Interruption interference refers to significant decreases in performance that occur following task interruption. Evidence has suggested that practicing recovering from interruptions can reduce interruption interference as measured by the time required for resuming the interrupted task. Conflicting evidence, however, has indicated that interruption practice might only improve resumption for the practiced primary and interrupting task-pair. The studies within this dissertation utilize a transfer paradigm to resolve this conflict and determine whether or not interruption resumption practice in one task-pair context can benefit interruption resumption in a novel task-pair context. A new theory, Interruption Recovery Goal, defines the mechanisms of interruption handling skill acquisition and transfer as production consolidation that facilitates the storage and maintenance, via rehearsal, of the pre-interruption task state, as well as any planned action sequences, for retrieval after the interruption. The first two reported studies provided evidence that interruption handling skill for one task-pair context transferred to a novel task-pair when one (first study) or both (second study) tasks in the context changed. The third study supported theories that have defined the mechanism of interruption handling skill as an improvement to primary task goal state and action sequence memory, rather than reconstruction, by showing that resumption times improved even when the onscreen display of the primary task’s target state was removed at resumption. This study also supported the task-general view of interruption handling skill by providing evidence that interruption handling skill acquisition and transfer did not strongly relate to primary task skill acquisition and transfer. The fourth study tested for interruption handling skill transfer across novel interruption contexts when interruption duration, the availability of pre-interruption rehearsal, or both differed at transfer. The results showed resumption time improvements across interruption contexts, indicating that rehearsal and retrieval mechanisms vital for interruption resumption remained similar across contexts for skill transfer. Although further research is needed to understand the extent to which this transfer is fully task-general, the theory supported by these studies provides new directions for the study of interruption handling skill and has implications for the development of training methods for reducing interruption interference in high-risk workplaces.

Note:

Note:

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

L'apparition de l'acquisition et de la cession des actions étrangères en Chine s'inscrit dans la progression de développement de l'économie chinoise qui a été fortement stimulée par l'application de la politique d'ouverture. Depuis l'adhésion à l'OMC en 2001,les modes d'investissement de l'acquisition et de la cession d'actions ont graduellement commencé à remplacer celle d'investissement relative simplement à l'installation d'une entreprise étrangère en Chine. Bien que la législation chinoise ait essayé de contribuer à la protection de ces nouvelles modes d'investissement étranger, les défauts de loi ainsi que le vide juridique deviennent comme même l'obstacle principal qui empêche le développement de l'acquisition et la cession des actions étrangères en Chine. Dans ce contexte, la problématique de cette thèse est d'une part d'analyser l'ensemble des dispositions actuelles portant sur l'acquisition et la cession des actions étrangères afin de les mettre en œuvre en pratique, d'autre part de rationaliser les mécanismes juridiques chinois en recherchant la possibilité de réforme proposé.

This corpus-based study examined English and Spanish learner language for ‘heart’ metaphors. Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) compared ‘heart’ metaphors across five languages and that study served as a reference framework for the work presented here. This work intended to find evidence of metaphor transfer and/or new metaphor learning in second language writing. Conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and linguistic or lexical metaphors (Falck, 2012) from both languages were considered in the analysis. This work analyzed ‘heart’ metaphors taken from two learner corpora, the Cambridge Learner Corpus and the Corpus de Aprendices de Español. Results were compared to the findings of Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) to see whether these metaphors typically occur only in English, only in Spanish, or are found in both languages. The results showed evidence of language learners using several kinds of metaphors that do not typically occur in their first language. The aim of this study was to add a new facet to this body of research by examining these phenomena in learner corpora rather than monolingual corpora. Furthermore, this study also examined both second language English and second language Spanish corpora, addressing potential bi-directionality of transfer or conversely, the use of new linguistic forms.

Previous studies on the acquisition of definite plurals in Child and Second Language Acquisition have found strong evidence on how transfer can affect the L2-acquisition of articles. Nevertheless, these studies presented some limitations. First, they failed to consider other variables that could interfere with transfer in the acquisition of the article system. And second, the methodology used to test the participants’ implicit knowledge of article system was very similar in all studies (Truth-Value Judgment Task). In order to fill these two gaps in the literature, the present study uses a listening comprehension task to test how the mass/count distinction can affect the interpretation of definite plurals in intermediate L1-English L2-Spanish learners. This study also adds another variable, the type of verb, to test whether the mass/count distinction equally affects L1-English L2-Spanish interpretations’ of the Spanish article system throughout different kind of verbs. Two types of verbs were used: gustar-like verbs (psychological verbs) and non-psychological verbs. These verbs were used in questions, so their different syntactic characteristics were neutralized. Two experiments were created following the same guidelines, but using a different type of verb. First, the participants were shown a situation in a computer screen. These situations were controlled so both specific and generic readings could be interpreted. After reading each situation, a question, which could either trigger a specific or a generic reading, was asked orally to the participants. Written responses were collected from each participant, and coded as either ‘generic’, ‘specific’, or ‘other’. The results of this thesis show highly statistically significant differences for how L1-English L2-Spanish learners interpret count and mass nouns. On the one hand, L1-English L2-Spanish tended to interpret count nouns as specific. On the other, they showed a strong tendency to interpret mass nouns as generic. In this sense, the statistical analysis conducted suggests that L1-English L2-Spanish and Spanish native speakers converged in their implicit knowledge of definite plurals containing mass nouns. Nevertheless, native speakers and L2-Spanish learners significantly differed in their interpretations of countable nouns. All of these patterns were found for both psychological and non-psychological verbs. The present study found very similar rates of generic responses for non-psychological verbs in L2-Spanish as previously reported by Ionin and Montrul (2012) and Ionin, Montrul, and Crivós (2011). Interestingly, the rates of generic responses for psychological verbs were much higher and diverged a bit from the results of Ionin and Montrul (2012) and Ionin, Montrul, and Crivós (2011). I discuss the importance of these results for the field of Second Language Acquisition and Semantics.

Des études précédentes démontrent qu’avoir accès à la structure syntaxique des phrases aide les enfants à découvrir le sens des mots nouveaux. Cela implique que les enfants doivent avoir accès à certains aspects de la structure syntaxique avant même de connaître beaucoup de mots. Étant donné que dans toutes les langues du monde la structure prosodique d’une phrase corrèle avec sa structure syntaxique, et que par ailleurs les mots et morphèmes grammaticaux sont utiles pour déterminer la catégorie syntaxique des mots, il se pourrait que les enfants utilisent la prosodie et les mots grammaticaux pour initialiser leur acquisition lexicale et syntaxique. Dans cette thèse, j’ai étudié le rôle de la prosodie phrasale et des mots grammaticaux pour guider l’analyse syntaxique chez les enfants (PARTIE 1) et la possibilité que les jeunes enfants exploitent cette information pour apprendre le sens des mots nouveaux (PARTIE 2). Dans la partie 1, j’ai construit des paires minimales de phrases en français et en anglais afin de tester si les enfants exploitent la relation entre les structures prosodique et syntaxique pour guider leur interprétation des homophones noms-verbes. J’ai démontré que les enfants d’âge préscolaire utilisent la prosodie phrasale en temps réel pour guider leur analyse syntaxique. En écoutant des phrases telles que [La petite ferme][.., les enfants interprètent ferme comme un nom, mais pour les phrases telles que [La petite][ferme...], ils interprètent ferme comme un verbe (Chapitre 3). Cette capacité a également été observée chez les enfants américains: en écoutant des phrases telles que « The baby flies… », ils utilisent la prosodie des phrases pour décider si flies est un nom ou un verbe (Chapitre 4). Par la suite, j’ai démontré que même les enfants d’environ 20 mois utilisent la prosodie des phrases pour récupérer leur structure syntaxique et pour en déduire la catégorie syntaxique des mots (Chapitre 5), une capacité qui serait extrêmement utile pour découvrir le sens des mots inconnus. C’est cette hypothèse que j’ai testé dans la partie 2, à savoir si l’information syntaxique obtenue à partir de la prosodie phrasale et des mots grammaticaux permet aux enfants d’apprendre le sens des mots. Une première série d’études s’appuie sur des phrases disloquées à droite contenant un verbe nouveau en français : [ili dase], [le bébéi] qui est minimalement différente de la phrase transitive [il dase le bébé]. Mes résultats montrent que les enfants de 28 mois exploitent les informations prosodiques de ces phrases pour contraindre leur interprétation du sens du nouveau verbe (Chapitre 6). Dans une deuxième série d’études, j’ai étudié si la prosodie et les mots grammaticaux guident l’acquisition de noms et de verbes. J’ai utilisé des phrases comme « Regarde la petite bamoule » qui peuvent être produites soit comme [Regarde la petite bamoule!], où «bamoule» est un nom, ou [Regarde], [la petite] [bamoule!], où bamoule est un verbe. Les enfants de 18 mois ont correctement analysé ces phrases et ont attribué une interprétation de nom ou de verbe au mot bamoule selon sa position dans la structure prosodique-syntaxique des phrases (Chapitre 7). Ensemble, ces études montrent que les jeunes enfants exploitent les mots grammaticaux et la structure prosodique des phrases pour inférer la structure syntaxique et contraindre ainsi l’interprétation possible du sens des mots. Ce mécanisme peut permettre aux enfants de construire une représentation initiale de la structure syntaxique des phrases, avant même de connaître la signification des mots. Bien que les informations prosodiques et les mots grammaticaux puissent prendre des formes différentes selon les langues, nos études suggèrent que cette information pourrait représenter un outil universel et qui permettrait aux enfants d’accéder à certaines informations syntaxiques des phrasesqu’ils entendent, et d’initialiser l’acquisition du langage. / Previous research demonstrates that having access to the syntactic structure of sentences helps children to discover the meaning of novel words. This implies that infants need to get access to aspects of syntactic structure before they know many words. Since in all the world’s languages the prosodic structure of a sentence correlates with its syntactic structure, and since function words/morphemes are useful to determine the syntactic category of words, infants might use phrasal prosody and function words to bootstrap their way into lexical and syntactic acquisition. In this thesis, I empirically investigated the role of phrasal prosody and function words to constrain syntactic analysis in young children (PART 1) and whether infants exploit this information to learn the meanings of novel words (PART 2). In part 1, I constructed minimal pairs of sentences in French and in English, testing whether children exploit the relationship between syntactic and prosodic structures to drive their interpretation of noun-verb homophones. I demonstrated that preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. When listening to French sentences such as [La petite ferme][…–[The little farm][…, children interpreted ferme as a noun, but in sentences such as [La petite][ferme…] – [The little girl][closes…, they interpreted ferme as a verb (Chapter 3). This ability was also attested in English-learning preschoolers who listened to sentences such as ‘The baby flies…’: they used prosodic information to decide whether “flies” was a noun or a verb (Chapter 4). Importantly, in further studies I demonstrated that even infants around 20-months use phrasal prosody to recover syntactic structures and to predict the syntactic category of upcoming words (Chapter 5), an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of unknown words. This is what I tested in part 2: whether the syntactic information obtained from phrasal prosody and function words could allow infants to constrain their acquisition of word meanings. A first series of studies relied on right-dislocated sentences containing a novel verb in French: [ili dase], [le bébéi] - ‘hei is dasing, the babyi’ (meaning ‘the baby is dasing’) which is minimally different from the transitive sentence [il dase le bébé] (he is dasing the baby). 28-montholds were shown to exploit prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of the novel verb meaning (Chapter 6). In a second series of studies, I investigated whether phrasal prosody and function words constrain the acquisition of nouns and verbs. I used sentences like ‘Regarde la petite bamoule’, which can be produced either as [Regarde la petite bamoule!] - Look at the little bamoule!, where ‘bamoule’ is a noun, or as [Regarde], [la petite] [bamoule!] - Look, the little (one) is bamouling, where bamoule is a verb. 18-month-olds correctly parsed such sentences and attributed a noun or verb meaning to the critical word depending on its position within the syntactic-prosodic structure of the sentences (Chapter 7). Taken together, these studies show that infants exploit function words and the prosodic structure of an utterance to recover the sentences’ syntactic structure, which in turn constrains the possible meaning of novel words. This powerful mechanism might be extremely useful for infants to construct a first-pass syntactic structure of spoken sentences even before they know the meanings of many words. Although prosodic information and functional elements can surface differently across languages, our studies suggest that this information may represent a universal and extremely useful tool for infants to access syntactic information through a surface analysis of the speech stream, and to bootstrap their way into language acquisition.