Developmental Psychology Commons^™

Early Childhood Language And Literacy Development Programs For Autism Spectrum Disorder And D/Deaf And Hard-Of-Hearing Students, Mayson Spillman

Lewis Honors College Thesis Collection

This paper examines several popular approaches in the United States for enhancing early childhood literacy and language development in two special education populations— d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing (d/DHH) students and students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In addition to examining the effectiveness of these approaches, I adopt an educational equity lens to describe how variability in implementation can impact outcomes for these children. Based on my critical reading of the literature, I offer three broad recommendations for school psychologists: (1) Carefully consider dosage and fidelity of implementation, (2) Use caution when modifying existing interventions for these populations, and (3) Increase in-service …

Reading In Kapampangan, Filipino, And English: A Look At Multilingual Children In An Economically Challenging Philippine Community, Portia Padilla

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The present studies advance current understanding of the skills and processes involved in multilingual reading, especially in less researched alphabetic languages. These studies examined whether the dominant models in reading in English can explain the reading processes involved among low-income multilingual speakers of Kapampangan (L1), Filipino (L2), and English (L3) in the Philippines, a developing country. Kapampangan and Filipino use the same Roman alphabet that English uses. However, these two languages have transparent orthographies while English has an opaque orthography.

Study 1 examined the psycholinguistic grain size theory within the context of multilingual reading. There were three hundred twenty-six children …

Learning To Read In English: Vocabulary Knowledge, Phonological Awareness In Relation To Oral Reading Fluency In Chinese-English Bilinguals, Michelle (Ruyun) Huo

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Second language (L2) acquisition has received increasing interest due to the large number of people immigrating or learning an L2 (e.g., Statistics Canada, 2016). Word reading fluency has been found to be a strong predictor of text reading fluency and comprehension (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp & Jenkins, 2001). For people learning to read in L2, skills such as oral reading fluency serve as an indicator of overall reading competence in their L2. The current study examined oral reading fluency in relation to vocabulary knowledge, rapid naming (RAN) and phonological awareness in English and Mandarin in Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants included 40 Chinese-English …

Reading In Arabic Script: A Cross-Linguistic And Cross-National Study, Asma Amin

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The current study examined within- and cross-language predictors of word reading and reading comprehension among groups of Arabic-English bilingual children in different language learning environments. A total of 80 children were tested, forty Arabic-English bilingual children recruited from Saudi Arabia and forty Arabic-English bilingual children were recruited from Canada. Both groups completed parallel measures of word-level reading, reading comprehension and vocabulary in Arabic and English. Results indicated that the underlying components related to within- and cross-language word reading and reading comprehension varied across groups. Within-language results demonstrate that English morphological awareness was significantly related to English word reading in both …

Rhyme: A Tool For Word Learning, Kristen Elizabeth Thompson Mills

Masters Theses

To become successful readers, children must be able to recognize how changes in sound correspond to changes in word meaning. Rhymes, which contain minimal pair words that differ in their initial phoneme but share final vowels and codas (e.g., the cat in the hat), are often used in preschool and kindergarten classrooms as a tool to promote literacy and word learning. Although young language learners can generally discriminate minimal pair words, they often show difficulty when asked to assign them as labels for separate novel objects. The present experiment investigated the role of experience with rhyme on the mapping of …