A need has been established for aural rehabilitation (AR) sessions throughout the years. The literature reviewed here demonstrates that new hearing aid users do benefit from a structured follow-up AR program. However, this need is often not met for a variety of patient and audiologist related factors. Therefore, an AR program that could be viewed at home has been suggested. I have developed a prototype for a CD-ROM based aural rehabilitation (AR) program. Included in the program are communication and speechreading strategies, which are the most prevalent materials in AR. The instructional and interaction portions of the prototype were created to be understood by the average person. The prototype includes the use of video, graphics, and audio to support the written information and to incorporate a sense of excitement into the CD-ROM based program.

The purpose of this study was to examine how motivation and anxiety within learners studying a foreign language are affected by a participant's language requirement (whether a participant has a language requirement as part of their education), language class level, and language learning environment (those with traditional classroom verses significant in- country experience). The current study surveyed and analyzed the responses of 124 students currently enrolled in a language class at Brigham Young University. Self- reported survey results demonstrate the relationship between motivation and anxiety with relation to language class level, language learning experience, and language requirement fulfillment. Further analyses were done in order to explore the interaction of different types of motivation (instrumental, integrative, intrinsic and resultative) and different types of anxiety (classroom, text anxiety and fear of negative evaluation) on the three factors examined in this study. Results indicated that there was a significant difference in motivation for participants whose major required taking foreign language courses and those whose major did not require a foreign language. Specifically, the results of the sub types of motivation (integrative, intrinsic, instrumental, and resultative) indicated that those that were required to take the language as a requirement had higher instrumental motivation than those that were not required to take a foreign language. The second significant finding of this study is that there was no effect on motivation and anxiety levels of participants with regard to language class level with one exception. Students at the 200 level had greater language class anxiety and lower resultative motivation than the other levels did. The third significant finding was that significant in- country experience did not affect motivation or anxiety. These results demonstrate that several factors may influence students' motivation and anxiety levels when learning a foreign language.

This dissertation presents a knowledge-guided expert system that is capable of applying routinesfor multispectral analysis, (un)supervised clustering, and basic image processing to automatically detect and segment brain tissue abnormalities, and then label glioblastoma-multiforme brain tumors in magnetic resonance volumes of the human brain. The magnetic resonance images used here consist of three feature images (T1-weighted, proton density, T2-weighted) and the system is designed to be independent of a particular scanning protocol. Separate, but contiguous 2D slices in the transaxial plane form a brain volume. This allows complete tumor volumes to be measured and if repeat scans are taken over time, the system may be used to monitor tumor response to past treatments and aid in the planning of future treatment. Furthermore, once processing begins, the system is completely unsupervised, thus avoiding the problems of human variability found in supervised segmentation efforts. Each slice is initially segmented by an unsupervised fuzzy c-means algorithm. The segmented image, along with its respective cluster centers, is then analyzed by a rule-based expert system which iteratively locates tissues of interest based on the hierarchy of cluster centers in feature space. Model-based recognition techniques analyze tissues of interest by searching for expected characteristics and comparing those found with previously defined qualitative models. Normal/abnormal classification is performed through a default reasoning method: if a significant model deviation is found, the slice is considered abnormal. Otherwise, the slice is considered normal. Tumor segmentation in abnormal slices begins with multispectral histogram analysis and thresholding to separate suspected tumor from the rest of the intra-cranial region. The tumor is then refined with a variant of seed growing, followed by spatial component analysis and a final thresholding step to remove non-tumor pixels. The knowledge used in this system was extracted from general principles of magnetic resonance imaging, the distributions of individual voxels and cluster centers in feature space, and anatomical information. Knowledge is used both for single slice processing and information propagation between slices. A standard rule-based expert system shell (CLIPS) was modified to include the multispectral analysis, clustering, and image processing tools. A total of sixty-three volume data sets from eight patients and seventeen volunteers (four with and thirteen without gadolinium enhancement) were acquired from a single magnetic resonance imaging system with slightly varying scanning protocols were available for processing. All volumes were processed for normal/abnormal classification. Tumor segmentation was performed on the abnormal slices and the results were compared with a radiologist-labeled ��ground truth' tumor volume and tumor segmentations created by applying supervised k-nearest neighbors, a partially supervised variant of the fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm, and a commercially available seed growing package. The results of the developed automatic system generally correspond well to ground truth, both on a per slice basis and more importantly in tracking total tumor volume during treatment over time.

Prophecy is a poorly understood genre, commonly understood as literature primarily focused on mantic visions of future events. A more nuanced understanding of literary prophecy recognizes the limits of this view, as well as the diversity of genres within many prophetic texts. These two views present one problem: forced readings of prophecy as a kind of reverse history on the one end and the problem of generic diversity on the other, resist an easy scheme of classification for prophetic literature. This study elucidates some of the problematic assumptions of primarily Biblical prophecy, and suggests that contemporary genre theory"“which views genre it terms of function more than a mere scheme of literary kinds"“can offer a unified conception of prophecy. From this, I suggest that prophecy can be defined as goal-oriented literary rhetoric intended to re-orient the reader or hearer into face-to-face aesthetic proximity with the Divine. The definition is defended utilizing a reading of the Denkschrift section of Isaiah, focusing primarily on chapter 5. The implications of this definition and the reading that follows are then explored through the lens of contemporary hermeneutics, where the theophanic encounter implicit in a reading of prophetic text is explored, and the proximity of second-person orientation is re-introduced to suggest that Biblical prophecy is intended to create a lived experience of the Covenant, where fidelity to the Covenant amounts to a face-to-face encounter with God.

Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) is a self-regulation method shown to increase goal achievement through a combination of positive visualization and planning to overcome anticipated obstacles, specifically in time management, physical fitness, smoking cessation, dieting, social interaction, and classroom performance (Duckworth et al. 2013; Oettingen & Reininger 2016) Because second language (L2) acquisition is highly influenced by learner motivation, this study investigated whether MCII could be applied to motivation to acquire L2 vocabulary in beginning Arabic classes. A control group was compared to two treatment groups, one receiving vision-oriented MCII training that asked them to recall what first motivated them to begin language study when facing lack of motivation and a second receiving action-oriented MCII training encouraging participants to create an action-based plan when facing lack of motivation. Motivation levels of all participants were tracked through a survey of student motivation given at the beginning and end of the semester as well as through shortened weekly surveys tracking motivation level and L2 vocabulary acquisition over time. The results of this study showed that while there was no statistically significant motivational gain in any one group, there were several level items that revealed statistical significance within and between groups. No significant differences were found between groups in terms of motivation development, but raw averages of student motivation levels pre and post MCII training show that more participants in the vision-oriented groups saw motivational gains than those in the action-oriented group. Additionally, qualitative student comments revealed that many participants had failed to incorporate their MCII plans into their study regularly. This consequently may have limited the impact of MCII. Additional qualitative comments by students who did incorporate MCII suggest that they felt positively about MCII and believed it benefited their motivation and vocabulary acquisition. Consequently, additional research in which greater participation and more active use of MCII are promoted and qualitative data such as student journals and post interviews of students utilizing MCII are carefully analyzed is recommended. is recommended to further understand the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of MCII as applied to learner motivation level.

Important to understanding bilingualism and second language (L2) learning are L2 morphological processing and acquisition of tense and aspect. This study used narrative elicitation to examine the expression of boundedness and definiteness in Finnish and English by first language (L1) Finnish speakers who speak English as an L2 and L1 English speakers who speak Finnish as an L2. In Finnish, boundedness and definiteness were largely portrayed by using partitive and accusative cases, though tense and aspect conjugation also played a role. In English, boundedness was largely conveyed through tense and aspect conjugation and definiteness through article usage. Both L1 speaker groups appeared to demonstrate first language transfer as well as form following meaning in acquisition, meaning that a given form will be acquired first in contexts where the meaning of the form is inherent. There was also evidence pointing to avoidance by L2 speakers. Notably, varying interpretations of what the images used portrayed also seemed to play a role in some of the differences in responses across groups. The narrative elicitation methodology was useful in producing meaningful and easily comparable results.

The purpose of this study was to examine how motivation and anxiety within learners studying a foreign language are affected by a participant's language requirement (whether a participant has a language requirement as part of their education), language class level, and language learning environment (those with traditional classroom verses significant in- country experience). The current study surveyed and analyzed the responses of 124 students currently enrolled in a language class at Brigham Young University. Self- reported survey results demonstrate the relationship between motivation and anxiety with relation to language class level, language learning experience, and language requirement fulfillment. Further analyses were done in order to explore the interaction of different types of motivation (instrumental, integrative, intrinsic and resultative) and different types of anxiety (classroom, text anxiety and fear of negative evaluation) on the three factors examined in this study. Results indicated that there was a significant difference in motivation for participants whose major required taking foreign language courses and those whose major did not require a foreign language. Specifically, the results of the sub types of motivation (integrative, intrinsic, instrumental, and resultative) indicated that those that were required to take the language as a requirement had higher instrumental motivation than those that were not required to take a foreign language. The second significant finding of this study is that there was no effect on motivation and anxiety levels of participants with regard to language class level with one exception. Students at the 200 level had greater language class anxiety and lower resultative motivation than the other levels did. The third significant finding was that significant in- country experience did not affect motivation or anxiety. These results demonstrate that several factors may influence students' motivation and anxiety levels when learning a foreign language.

On November 7, 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that her 1931 novel, The Waves, would be an "abstract mystical eyeless book" (Diaries 3; 203). In her personal writings, she also referred to the novel as "an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren't there" (114). From the initial inspiration for the novel to her own notes, Woolf envisioned The Waves to be "spiritual" above all else. This project examines Woolf's engagement with spirituality throughout The Waves, particularly in the moments in the novel in which the queer characters--Rhoda and Neville--express sexual desire. In doing so, I suggest that Woolf engages in a queer spirituality--a spirituality that conveys both a queer sexual desire and identity. For Rhoda and Neville, and in some ways Woolf herself, that desire remains unachieved, suggesting that Woolf viewed spirituality as a means of expressing a queer identity that was oftentimes frustrated and unfulfilled. In that frustration, however, Woolf also appears hopeful for a future, a potentiality, in which queer individuals could express their queerness openly.

Genericide is the process by which a trademarked term is used generically by the public and ultimately loses its legal trademark protections. The linguistic methods that courts have used to determine whether a given term is in the process of or has undergone genericide have historically relied on dictionaries. However, there has a been recent push to use corpus linguistics as a tool to aid in that determination for not only trademarks but word meaning in general (Hoopes, 2019; Lee & Mouritsen, 2018). In addition to corpus data, I argue that the use of experimental data via a linguistic questionnaire can support, validate, and clarify corpus findings and can be an additional means to aid in the determination of the semantic status of trademarked terms. Corpora comprised of texts from the social media website Reddit were created and concordance lines exhibiting uses of 24 terms (10 generic and 14 trademarked) were judged based on their semantic senses as interpreted by two raters. These concordance lines were compared to the responses of a linguistic questionnaire asking participants how they used those 24 terms. Results show that the questionnaire responses are comparable to and validate many of the results of the judging of the Reddit corpora. The questionnaire data provided clarity on use of terms deemed ambiguous by previous research. I assert that the use of questionnaire data is a useful option in researching the genericide phenomenon either in conjunction with corpus data or independently. Both methods are considered helpful for courtrooms and businesses in investigating genericide, but based on the findings of this thesis I advocate that neither method can determine genericide alone but should be only considered as aids to work in conjunction with other evidence and data.

This is a book of poems.