This study describes how intermediate-level first language English readers of Russian as a second language deploy lexical inferencing and other strategies when reading informational texts. Fifth-semester students of Russian performed think-alouds while reading two texts; one written for the general adult reader, and the other meant for school-age children. Reader think-alouds were transcribed a...

Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory and forgetting, and attachment to community and place. In my talk I explore the history of wr...

In recent years, we have investigated algorithmic methods for automatically discovering and optimizing sequential treatments for chronic and life-threatening diseases. In this talk I will discuss two aspects of this work, first the problem of efficiently collecting data to learn good sequential treatment strategies, and second the problem of using data collected in multi-stage sequential trials...

'When it changed' and 'Litmus' have been two recent book projects from Comma Press, which brought together authors and scientists to produce anthologies of science-based short stories. Each story arose from the direct collaboration of one author and one scientist, and each was followed by a discussion of the motivating science. In this talk I will describe the interaction between myself as a sc...

Thinking aloud is widely used for usability evaluation and its reactivity is therefore important to the quality of evaluation results. This study investigates whether thinking aloud (i.e., verbalization at levels 1 and 2) affects the behaviour of users who perform tasks that involve interruptions and time constraints, two frequent elements of real-world activities. We find that the presence of ...

This single subject study concerned how a 13 year-old student with specific learning disabilities used metacognition as he composed discourse in response to a writing prompt. Ethnographic procedures were used to collect and analyze data. The participant engaged in a think aloud procedure as he composed a paper about a famous historical figure. His transcribed verbalizations were analyzed by use...

Verbal data is the primary focus for analysis in the prevalent Usability evaluations like in ‘Think Aloud Method’. This study involves 18 cross cultural TA tests and it was found that users use gestures profoundly to communicate their mental activities. It was observed that hand gestures are attempts to communicate abstract feelings as well as to quantify, to simplify a complex expression & ref...

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 ...

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...