Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Comparison of an Integrative Inductive Approach, Presentation-and-Practice Approach, and Two Hybrid Approaches to Instruction of English Prepositions(2012) Mueller, Charles Mark; DeKeyser, Robert M; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Certain semantic categories, such as the polysemous senses of English prepositions, present specific problems for adult second language (L2) learners, whether they attempt to acquire these meanings through implicit learning mechanisms or through explicit mechanisms associated with incidental learning or instruction. This study examined research on categorization and practice, along with results of learner corpus analyses, to arrive at a characterization of the learning problem posed by English prepositions. An experiment then assessed the effectiveness of a novel pedagogical intervention called semantic highlighting (SH), which employed an inductive, integrative approach to the acquisition of procedural knowledge while accounting for some of the distinctive features of the learning problem posed by polysemy and semantic complexity. A between-subject comparison examined the performance of a control group and four treatment groups. One treatment group (D-P) received explicit explanations of the senses of various prepositions, followed by practice with immediate feedback. Another group (SH) received only a practice session in which cues, referred to here as "semantic highlighting" (SH), were used to draw participants' attention to concrete form-meaning mapping as it applied to the target sentences. The other two treatment groups received hybrid instruction with explicit explanations preceding SH practice (D-SH) or with SH practice preceding explicit explanations (SH-D). Acquisition was measured using a fill-in-the-blanks (FB) test and a written sentence-elicitation (SE) test that was scored using a target-language use analysis (Pica, 1984). Two ANCOVAs, using pretest scores as a covariate, showed significant differences between groups on the FB measure (p < .001) and SE measure (p < .001) at an alpha level of .025. On the FB test, results indicated an advantage for the SH (p < .001) group relative to the SH-D group. On the SE measure, the SH group outperformed the D-P (p = .010), SH-D (p = .013), and D-SH (p = .002) groups. The results suggested that the SH treatment, and possibly the D-SH treatment, as well, constitute viable alternatives to a conventional presentation-and-practice approach when teaching complex semantic targets. The results were further discussed in terms of implications for theoretical accounts of explicit instruction and categorization.Item The structure and perception of budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus) warble songs(2009) Tu, Hsiao-Wei; Dooling, Robert J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The warble song of male budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) is an extraordinarily complex, multi-syllabic, learned vocalization that is produced continuously in streams lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes without obvious repetition of particular patterns. As a follow-up of the warble analysis of Farabaugh et al. (1992), an automatic categorization program based on neural networks was developed and used to efficiently and reliably classify more than 25,000 warble elements from 4 budgerigars. The relative proportion of the resultant seven basic acoustic groups and one compound group is similar across individuals. Budgerigars showed higher discriminability of warble elements drawn from different acoustic categories and lower discriminability of warble elements drawn from the same category psychophysically, suggesting that they form seven perceptual categories corresponding to those established acoustically. Budgerigars also perceive individual voice characteristics in addition to the acoustic measures delineating categories. Acoustic analyses of long sequences of natural warble revealed that the elements were not randomly arranged and that warble has at least a 5th-order Markovian structure. Perceptual experiments provided convergent evidence that budgerigars are able to master a novel sequence between 4 and 7 elements in length. Through gradual training with chunking (about 5 elements), birds are able to master sequences up to 50 elements. The ability of budgerigars to detect inserted targets taken in a long, running background of natural warble sequences appears to be species-specific and related to the acoustic structure of warble sounds.Item Analogies as Categorization Phenomena: Studies from Scientific Discourse(2004-11-30) Atkins, Leslie Jill; Hammer, David; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Studies on the role of analogies in science classrooms have tended to focus on analogies that come from the teacher or curriculum, and not the analogies that students generate. Such studies are derivative of an educational system that values content knowledge over scientific creativity, and derivative of a model of teaching in which the teacher's role is to convey content knowledge. This dissertation begins with the contention that science classrooms should encourage scientific thinking and one role of the teacher is to model that behavior and identify and encourage it in her students. One element of scientific thinking is analogy. This dissertation focuses on student-generated analogies in science, and offers a model for understanding these. I provide evidence that generated analogies are assertions of categorization, and the base of an analogy is the constructed prototype of an ad hoc category. Drawing from research on categorization, I argue that generated analogies are based in schemas and cognitive models. This model allows for a clear distinction between analogy and literal similarity; prior to this research analogy has been considered to exist on a spectrum of similarity, differing from literal similarity to the degree that structural relations hold but features do not. I argue for a definition in which generated analogies are an assertion of an unexpected categorization: that is, they are asserted as contradictions to an expected schema.