<p>Denna kandidatuppsats handlar om modebloggar och deras påverkan på konsumenters agerande. I dagens konsumtionssamhälle står mode högt i kurs och bloggläsare tar dagligen in information om nya produkter och varumärken genom word of mouth. En undersökning som Mahir PR har gjort visar att 58 procent av bloggläsarna faktiskt har köpt en identisk vara som de tidigare sett i en modeblogg. Vårt syfte är således att från Mahir PRs undersökning vidare beskriva på vilket sätt modebloggar påverkar konsumenters agerande. Vi har använt oss av teori kring word of mouth, samt Solomons kommunikationsmodell där massmedias information filtreras av olika opinionsledare eller grindvakter innan de når mottagarna/konsumenterna. Vi skriver även om referensgruppers påverkan, och informationskällans trovärdighet. Till vår empiri valde vi att genomföra tio intervjuer med modeintresserade bloggläsare som faktiskt valt att konsumera efter att ha läst en modeblogg.</p><p>Resultatet visar på att det är personen bakom modebloggen som påverkar läsarna mer än själva bloggen. Vi kommer även fram till att många läsare påverkas undermedvetet utav modebloggar. Dock tar få till sig modebloggerskornas åsikter direkt utan att rådgöra med sina vänner först. Detta för att de ska känna sig bekväma i sociala situationer med de nya trenderna.</p><p>Nyckelord</p><p>: Opinionsledare, word of mouth, referensgrupper, modeblogg, blogg</p>

Contract no. DA36-039-AMC-03200(E).

The need for robust and easily extensible systems for word sense disambiguation coupled with successes in training systems for a variety of tasks using large on-line corpora has led to extensive research into corpus-based statistical approaches to this problem. Promising results have been achieved by vector space representations of context, clustering combined with a semantic knowledge base, and decision lists based on collocational relations. We evaluate these techniques with respect to three important criteria: how their definition of context affects their ability to incorporate different types of disambiguating information, how they define similarity among senses, and how easily they can generalize to new senses. The strengths and weaknesses of these systems provide guidance for future systems which must capture and model a variety of disambiguating information, both syntactic and semantic.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-73). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.(Teologie)--Universiteit van Pretoria, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-117)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-168). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D. in Religion)--Vanderbilt University, May 2006. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

The present study explores the role of the word position-in-text in sentence and paragraph reading. Three eye-movement data sets based on the reading of Dutch and German unrelated sentences reveal a sizeable, replicable increase in reading times over several words in the beginning and the end of sentences. The data from the paragraphbased English-language Dundee corpus replicate the pattern and also indicate that the increase in inspection times is driven by the visual boundaries of the text organized in lines, rather than by syntactic sentence boundaries. We argue that this effect is independent of several established lexical, contextual and oculomotor predictors of eye-movement behavior. We also provide evidence that the effect of word position-intext has two independent components: a start-up effect arguably caused by a strategic oculomotor program of saccade planning over the line of text, and a wrap-up effect originating in cognitive processes of comprehension and semantic integration.

Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to previous and next words. Results are based on fixation durations recorded from 222 persons, each reading 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes.

The general aim of this thesis was to examine variations in the word decoding skills of reading disabled children. These variations were related to possible cognitive, developmental, and environmental causes of reading disability. Possible implications for educational interventions were also analysed. The thesis critically examines the inclusion of the concept of intelligence in the definition of developmental dyslexia. It is suggested that variations in word decoding skills should offer a more solid basis for a study of varieties of reading disability. The empirical studies showed that a) in young children there was a shift from phonological to orthographic word decoding; b) phonological type children (weak in phonological decoding) were characterised by specific phonological deficits; c) surface type children (weak in orthographic decoding) showed more global cognitive deficits suggesting a general developmental delay; d) surface type children showed impaired visual implicit memory for words, which might be associated with limited print exposure; e) an improvement in phonological awareness only transferred to an improved text reading ability for some reading disabled children; f) children who did not benefit from a phonological intervention seemed to rely on orthographic word decoding in text reading. Thus, the thesis suggests that variations in phonological and orthographic word decoding skills offer a useful basis for the study of varieties of reading disability and that educational interventions should pay regard to what the child is already attempting to do when reading. / On the day of the defence date the status of article IV was: Manuscript.