The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive oral expressive vocabularies. It was hypothesized that receptive discrimination pretraining has a greater influence on the reate of acquisition of its expressive vocal counterpart as compared to the reate of vocal acquisition of words without receptive pretraining.

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Complex and chronic health conditions with multiple diagnoses and lacking in clinical practice guidelines often require a multidisciplinary care management scheme. Research has shown that the domain knowledge for these conditions is multidisciplinary, inconsistent, nonstandardized and poorly categorized making them heterogeneous and consequently challenging for collaborative work. The application of the boundary objects approach has come to the forefront as a way of closing communication gaps in collaborative work. There are limited research efforts in the application of boundary objects in the health care field and almost none in the area of complex chronic conditions. Research investigation of the application of boundary objects in heterogeneous domains is also limited. The primary objective(s) of this thesis is (are) to develop, test and evaluate a model and a methodology for creating boundary objects in the heterogeneous domain of complex chronic conditions. The methodology in this research applies a two-staged approach for enabling interoperability in the domain. The first stage is the development of a controlled vocabulary as a boundary object and the second stage of the two-staged approach is the development of an ontology as a boundary object to generate syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels of interoperability in the dynamic domain. Towards these objectives, the boundary objects developed in the study satisfy certain unique requirements, namely to, have pragmatic boundaries, be dynamic in nature and be in standardized forms. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first to investigate the development of boundary objects in the heterogeneous domain of complex chronic conditions. The outcome of this research is the development of a model for the generation of boundary objects to enhance communication among multidisciplinary clinicians. The model is developed in the heterogeneous domain of two complex chronic health conditions, namely, multiple chemical sensitivity and chronic pain. A testing and an evaluation process conducted in this research demonstrates that a high percentage of clinicians (>80%) agree on the overall usefulness of the boundary objects developed in this research. The results from the research are promising in terms of the potential applications of boundary objects in closing communication gaps in the multidisciplinary management of complex conditions.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

Thesis (M.A.Ed.) -- Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Bibliography: leaves 54-55.

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A 'Subject Indexing Language' (SIL) is an artificial language used for formulating names of subjects. Although classificationists have sought for universals in many fields of study such as, philosophy, biology, general systems theory, etc., the search for a deep structure of SILs formally began with Ranganathan's idea of 'absolute syntax' and was brought to the present by G. Bhattacharyya and D. Austin. Whereas Bhattacharyya's deep structure of SIL is primarily based on classificatory principles (parallel to 'absolute syntax'), the deep structure proposed by Austin has a linguistic connotation. The present study describes and compares two such deep structurebased SILs, viz., PRECIS (PREserved Context Index System) and DSIS (Deep Structure Indexing System), a recent computerized version of POPSI (POstulate-based Permuted Subject Indexing), developed by F. J. Devadason at Documentation Research and Training Centre, Bangalore, India. Both also belong to the category of SILs typified as 'string indexing' languages. The study involves: i) writing of a suitable DSIS index entry generation program, ii) using both PRECIS (in-house) and DSIS programs to index a collection of representative sample documents from the soft sciences, iii) analyzing and comparing their respective syntactic and semantic aspects in terms of both linguistic and classificatory principles, and iv) applying some measures of efficiency and effectiveness. It was realized that certain modifications in the existing DSIS string manipulation algorithms are necessary to make the program fully operational. Although, no attempts have been made to quantify the measures of effectiveness and efficiency as such, suggestions have been provided as to what these probably would be. Some indications of their searching difficulties for a prospective searcher have been put forward as well.