Previous investigations of the phenomenon of preferred adjective order in English have overlooked or ignored the influence of rhythmic stress in language recall. The importance of researching this dimension becomes evident when one attempts to understand preferred adjective order cross-culturally, particularly in languages such as Spanish and French where adjective order is flexible, but rhythmic stress is not. The hypothesis of the present experiment, that the nonstressed word of a phrase would be a better cue than the stressed word for the rest of the phrase was not substantiated. However, the finding that first word stress during input was the most relevant variable with respect to recalling phrases has important implications for speech perception and first language learning. In effect, the data suggest that the acoustical marker of first word stress constitute a perceptual strategy which is primary in learning English. The data are not comprehensive enough to generalize this principle to other languages, but certainly suggest the value of investigating such a possibility. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Background: The digital world of today alters the way consumers search, communicate, and perceive information significantly. Specifically, the traditional word-of-mouth, which refers to the exchange of information between consumers about products and brand, has become digitalized. This transforms word-of-mouth into electronic wordof-mouth, which serves as a user-generated information resource and can be accessed through various social media platforms. Problem: The ubiquitous presence of social media platform usage increases consumer’s exposure to electronic word-of-mouth reviews of goods and services. Previous studies primarily emphasized the effect of eWoM review quality and credibility, but neglected the reviewers that create the content of these reviews. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the influence that eWoM reviewers exert on Millennials’ purchasing behaviors. Method: A positivist approach was utilized together with a deductive approach in this quantitative study. A self-completion questionnaire which was distributed online, and the data collected from the respondents of it served as the primary data with academic literature serving as secondary data. The analysis of the data was processed in SPSS. Conclusion: The findings of this study show eWoM reviewers and their social currency affect the purchasing behaviors of Millennials. Furthermore, the study showed that the nature of the influence of eWoM reviewers was directed at entertaining, educating, and persuading Millennials rather than acquainting them with new products.

The goal of this thesis is to investigate the effects of different hotel response strategies to negative user-generated electronic word of mouth on online travel guide sites and subsequently to identify managerial implications that would lead to an effective online review management in the hotel industry. Three basic response strategies to a negative review were identified: no-response strategy, defensive response strategy and accommodating response strategy. An experimental research method with 240 respondents proved that accommodating response to a negative review has positive impact on customer's perception of a hotel. The most negative perception was observed by the defensive response strategy. The results of this experimental research were confirmed in a Mann-Whitney U-test.

Research over the past decade into the psychophysics of reading has demonstrated that information extracted from text falling on the parafoveal and peripheral regions of the retina is used by the human visual system to significantly increase reading speed. Recent results provide evidence that knowledge of word frequency is brought to bear in processing parafoveal data. There is other psychological evidence indicating the type of large-scale features used by the visual system to recognize isolated characters in parafoveal vision. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a system able to recognize the most commonly occurring english words and suffixes from parafoveally available information by employing knowledge of their letter sequences and of large-scale features of lower-case characters. The Marr-Hildreth theory of edge detection provides a description of the information computed by the earliest stages of visual processing from parafoveal words. Large-scale features extracted from this description, while relatively invariant with respect to noise and font changes, are insufficient to uniquely identify most characters but are used to place each into one of several classes of similar characters. The sequence of these 'confusion classes' is found to place a strong constraint on word identity—of the 1000 most common words comprising the system's vocabulary, representing 70% of the volume of the Brown Corpus of printed English, 92% have mutually unique confusion class sequences. Word recognition is achieved by using the confusion class sequence as a key into the vocabulary, retrieving the word or words having the same sequence. Suffixes are recognized in a similar way. Results are presented demonstrating the system's ability to identify words and suffixes in text images over a range of simulated parafoveal eccentricities and in two different fonts, one with serifs and one without. Smoothing by the Marr-Hildreth operator, the simplicity and scale of the features, the size of the character classes, and the context provided by the character sequence give the system a degree of robustness. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

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No description available.

Attention impairments are well documented in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Under associative accounts of early word learning, the attention impairments in children with ASD preclude them from developing effective learning strategies. In this study we examined whether children with ASD utilize the same attention cues for learning as their unaffected receptive-vocabulary mates. In a word-learning task, we asked: 1) whether hearing novel and attention-grabbing words cued children to shift their attention to the speaker, and 2) whether the children followed the gaze of the speaker to determine the speaker's focus of attention. We taught novel words in two conditions. One condition provided maximal social-attention scaffolding; the examiner followed the focus of the child's attention. The other was less scaffolded; the examiner directed the child's attention to the target using eye gaze. We manipulated the number of objects present during teaching, two versus four, to examine the effect of non-social attention scaffolding with scaffolding here defined as a reduction in distractions. Fifteen-children with ASD (ages 36-91 months) were matched to fifteen unaffected children (ages 16-92 months) on the basis of receptive vocabulary (RVM group). The ASD group's performance differed from the RVM group's performance on one measure: shifting attention to the speaker upon hearing a novel or attention-grabbing word on the initial trial. On all other measures, the ASD group's performance did not significantly differ from the RVM group's performance. Although there was not a significant effect of condition, closer analysis revealed that in the RVM and ASD groups, only the consistent-gaze followers' performed better than chance on the word-learning tasks. We hypothesize that, when all else is equal, providing a label does not make the target distinct enough to support word-referent pairings for children who are not consistently attending to the speaker. Overall, the ASD group demonstrated greater within group variability in their attention than the RVM group. Gaze following was variable across (and within) the ASD group. The within subject variability suggests some children with ASD are slow to appreciate eye gaze cues in unfamiliar contexts.

The purpose of this study was to develop, digitally record, evaluate, and psychometrically equate a set of Thai monosyllabic word lists to use in the measurement of word recognition ability. A native male and female talker from Thailand, who were judged to have a standard Thai dialect, participated as talkers in digitally recording familiar Thai monosyllabic words. Twenty native Thai participants were used as subjects to determine the percentage of correct word recognition for each word at 10 intensity levels ranging from --5 to 40 dB HL in 5 dB increments. The 200 words with the highest raw scores were included in the final word lists. Four lists of 50 words each were created and eight half-lists (25 words each) were created from the four lists. A chi-square analysis was performed, revealing no statistical differences among the lists and half-lists. The monosyllabic word data were analyzed using logistic regression to calculate threshold and slope for each list and half-list.

Diploma work reflects the issue of psychospiritutarian transformation. In this way, a local specific video installation was created aimed at the sensual experience of the viewer. The Film has approximately thirteen minutes and contains four parts, which arose from the archive of the recorded audiovisual material spinning on the camera with a fixed 50mm lens from May 2018. A special role plays a visual relationship that is traditionally linked to this phenomenon.

While we have traditionally understood the hippocampus to be involved in memory and navigation, it also appears that it has a role in language processing, creation and prediction. An obvious explanation for this is that language is impossible if linguistic signs cannot be remembered and retrieved. Because linguistic signs are definitionally biologically neutral or arbitrary, we must use the brain's apparatus for learning and storing information from the external world to store and retrieve them. Although plausible, this explanation fails to take into account the hippocampus' role in navigation as a contributing element in the processing, storage and retrieval of linguistic signs. Because the hippocampus also represents non-physical spaces through the same basic cognitive mechanisms with which it represents physical space, it is possible that the semantic content of linguistic signs is encoded in a fundamentally similar way to how navigational information is encoded. If true, this could have implications for education in general, and second language acquisition specifically. These experiments test whether there might be a learning benefit to presenting information in consistent spatial locations by having participants learn word associations in a 3-dimensional virtual environment. The experiments found that this was not the case. These findings have implications for education. Some educational paradigms stress learning in relevant contexts. These results suggest that physical location may not be an important component of a learning environment.