Very little research has occurred about students with severe disabilities and verbal difficulties and their ability to learn phonics, decoding, and other early literacy skills(Ainsworth et al., 2016 and Johnston et al., 2009b). Ainsworth et al. (2016) used the Accessible Literacy Learning curriculum to teach phonics and decoding. Johnston et al. (2009b) used a three-step instructional strategy, step one - increased opportunities for adult-directed teaching and active teacher child interaction, step two- use of time delay to teach, step three-consequences, to teach phonics and decoding. While both studies utilized time delay in some fashion, they were not entirely based upon the evidence-based practice. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine whether constant time delay is effective in teaching phonics and decoding to students with severe disabilities and verbal difficulties and if students can generalize the skill to words that have not been explicitly taught. Results indicated a functional relation between the use of constant time delay and decoding of CVC words. Additionally, students were able to maintain and generalize learning. Students with severe disabilities and verbal difficulties can effectively learn decoding of CVC words through constant time delay and can maintain and generalize the skill. Results were similar to other studies which implemented constant time delay to promote emergent literacy skills (e.g., Browder et al., 2012; Dessemont et al., 2019; Spooner et al., 2015; Tucker Cohen et al., 2008). Practitioners can use constant time delay to teach decoding to students with severe disabilities and verbal difficulties and to promote early reading skills. Future research should replicate the study with students from different age groups as well as examining the effects of this strategy on the acquisition of CCVC and CVCC words.

The architecture of virtual machine (VM) interpreters has long been a subject of researchand discussion. The initial trend of stack-based interpreters was shortly thereafterchallenged by research showing the performance advantages of virtual register machines. Despite this, many VM interpreters are still stack-based, with some notable exceptions, like Lua, Android Runtime, and its predecessor Dalvik. A register architecture isusually associated with greater overhead from instruction dispatch, and to some extent, instruction decoding. By designing, and implementing a novel technique that replaces the conventional way of decoding instructions, this thesis attempts to reduce that overhead. More specifically, a VM interpreter is developed as an artifact of design-science research. The novel technique is then evaluated through benchmarking in various configurations. As the results indicate, however, using this technique showed no performance advantage, as the resulting machine instructions are exactly the same after compiler optimization. This suggests that there is no apparent decoding overhead to begin with. As a result, register-based VMs seem to not suffer from any dispatch related overhead, other than the fact that there are more operands per instruction to access. Source code is available on GitHub, at https://github.com/kaspr61/RackVM.

Studiens syfte är att bidra med ökad kunskap kring varför medlemmarna i Oatlys brand community engagerar sig i communityn och hur de värderar information som kommer från Oatlykontra från externa källor. Studien syftar även till att undersöka om medlemmarnas konsumtionsbeteenden påverkas av negativ information de får om Oatly. Det empiriska materialet bygger på medlemmar i Oatlys brand community på Instagram och samlades in genom två fokusgruppsdiskussioner. Studien har visat att medlemmarna engagerar sig i communityn för att tillfredsställa behov av gemenskap, identitet, och information samt att medlemmarna värderar information från Oatly som pålitlig och positiv medan de värderar externa källors informationsom felaktig och opålitlig. Ännu en av slutsatserna från studien är att deltagarna i communityntolkar budskap utifrån en gemensam tolkningsram. Vidare visade studien att mer lojala medlemmar uppgav att de ökade sin konsumtion i mötet av negativ information om Oatly.

Objectives: Development of accurate auditory attention decoding (AAD) algorithms, capable of identifying the attended sound source from the speech evoked electroencephalography (EEG) responses, could lead to new solutions for hearing impaired listeners: neuro-steered hearing aids. Many of the existing AAD algorithms are either inaccurate or very slow. Therefore, there is a need to develop new EEG-based AAD methods. The first objective of this project was to investigate deep neural network (DNN) models for AAD and compare them to the state-of-the-art linear models. The second objective was to investigate whether generative adversarial networks (GANs) could be used for speech-evoked EEGdata augmentation to improve the AAD performance. Design: The proposed methods were tested in a dataset of 34 participants who performed an auditory attention task. They were instructed to attend to one of the two talkers in the front and ignore the talker on the other side and back-ground noise behind them, while high density EEG was recorded. Main Results: The linear models had an average attended vs ignored speech classification accuracy of 95.87% and 50% for ∼30 second and 8 seconds long time windows, respectively. A DNN model designed for AAD resulted in an average classification accuracy of 82.32% and 58.03% for ∼30 second and 8 seconds long time windows, respectively, when trained only on the real EEG data. The results show that GANs generated relatively realistic speech-evoked EEG signals. A DNN trained with GAN-generated data resulted in an average accuracy 90.25% for 8 seconds long time windows. On shorter trials the GAN-generated EEG data have shown to significantly improve classification performances, when compared to models only trained on real EEG data. Conclusion: The results suggest that DNN models can outperform linear models in AAD tasks, and that GAN-based EEG data augmentation can be used to further improve DNN performance. These results extend prior work and brings us closer to the use of EEG for decoding auditory attention in next-generation neuro-steered hearing aids.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of constant time delay on decoding letter sounds within consonant-vowel-consonant words and to read constant-vowel-constant words skills for students with severe disabilities and verbal difficulties. This study used a multiple probe across participants design with four students with severe intellectual and/or development disabilities. Results indicated a functional relation between the use of constant time delay and decoding of CVC words. Additionally, students were able to maintain and generalize learning. Results were similar to other studies which implemented constant time delay to promote emergent literacy skills. Practitioners can use constant time delay to teach decoding to students with severe disabilities and verbal difficulties and to promote early reading skills. Future research should replicate the study with students from different age groups as well as examine the effects of this strategy on the acquisition of CCVC and CVCC words.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / For integers n, k 2:: 1, and k ~ n, the graph r~has vertices the 2n vectors of lF2 and adjacency defined by two vectors being adjacent if they differ in k coordinate positions. In particular, r~is the classical n-cube, usually denoted by Hl (n, 2). This study examines the codes (both binary and p-ary for p an odd prime) of the row span of adjacency and incidence matrices of these graphs. We first examine codes of the adjacency matrices of the n-cube. These have been considered in [14]. We then consider codes generated by both incidence and adjacency matrices of the Hamming graphs Hl(n,3) [12]. We will also consider codes of the line graphs of the n-cube as in [13]. Further, the automorphism groups of the codes, designs and graphs will be examined, highlighting where there is an interplay. Where possible, suitable permutation decoding sets will be given.

Denna studie undersöker hur (den multimodala) argumentationen är uppbyggd i den fiktivafilmen Tropa de Elite (2007). Detta görs med syftet att lyfta hur man kan hjälpa gymnasieeleversjälva identifiera argumenten. Via en argumentationsanalys analyseras åtta scener, och fokusligger på filmens narrativa element. De stilistiska elementen tas endast upp när de tydligtpåverkar argumenten som förs fram. I samband med detta identifieras logos-, ethos- ochpathosargument i scenerna för att tydliggöra vilken typ av argument filmen för. Argumentenkan oftast tolkas på två motstridiga vis beroende på vilken av två doxa man läser filmen via;även i scener där filmen försöker få publiken att läsa scenen enligt en av dessa så finns detdetaljer som är lättare att förlika med den andra doxan. Resultaten kopplas sedan till StuartHalls (2011) begrepp encoding och decoding för att nyansera förklaringen till varför publikenkan tolka argumenten på motstridiga vis. Avslutningsvis lyfts tre metoder som användbara föratt hjälpa gymnasieelever själva identifiera argumenten: (1) presentera filmens tes och två doxainnan man börjar se filmen, (2) pausa filmen efter scener där viktiga argument förs fram samt(3) lyft logos, ethos och pathos varje gång man pausar och diskuterar en scens argument.

The overall aim of this study is to analyse and describe reading ability from the second to sixth year of schooling in Sweden (ages 8–13). An intro­ductory study presents the pupils’ reading profiles and also the extent to which teaching in reading comprehension is given at their schools. In a second study, the results and effects of the national test in Swedish in grade three (age 9) are studied and compared with other recognised test data on the development of children’s reading. A total of 428 pupils at four schools participated in the study. Each child was tested once a year during two consecutive school years. In addition to collecting results on the national test for all the pupils in their third year, standardised tests of word decoding ability and reading comprehension were administered to all students in the study. A questionnaire dealing with teaching reading and skills development was answered by 23 teachers. The study reveals that there are stronger links between phonological tasks and reading comprehension for pupils in their first three years than for those in years 4–6. The study also shows that the national test identifies some pupils with reading difficulties but not all of them. A number of pupils who have problems with word decoding nevertheless attain the national test threshold for reading comprehension tasks in the third year. There are also pupils who cannot manage the age-adapted reading comprehension tasks but who still pass the national test in their third year. The findings reveal that teachers work with reading comprehension exercises to only a small extent in both the first three years and second three years of schooling. The study indicates the importance of using a diagnostic approach, so that early and effective measures can be adopted to prevent the emergence of reading comprehension problems.

This thesis will explore the concept of cultural citizenship by researching visitor’s responses to five exhibitions across two museums in the Lower Hutt region of New Zealand. The thesis will also examine museum management and staff’s perspectives on these exhibits, and compare these to visitor’s. The aim of the thesis is to understand how museum visitors reflect upon and use museum exhibits as tools in relation to their cultural heritage and cultural citizenship. This approach provides a focus for reflection regarding the cultural importance of museum exhibitions. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model will serve as an overall framework for the study, and the theoretical concepts of memory, rhetoric, meaning making and cultural citizenship will further inform the analysis. The results indicate that museum visitors reflect upon exhibits as tools for reminding, and also indicate that exhibits are seen important for learning and representation. Furthermore, the study finds that visitors do not find exhibits particularly challenging or personal. Museum staff provide other perspectives on the importance of museum exhibits, such as their art historical, representational and community-museum relationship building potential, but the study finds that these themes are seldom explicitly recognised by visitors. The concluding discussion reflects on these results, and suggests avenues for future research.

The aim of this master thesis is to contribute to a more profound knowledge of women's magazine reading by giving insights into the readerships’ interpretations of magazine texts. Three different dimensions of interpretation were thereby identified: the relation to the audiences’ own situations in life, the audiences’ reflections on their prior experiences, and the emerging emotions in the interpretation process. Audience and reception theory, as well as feminist media theory, form the theoretical framework of my research. As audience reception concerns the dynamic interaction between text and the audiences’ reception of it, I decided to concentrate on both text analysis and qualitative interviews. With my qualitative, methodological approach – comprising an analysis of three articles concerning texting advice and interviews with six regular readers, I was able to explore nuances and depths of the phenomenon. I identified four interpretative repertoires which the women used for making meaning of the texts: pleasure, rejection, self-reflection, and practical relevance. Pleasure and rejection were found to be the women’s predominant emotions in the interpretation process. Moreover, my research illustrates that women are interpreting the texting advice in a practical as well as in a self-reflexive way. Their own circumstances and prior experiences are thereby variables, which influence the reception. My work strengthens the perspective of readers as being empowered to understand, evaluate, and critique the media content they consume. This is an important finding influencing society at large. As my research outlines, critical readings were found to be superior to possible ideological influences of women’s magazines. Future research should focus on a further in-depth analysis of individual influencing variables in relation to the audiences’ interpretations as I was only able to evaluate some in my study.