Previous natural observations have found a robust correlation between infants’ spontaneous gesture production and vocabulary development: the onset and frequency of infants’ pointing gestures are significantly correlated to their subsequent vocabulary size (Colonnesi, Stams, Koster, & Noom, 2010). The present study first examined the correlations between pointing and vocabulary size in an experimental setting, and then experimentally manipulated responses to pointing, to investigate the role of pointing in infants’ forming word-object associations. In the first experiment, we elicited 12- to 24-month old infants’ pointing gestures to 8 familiar and 8 novel objects. Their vocabulary was assessed by the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI): Words and Gestures. Results showed that 12-16 month old infants’ receptive vocabulary was positively correlated to infants’ spontaneous pointing. This correlation, however, was not significant in 19-24 month old infants. This experiment thus generalizes the previous naturalistic observation findings to an experimental setting, and shows a developmental change in the relation between pointing and receptive vocabulary. Together with prior studies, it suggests a possible positive social feedback loop of pointing and language skills in infants younger than 18 months old: the bigger vocabulary size infants have, the more likely they point, the more words they hear, and then the faster they develop their vocabulary. In the second experiment, we tested whether 16-month-old infants’ pointing gestures facilitate infants’ word learning in the moment. Infants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: the experimenter labeled an unfamiliar object with a novel name 1) immediately after the infant pointed to it (the point contingent condition); 2) when the infant looked at it; or 3) at a schedule predetermined by a vocabulary-matched infant in the point contingent condition. After hearing the objects’ names, infants were presented with a word learning test. Results showed that infants successfully selected the correct referent above chance level only in the point contingent condition, and their performance was significantly better in the point contingent condition than the other two conditions. Therefore, only words that were provided contingently after pointing were learned. Taken together, these two studies further our understanding of the correlation between early gesture and vocabulary development and suggest that pointing plays a role in early word learning.

Schools in Florida used the multitiered system of support response to intervention framework to help students achieve the state and national standards but, in the national report card, 61% of the fourth-graders assessed in mathematics failed to achieve proficiency. Research indicated that the students lacked mathematical word problem-solving skills. The purpose of the qualitative study was to discover how fourth-grade special and general education teachers used the response to intervention framework evidence-based curriculum, instruction, intervention, assessment, and student data to teach math word problem-solving skills to children who have persistent and significant difficulties. Welner'€™s zone of mediation framework and Vygotsky'€™s sociocultural theory form the conceptual framework for the study. The teachers provided data through in-depth interviews, math intervention program, training document, teachers'€™ guides, assessment tools, and observation. All the data was uploaded to the latest version of NVivo and analyzed based on the research questions. The study findings showed that participants used all the features of the response to intervention framework to teach math word problem-solving skills and address the needs of at-risk students. Teachers should continuously reinforce math vocabulary, terminology, and math reading comprehension skills of students. Administrators and teachers should be able to use the findings of this study to improve the use of the response to intervention features to develop the math word problem-solving skills of students and influence teachers'€™ pedagogical practices.

A “biomedical event” is a broad term used to describe the roles and interactions between entities (such as proteins, genes and cells) in a biological system. The task of biomedical event extraction aims at identifying and extracting these events from unstructured texts. An important component in the early stage of the task is biomedical trigger classification which involves identifying and classifying words/phrases that indicate an event. In this thesis, we present our work on biomedical trigger classification developed using the multi-level event extraction dataset. We restrict the scope of our classification to 19 biomedical event types grouped under four broad categories - Anatomical, Molecular, General and Planned. While most of the existing approaches are based on traditional machine learning algorithms which require extensive feature engineering, our model relies on neural networks to implicitly learn important features directly from the text. We use natural language processing techniques to transform the text into vectorized inputs that can be used in a neural network architecture. As per our knowledge, this is the first time neural attention strategies are being explored in the area of biomedical trigger classification. Our best results were obtained from an ensemble of 50 models which produced a micro F-score of 79.82%, an improvement of 1.3% over the previous best score.

Many students who are proficient with basic math facts struggle for understanding when it comes to word problems. Teachers time and time again teach and re-teach problem solving strategies in hope that their students will one day acquire all the skills necessary to become proficient in this area. Unfortunately understanding problem solving skills is not the only answer to solving word problems. There has been a significant amount of evidence linking reading comprehension to mathematical reasoning. The development of a website to assist teachers and students who are having difficulties with mathematical word problems is extremely beneficial. The website is designed with links, power points, and examples that enhance reading comprehension within mathematical word problems. Through this project, it has been determined that students who are exposed to an additional mathematical program related to breaking apart word problems show evidence of a greater understanding and mastery of solving mathematical word problems.

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Verbal communication relies heavily on the ability to effortlessly produce intended words to express a meaning. This capacity is frequently impaired in individuals with aphasia, and impairment often lasts well into the chronic stages. However, the nature of anomia can vary. Phonological neighborhood density (PND) is one feature of words which has been shown to impact the ease of retrieval in speakers with aphasia; words with more similar-sounding neighbors are easier to retrieve because the neighbors help activate the target. However, it is unclear how different types of lexical access breakdowns affect the impact of PND. The aim of this project was to analyze the relationship between word retrieval accuracy, speech error patterns, and PND in individuals with aphasia. Twenty-two participants with various types and severities of aphasia named 200 single-syllable line drawings. WebFit, an online software program designed to fit naming data to a theoretical model of word retrieval, was used to characterize participants' error patterns by calculating the strength of connections within the lexicon, as well as the rate of decay. Analyses confirmed previous findings that participants with all types of breakdown achieved lower rates of overall accuracy. Weaker connections between semantic knowledge and words resulted in a more errors that were close to the target, relative to errors with no relationship to the target. Individuals with more severe impairments of the semantic-lexical connections and the lexical-phonological connections produced words with many neighbors more accurately than words with fewer neighbors. Implications for initial therapy target selection and directions for further research are discussed.

In order to learn a new word, a young child must extricate the correct object from multiple possible items in front of them, make an initial association between the specific word-form and the particular referent, robustly link the new word and referent and integrate the new word into their lexicon. Recent research suggests processes that focus attention on the most novel objects in a complex environment, as well as the child's own developing vocabulary play critical roles in this process. This thesis aims to understand the influence of novelty and prior vocabulary knowledge on referent selection and how the interaction of novelty and knowledge can lead to word learning. A series of empirical studies first probed the use of children's endogenous novelty bias in a referent selection task, and then explored how the use of novelty was related to retention of newly mapped word-referent pairs. A second set of studies explored children's use of vocabulary knowledge in ambiguous learning situations by varying the strength of knowledge for competing items present during novel word learning. Finally, a Hebbian Normalized Recurrent Network model was used to explore the underlying associative process of referent selection and retention in novelty- or knowledge-based word learning tasks. Counter to prior work, results here suggest that novelty can override knowledge and in fact, be a detriment to word learning. Children demonstrate a novelty bias across multiple contexts and tasks, but the dominant use of novelty does not translate to retention and does not appear to implicate the use of the child's lexicon. As novelty diminishes and vocabulary knowledge increases, some children can overcome this bias and demonstrate retention for new word-referent pairs. Moreover, the results also suggest that when disambiguation requires the use of weak prior knowledge, more cognitive processing is necessary. The increases in processing subsequently translate to retention for new word-referent pairs. The empirical and computational results together suggest potential limitations of these findings to word learning and suggest future directions exploring variability in object and word representations during learning.

Previous work shows that young children focus on holistic (or overall) similarity and older children focus on dimensional similarity (selectively attending to one property to the exclusion of others). Research on early word learning, however, suggests that process of learning new words trains attention towards category-relevant dimensions via regularities in the linguistic and physical environment. Thus, over development, children learn to attend to specific dimensions when making nominal category judgments--they selectively attend to shape, for example, when learning names for solid objects. In four experiments, I asked a question fundamental to our understanding of dimensional attention: does word learning scaffold attention to dimensional similarity in more general contexts. The results of Experiment 1 showed that children who are holistic classifiers are slower than dimensional classifiers to learn categories of objects that vary along both a category-relevant dimension (e.g. size) and a category-irrelevant dimension (e.g. brightness). However, the results of Experiment 2 showed that when children were presented with incidental labels during category learning, holistic classifiers learn the categories as quickly as dimensional classifiers. In a follow-up similarity classification task, children who had been holistic classifiers showed an increase in dimensional attention only if they had been in the label experiment. In Experiments 3 and 4, I examined category learning with and without a label in children who preferred to selectively attend to one dimension of similarity (e.g. brightness) regardless of whether this means selecting dimensional or holistic matches in a classification task. The results of these experiments provide a more complete picture of the continuous developmental trajectory of increasing selective and flexible dimensional attention. By showing how labels support dimensional attention, these results clarify the processes involved in development of similarity perception and potentially unify our understanding of attentional processes in word learning with those in a broader context.

Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate that online complainants' reactions to a company's service recovery attempts (webcare) can significantly vary across two different types of dissatisfied customers ("vindictives" vs "constructives"), who have dramatically diverging complaint Goal orientations. Design/methodology/Approach: Online multi-country survey among 812 adult consumers who recently had a dissatisfying brand experience and turned to a marketer-generated social media site to voice an online complaint for achieving their ultimate complaining goals. Scenario-based online experiment for cross-validating the survey findings. Findings: Results suggest that "vindictive complainants" - driven dominantly by brand-adverse motives - are immune to any form of webcare, while "constructive complainants" - interested in restoring the customer-brand relationship - react more sensitively. For the latter, "no-responses" often trigger detrimental brand-related reactions (e.g. unfavorable brand image), whereas "defensive Responses" are likely to stimulate postwebcare negative word-of-mouth. Research limitations/implications: This research identifies the gains and harms of (un-)desired webcare. By doing so, it not only sheds light on the circumstances when marketers have to fear negative effects (e.g. negative word-of-mouth) but also provides insights into the conditions when such effects are unlikely. While the findings of the cross-sectional survey are validated with an online experiment, findings should be interpreted with care as other complaining contexts should be further investigated. Practical implications: Marketers have to expect a serious "backfiring effect" from an unexpected source, namely, consumers who were initially benevolent toward the involved brand but who received an inappropriate response.

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