1. Much of the debate surrounding the issue of syntactic reconstruction seems to me to be confounded by a certain degree of terminological (and perhaps conceptual) imprecision. In today’s talk I would like to present some aspects of the problem, walking through how they look to someone who makes the set of assumptions that I make regarding how historical linguistics works, what syntax is, what ...

Think aloud protocols are widely applied in user experience studies. In this paper, the effect of two different applications of the Retrospective Think Aloud (RTA) protocol on the number of user-reported usability issues is examined. To this end, 30 users were asked to use the National Cadastre and Mapping Agency web application and complete a set of tasks, such as measuring the land area of a ...

This paper describes a comparative study of three usability test approaches: concurrent thinkaloud protocols, retrospective think-aloud protocols, and constructive interaction. These three methods were compared by means of an evaluation of an online library catalogue, which involved four points of comparison: number and type of usability problems detected; relevance of the problems detected; ov...

Think-aloud protocols are a dominant method in usability testing. There is, however, only little empirical evidence on the actual validity of the method. This paper describes an experiment that compares concurrent and retrospective think-aloud protocols for a usability test of an online library catalogue. There were three points of comparison: usability problems detected, overall task performan...

The present study focuses on an exploration and identification of design heuristics used in the ideation process in both industrial designers and engineering designers. Design heuristics are cognitive strategies that help the designer generate novel design concepts. These cognitive heuristics may differ based on the design problem, the context defined, and designers’ preferences. In a think-alo...

Spatial annotations form part of the Semantic Annotation Framework (SemAF). The current development SemAF-Space (ISO 24617-7) provides a formal specification but does not provide annotation guidelines. In my talk I will compare this approach with the approach developed for the annotation of preposition senses in Müller et al. (2011), where the annotation guidelines form the annotation specifica...

Usually, by Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs) we mean expressions whose structure and meaning cannot be derived from their component words as they occur independently. In this talk I will discuss a different kind of multi-word expressions that behave as discourse relation markers (DRMs), yet do not seem to belong to well-defined syntactic classes. The apparent open-endedness of these expressions is...

This paper presents the IPS-I-model: a model that describes the process of information problem solving (IPS) in which the Internet (I) is used to search information. The IPS-I-model is based on three studies, in which students in secondary and (post) higher education were asked to solve information problems, while thinking aloud. In-depth analyses of the thinking-aloud protocols revealed that t...

Critical thinking skills are crucial in the public relations profession, but teaching these skills to the Millennial Generation is vastly different from previous generations. How can a professor get past No Child Left Behind’s dependence on test review guides and “everybody wins” in getting students to think for themselves? Using the Socratic method along with thinking tools/exercises, students...

The second feature of any talk I give is the purpose of my bothering to perform at all. When I ask my colleagues the purpose of a lecture, they often give some dreadfully dull responses. My view is as follows: a lecture is an opportunity to take a group of people on a journey of my choice; on the journey, I tell a story; if at the end of the journey people are still listening to my story, I kno...