To build an Artificial Intelligence system that can assist us in daily lives, the ability to understand the world around us through visual input is essential. Prior studies train visual perception models by defining concept vocabularies and annotate data against the fixed vocabulary. It is hard to define a comprehensive set of everything, and thus…

In order to comprehend complex and abstract phenomena, students must partake in the process of learning by integrating complex and invisible components without ever physically encountering or manipulating such components. Prior knowledge and experiences will influence the way students assimilate and model new experiences and knowledge. If prior…

Speech is a complex, redundant and variable signal happening in a noisy and ever changing world. How do listeners navigate these complex auditory scenes and continuously and effortlessly understand most of the speakers around them? Studies show that listeners can quickly adapt to new situations, accents and even to distorted speech. Although prior…

Structural reasoning is a combined ability to "look for structures, recognize structures, probe into structures, act upon structures, reason in terms of general structures, and see how a piece of knowledge acquired resolves a perturbation experienced" (Harel and Soto, 2017). The purpose of this study was to explore the cognitive…

Language learners need to map a continuous, multidimensional acoustic signal to discrete abstract speech categories. The complexity of this mapping poses a difficult learning problem, particularly for second language learners who struggle to acquire the speech sounds of a non-native language, and almost never reach native-like ability. A common…

Financial concerns and public scrutiny are causing many educational leaders and community stakeholders to study the district configurations of school corporations, academic preparation, and ideal school size. The purpose of this qualitative case-study research design was to identify and better understand successful small school districts as…

Reading is an essential skill for daily life and academic success. According to the connectionist model of reading, word recognition involves orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing, as well as the interactions among them. Language skill such as phonological processing, develops earlier than reading acquisition, and thus likely serves…

Spatial intelligence is an essential skill commonly used within various fields of science. Students with low spatial abilities frequently struggle to identify, retrieve, and apply key complex abstract information presented as multiple representations to actual three-dimensional natural materials and phenomena. Spatial ability may be considered a…

Skill acquisition theorists conceptualize second language (L2) learning as the acquisition of a set of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills. The dominant view in skill acquisition theory is to regard L2 skill acquisition as a three-stage process "from initial representation of knowledge through initial changes in behavior to eventual…

Visual categorization is ubiquitous in many professions, yet training programs are typically time- and effort-intensive. This work focuses on developing methods to improve human learning and performance on challenging visual categorization tasks, e.g., bird species identification, diagnostic dermatology. As part of the general approach, we infer…

All language use reflects the user's social identity in systematic ways. While humans can easily adapt to this sociolinguistic variation, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems continue to struggle with it. This dissertation makes three main contributions. The first is to provide evidence that modern state-of-the-art commercial ASR systems…

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between early intervention providers' backgrounds, and their perceptions of caregiver coaching and auditory skill development, to develop professional development programs. An explanatory sequential design was used with participants of varying backgrounds and experience. In the first…

I conduct a study of learning in HMAX-like models, which are hierarchical models of visual processing in biological vision systems. Such models compute a new representation for an image based on the similarity of image sub-parts to a number of specific patterns, called prototypes. Despite being a central piece of the overall model, the issue of…

A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker's knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties…

The purpose of this qualitative comparative case study was to understand how front-line student services staff experience transition from a traditional model of service to an integrated model of service. There were three fundamental questions framing this research study: 1. What strategies and support systems were utilized by staff making the…