Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-80). Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-106). Also available in print.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universitat Hamburg, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1964. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-67).

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in Linguistics. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-148). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ99397

Thesis (M.A)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Play is a universal activity among children that can be indicative of a child’s developmental level. Additionally, play provides an avenue for children to practice certain skills and can be a causal agent in developmental change. Pretend play is especially important given the underlying cognitive and affective processes that are involved in pretense. Play is also strongly linked with creativity and psychosocial adjustment. Children with better play skills also demonstrate higher levels of creativity, emotion knowledge, social adjustment, and problem-solving abilities. Research suggests that culture and language also play an important role in child play development. Furthermore, parent play beliefs can impact how children develop play skills. Understanding differences in play development and related factors can inform interventions to improve play skills in this population. Additionally, research indicates a relationship between language and play and creativity. Learning more than one language may be related to children’s play skills and creative capacities. Thus, one aim was to investigate differences in play, creativity, and psychosocial adjustment between children in general education classrooms and children in an immersive bilingual education program (TWI program). A total of 117 child participants ages 5-10 years in kindergarten through 5th grade were recruited for this study. Participants completed tasks related to play and creativity and their parents completed questionnaires regarding parent play beliefs and child psychosocial adjustment. Results regarding play, creativity, and psychosocial adjustment indicated a strong relationship between play and creativity, consistent with prior research; however, no significant relationship was found between play and psychosocial adjustment. The TWI group demonstrated more imagination in their play and obtained higher scores on divergent thinking and fluency, which are measures of creativity, compared to those in the general education group. In the overall sample, parent play beliefs were not significantly related to pretend play skills. Overall, the results from the current study indicate that learning a second language in an immersive bilingual setting, play, and creativity are positively related to one another. These findings can inform future interventions. For example, incorporating play into language learning interventions may further enhance or improve language acquisition. Further exploration of the relationships between each of these variables is needed. Additionally, research regarding play, creativity, and parent beliefs in diverse populations is still necessary to understand the underlying cognitive processes that may be shared among these factors.

This thesis examinest he use of silence by Japanese learners of English in cross-cultural communication. It also considers how cross-cultural misunderstandings can be avoided in a pedagogic context. To this end, an analysis is made of a contrastive study of the use of silence by Japanese students learning English, and by Western students learning Japanese. The study draws on insights from the ethnographic approach. The study consists of three parts. The first part, Chapters 1-4, investigates the theoretical background to the study. Chapter 1 examines various definitions of the word 'culture' and investigates the role of Pragmatics in cross-cultural communication. Chapter 2 surveys studies of silence in various socio-cultural contexts. Chapter 3 more specifically explores the use of silence in the Japanese context and its relation to Japanese cultural values and sociocultural norms. Then, Chapter 4 shifts attention to examine differences of communicative styles between Japanese and Westerners, and several important features in interaction. In part two, Chapters 5-8, the ethnographic approach takes the lead in the interpretation of the interview and observational material. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the study and carefully considers the principles of ethnography guiding this investigation. Chapter 6 considers the research design in relation to the context and purposes of the investigation. The data is analysed in Chapters 7 and 8 interpreting the use of silence from a socio-cultural perspective. Chapter 7 discusses the results of the questionnaires. Chapter 8 concentrates on the analysis of the video-recorded data. The last Chapter, Chapter 9, concludes with suggestions of possible pedagogic approaches tackling cross-cultural misunderstanding in foreign language learning.

abstract: Reading comprehension is a critical aspect of life in America, but many English language learners struggle with this skill. Enhanced Moved by Reading to Accelerate Comprehension in English (EMBRACE) is a tablet-based interactive learning environment is designed to improve reading comprehension. During use of EMBRACE, all interactions with the system are logged, including correct and incorrect behaviors and help requests. These interactions could potentially be used to predict the child’s reading comprehension, providing an online measure of understanding. In addition, time-related features have been used for predicting learning by educational data mining models in mathematics and science, and may be relevant in this context. This project investigated the predictive value of data mining models based on user actions for reading comprehension, with and without timing information. Contradictory results of the investigation were obtained. The KNN and SVM models indicated that elapsed time is an important feature, but the linear regression models indicated that elapsed time is not an important feature. Finally, a new statistical test was performed on the KNN algorithm which indicated that the feature selection process may have caused overfitting, where features were chosen due coincidental alignment with the participants’ performance. These results provide important insights which will aid in the development of a reading comprehension predictor that improves the EMBRACE system’s ability to better serve ELLs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2017

For the majority of the 20th century, one of the central dogmas of linguistics was that, at the level of the lexicon, the relationship between words and meanings is arbitrary: there is nothing about the word ‘dog’ for example that makes it a particularly good label for a dog. However, in recent years it has become increasingly recognized that non-arbitrary associations between words and meanings make up a small, but potentially important portion of the lexicon. This thesis focuses on exploring the effect that non-arbitrary associations between words and meanings have on language learning and the structure of the lexicon. Based on a critical analysis of the existing literature, and the results of a number of experiments presented here, I suggest that the overall prevalence and developmental timing of two forms of non-arbitrariness in the lexicon– systematicity and motivatedness – is shaped by the pressure for languages to be learnable while remaining expressive. The effect of pressures for learnability and expressivity have been recognized to have important implications for the structure of language generally, but have so far not been applied to explain structure at the level of the lexicon. The central claim presented in this dissertation is that features of the perceptual and cognitive organization of humans results in specific types of associations between words and meanings being easier for naïve learners to acquire than others, and that the pressure for languages to be learnable results in lexica that leverage these human biases. Taking advantage of these biases, however, induces constraints on the structure of the lexicon that, left unchecked, might limit its expressivity or penalize subsequent learning. Thus, lexica are structured such that early-acquired words are able to leverage these biases while avoiding the limitations imposed by those biases when they are extended past a certain point.