Ever since the birth of the telephony system, the problem with echoes, arising from impedance mismatch in 2/4-wire hybrids, or acoustic echoes where a loudspeaker signal is picked up by a closely located microphone, has been ever present. The removal of these echoes is crucial in order to achieve an acceptable audio quality for conversation. Today, the perhaps most common way for echo removal is through cancellation, where an adaptive filter is used to produce an estimated replica of the echo which is then subtracted from the echo-infested signal. Echo cancellation in practice requires extensive control of the filter adaptation process in order to obtain as rapid convergence as possible while also achieving robustness towards disturbances. Moreover, despite the rapid advancement in the computational capabilities of modern digital signal processors there is a constant demand for low-complexity solutions that can be implemented using low power and low cost hardware. This thesis presents low-complexity solutions for echo cancellation related to both the actual filter adaptation process itself as well as for controlling the adaptation process in order to obtain a robust system. Extensive simulations and evaluations using real world recorded signals are used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed solutions.

As a genre, the huaben話本 short story reassured readers of a Heaven who punished and rewarded human actions with perfect accuracy. Yet in the years before the Ming明 (1368-1644) collapse, the genre grew increasingly dark. Aina Jushi wrote Doupeng xianhua豆棚閒話, or Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (c. 1668), only a few years after the Manchus solidified their rule. The only full-frame story in pre-modern Chinese literature, the text is also notable for the directness with which it confronts societal and cosmological questions arising from the fall of the Ming dynasty. It was also the last significant huaben before the genre faded into obsolescence. My dissertation asks three questions. Why was this the last major collection of the genre? How do the form and the content work together? And what does Aina contribute to the Qing cosmological questioning through a genre obsessed with an ordered cosmos? I argue that the text deserves further study because of the beautiful complexity of its narrative structure and voices and its direct confrontation of the fall of the Ming. I also argue that Aina questions if there really is a moral Heaven that rewards and punishes human action and if there is any greater significance to virtuous action. His doubts about the presence of a moral Heaven increase as the text progresses but he is unwilling to completely discard Confucian relational ethics. This is shown by his loosening of the requirements of the huaben structure. The narratives become more incoherent and the content generally grows darker. By the final narrative, Aina drops the huaben form and presents an apathetic cosmos directly to the primary diegetic audience. The resulting cognitive dissonance causes the bean arbor to collapse and the audience to disperse. Aina offers us no moral certitude or clear didacticism.

I conducted 2 experiments investigating the relations between speaker-as-own-listener cusps and responding to bidirectional or reverse intraverbals. Speaker-as-own-listener cusps include, Naming, Say-Do Correspondence and Self-Talk Fantasy Play. During a pilot experiment, I found the source of the problem in 2 participants’ learning was their deficient speaker-as-own-listener repertoires. Although both participants in the pilot study had the Full Naming capability in repertoire, they lacked Say-Do and Self-Talk. Following a Self-Talk Immersion intervention, Say-Do was induced for both participants and coincidentally, correct responses to bidirectional or reverse intraverbals emerged. In Experiment I, I continued examining relations between the speaker-as-own-listener (SOL) repertoire and intraverbal responding with a statistical analysis of 35 Early Intervention (EI) and Preschool students recruited from CABAS® model schools who functioned at listener and speaker levels of verbal behavior. Findings from Experiment I indicated that the presence of Say-Do Correspondence and Self-Talk were significantly correlated to correct responses to reverse intraverbals. Experiment II was a functional analysis, during which 4 participants were selected from an EI classroom due to their similar levels of verbal behavior, deficient SOL repertoire, and because they could not respond to reverse intraverbals. Results indicated a functional relation between the presence of Say-Do Correspondence and Self-Talk and correct responses to intraverbal probes for all 4 participants.

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The purpose of this study is to find solutions on how to improve secondary school students’ persuasive argumentative English essay writing. The participants of this study are groups of ESL students aged 13 and 17 who live and study in a sub-urban area in Malaysia. All students and teachers converse amongst themselves using the Malay language on a daily basis while English language is merely used during classroom interaction time. Not only do they have very little opportunity to communicate using English language in their daily lives and for academic purposes, they also have limited opportunity to learn how to argue persuasively in their English classroom. Thus, they have difficulties in writing two-sided argumentative essays in English. The teaching-to-the-test culture has taken its toll on students’ writing performance when writing argumentative essays. In order to help students to score well in examination, teachers often overlook the need to teach critical thinking skills for the English subject. They focus solely on writing narrative essays as these essays require less critical thinking skill from the students. The Design-Based Research is employed to solve this problem of writing persuasive argumentative essays. Based on the pre-intervention essays written by the participants, it is believed that their difficulties are because of two major factors; insufficient English language skills and no exposure to persuasive argumentation skills. The initial design framework asserts that students should improve their persuasive argumentative essay writing if they are initially exposed to face-to-face group argumentation. However, the findings from the exploratory study revealed that face-to-face group argumentation is unmanageable in the context studied. Hence, an online learning intervention was considered to support secondary school students to improve their written argument. It was developed underpinned by design principles based on Exploratory Talk to achieve persuasive argumentation. The prototype online intervention was tested and developed through a series of iterations. Findings from Iteration 1 show that only a small number of students manage to write two-sided essays because most of them have an extreme attitude when writing about an issue and display a lack of positive transfer from group to individual argumentation. Prior to Iteration 2, the prototype intervention was adapted to tackle the extreme attitude and negative transfer issues by highlighting five elements: face-to-face classroom practice, focus more on three main ground rules, argument game, role of teachers during group argumentation and the use of argument map during the post-intervention essay writing. The findings demonstrate that all students in the second iteration wrote argumentative essays which are more persuasive. The final design framework developed in this study suggests a design framework that could be used by future researchers and ESL teachers at secondary school level who are interested in improving students’ persuasive argumentative essays.

I conducted a descriptive study consisting of 30 preschool participants with and without disabilities to examine the relation between the 3 bidirectional operants. The bidirectional operants were speaker-as-own-listener cusps, which included bidirectional verbal operants between people, bidirectional self-talk conversational units, and Bidirectional Naming (BiN). Using previously recorded videos of 10-min of social play (between-people condition) and 10-min of isolated fantasy play (self-talk condition), I recorded each instance of verbal behavior as a vocal initiation (VI), a non-vocal initiation (NI), a vocal response (VR), and a non-vocal response (NR). These initial recordings were further analyzed into the number of unidirectional and bidirectional verbal operants between people, unidirectional and bidirectional self-talk, single topography verbal behaviors, multiple topography verbal behaviors, missed opportunities, initiations, responses, and numbers of verbal episodes. The data collection procedure consisted of identifying each instance of verbal behavior during the between-people and self-talk fantasy play conditions and identifying the rotation in the participant’s role as a speaker and a listener within the verbal episodes to measure the social reinforcement function. For BiN, I measured the number of untaught listener responses (10 selection responses) and the number of untaught speaker responses (10 tact and 10 intraverbal responses) with familiar and unfamiliar novel stimuli following a naming experience in which the participants received 20 opportunities to hear the names of 5 novel stimuli while observing the pictures of the stimuli. Data were statistically analyzed using parametric and nonparametric analyses with Bonferroni corrected p-value. The results of the study were as follow: (1) the participants’ demographic characteristics were independent of their demonstrations of the three bidirectional operants, (2) BiN with unfamiliar stimuli was related to the participants’ emission of the bidirectional verbal operants between people, (3) the components of BiN and the bidirectional self-talk conversational units were independent but the results are inconclusive, (4) the unidirectional verbal operants between people were related to the bidirectional self-talk conversational units, and (5) the participants’ additional communicative verbal behaviors (i.e., vocal and non-vocal verbal behaviors, single and multiple topographies verbal behaviors, initiations, and responses) were independent of their degrees of BiN. The analyses of data suggested that there may be an underlying social reinforcement that is shared amongst the three bidirectional operants. Some may be more observable, such as the shared social reinforcement function between the bidirectional verbal operants between people and BiN with unfamiliar stimuli; whereas some may be less observable, as it may be manifested in a form of an audience control rather than social reinforcement function. Thus, the current study adds to the existing literature on verbal development as it shows the relation between the three bidirectional operants and the importance of social reinforcement not only to engage in conversation with others but to learn names of new unfamiliar objects or to come under audience control.

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the impact of different types of self-talk (i.e., group-oriented self-talk versus individual-oriented self-talk) upon self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and performance of a dart-throwing task in a group setting. The second object was to examine the interaction individuals' between individualistic or collectivistic orientations and self-talk on their perceptions of self-efficacy and collective efficacy. Participants were 80 university students (age, M = 22.25 years, SD = 4.41). A series of 3 (self-talk intervention levels) X 2 (individualism-collectivism levels) between-groups ANOVAs revealed that both self-efficacy and collective efficacy beliefs were significantly higher in the group-oriented self-talk condition than in the control condition. Consistent with efficacy beliefs, significant differences in performance improvement were found between the group-oriented-self-talk and the control condition. However, no interaction between self-talk and individualism-collectivism was found for self-efficacy or collective efficacy. The results suggest that in interdependent contexts, group-oriented self-talk strategies could be more effective in enhancing participants' confidence in their own abilities, their team's abilities, and performance than individual-oriented self-talk strategies. Limitations and implications for the future study of efficacy beliefs within a group performance setting are discussed.

This study examines talk-radio relations in advance of digitisation, testing the continuity of patterns of listener formation, to assess the accuracy of claims that 'interactivity' and individuated informational flows are demand-driven. Australian talk broadcasters are shown discursively creating a living 'thirdspace' or 'real virtuality' of transactional locations. Listener-caller participation arrays varying social orders across this imagined-yet-real terrain. Radio talk thus becomes a 'euphemised' form of social pre-dispositioning power, differentially locating power across communities. Four sets of talk-radio texts are examined in detail, using a socially contextualised form of linguistic analysis. Transcripts from 2UE's 'The Stan Zemanek Show' reveals an openly-gendered and more covertly classed discourse. The address to private rather than to public 'selves' in late-night sex-counselling talkback is examined. The study then examines programming from the community radio sector of volunteer-produced, local radio transmission. Finally, the study examines 'The prison show', a community radio music request and message programme for Aboriginal prisoners. The study concludes by suggesting that talk radio's role within cultural formation is complex in its articulations, but deeply implicated within the major cultural formational activities of contemporary consumer culture, on which are being modelled digital audio broadcasting's newly intensified flows of interactivity / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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