Spontaneous speech is replete with disfluencies: pauses, hesitations, restarts, and less than ideal deliveries of information. Disfluency is a topic of interdisciplinary research with insights from psycholinguistics, phonetics and speech technology. Researchers have tried to determine: When does disfluency occur?, Can disfluency be reliably predicted to occur?, and ultimately, Why does disfluency occur? The focus of my thesis will be to address the question of why disfluency occurs by reporting the results of analyses of disfluency frequency and the relationship between disfluency and eye gaze in a collaborative dialogue. Psycholinguistic studies of disfluency and collaborative dialogue differ on their answers to why disfluency occurs and its role in dialogue. One hypothesis, which I will refer to as Strategic Modelling, suggests that disfluencies are designed by the speaker. According to the alternative view, which I will call the Cognitive Burden View, disfluency is the result of an overburdened language production system. Throughout this thesis, I will contrast these two theories for an ultimate answer to why disfluency occurs. Each hypothesis attaches a functional role to a structural definition of disfluency and therefore in order to determine why disfluency occurs, I will contrast the structural and functional characteristics of disfluency. I will attempt to do this by analysing the dialogue behaviour in terms of speech goals and eye gaze behaviour a speaker is engaged in when they make certain types of disfluencies. A multi-modal Map Task paradigm was used in this thesis, in which speakers were asked to describe the route on a cartoon map to a distant confederate listener who provided either visual or verbal feedback. Speakers were eye-tracked during the dialogue and a record was kept of when the speaker attended to the listener’s visual feedback. Experiment 1 tested the visual feedback paradigm to establish its validity as a baseline condition. Speakers were found to make more disfluencies when they could interact with the visual feedback, suggesting disfluency is more common in interactive circumstances. Experiment 2 added verbal feedback to the experimental paradigm to test whether listeners react differently to the two modalities of feedback. Speakers made more disfluencies when the feedback was more complicated. Structural disfluency types were also observed to fulfil different functions. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated the motivation of the speaker and found that Motivated speakers gazed more often and were more disfluent per opportunity than Control speakers suggesting that highly motivated subjects are more willing to engage in difficult tasks.

Standards of female beauty have long been a source of debate within Western society. Determining who dictates these standards of beauty and how these standards inform individual value seemingly become more and more determined by the individuals themselves, yet there remains a high value placed on white, thin and cisgender females. This standard, although increasingly challenged remains the default for beauty in our society and within our literary culture. This thesis works to expose two modern Young Adult texts, John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines and Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap, for the ways in which they continue to reinforce these standards of beauty in women. While presenting challenges to these stereotypes, the standards set out in these texts ultimately portray women as defined and controlled by men. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Neste estudo propomos uma leitura interdisciplinar, confrontando a trajetória e o encontro de dois olhares, a saber: de um lado, o olhar do escritor belga-argentino Julio Cortázar (1914/1984), e, do outro, o do cineasta italiano Michelangelo Antonioni (1912), e dado às divergências consideráveis que existem entre as duas linguagens, buscaremos encontrar o ponto onde nos parece que acontece o diálogo das poéticas do autor e do diretor. Ao postular a aproximação entre a palavra e a imagem, o olhar é eleito como questão nuclear, transitando ainda pelo erótico e a personagem feminina. / In this study we propose an interdisciplinary interpretation that evaluates the trajectories and convergence of two looks: on the one hand, the view of the Belgian-Argentinean writer Julio Cortazar (1914/1984), and on the other, the view of the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni (1912). Given the considerable incongruities between the two languages, we aim to find a poetical meeting point at which the dialogue between the writer and the director can be established. By postulating a convergence between word and image, the gaze is chosen as the core issue, transiting also through the erotic and the feminine character.

Gaze tracking technology is widely used in Human Computer Interaction applications such as in interfaces for assisting people with disabilities and for driver attention monitoring. However, commercially available gaze trackers are expensive and their performance deteriorates if the user is not positioned in front of the camera and facing it. Also, head motion or being far from the device degrades their accuracy. This thesis focuses on the development of real-time time appearance based gaze tracking algorithms using low cost devices, such as a webcam or Kinect. The proposed algorithms are developed by considering accuracy, robustness to head pose variation and the ability to generalise to different persons. In order to deal with head pose variation, we propose to estimate the head pose and then compensate for the appearance change and the bias to a gaze estimator that it introduces. Head pose is estimated by a novel method that utilizes tensor-based regressors at the leaf nodes of a random forest. For a baseline gaze estimator we use an SVM-based appearance-based regressor. For compensating the appearance variation introduced by the head pose, we use a geometric model, and for compensating for the bias we use a regression function that has been trained on a training set. Our methods are evaluated on publicly available datasets.

Gaze estimation systems determine where someone is looking. Gaze is used for a wide range of applications including market research, usability studies, and gaze-based interfaces. Traditional equipment uses special hardware. To bring gaze estimation mainstream, researchers are exploring approaches that use commodity hardware alone. My work addresses two outstanding problems in this field: 1) it is hard to collect good ground truth eye images for machine learning, and 2) gaze estimation systems do not generalize well -- once they are trained with images from one scenario, they do not work in another scenario. In this dissertation I address these problems in two different ways: learning-by-synthesis and analysis-by-synthesis. Learning-by-synthesis is the process of training a machine learning system with synthetic data, i.e. data that has been rendered with graphics rather than collected by hand. Analysis-by-synthesis is a computer vision strategy that couples a generative model of image formation (synthesis) with a perceptive model of scene comparison (analysis). The goal is to synthesize an image that best matches an observed image. In this dissertation I present three main contributions. First, I present a new method for training gaze estimation systems that use machine learning: learning-by-synthesis using 3D head scans and photorealistic rendering. Second, I present a new morphable model of the eye region. I show how this model can be used to generate large amounts of varied data for learning-by-synthesis. Third, I present a new method for gaze estimation: analysis-by-synthesis. I demonstrate how analysis-by-synthesis can generalize to different scenarios, estimating gaze in a device- and person- independent manner.

Twenty first-born infants age three to five rronths, nine males and eleven fenales, were observed and vi deotaped for five minutes with each parent, in order to explore touch and gaze in free-play parent-infant interactions. Gazing behaviors of parents and infants and mutual gazing were rreasured in vivo; touching behaviors were rreasured fran the videotapes of each dyad. For each behavi or, four rreasures were taken: percent of total t:irre, average rate per minute, rrean duration of the behavior, and rrean duration of the intervals between behaviors. The results show that, on the average, parent touch and gaze were typical of parents at play with infants: frequent short touches and frequent long gazes. The infants look back at parents much less often, typical of infants whose parents are trying to get their attention. The data show unique response patterns depending on the sex of the infant and parent. Both rrothers and fathers use touch with boys, but not girls, as an instrurrental attention getting technique , touching rrore when the infant looks less often. M:lthers show a rrore canplex response than fathers, probably learned fran their greater caretaking experience. Touching to girls is related only to the parent's own attention, seeming to be a !!Ore expressive response. Yothers, but not fathers, increase their ix gaze reciprocally with girls ' gaze but not toys'. These unique relationships for !!Others and fathers with sons and daughters nay be the beginnings of differential sex-typed socialization. MJthers and fathers of the sane infants show very different behaviors, often negatively correlated, indicating that they may have developed a:rnplernentary relationships with their infants.

In the 150 years since Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel (1865/1866) first published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, various illustrators have found inspiration in this story to recreate its images again and again. Since Carroll and Tenniel, Wonderland has concerned itself with sociocultural ideas and the work of artists who re-illustrated this story provide ways to trace history of these ideas. Accordingly, the purpose of this project was to examine connections and breaks with tradition in illustration that contribute to an evolution of meaning in the Wonderland story. Additionally, through this project, I worked to interpret ideas from different artists in different times and spaces in an attempt to understand intersecting ideas of culture and Wonderland illustration. Through this work, I developed the concept of curation as a visual research methodology in order to make sense of and share my discoveries. Wonderland offers a rich context to explore and elucidate the arts-based qualitative methodology of curation because of its literary merits, artistic interpretations, and persistence and pervasion worldwide over the last century and a half. Curation allowed me flexibility in thinking about thematic interpretations of the illustrations I studied. Specific curatorial methods led me to identify the scene of Alice's decent to Wonderland, visual characterizations of the Hatter character, and depictions of the playing card characters as signals of sociocultural changes. When examined together, these interpretations point to an ever-shifting relationship between author, illustrators, and readers in classic, illustrated novels. Specifically, through the illustrations in Wonderland, Alice is no longer portrayed as a particular girl and illustrators over time have placed readers as the subject of the adventures. In recent times, Wonderland has gained some ability to cross over from its pages into the real world and take a look at its readers. This shift in perspective in Wonderland speaks to a current sociocultural environment wherein reality is hyper-subjective and nothing is quite as it seems.

<p>Gaze tracking is the estimation of the point in space a person is “looking at”. This is widely used in both diagnostic and interactive applications, such as visual attention studies and human-computer interaction. The most common commercial solution used to track gaze today uses a combination of infrared illumination and one or more cameras. These commercial solutions are reliable and accurate, but often expensive. The aim of this thesis is to construct a simple single-camera gaze tracker from off-the-shelf components. The method used for gaze tracking is based on infrared illumination and a schematic model of the human eye. Based on images of reflections of specific light sources in the surfaces of the eye the user’s gaze point will be estimated. Evaluation is also performed on both the software and hardware components separately, and on the system as a whole. Accuracy is measured in spatial and angular deviation and the result is an average accuracy of approximately one degree on synthetic data and 0.24 to 1.5 degrees on real images at a range of 600 mm.</p>

Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to previous and next words. Results are based on fixation durations recorded from 222 persons, each reading 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes.

Emotional interplay and communication with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia was studied in clinical interviews. Fifty-one video recorded interviews were conducted by two psychologists with nine patients. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used in three successive studies. Study I examined the communicative interplay on an overall level, including verbal and nonverbal means of communication. The interviewer’s willingness to explore and pursue the emotional content in the patient’s narrative was found to be important for establishing well functioning communication. In Study II, the stability over time of facial affective expressions in the emotional interplay was evaluated, using EMFACS. For the patients, no substantial changes in the amount of affects were found across all the interview occasions, although for one interviewer, contempt slightly increased. Whereas previous findings found contempt to be the most frequent affect in patients, in the present material disgust was as common, but depended on the interviewer. Study III investigated gaze behaviour and facial affective expressiveness. The objective was to test whether patients reduced their negative facial affectivity during mutual gaze. The patients were found to not reduce their negative facial affectivity during the state of mutual gaze. This finding was independent of both interview occasion and interviewer and implies that the patients might have intended to communicate negative facial affectivity to the interviewer. The research suggests that the emotional interplay is dominated by the negative facial affective expressions of mainly disgust and contempt. It is proposed that these negative affects may be connected to a patient’s low self-esteem, as the self in schizophrenia may be engrained by self-disgusting and self-contemptive affective experiences. The interviewer’s capacity to respond to these negative facial expressions must therefore be considered as important.