Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Linguistics

Speakers adopt acoustic characteristics of others' speech, a process known as phonetic imitation, and they also maintain and generalize imitation to novel words to which they have not been exposed. Relatively little, however, is known about what factors influence imitation generalization and maintenance, especially for cross-category variants. This dissertation focused on imitation of dialect-specific segmental variants in Jianshi Mandarin, and aimed to address three main research questions: (i) the role of automaticity vs. speakers' control in mediating imitation generalization and maintenance; (ii) the levels of representational specificity at which cross-category imitation operates and generalizes, i.e., representations of monosyllabic words, syllables, phonemes, or features; and (iii) the relative contribution of exposure amount and variability to imitation generalization and maintenance beyond perceptual exposure. To explore the role of automaticity vs. speakers' control, three types of post-exposure reading instructions were used as a way of manipulating participants' conscious effort during post-exposure speech production: to read the words, to say the words like the person you heard, and to say the words in the way you normally say them. Participants consistently imitated the target variants during the shadowing block. In the post-exposure block, the most robust and consistent imitation generalization and maintenance effects were observed with the explicit imitation instruction. The read and not imitate instructions led to no or weak imitation generalization and maintenance, which were smaller in magnitude and consistency than in the imitation instruction condition. These results suggest that imitation generalization and maintenance involve both automatic and controlled aspects, and that speakers' control plays a primary role and automaticity is secondary in these processes. Regarding representational specificity involved in imitation generalization, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cynthia Clopper (Advisor); Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (Committee Member); Shari Speer (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2017, Music

Infant vocalizations have been described mostly from the perspective of language acquisition. There is little systematic research on infant production of music sounds. This study investigated infants' music production by identifying and analyzing vocal imitation of music produced by one infant throughout one day. One 15-month-old infant wore a portable recording device that captured 16 continuous hours of sounds produced within hearing distance of the infant, as well as sounds from the infant's own vocal production. Instances of music imitation were identified through extensive and intensive listening of the audio file. Physical parameters of the imitative vocalizations were collected through acoustic analysis. A selection of imitations was presented to adults in a validation study involving perceptual similarity judgments between the infant's imitation and the model that was imitated. Results from acoustic analyses and the validation study supported the perceptual identification of the imitations. The findings show that the infant imitated music that he had heard that day. The infant imitated music features such as pitches, intervals, and rhythms of songs that were sung to him and of a melody produced by a toy. Some imitations occurred many hours after the infant had heard the melodies that served as models. These results reveal the ability of infants to (a) develop accurate representations of music melodies, (b) recall such representations at will hours later, and more importantly, (c) express these music representations vocally. In summary, the findings show that infants are capable of producing music imitations.

Committee: Eugenia Costa-Giomi (Advisor); Julia Shaw (Committee Member); Laura Wagner (Committee Member) Subjects: Music; Music Education

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1923, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1971, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

BA, Kent State University, 2024, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

The way in which children learn language is a matter of long-standing debate in the cognitive sciences. However, there is still no definitive answer on what neurocognitive mechanisms actually facilitate language learning. The Declarative/Procedural model of language (Ullman, 2015) suggests that both the declarative and procedural memory systems are involved in language learning, and they each serve different processes. Previous work has supported these claims, with especially large associations seen between declarative memory and language in children. However, previous work has stopped short of systematically examining declarative memory and language in very young children. In this study, a meta-analysis was conducted to explore the relationship between declarative memory and language abilities, specifically in young children under five years of age—a critical age range for language development that was not examined in previous meta-analyses. Studies reporting correlations between a widely studied kind of declarative memory ability (deferred imitation) and language abilities in neurotypical children under five years of age were examined. Six studies met the criteria for the meta-analysis, from which 14 correlations were extracted. The results indicate that there is a statistically significant correlation between declarative memory (as operationalized by deferred imitation) and language abilities in young children; however, this relationship was smaller than previous estimates (Hamrick et al., 2018). These results are consistent with the Declarative/Procedural model of language, as they show that general declarative memory abilities underpin some aspects of language in children. Additionally, these findings raise important questions about the limitations of declarative memory abilities in language.

Committee: Phillip Hamrick (Advisor); Luis Hermosilla (Committee Member); Edward Dauterich (Committee Member); Dana Miller-Cotto (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics; Psychology

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2023, Engineering and Applied Science: Mechanical Engineering

Distributed multi-agent systems are becoming increasingly crucial for robotics applications due to their potential for efficiency, resilience, scalability, and achieving complex tasks. Such applications include environmental mapping, search after natural disasters, and military systems. Hence, swarm robotics has been a focus of research for several years. However, controlling these systems in a distributed sense relying on local information is particularly challenging. Centralized methods using global information are often faced with the issue of scalability and significant computational requirements. All the information is sent to a central agent, which computes the actions of each agent. This is a bottleneck; such systems are not robust or scalable and often impractical. As the number of agents increases, decentralized control becomes a necessity. Each agent must decide its own action based on the local information from its neighbors. Traditional control-theoretic methods have been used in literature to develop such controllers. However, it is highly challenging to obtain an efficient decentralized controller that would enable individual agents to use local information to compute their control actions to achieve a global task. This dissertation uses data-driven Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques to develop decentralized control schemes for multi-agent systems. Such approaches have shown immense promise in solving complex problems such as facial recognition, anomaly detection, smart manufacturing, robotics, etc. This dissertation aims to develop a scalable and decentralized controller for large-scale heterogeneous robot swarms exhibiting segregative, aggregative, and navigation behaviors by learning in a supervised and unsupervised manner. This work presents two learning approaches: a) an imitation learning-based framework for segregation and aggregation tasks and b) a multi-agent deep graph reinforcement learning framework for cohesiv (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Manish Kumar Ph.D. (Committee Chair); David Thompson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Ali Minai Ph.D. (Committee Member); Xiaodong Jia Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Mechanical Engineering

Doctor of Management, Case Western Reserve University, 2010, Weatherhead School of Management

Strategic management literature has recognized that the presence of causal ambiguity plays a pivotal role in generating differences in obtained rents. At the same time, causal ambiguity may hamper internal diffusion of capabilities within the firm negatively affecting its performance (Szulanski, 1996). Overall, the relationship between dynamic capabilities, causal ambiguity and firm performance has remained poorly understood. In this doctoral study, we seek to address this gap by developing a causal model that depicts how management perceptions of causal ambiguity mediate the effects of the firm's competencies on firm performance. Three mixed method studies together provide a rich account of how managers respond to causal ambiguity and its effects on firm performance. The first study examines the extent to which characteristics of managers are related to ambiguity. The second study based on qualitative interviews shows that a holistic approach to firm operations addresses causal ambiguity more effectively than attempts to address ambiguous situations separately. The third study analyzes using a survey methodology how ambiguous competencies are deployed within the organization and to what extent causal ambiguity mediates the effects of firm competencies. The results suggest two important considerations for management practice. First, participative leadership style, open climate, and congruent sustained values should be considered for their positive impact on reducing causal ambiguity. Second, the managerial climate and organizational values have also an effect in decreasing causal ambiguity.

Committee: Kalle Lyytinen, Ph.D. (Advisor); Richard Boland, Ph.D. (Advisor) Subjects: Management

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1966, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1963, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Psychology

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2016, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Imitation and evaluation procedure is important for ASL learning and teaching. However, the current online ASL learning resources do not provide affordable and convenient imitation-evaluation function. To solve this problem, we propose an Automatic American Sign Language Imitation Evaluator (AASLIE) to evaluate the hand movement in the imitation. The proposed AASLIE system extracts 3D trajectory of the centroid of the hand by first applying a two-stage algorithm for 2D hand detection and tracking allowing possible hand-face overlaps. The 3D trajectory is extracted using a Structure from Motion algorithm with the point correspondences calculated from minimizing an affine transformation. The evaluation contains two parts, recognition and quantitative evaluation, for giving more sensitive feedback than the current sign language recognition systems. The recognition is achieved by a classification algorithm. The quantitative evaluation score, which indicates the goodness of imitation, is given by a weighted sum of point-wise distance between the imitation trajectory and the standard trajectory. Experiments were conducted for testing the recognition and quantitative evaluation functionality proposed in the system. The results show that the AASLIE system recognizes the trajectories with an average accuracy 0.8581 (±0.05) and the score accurately captures the different levels of goodness of imitation.

Committee: Aleix Martinez PhD (Advisor); Yuejie Chi PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Electrical Engineering

PHD, Kent State University, 2015, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This dissertation examines Vygotsky's theory of imitation and it relationship to the zone of proximal development. After noting incongruities within scholarship regarding the ZPD, I discuss the similarities between Vygotsky's theory of imitation and Bandura's theory of modeling. Based on this discussion, I operationalize Bandura's paradigm for successful modeling, introduce his notion of self-efficacy, and describe how modeling and imitation provides students an opportunity to achieve mastery skills needed in a peer review session, skills which are effective in changing an individual's sense of efficacy and increases motivation for peer review and engagement in the writing process. This semester long, exploratory study used pre and post Self Efficacy surveys (see Bandura, Pajares, Zimmerman), pre and post in class writings, and an informal interview to generate data; results indicate that modeling and imitation increased student ability and engagement with peer review. Moreover, the participant's favorable claims for peer review and the effects which modeling had on them suggest that modeling cognitive strategies changed these writers' attitude toward revision and the peer review process. By providing observable behaviors and allowing students to imitate these behaviors, the mystique of the peer review process and the interpretive demand of the rough draft was reduced. In addition, understood as an important step in the writing process, students were using it in other writing tasks and intended to continue using it beyond the composition class.

Committee: Sara Newman PhD (Committee Chair); Michele Eodice PhD (Committee Member); Robin Selinger PhD (Committee Member); Lewis Fried PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, Linguistics

This study examined the effect of regional dialect on implicit spontaneous phonetic imitation in typically developing adults (TD) and adults with high functioning autism (HFA). Participants shadowed CVC target words produced by talkers from two American English dialect regions, the North and the Midland. Imitation was measured acoustically in terms of vowel quality, vowel duration, midpoint f0, f0 trajectory, and onset and coda consonant duration. It was hypothesized that TD shadowers would imitate familiar dialects less than unfamiliar dialects, based on previous results showing that high frequency words are imitated less than low frequency words (Goldinger, 1998). By extension, frequently encountered or familiar dialects should be imitated less than unfamiliar dialects. Effects of dialect familiarity were in the expected direction, with more imitation of unfamiliar dialects. TD shadowers also imitated perceptually salient targets, including those with long vowels, high f0, or rising f0. The TD productions and targets from the shadowing task were then used as stimulus materials in an AXB discrimination task to measure perceived imitation. Results suggest that TD shadowers were imitating some dialect features. Among the acoustic measures, perceived imitation was correlated with vowel duration and coda duration. HFA shadowers were expected to exhibit less imitation than TD shadowers based on research showing that impaired imitation is a characteristic of HFA (Stieglitz et al., 2008; Stone et al., 1990). This prediction was supported for vowel quality and onset duration, but HFA shadowers imitated vowel duration and midpoint f0 more than TD shadowers. HFA shadowers were less likely than TD shadowers to imitate perceptually long or high f0 vowels, but more likely to imitate long consonants. Effects of dialect familiarity for HFA shadowers were in the opposite direction from those for TD shadowers, with HFA shadowers imitating Northern targets less than the more familia (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cynthia Clopper (Committee Chair); Shari Speer (Committee Member) Subjects: Experiments; Language; Linguistics; Psychology

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2010, Psychology

Children's preferences for native speakers of their native language over foreign-accented speakers have been documented across a variety of different situations. Two experiments were used to test whether five- to six-year-old children (N=98) and adults (N=68) show the native-speaker preference when learning non-functional behaviors, a type of cultural information. In experiment 1, children imitated native-speakers' non-functional behaviors more than foreign-accented speakers' non-functional behaviors, but adults did not show any imitative preference. Experiment 2 tested whether children's performance in Experiment 1 was due to a belief that native speakers are more credible sources of cultural information. Results from experiment 2 showed that children preferentially imitated non-functional behaviors of a credible native speaker but not a credible foreign-accented speaker. Adults imitated the non-functional behaviors of whichever speaker used explicit credibility cues. Results from both experiments suggest that, for children, native accent signals speaker credibility, but maybe not for adults.

Committee: Laura Wagner (Advisor); Susan Johnson (Committee Member); Russell Fazio (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, Physical Activity and Educational Services

Children and adults acquire countless skills through the strategy of imitation. However, some children with disabilities do not demonstrate the ability to imitate in the course of their natural development. Therefore, explicit instruction is required to help these children take advantage of such a pivotal skill. Much of the research in the area of imitation has focused on observational learning. In these studies, many of the participants are already able to imitate the actions of adults, and are then taught to imitate their peers (Garfinkle & Schwartz, 2002; Venn et al., 1993). Previous interventions for teaching initial imitation skills to young children with disabilities has focused on methoods such as discrete trial training, where instruction is provided by an adult in an isolated, distraction-free setting (Smith, 2001). The purpose of this study was to evaluate an imitation training package, designed to teach initial imitation skills using constant time delay in the context of a preschool classroom. The target children were paired with typically developing peers, and all aspects of the study were embedded into ongoing activities. Generalization sessions were conducted, and incorporated a larger group of children with the classroom teacher providing the model. The dependent variables included the number of correct imitations, and the number of approximations of correct imitations of the adult model. Trials in which the children did not respond, or responded inappropriately were also measured. The effects of the intervention were monitored using a single-subject multiple baseline design across target behaivors, replicated across children. Additionally, measures of procedural integrity, accuracy and social validity were collected. The results of this study indicated that children with severe disabilities could learn to imitate an adult's model in the context of ongoing activities, with a typically developing peer. While the target children learned to imitate the a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Diane Sainato (Advisor) Subjects: Education, Special