The intent of this study is to determine the effects on the reading and math scores of females segregated into single-gender alternative classrooms that had the benefit of an individualized, self-paced curriculum. The Challenge Academy testing clerk, using the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement in the areas of reading and math, collected data on the students’ first and last days of enrollment. Significant main effects for gender, time, educational status, age, and ethnicity were probed using a general linear model of repeated measures. This quantitative model was used because it provided more flexibility to describe the relationship between a dependent variable and a set of independent variables, manipulated one at a time. Comparisons of between-subject effects and within-subject effects were made using a summary ANOVA followed by ad hoc testing when significance was found when there were three factors being tested, such as school age group and ethnicity. Significance was set at 0.025. Of the 500 students enrolled over the seven-year existence of the program, only students who had been pre and post tested were included in this research. After removing students who did not meet the criteria, a sample of 150 students remained. This resulted in small and non-existent cell sample sizes, and adjustments were made to the original intent of the study. The findings observed in this body of research suggest that the gains achieved by males in reading surpassed those of females. Both genders achieved equally in math. A statistical comparison based on gender in special education, school age group, or ethnicity could not be made due to small cell size. Recommendations for further studies include: (1) a study using a larger sample size allowing for greater numbers in each category; (2) longitudinal studies in elementary, middle, and high schools using annual TAKS scores as the data source; (3) a study considering the gender of the instructor; (4) a study comparing high schools whose majority school population represented each of the three ethnic groups; (5) a study of private schools with single-gender populations.

Yes / Older adults use their smartphones to learn new material but few studies examined their learning with the presence of a chatbot in a smartphone. We developed a three-week self-paced learning module on three topics (chatbot, QR scanner, Google Drive) using their smartphone. Our aims were to examine participants’ self-paced learning accuracy while exploring older adults acceptance of the chatbot. Twelve participants participated in this study (Mage: 64.75 years) for three weeks at their homes individually. Results showed that they had low accuracy for the chatbot but higher accuracy for the other two. Qualitative analyses indicated that participants disliked the chatbot and that good clarity in our instructional videos and slides may have contributed to the low acceptance for the chatbot. Our findings indicated that self-paced learning is feasible with slides and videos only, and to create more chatbot-related assessments to increase chatbot usage. / Newton Fund Institutional Links grant ID: 331745333. / The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 04 Sep 2024.

Background: Treadmill walking should closely simulate overground walking for research validation and optimal skill transfer. Traditional fixed-speed treadmill (FS) walking may not simulate natural walking because of the fixed belt speed and lack of visual cues. Self-paced (SP) treadmill walking, especially feedback controlled SP treadmill walking, enables close-to-real-time belt speed changes with users' speed changes. Different sensitivity levels of SP treadmill feedback determine how fast the treadmill respond to user's speed change. Few studies have examined the differences between FS and SP treadmill walking, or the difference between sensitivity levels of SP treadmills, and their methods were questionable because of averaging kinematics and kinetics parameters, and failing to examine directly treadmill and subjects' speed data. This study compared FS with two SP modes with variation of treadmill speed and user's speed as dependent variables. Method: Thirteen young healthy subjects participated. Subjects walked on a motorized split-belt treadmill under FS, high sensitivity SP (SP-H) and low sensitivity SP (SP-L) conditions at normal walking speed. Root mean square error (RMSE) for subject's pelvis global speed (Vpg), pelvis speed with respect to treadmill speed (Vpt), and treadmill speed (Vtg) data were collected for all trials. Results: Significant condition effects were found between FS and the two SP modes in all RMSE values (p < 0.001). The two sensitivity levels of SP had similar speed patterns. Large subject × condition interaction effects were found for all variables (p < 0.001). Only small subject effects were found. Conclusions: The results of the study reveal different walking patterns between FS and SP. However, the two sensitivity levels failed to differ much. More habituation time may be needed for subjects to learn to optimally respond to the SP algorithm. Future work should include training subjects for more natural responses, applying a feed-forward algorithm, and testing the effect of optic flow on FS and SP speed variation. / text

This study examines how Chinese speakers understand sentences describing events that have varying degrees of typicality. How the interpretation of typicality is obtained from linguistic input is not fully understood. In this study, I investigate the association of pairs of content words in order to determine their contribution to judgments of event typicality. The associations between words could influence the interpretation of event typicality. Two words that are not associated semantically, for example baby and wine, may be seen as an atypical combination. However, when these words are placed in a sentence context, the resulting sentences can be a typical scenario, such as the baby spilled the wine. Four offline judgment studies were conducted to obtain quantitative measurements of the association of word pairs and of judgments of event typicality in sentences. These studies demonstrated that noun pairs showed larger differences in their association ratings than those of noun-verb pairs. When the sentences containing the word pairs were judged, the association of the noun pair strongly influenced the sentence’s event typicality ratings, regardless of word order or of the typicality of the verb. Two online, word-by-word self-paced reading studies were conducted to examine whether judgments of word associations and event typicality are used in real-time sentence processing. The results showed that there was a slowdown in reading times at the critical regions when the noun pairs were atypical. The typicality of the verb did not result in a difference in reading times, regardless of the word order of the sentences, although offline judgment scores of event typicality were predictive of online reading times. The findings of these studies suggest that: (1) event typicality is more than the semantic association between words. Noun-noun and noun-verb associations contribute to event typicality but the association of two nouns has a more significant contribution and is not affected by an intervening word, (2) the typicality of verbs contributed to real-time sentence processing, insofar as the verbs contributed to the judged typicality of the events expressed by SVO and SOV clauses, and (3) in real-time sentence processing, regardless of the sentence’s word order, the association of nouns has greater impact on event typicality processing. This is not likely to be due simply to a priming effect between nouns, but rather also reflects the processing of the sentence’s event typicality. / text

This study investigated the effects of music choice on the ratings of attentional focus, affective valence, perceived exertion, and enjoyment during and after self-paced treadmill exercise of varied intensities. Thirty-four college-aged, healthy, active males and females volunteered to participate in the study. Participants completed 6 visits to the laboratory: the first visit was a medical screening to ensure safety of the participants. For the second visit, participants completed a maximal treadmill exercise test. On the third visit, participants completed the Brunel Music Rating Inventory-2 to determine their preferred and non-preferred music genres, and to self-select the low, moderate and high intensity exercise speeds that would be used in the experimental trials. During the last three visits, participants completed each of the three (preferred, non-preferred, no music) randomized and counterbalanced experimental trials. The Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale and the Feeling Scale were used to measure baseline and post-exercise ratings of enjoyment and affective valence. During exercise, the single-item Attentional Focus Scale, Feeling Scale, Borg 6-20, and Exercise Enjoyment Scale were used to measure attentional focus, affective valence, perceived exertion, and enjoyment, respectively. Results revealed a main effect for condition for affective valence and enjoyment (p < 0.001 for both interactions). A main effect was also found for intensity for attentional focus (p = 0.002) and perceived exertion (p < 0.001). Lastly, there was a main effect for activity revealed for affective valence (p = 0.047) and enjoyment (p = 0.012). Moreover, tests of between and within subjects factors revealed an interaction effect for condition by intensity for affective valence (p = 0.019) and for condition by intensity by activity for perceived exertion (p = 0.005). There was a general trend for thoughts to be more associative as intensity increased in both groups. In addition, there was a general trend for thoughts to be more dissociative during the preferred music condition compared to the non-preferred and no music trial. However, these differences were only found to be significant in the active group. Furthermore, there was a general trend in the active group for affective valence to be more positive regardless of exercise intensity or music condition when compared to the inactive group. Both groups showed the highest ratings of affective valence during the preferred music condition, followed by the non-preferred and no music condition. In-task enjoyment ratings were highest during the preferred music condition when compared to the non-preferred and no music condition regardless of exercise intensity or activity status. The results did not reveal significant differences for ratings of exertion across music conditions, which does not support previous findings. In conclusion, the perceptual responses in this study, which represent affective valence, attentional focus, and enjoyment, were generally more favorable during the preferred music condition and in the active participants. These results support previous findings to suggest exercising while listening to preferred music may lead to an increase in physical activity adherence.

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Past studies of grammatical gender have shown that native speakers encounter processing difficulties when encountering a form that does not agree in gender with previous words. However, the specific behavioral and neural responses to these difficulties have not been replicated across studies of the same type. This is in part due to different experimental designs and statistical analyses, but a crucial factor may be the lack of control between nouns of masculine and feminine gender in stimuli creation. Masculine and feminine gender show distinct distributional asymmetries and collapsing them into one condition diminishes the explanatory power of any study examining grammatical gender. We used reading times in a self-paced reading experiment to examine whether masculine and feminine gender violations differentially affect processing speeds. Fifty French speakers read sentences that were well-formed or contained a mismatch in gender between determiner and noun, half of which were masculine and half feminine. Following Beatty-Martínez et al. (2021), we added individual difference measures to determine how participant-specific factors modulate processing. Participants also completed a category verbal fluency task and the AX-CPT, a measure of cognitive control. They found that ERP components were modulated by these components for Spanish speakers and the modulation differed between masculine noun and feminine noun violations. We hypothesized that reading times would be similarly affected in French, a closely related language with the same gender categories. However, no conditions or interactions reached statistical significance. It is unclear whether this is due to the experimental manipulation or lack of control for participants’ language background, as we had a high number of bilingual and multilingual participants. Regardless, elements of the procedure may provide insight on how to design future experiments that lay a groundwork in understanding the most basic elements of gender processing. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Why is ‘pen’ masculine and ‘car’ feminine? Grammatical gender is a widespread feature of languages that comes naturally to native speakers and perplexes many second language learners. The assignment of gender seems to be random, but upon closer examination, patterns can be established. What do these differences mean for speakers of gendered languages? In the current study, we set out to determine how masculine and feminine grammatical gender is processed in French and how this is influenced by differences between individual speakers. Participants read French sentences that were either grammatical or contained a mismatch in gender between article and noun. Reading times were used to evaluate how speakers react when encountering an ungrammatical form with either masculine or feminine gender. Participants also completed tasks measuring response inhibition and verbal fluency to see how individuals with different cognitive and language skills react differently to unexpected forms.

Research in the last decade has focused on the impact of the caregiver role (Cantor, 1983), the nature of caregivers (Brody, 1981, 1983), and the stress and burden associated with caregiver (Zarit, Todd and Zarit, 1986). Health professionals working with caregivers have attempted to focus on interventions to reduce feelings of burden and to increase effective coping. Evaluation of educational interventions to reduce caregiver stress and burden has been a recent research focus. Unfortunately, research has shown that it is altruistic to believe that caregiver stress and burden can be alleviated by educational interventions. Family caregivers are faced with the task of learning about the nature and complexity of dementia and the unusual behaviours which accompany Alzheimer's disease. A resource booklet, written to assist caregivers to learn about the disease, about management strategies and about their own feelings may be more effective than interventions to reduce stress. The evaluation focused on whether the resource booklet would provide information which family caregivers would perceive to be relevant and useful. The evaluation was conducted using a convenience sample of ten caregivers. Two time intervals were used to collect information on caregivers' reactions to the resource booklet; one week following the initial reading of the booklet and 4-6 weeks post-reading. A written questionnaire at time one, and follow-up telephone interviews at time two, were used to measure caregivers' reactions to the booklet. Results indicated that the information in the booklet was useful in assisting caregivers to manage care, and that the caregivers found the booklet easy to read and the format acceptable. / Thesis / Master of Science (Teaching)

The aim of this thesis is to study the effect that linguistic context exerts on the activation and processing of word meaning over time. Previous studies have demonstrated that a biasing context makes it possible to predict upcoming words. The context causes the pre-activation of expected words and facilitates their processing when they are encountered. The interaction of context and word meaning can be described in terms of feature overlap: as the context unfolds, the semantic features of the processed words are activated and words that match those features are pre-activated and thus processed more quickly when encountered. The aim of the experiments in this thesis is to test a key prediction of this account, viz., that the facilitation effect is additive and occurs together with the unfolding context. Our first contribution is to analyse the effect of an increasing amount of biasing context on the pre-activation of the meaning of a critical word. In a self-paced reading study, we investigate the amount of biasing information required to boost word processing: at least two biasing words are required to significantly reduce the time to read the critical word. In a complementary visual world experiment we study the effect of context as it unfolds over time. We identify a ceiling effect after the first biasing word: when the expected word has been pre-activated, an increasing amount of context does not produce any additional significant facilitation effect. Our second contribution is to model the activation effect observed in the previous experiments using a bag-of-words distributional semantic model. The similarity scores generated by the model significantly correlate with the association scores produced by humans. When we use point-wise multiplication to combine contextual word vectors, the model provides a computational implementation of feature overlap theory, successfully predicting reading times. Our third contribution is to analyse the effect of context on semantically similar words. In another visual world experiment, we show that words that are semantically similar generate similar eye-movements towards a related object depicted on the screen. A coherent context pre-activates the critical word and therefore increases the expectations towards it. This experiment also tested the cognitive validity of a distributional model of semantics by using this model to generate the critical words for the experimental materials used.

Language processing has been a focus of working memory research since Baddeley introduced his Model of Working Memory in the 1970’s. There has been continued discussion over whether the same working memory (WM) system that underlies verbally-mediated tasks relying on conscious, controlled, processing also provides the resources used in language processing. Recently, Caplan, DeDe, Waters, & Michaud (2011) found that increased reading times at only the most difficult point of the most difficult sentences presented in their study (sentences with doubly embedded relative clauses) correlated with improved comprehension. They hypothesized that this correlation occurs because at these points where normal parsing fails, individuals with high working memory capacities use ancillary comprehension mechanisms that rely on verbal working memory. Caplan and Waters (2013) proposed that use of verbal working memory for ancillary comprehension in sentence processing may appear behaviorally as improved comprehension with longer reading times in self-paced reading tasks and as regressive eye movements out of these points where parsing is thought to fail. This thesis attempted to replicate the above mentioned finding of Caplan et al. (2011). This study also added an eyetracking task to enable measurement of regressive eye movements and a measure of working memory to permit analysis of individual differences. Forty-eight healthy adults completed a working memory battery (alphabet span, subtract two span, and sentence span), a self-paced reading task, and an eye-tracking task. For the self-paced reading and eye tracking components, participants read sentences with doubly embedded relative clauses and parallel sentences with sentential complements. Linear mixed effects models found increased self-paced reading times and go-past times at the hardest point in the harder sentences (those with doubly embedded relative clauses) as working memory increased. These results support the hypothesis that ancillary comprehension mechanisms are used in sentence processing at points where comprehension is extremely difficult. In the attempted replication of the findings of Caplan et al. (2011), logistic mixed effects models showed increased accuracy as reading times increased at the hardest point in the harder sentences, and also as reading times increased at five of the other seven segments. Logistic mixed effects models showed no significant increase in regressions out of the hardest point in harder than in the easier sentences as working memory increased. These results can be taken as further evidence, using eye tracking methods combined with self-paced reading and measurement of working memory, that ancillary comprehension mechanisms may be used in sentence processing when the limits of the normal parser are exceeded.