Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item EVALUATION OF A SPACE ROBOTICS CONTROL CONSOLE USING EYE TRACKING GLASSES(2020) Kracinovich, Casey; Akin, David; Aerospace Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis seeks to evaluate the human factors of the design of the space robotics control console to be used at NASA Goddard in the OSAM-1 mission, using eye tracking glasses to gain insights into the ways in which operators interact with the various console elements. An experiment was performed in which trained robot operators wearing eye tracking glasses executed a simplified task on the ground, representative of an attention-intensive in-flight task. As the OSAM-1 mission is not scheduled to launch until 2023, the configuration of this console is still somewhat in flux, so this task was repeated three times in different possible console configurations. Drawing on previous eye tracking literature in combination with the gathered eye tracking data, conclusions were developed about this particular console and task, and more broadly, insights were gained into robot control console design in general.Item COMMITMENT AND FLEXIBILITY IN THE DEVELOPING PARSER(2010) Omaki, Akira; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates adults and children's sentence processing mechanisms, with a special focus on how multiple levels of linguistic representation are incrementally computed in real time, and how this process affects the parser's ability to later revise its early commitments. Using cross-methodological and cross-linguistic investigations of long-distance dependency processing, this dissertation demonstrates how paying explicit attention to the procedures by which linguistic representations are computed is vital to understanding both adults' real time linguistic computation and children's reanalysis mechanisms. The first part of the dissertation uses time course evidence from self-paced reading and eye tracking studies (reading and visual world) to show that long-distance dependency processing can be decomposed into a sequence of syntactic and interpretive processes. First, the reading experiments provide evidence that suggests that filler-gap dependencies are constructed before verb information is accessed. Second, visual world experiments show that, in the absence of information that would allow hearers to predict verb content in advance, interpretive processes in filler-gap dependency computation take around 600ms. These results argue for a predictive model of sentence interpretation in which syntactic representations are computed in advance of interpretive processes. The second part of the dissertation capitalizes on this procedural account of filler-gap dependency processing, and reports cross-linguistic studies on children's long-distance dependency processing. Interpretation data from English and Japanese demonstrate that children actively associate a fronted wh-phrase with the first VP in the sentence, and successfully retract such active syntactic commitments when the lack of felicitous interpretation is signaled by verb information, but not when it is signaled by syntactic information. A comparison of the process of anaphor reconstruction in adults and children further suggests that verb-based thematic information is an effective revision cue for children. Finally, distributional analyses of wh-dependencies in child-directed speech are conducted to investigate how parsing constraints impact language acquisition. It is shown that the actual properties of the child parser can skew the input distribution, such that the effective distribution differs drastically from the input distribution seen from a researcher's perspective. This suggests that properties of developing perceptual mechanisms deserve more attention in language acquisition research.