Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1982.

Thesis (M.A.)--Marshall University, 2002. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 25 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 15-18).

Thesis (M. Mus.)--Universiteit van Pretoria, 1996. / Paper copy accompanied by a sound cassette. Abstract in Afrikaans and English. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (D. Mus.)--University of Pretoria, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

As the role of emerging markets become increasingly important in today‘s global economy, recent research has proliferated in topics such as new marketing perspectives (Sheth, 2011), successful firm entry (Johnson and Tellis, 2008), and innovation in emerging markets (Immelt, Govindarajan, and Trimble, 2009). Innovation in particular has become an important topic. Following this line of research this two-part thesis covers two different perspectives of firm innovation in an emerging market: (1) How domestic Chinese firms globalize and learn through innovation and (2) How foreign firms effectively innovate within China. Through this two-part thesis, I hope to contribute to the growing body of literature on firms’ strategies, particularly in developing innovative capacity for performance, in emerging markets. In the first part, I investigate how domestic Chinese firms learn through innovation and other mechanisms, as they internationalize through exporting activities. As China continues to display its influence on developed markets and the global economy, it is increasingly important to examine issues surrounding the globalization of Chinese firms. Research has documented a “learning-by-exporting” (LBE) effect in which firms (especially from emerging markets) learn through exporting, leading to productivity improvements. Yet prior studies have not discovered the exact learning mechanisms involved. Thus, this study “opens the black box” in examining how and under what conditions firms learn and achieve these productivity gains. I posit that firms leverage their learning through innovativeness, production capability improvements and managerial improvements. I test my hypotheses with panelized data on over 240,000 privately-owned Chinese firms between 2001 and 2007. All three mechanisms show a parallel and significant mediation between firm exporting and firm productivity. Furthermore, I find that the salience of these mechanisms is contingent upon industry characteristics: firms in industries with intensive R&D and moderate exporting demonstrate the most learning through all three conduits. In the second part, I take a reverse perspective and investigate how foreign firms set up their operations in China with the purpose of innovating, and highlight the effective strategies involved in this process. Foreign firms are increasingly moving their research operations to emerging markets, which represents a new technology strategy involving significant investments in R&D resources and local technological talent. Using absorptive capacity as a theoretical framework, I examine the effectiveness of this strategy and its boundary conditions. Specifically, how can establishing a local knowledge base (reflecting path dependency), obtaining local government support (to mitigate appropriability risks), and employing a strongly controlled organizational mode (wholly owned subsidiaries) facilitate foreign firms’ technology strategy in an emerging market? To test these postulates, I consider the innovative and local market performance of 524 foreign firms (216 wholly owned foreign subsidiaries and 308 international joint ventures) in China in 2008. The significant empirical support for my hypotheses contributes to the growing literature on foreign firms’ R&D strategy, emerging market innovations, and organizational entry modes. / published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This study examined the nonsymbolic numerical magnitude processing in Chinese first graders with marked mathematics difficulties (MD) and typically achieving peers. The approximate number system (ANS) view has suggested that children with MD may have deficit in the internal representation of magnitudes. Chinese first-graders with MD were compared with age-matched typically achieving children on approximate numerical comparison, approximate addition and multiplication tasks. Children with MD were found to perform significantly worse than their age-matched controls in all tasks. Students before formal instruction in multiplication yielded an above-chance level of performance in approximate multiplication task, which suggested the existence of approximate multiplicative ability. After formal instruction in multiplication, the MD group performed significantly worse than controls in approximate multiplication task and arithmetic tests. Only normally achieving children showed significant improvement after formal instruction. This study provided further evidence for an intuitive numerical processing in arithmetic operation, and the result had significant implication to the diagnosis of MD and intervention on mathematics difficulties. / published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Procedural memory consolidation has been shown to enhance a variety of perceptual and motor skills during sleep. Only recently has this effect been investigated in trained musicians performing music. I tested the extent to which a music performance skill benefited from sleep-based consolidation overnight and whether this process may be inhibited when musicians learn two melodies in juxtaposition. 60 experienced musicians, all nonpianists, learned to perform either one or two 13-note piano melodies during evening training sessions. The musicians practiced each melody with their nondominant hand by repeating it from beginning to end during 12 30-second practice blocks alternating with 30-second rest intervals. All participants were retested on the target melody the following morning in three 30-second retest blocks alternating with 30-second rest intervals. Participants who learned only one melody in the evening showed overnight gains in the number of correct key presses per block (CKP/B) in the target melody at retest. Participants who learned the target melody and an additional melody at training showed no overnight gains in CKP/B in the target melody. Participants who learned both melodies and then immediately were retested on the target melody at training showed overnight gains in CKP/B in the morning retest of the target melody--gains similar to those observed among the participants who learned only the target melody at training; this group showed no decrement in the performance of the target melody in the retest at the end of training, which indicates that there were no immediate interference effects apparent in the target melody after having learned the second melody. These results show that experienced learners performing a familiar type of task, and one that includes auditory processing demands, benefit from overnight consolidation of procedural memories. These benefits may be inhibited, however, when musicians learn similar, competing tasks in juxtaposition. / text

Motor unit synchronization is phenomenon driven by a common input that results in the near-simultaneous firing of two or more motor units, which is referred to as short-term synchronization. The relationship between motor unit synchronization and force steadiness is still unclear, even after numerous experiments and simulations. Our main hypothesis was that the decreased force tetanus brought on by motor unit synchronization would be correlated to reduced steadiness at very low hand muscle forces. To determine if this correlation existed, young, healthy adults performed a submaximal, isometric pinch at four forces to determine if motor unit synchronization increased with a progressive decrease in force steadiness driven by reduced force levels. However, before performing synchronization analyses, we had to establish the best technique for measuring motor unit coherence, which quantifies the strength and frequency of a periodic common input. We used a pool of simulated spike trains with various firing rates, coefficients of variation (CV), common input frequencies and trial durations to explore the effects of data segmentation and spike train properties on coherence. We found that tapered segments overlapped by at least 50% maximized coherence measurements, regardless of taper type and that increasing common input frequency CV from 0.15-0.50 made coherence measurements unusable, even at high synchronization levels. During an isometric pinch at 2, 4, 8, and 12% of maximum digit force, we recorded thumb and index finger forces and EMG from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and adductor pollicis (AdP) muscles. As expected, the force CV dropped as each digit force increased. Pooled coherence revealed a dominant peak for the 2-10 Hz, but power for both digits' forces was limited to the 0-2 Hz bandwidth. There was a weak correlation for thumb force CV and coherence for within-AdP pairs, but no significant correlations were found for within-FDI pair coherence and finger force CV. Therefore, motor unit synchronization was not a strong driver of force steadiness for this protocol. To ensure that inherent firing rate nonstationarity of spike train data did not affect coherence measurements, we produced a new set of spike train pairs with firing rates and variances that approximated those for physiological motor units, which varied from 0-25%. Stationarity level was not significantly correlated to peak coherence (max R² = 0.082). Therefore, coherence measurements of spike train data with characteristics similar to those of the simulated trains were not significantly affected by nonstationarity. The establishment of the best method for computing coherence, the lack of a strong correlation between force steadiness and motor unit synchronization for submaximal isometric forces, and the knowledge that spike train nonstationarity has no significant effect on coherence measurements are all important discoveries needed for progress in the areas of basic neuromuscular function, motor unit synchronization, and pathological force unsteadiness.

This study examined the effects of a narrative intervention for second graders with poor narrative ability. Second graders in one school were screened for narrative ability and 36 students with poor oral narrative skills were randomly assigned to an intervention or comparison group (no narrative instruction). The intervention group participated in 22, 30-minute small group narrative instruction sessions for 8 weeks. Intervention focused on macrostructure and microstructure aspects of narrative. Before and after the 8-week intervention, students in both groups were evaluated by the Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004), a measure of narrative production and narrative comprehension. In addition, students were given a researcher-developed measure that assessed knowledge of specific words encountered in intervention materials. Narratives were also analyzed with respect to microstructure and macrostructure elements. Three separate Analyses of Covariance (ANCOVA) were conducted using the following dependent variables with each pretest score used as a covariate: (1) the narrative comprehension subtest of the Test of Narrative Language (TNL), (2) the oral narration subtest of the TNL, and (3) a researcher-developed vocabulary test. Practical significance effect size results indicated that there was a statistically significant intervention/comparison group difference effect on oral narration ability (effect size = 1.45) and specific vocabulary knowledge (effect size = 1.32); however, there was no significant difference between group posttest scores on the narrative comprehension subtest (effect size = .19). In addition, English language learners in the intervention group (n = 3) performed similarly to their peers.

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Philosophy