Mediation analyses are crucial for understanding the mechanisms through which interventions or theoretical constructs influence outcomes within nested structures, commonly found in education, psychology, and sociology. Recognizing the importance of these effects, designing and analyzing robust studies to detect them is essential. This dissertation…

Graph representations underlie many modern computer applications, capturing the structure of such diverse networks as the Internet, personal associations, roads, sensors, and metabolic pathways. While the static structure of graphs is a well-explored field, a new emphasis is being placed on understanding and representing the way these networks…

Synthesis writing is a common requirement in secondary schools and colleges, but it is often done ineffectively because students fail to engage the critical processes of selecting, organizing, and connecting information, which are the crux of synthesis writing. Therefore, it is imperative to teach students synthesis writing strategies. The present…

Examining verbal memory recall from a speech production standpoint can greatly contribute to the understanding of both processes. The existence of the segment as the minimal unit of articulation, already shown in the naming task, has important implications for how recall might occur in verbal recall tasks. Specifically, the initial segment of a…

Vowel nasality is the most controversial phonological aspect of Brazilian Portuguese. Scholars suggest the oral-nasal vowel distinction may not exist. A consonant-like nasal resonance presence at the vowel's right edge (the nasal appendix) might make nasal vowels the product of a contextual vowel nasalization rule. Others suggest that the appendix…

In a series of three experiments, I investigated the emergence of conditioned seeing, defined as delayed drawing responses, as a potential component of bidirectional naming (BiN) for unfamiliar stimuli, which was defined in this study as the emergence of untaught listener and speaker responses following a naming experience with school-aged…

Web application software uses new technologies that have novel methods for integration and state maintenance that amount to new control flow mechanisms and new variables scoping. While modern web development technologies enhance the capabilities of web applications, they introduce challenges that current testing techniques do not adequately test…

The experimenter conducted three experiments to compare incidental language acquisition of familiar and non-familiar stimuli, and asses the effects of specific pairing experiences on the emergence of bidirectional naming (BiN) for familiar and non-familiar stimuli. In Experiment I the experimenter assessed the numbers of accurate untaught listener…

Two problems at two different abstraction levels of computational biology are studied. At the molecular level, efficient pattern matching algorithms in DNA sequences are presented. For gene order data, an efficient data structure is presented capable of storing all gene re-orderings in a systematic manner. A common characteristic of presented…

A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the writing literature. Research suggests that higher quality writing is…

Companies have adopted environmental practices such as reverse logistics over the past few decades. However, studies show that aligning partners inside the green supply chain can be a substantial problem. This lack of coordination can increase overall supply chain cost. Information technology such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has the…

This dissertation examines the thesis that implicit learning plays a role in learning about scientific phenomena, and subsequently, in conceptual change. Decades of research in learning science demonstrate that a primary challenge of science education is overcoming prior, naive knowledge of natural phenomena in order to gain scientific…

In addition to the display application, Liquid Crystals (LC) can be very useful in other applications such as beam steering, tunable lenses, etc. Electro-optical LC tunable lenses have been considered as an alternative to conventional glass lenses because of their ability to change their focal length with the application of a control voltage, as…

English speakers talk and think about Time in terms of physical space. The past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. In this way, we "map" space onto Time. This dissertation addresses the specificity of this physical space, or its topography. Inspired by languages like Yupno (Nunez, et al., 2012) and Bamileke-Dschang (Hyman,…

Online social bookmarking systems allow users to assign tags (i.e., keywords) to represent the content of resources. Research on the effects of target audience on social tagging suggests that taggers select different tags for themselves, their community (e.g., family, friends, colleagues), and the general public (Panke & Gaiser, 2009; Pu &…