No description available.

No description available.

For centuries referential theories of language and meaning have dominated Western philosophy. The idea that noises and scratches become meaningful words and writing by virtue of a mental grasp one has on the referents they are talking about has become deeply entrenched. Starting with Plato, and reinvented by Locke, contemporary theorists continue to reproduce this mental fix requirement (MFR) in their philosophies of language and intentionality-Physicalists, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland are typical. Plato, Locke and the Churchlands all share the view that bits of language reach out to extra-linguistic entities by some act of mind (for Plato the mind grasped referents via the Forms, for Locke Ideas bridged the relation, and the Churchland's, brain states). In each case a self-referential mental act gets language up and running, i.e. mental connections (or representations) to referents do the trick. My question also concerns what makes squiggles and noises meaningful. The question is a nested one-ancillary to it are questions of what makes language work? How do words mean or relate to the world? How do speakers mean certain things and not others? I will approach the question from a contextualist perspective where roles in rule-governed activities are the bottom line, not representations in the mind/brain.

The topic of this thesis is how the decline of cognitive abilities and memory functioning in elder people can be assisted by external memory aids. This issue was approached through a combination of methods. The starting point was a literature review of two approaches to the study of memory – the traditional where memory functions are located in the brain and the situated where remembering transcends over external resources, and by a literature review on declining memory abilities in elderly people. An ethnographic study of everyday remembering in an older population, aged from 72 to 91, found many instances of the spontaneous use of the environment to support a declining memory ability, which in turn suggest that the traditional approach to memory research is of limited value when studying everyday memory abilities in older people. A study on existing memory aids, as well as memory aids currently under development in research laboratories showed that these technologies are primarily based on an explicit or implicit traditional view of memory that disregard several aspects of remembering in the natural world. It is therefore suggested that future development of memory aids could fruitfully benefit from a distributed and situated approach, where the individuals‘ current use of external memory aids are used as the starting point, with the goal of extending and amplifying methods and artefacts already spontaneously in use.

Agile programming methods have become popular in software development projects. These methods increase productivity and support teamwork processes. In this thesis, we have analyzed three well-known Agile methods - Scrum, Extreme Programming and Crystal Orange - from the perspective of situated cognition to investigate how well the methods support cognition. Specifically, we looked at how the methods aid memory and attention through the use of external representations. The study suggests that the methods support different aspects of situated cognition reasonably well. However, among the investigated methods, Scrum stands out due to aspects of task representation (progress charts), its approaches to externalize what-to-do (memory), and the means to focus on the important programming tasks for the day (attention).

Cette thèse propose d’étudier le rôle de la musique dans des contextes émotionnels intenses. Dans les rituels d’invocation de Dieu, les soufis tentent d’accéder à un état spirituel supérieur en s’approchant de la connaissance immanente du monde divin. La confrérie šaḏiliyya place la musique au cœur de ce processus : l’écoute de poèmes d’amour mystique chantés, puis la production collective de gestes dansés porte l’émotion à son paroxysme, en une extase contemplative (wajd). Entre ethnomusicologie et psychologie cognitive, cette thèse présente des pistes de réflexion pour l’étude des musiques vocales de tradition orale et leur expressivité. Dans un premier temps, une étude ethnographique dépeint le quotidien d’une confrérie damascène, pour tenter de déterminer les éléments musicaux pouvant être source d’émotion. Après une exposition des théories psychologiques cognitives de l’émotion, une analyse musicale acoustique s’intéresse plus particulièrement aux stratégies de deux interprètes. / The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate the role of music in intense emotional contexts. In Sufi invocation rituals, believers try to reach to a superior spiritual state in their quest for divine knowledge. The šaḏiliyya brotherhood includes music at the core of this process : by listening to mystic love songs followed by collective dancing, emotion reaches its paroxysm in an ecstatic contemplation (wajd). This dissertation lies in between the fields of ethnomusicology and cognitive psychology. It introduces several lines of thinking concerning the study of vocal music belonging to the oral tradition and its expressivity. First, a description of a Damascene brotherhood doctrine will highlight emotional elements in rituals. Then, following a presentation of major theories of emotions in cognitive psychology, two interpretations of the same work will be compared using acoustic and prosodic methods of analysis.

In this dissertation, I criticize current approaches to moral cognition research and develop an embodied account of moral cognizing. Contemporary research into moral cognizing is strongly influenced by an orthodox cognitive mindset. Modern approaches to cognitive science, especially situated, i.e., embodied-enacted, approaches emphasize the role of affectivity, emotions, bodily experiences, sociality, culture, interpersonal relationship, and dynamic interactions in human cognizing. However, these non-orthodox approaches have only occasionally been applied to the study of the moral mind. The embodied account defended analyzes moral actions in terms of an agent's engagement with the world. Agents acquire a repertoire of possible interactions with the world rooted in their sensorimotor expertise. This embodied view of moral action focuses on the role culture, sociality, and interpersonal relations play in contextualizing actions and constituting an agent's identity. Enactive theory provides a broader cognitive framework to understand embodied action and moral identity, overcoming the dominant logic of doing and being done to, opening up moral agency to a sphere of joint action.

In order to investigate ways pre-service student teachers (PSTs) might learn to teach with high-level tasks and effectively incorporate student thinking into their lessons a teaching experiment was designed and carried out by the cooperating teacher/researcher (CT). The intervention was for the CT to interject into the lessons of the PSTs during moments of opportunity. By interjecting a small question or comment during the lesson the CT hoped to support the learning of both the students of mathematics in the class and the PSTs. This in-the-moment interjecting was meant to enhance and underscore the situated learning of the PSTs within the context of actual practice. Essentially the PSTs learned how to manage and improve the discourse of the classroom in the moment of the discourse. This study utilized both an ongoing analysis of the data during collection in order to inform the instruction provided by the CT and a retrospective analysis of the data in order to develop an understanding of the developmental sequence through which PSTs progressed. The results suggest the interjections provided to the PSTs served multiple roles within the domains of mathematical development for the students of mathematics and pedagogical development for the PSTs. A classification of the interjections that occurred and the stages of development through which PSTs passed will be discussed. Implications from this work include increased attention to the groundwork leading up to the student teaching experience as well as an adjustment to the role of cooperating teacher to be more that of a teacher educator.

One of the principles regarding our knowledge about life on earth is that no organism can be fully understood without taking into account its surrounding environment. This study examines the extent to which ecosystem-focused field studies may be associated with students' academic performance and potential to contribute to the advancement of science and conservation. Pilot studies conducted in Panama and California established methods used in this project from 1993-2003. Two hundred and sixty-seven students conducted field studies in either Kenya or Costa Rica. Students worked in cognitive apprenticeships, in which research staff trained each student to conduct field research. At the conclusion of their fieldwork, the research staff assessed the students written field reports. The students' reports were then sorted according to the extent to which their studies were ecosystem-focused. Data analysis through nonparametric, Kruskal-Wallis statistical tests revealed no significant difference in academic performance on field study reports, in regards to whether the studies were narrow in scope (species-specific) or broad (ecosystem-focused). Marginal significance was revealed between ecosystem-focused studies and the potential for students' fieldwork to contribute to the advancement of science and conservation. Also addressed in the data were injuries, disease, and potential hazards, which were influenced by prudent and decisive leadership. Successful field studies require consideration of the content, context, and design of the intended field projects. Many of the solutions to environmental problems on the planet will come from the working hands of teachers and students that conduct explorations in the field. / Life Sciences in Education / D. Phil. (Mathematics, Science and Technology Education)

Notre recherche se situe en lexicographie computationnelle, et concerne non seulement le support informatique aux ressources lexicales utiles pour la TA (traduction automatique) et la THAM (traduction humaine aidée par la machine), mais aussi l'architecture linguistique des bases lexicales supportant ces ressources, dans un contexte opérationnel (thèse CIFRE avec L&M).Nous commençons par une étude de l'évolution des idées, depuis l'informatisation des dictionnaires classiques jusqu'aux plates-formes de construction de vraies "bases lexicales" comme JIBIKI-1 [Mangeot, M. et al., 2003 ; Sérasset, G., 2004] et JIBIKI-2 [Zhang, Y. et al., 2014]. Le point de départ a été le système PIVAX-1 [Nguyen, H.-T. et al., 2007 ; Nguyen, H. T. & Boitet, C., 2009] de bases lexicales pour systèmes de TA hétérogènes à pivot lexical supportant plusieurs volumes par "espace lexical" naturel ou artificiel (UNL). En prenant en compte le contexte industriel, nous avons centré notre recherche sur certains problèmes, informatiques et lexicographiques.Pour passer à l'échelle, et pour profiter des nouvelles fonctionnalités permises par JIBIKI-2, dont les "liens riches", nous avons transformé PIVAX-1 en PIVAX-2, et réactivé le projet GBDLEX-UW++ commencé lors du projet ANR TRAOUIERO, en réimportant toutes les données (multilingues) supportées par PIVAX-1, et en les rendant disponibles sur un serveur ouvert.Partant d'un besoin de L&M concernant les acronymes, nous avons étendu la "macrostructure" de PIVAX en y intégrant des volumes de "prolexèmes", comme dans PROLEXBASE [Tran, M. & Maurel, D., 2006]. Nous montrons aussi comment l'étendre pour répondre à de nouveaux besoins, comme ceux du projet INNOVALANGUES. Enfin, nous avons créé un "intergiciel de lemmatisation", LEXTOH, qui permet d'appeler plusieurs analyseurs morphologiques ou lemmatiseurs, puis de fusionner et filtrer leurs résultats. Combiné à un nouvel outil de création de dictionnaires, CREATDICO, LEXTOH permet de construire à la volée un "mini-dictionnaire" correspondant à une phrase ou à un paragraphe d'un texte en cours de "post-édition" en ligne sous IMAG/SECTRA, ce qui réalise la fonctionnalité d'aide lexicale proactive prévue dans [Huynh, C.-P., 2010]. On pourra aussi l'utiliser pour créer des corpus parallèles "factorisés" pour construire des systèmes de TA en MOSES. / Our research is in computational lexicography, and concerns not only the computer support to lexical resources useful for MT (machine translation) and MAHT (Machine Aided Human Translation), but also the linguistic architecture of lexical databases supporting these resources in an operational context (CIFRE thesis with L&M).We begin with a study of the evolution of ideas in this area, since the computerization of classical dictionaries to platforms for building up true "lexical databases" such as JIBIKI-1 [Mangeot, M. et al., 2003 ; Sérasset, G., 2004] and JIBIKI-2 [Zhang, Y. et al., 2014]. The starting point was the PIVAX-1 system [Nguyen, H.-T. et al., 2007 ; Nguyen, H. T. & Boitet, C., 2009] designed for lexical bases for heterogeneous MT systems with a lexical pivot, able to support multiple volumes in each "lexical space", be it natural or artificial (as UNL). Considering the industrial context, we focused our research on some issues, in informatics and lexicography.To scale up, and to add some new features enabled by JIBIKI-2, such as the "rich links", we have transformed PIVAX-1 into PIVAX-2, and reactivated the GBDLEX-UW++ project that started during the ANR TRAOUIERO project, by re-importing all (multilingual) data supported by PIVAX-1, and making them available on an open server.Hence a need for L&M for acronyms, we expanded the "macrostructure" of PIVAX incorporating volumes of "prolexemes" as in PROLEXBASE [Tran, M. & Maurel, D., 2006]. We also show how to extend it to meet new needs such as those of the INNOVALANGUES project. Finally, we have created a "lemmatisation middleware", LEXTOH, which allows calling several morphological analyzers or lemmatizers and then to merge and filter their results. Combined with a new dictionary creation tool, CREATDICO, LEXTOH allows to build on the fly a "mini-dictionary" corresponding to a sentence or a paragraph of a text being "post-edited" online under IMAG/SECTRA, which performs the lexical proactive support functionality foreseen in [Huynh, C.-P., 2010]. It could also be used to create parallel corpora with the aim to build MOSES-based "factored MT systems".