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There is concern that the use of financial incentives might exert an undue influence on potential research participants; unable to resist the lure of a large financial incentive, an individual might enroll in a trial against his or her better judgment. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the concept of undue inducement, and determine if the use of incentives in research is really problematic in this way. I suggest that ‘undue inducement’ mislabels a different problem --inadequate comprehension by research participants-- and argue that a strong comprehension requirement is the solution to the real problem raised by the use of incentives to participate in research. I also consider objections to a strong comprehension requirement, and examine whether a strong comprehension requirement provides a solution to the problems of coercion and exploitation in clinical research trials in the same way that it solves the problem of undue inducement.

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The component processes specific to simultaneous interpreting and common to interpreting and listening were investigated. Experienced conference interpreters and inexperienced bilinguals performed aural-to-oral simultaneous interpreting of a narrative and a procedure from English into French and then gave a free recall of each immediately afterwards. A comparison group of bilinguals performed a simple listening task with the same materials. The texts were on an unfamiliar topic (positron emission tomography) and differed only with respect to frame type. / Experience showed a main effect on interpreting measures, (experienced interpreters performed more accurately), and interacted with text-structure variables that indexed proposition generation, but did not affect recall. Task did not have a main effect on recall and interacted weakly with text-structure variables. Text and Text-structure variables had very strong effects both for the interpreting and the recall measures. / The results were viewed as evidence that interpreting involves the same component processes as normal listening comprehension rather than constituting a specialized comprehension skill. Analyses of text-structure variables provided evidence for influence of high-level conceptual processing and other component processes both on line and off line. Since there was no evidence that interpreting interfered with comprehension, the qualitative on-line measures possible in the interpreting task appear to be generalizable to comprehension under more usual circumstances.

The ability of dictionaries, either in printed or electronic form, to enhance text comprehension has not been systematically investigated. Consequently, in order to investigate whether dictionary support improves text comprehension, this study compared readers' first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) text comprehension across three dictionary conditions and two proficiency levels. Recall, dictionary usage and reading times were the measures employed. Subjects were anglophone members of the Canadian Armed Forces military personnel with high-intermediate to advanced French second-language skills. / Procedural texts were used: subjects read both an L1 and an L2 text in each of three conditions: (a) no dictionary access; (b) access to hard-copy dictionaries; and (c) access to on-line computerized dictionaries. The number of words looked up varied greatly by language, by proficiency level and by dictionary modality, with a far greater number of words accessed in L2 than in L1, by intermediate- than by advanced-level readers and in the on-line rather than in the hard-copy dictionary condition. The variance in dictionary usage was explained by the two-way interactions between language, proficiency level and dictionary condition. / Reading times were higher for intermediate-level readers than for advanced-level readers, and when L2 rather than L1 texts were read. These reading time results are consistent with the patterns of dictionary consultation, where intermediate L2 reading produced the most look-ups. / Most readers expressed a preference for on-line dictionaries, reporting that the ease of access led to faster and better text comprehension, but this impression was not confirmed by the findings. Analyses of recall protocols indicated that there was no main effect for the type of dictionary consulted. Similar levels of recall were found on all passages read with access to dictionaries, regardless of the language of presentation. Significantly lower recalls were found on passages read with no access to dictionaries, with L2 recall lower than L1 recall. This study indicates that the type of dictionary accessed does not significantly influence comprehension. The high number of L2 dictionary look-ups does suggest that readers may use dictionaries to compensate for weaker second language vocabulary skills, resulting in similar levels of text comprehension across languages.

Children with ADHD have significant attentional problems that affect their academic performance. Because many of the typical symptoms of ADHD manifest themselves in classrooms, these attentional problems may have an impact on comprehension and its course of development. This is a significant area of interest because the academic success of a child requires being able to recall and comprehend information. Effective comprehension requires being able to understand both causal (why?) and factual (what?) questions. The purposes of this study are use the television viewing methodology and 1) to employ a longitudinal investigation and compare patterns of developmental change among children with ADHD and comparison children in attention and comprehension, 2) examine if cognitive engagement, as indexed by long looks, increases with age for each group, and 3) investigate how look lengths relate to comprehension for each group. Participants were 59 children with ADHD and 101 comparison children. Children viewed two 12-minute episodes of the Rugrats television program at time one and two episodes at time two, approximately 18-months later. Each of the children viewed the television program in one of two viewing conditions, toys-present and toys-absent. Results provide insight into the problems in attention and comprehension experienced by children with ADHD. First, the preciously observed difficulties in sustaining attention with toys-present for children with ADHD are stable across time and a wide age range. Second, as they got older children with ADHD did not exhibit the same increase in time spent in long looks as comparison children. Third, the older high IQ children with ADHD fell behind comparison children in their recall of factual information as they got older. Fourth, as they became older, high IQ children with ADHD did not show improvement in their causal recall with toys present, in contrast to comparison children. Finally, although there was some support for the hypothesis that time spent in long looks is associated with comprehension of the televised material, it did not account for group differences in recall. Several implications and directions for future research are discussed.

This thesis proposes a method for the re-modularisation of legacy COBOL. Legacy code often performs a number of functions that if split, would improve software maintainability. For instance, program comprehension would benefit from a reduction in the size of the code modules. The method aims to identify potential reuse candidates from the functions re-modularised, and to ensure clear interfaces are present between the new modules. Furthermore, functionality is often replicated across applications and so the re-modularisation process can also seek to reduce commonality and hence the overall amount of a company's code requiring maintenance. A 10 step method is devised which assembles a number of new and existing techniques into an approach suitable for use by staff not having significant reengineering experience. Three main approaches are used throughout the method; that is the analysis of the PERFORM structure, the analysis of the data, and the use of graphical representations. Both top-down and bottom-up strategies to program comprehension are incorporated within the method as are automatable, and user controlled processes to reuse candidate selection. Three industrial case studies are used to demonstrate and evaluate the method. The case studies range in size to gain an indication of the scalability of the method. The case studies are used to evaluate the method on a step by step basis; both strong points and deficiencies are identified, as well as potential solutions to the deficiencies. A review is also presented to assesses the three main approaches of the methods; the analysis of the PERFORM and data structures, and the use of graphical representations. The review uses the process of software evolution for its evaluation using successive versions of COBOL software. The method is retrospectively applied to the earliest version and the known changes identified from the following versions are used to evaluate the re-modularisations. Within the evaluation chapters a new link within the dominance tree is proposed as is an approach for dealing with multiple dominance trees. The results show that «ach approach provides an important contribution to the method as well as giving a useful insight (in the form of graphical representations) of the process of software evolution.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1989. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.