI) have worse word fluency abilities and analogical reasoning abilities compared to normal-hearing children. There is a relationship between language and analogical reasoning. However, a possible relationship between word fluency and analogical reasoning has not been studied before among children with CI or among normal-hearing children. This warrants the present study, which aimed to examine if there are differences between children with CI and normal-hearing children regarding word fluency and analogical reasoning. The study also aimed to examine the relationship between word fluency and analogical reasoning in children with CI and normal-hearing children. The present study involved nine children with CI aged 6;4–8;2 years and thirty normal-hearing children aged 6;1–7;1 years. Word fluency was examined using the phonological word fluency test FAS and the semantic word fluency test Animal. Visual analogical reasoning was examined using AnimaLogica and verbal analogical reasoning using Spoken Analogies from Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities-3 (ITPA-3). The results of the present study show that the children with CI had poorer word fluency ability and analogical reasoning compared to the normal-hearing children. A relationship between semantic word fluency and verbal analogical reasoning in normal-hearing children was found, with the children with CI showing the same trend. Word fluency ability and analogical reasoning and their relationship has a clinical relevance for speech-language pathologists since this must be considered when investigating and treating language difficulties in children with CI as well as normal-hearing children.

abstract: The main objective of this project was to create a framework for holistic ideation and investigate the technical issues involved in its implementation. In previous research, logical ideation methods were explored, ideation states were identified, and tentative set of ideation blocks with strategies were incorporated in an interactive software testbed. As a subsequent study, in this research, intuitive methods and their strategies were investigated and characterized, a framework to organize the components of ideation (both logical and intuitive) was devised, and different ideation methods were implemented based on the framework. One of the major contributions of this research is the method by which information passes between different ideation methods. Another important part of the research is that a framework to organize ideas found by different methods. The intuitive ideation strategies added to the holistic test bed are reframing, restructuring, random connection, force connection, and analogical reasoning. A computer tool facilitating holistic ideation was developed. This framework can also be used as a research tool to collect large amounts of data from designers about their choice of ideation strategies, and assessment of their effectiveness. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Mechanical Engineering 2012

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Les grammaires de construction postulent l’émergence progressive des structures du langage via l’utilisation de processus cognitifs généraux. Les hypothèses théoriques qui en émanent suggèrent que la complexité et la structure des formes morphosyntaxiques ne peuvent s’expliquer que dans une perspective constructiviste, où l’enfant développe ses nouvelles formes en complexifiant et en généralisant ses propres productions antérieures. Ces hypothèses ont été éprouvées auprès de populations présentant un développement typique du langage (DTL) mais ont peu fait l’objet d’une mise en application auprès d’enfants avec troubles spécifiques du langage (TSL). Or, ces théories offrent de nouvelles perspectives théoriques permettant de mieux appréhender leurs difficultés langagières. Ces enfants présentent un manque de productivité syntaxique ainsi qu’une plus grande dépendance à l’input linguistique, allant dans le sens d’un manque de généralisation des schémas de construction. Nous suggérons que, contrairement aux enfants avec DTL, l’abstraction des schémas de construction des enfants avec TSL serait entravée en raison d’un mécanisme de généralisation qui se mettrait en place plus lentement. Ce travail de thèse a pour objectif de tester cette hypothèse chez les enfants avec TSL, en s’intéressant plus particulièrement au rôle du mapping analogique. Les résultats obtenus sont prometteurs et compatibles avec cette hypothèse. Si l’étude du mapping analogique comme facteur à l’origine des difficultés des enfants avec TSL est particulièrement séduisante, de nombreuses pistes restent à explorer pour appuyer davantage notre hypothèse. / Construction grammars argue that language structures progressively emerge thanks to the use of general cognitive processes. Theoretical hypotheses suggest that complexity and structure of morphosyntactic forms can only be explained in a constructivist perspective in which children develop their new forms by making more complex and generalizing their own prior utterances. These hypotheses have been already tested with children with typical language development (TLD) but few studies were interested in children with specific language impairment (SLI). These hypotheses give new interesting theoretical perspectives for apprehending their language disorders better. Children with SLI present a lack of syntactic productivity and a more important input dependency. These observations are compatible with the hypothesis of a lack of generalization of construction schemas. Consequently, the children’s abstraction of construction schemas would be slowed down compared to children with TLD’s abstraction. The current doctoral thesis studies the hypothesis of a lack of generalization in children with SLI by analyzing more particularly the role of analogical mapping. The results obtained are promising and in agreement with our hypothesis. If studies about the role of analogical mapping as a factor explaining the disorders in children with SLI are attractive, other considerations have still to be explored for strengthening our hypotheses.

Design is hard and needs to be supported by software. One of the ways software can support designers is by providing analogical reasoning. To make analogical reasoning work well, the software makers need to know how to create a knowledge representation that will facilitate the kind of analogies that the designers want. This thesis will inform software makers by experimenting with two kinds of knowledge representations, called device-centric (DC) and environment-centric (EC), and to try to determine the relative benefits of using either one of them for analogical matching. We performed computational experiments, using Structure Mapping Engine for matching, to determine the quantity and quality of analogical matches that are produced when the representation is varied. We conducted a limited human experiment, using questionnaires and repertory grids, to determine if any of the computational results were novel, and to determine if the human similarity ratings between devices correlated with the computer results. We show that design software should use DC representations to produce a few focused matches which have high average weight. It should use EC representations to produce many matches some of high weight and some of low weight. Based on our human experiment, design software can use either DC or EC representations to produce novel matches. Our experiments also show that human matches correlate most strongly with a combined DC and EC representation and that their similarity reasons are more EC than DC. This suggests that designers tend to think more in EC terms than in DC terms.

This exploratory case study was undertaken to obtain a greater understanding of the difficulties that physics students face when solving image-object projections in optics problems. This was carried out by studying the students’ reasoning when facing new kinds of problem settings using the refraction of light and the position of the virtual image and the real object as the frame for the research. The results show that there is more than one reasoning possibility that is feasible for students to use when dealing with the same problem. The results also illustrate how several different ways of reasoning may be simultaneously needed to solve a refraction problem. The different kinds of reasoning have been referred to as reasoning categories in this study. The analysis illustrates how the categories complement each other, and the use of many reasoning categories is shown to be fruitful. However, the vast majority of the participants made contradicting answer selections when solving similar problems by using contradicting reasoning approaches. This lack of consistency in the participants’ reasoning could indicate that they have a fragmentary understanding of optics in general. Both the capability to link reasoning approaches together, as well as the affordances that different modes of representations offer, are needed for the construction of a better conceptual understanding. Only mastering a few ways of reasoning and a few modes of representation could lead to fragmented knowledge, which, in turn leads to making problem solving really challenging. One purpose of this study was to find out if reasoning categories and modes of representations are essentially linked. If so, then the reasoning categories would be determined by the representation of the problem. The analysis shows that there is a connection, but that there are also other factors at play.

Le présent manuscrit développe une problématique liée à l’implication des capacités de gestion de buts et d’engagement des fonctions exécutives dans le raisonnement par analogie et son développement. Les trois premières expériences étudient cette problématique dans deux tâches de raisonnement par analogie différentes à travers l’étude des stratégies visuelles employées par des adultes et des enfants de 6-7 ans. Les résultats montrent des différences de stratégies visuelles entre les tâches, liées aux buts différents de celles-ci, ainsi que, entre enfants et adultes, des différences de patterns visuels liés à l’inhibition de l'information non pertinente pour la résolution des problèmes. Les deux expériences suivantes étudient les stratégies visuelles, toujours en lien avec le fonctionnement exécutif et le maintien du but, dans une tâche A:B::C:? dont la difficulté est manipulée afin de mettre en évidence des différences d’engagement de processus de contrôle et d’évaluation. Les résultats montrent un effet de la difficulté des essais, ainsi que du type de distracteur, dans les stratégies visuelles. Enfin les trois dernières expériences étudient l’implication de la flexibilité cognitive, une des fonctions exécutives, dans le raisonnement par analogie, chez l’enfant (5-6 ans), limité dans sa flexibilité. Les résultats montrent que l’ancrage dans un type de représentation, pertinent ou non pour la solution du problème, est lié à leur capacité à résoudre le problème, et suggèrent une difficulté à changer de représentation au cours de la résolution. Ces résultats sont finalement discutés en rapport aux modèles de raisonnement par analogie et de développement de cette capacité. / This manuscript develops an issue related to the involvement of goal management capabilities and executive functions in this type of reasoning and its development. The first three experiments examine this issue in two tasks of analogical reasoning, the scene analogy task and the A:B::C:? task, through the study of visual strategies used by adults, and children aged 6-to-7. The results show differences in visual patterns related to goals, and to the inhibition of irrelevant information for the solution of the problems, between the different tasks, and between children and adults. The following two experiments study the visual strategies, always in relation to executive functioning and goal management, in an A:B::C:? task whose difficulty is manipulated to highlight the difference in involvement of monitoring and evaluation processes. The results do show an effect of the difficulty of the test and the type of distractor in the visual strategies employed. Finally, the last three experiments investigate the involvement of cognitive flexibility, one of the executive functions, in the analogical reasoning of preschool children (5-6-year-olds), limited in their flexibility. The results show that their early anchoring in a type of representation, relevant or not to the solution of the problem, is related to their ability to solve the problem later, and thus suggest a difficulty in shifting their representation during the resolution of the problems. These results are finally discussed in relation to models of analogical reasoning and of the development of this ability, especially those integrating goal management and executive functions.

Following established traditions in anthropology and sociology, where cross-border research helps to identify important themes which benefit from comparative study, this dissertation introduces cross-sector policy research as a new methodology for generating useful insights about public policy. The cross-sector method is applied to the study of the UK energy and transport sectors. A range of generic policy developments in the energy sector are identified including: the development of efficiency indicators, scenario analysis, and the establishment of energy efficiency programmes. Such developments have not, as yet, occurred in the transport sector. A structural analogy between energy and transport is developed which is used to generate a range of innovations for transport policy including: gross mass movements and intensities as indicators of the efficiency with which the economy uses transport; the projection of a quantitative scenario of sustainable mobility; and the outline of a transport efficiency programme. The insights from the analogy are generalised to consider the benefits of a wider application of cross-sector policy research to other policy areas.

Many people face difficulties in remembering knowledge, which is complex and abstract. This is especially important when the descriptions of knowledge are to be stored in searchable knowledge bases. But if complex knowledge can be transferred through real life stories, it is more understandable and easier to retrieve for the knowledge acceptor. Moreover, if the stories follow a certain pattern like ‘intentional suspense’ it may be more useful. This study investigates how far a story with intentional interruption is helpful in transferring complex computer science knowledge through processing of information that compares similarities between new and well-understood concepts. The data collection was done by applying framework analysis approach through the interview of 40 students of Stockholm University. Results of this study is assumed to help organizations to design, store and retrieve complex knowledge structures in knowledge bases by using a specific pattern of the stories used in the narrative pedagogy known as 'Zeigarnik effect' which is a form of creating suspense. Interviews with managers showed that they are positive to using the type of knowledge transfer as is proposed in the results of this thesis. Transcribed interviews with students show that the students appreciate and understand the use of analogies in combination with the ‘Zeigarnik effect’ as is described in the result of this thesis. After analysis of the data collected from the experiments, it was confirmed that ‘Zeigarnik effect’ has a small positive effect for a group of people as better results have been found in most of the time when ‘Zeigarnik effect’ was used as compared to when the ‘Zeigarnik effect’ was not used. The participants that experienced the ‘Zeigarnik effect’ answered in a better way which proved that their understanding and memory regarding the subject have been enhanced using it.