Developmental Psychology Commons^™

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 …

Language Abilities As A Function Of Lateralization Of Language-Specific Brain Networks, Jacey Anderson

Honors Scholar Theses

The strength of hemispheric lateralization appears to be a good predictor of language abilities in children with developmental language impairments. Studies of healthy adults, in contrast, have generally failed to identify any association between degree of lateralization and language abilities, perhaps due to limited sensitivity to individual differences in standardized language assessments. This study used fMRI to measure the lateralization of functional task-engaged language networks in 25 healthy right-handed adults. Linear regressions examined lateralization indices (LI) of language activation in inferior temporal, superior temporal, and frontal brain networks, as a function of syntactic complexity (via story retelling), a grammaticality judgment …

Exploring The Relationship Between Children’S Vocabulary And Their Understanding Of Cardinality: A Methodological Approach, Justin Slifer, Emily Carrigan, Kristin Walker, Marie Coppola

Honors Scholar Theses

Is there a relationship between vocabulary and children’s understanding of cardinality? Does the way in which we classify cardinality data as tested by the Give-a-Number task affect finding such a relationship? This thesis explored these questions using a methodological approach, by testing the relationship between children’s receptive vocabulary scores and Give-a-Number scores classified in two different ways, the traditional knower-level assessment, as well as by calculating the proportion of trials answered correctly. A significant correlation was found between participants’ receptive vocabulary scores and Give-a-Number scores using both manners of classification, independent of the children’s ages. The results were compared with …

A Microgenetic Approach To Examining Set For Variability: An Exploration Of Early Reading Development, Phil R. Cave M.A.

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Learning sight words is a process that involves forming connections between letters and their sounds in order to connect spellings of words with their pronunciations as well as their meanings. During the development of sight word reading, children will sound out (phonologically recode) words that they do not yet know by sight (Share, 1995). Because English lacks transparency, sounding out according to grapheme-phoneme correspondences often only results in an approximation to the target word. The process by which a child must match a word they have recoded phonologically with a word that exists in their vocabulary has been referred to …

Vocabulary And Reading Comprehension Intervention: A Focus On Students In The Late Elementary Grades, Melissa L. Dol

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Literacy skills are key to success in school, career, and everyday life. Despite school curricula being strongly focused on literacy development (Ministry of Education, 2006), many children continue to fall behind the expected literacy skill levels for their grade (Education Quality and Accountability Office, 2012a, 2012b; National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). The present study evaluated a literacy intervention, Better Reading for School Success (BRSS), accompanied by a parent/guardian literacy workshop and weekly tips regarding how parents and/or guardians can promote literacy skill development at home. The BRSS was also evaluated as a subsection of family literacy afterschool programs, ‘Get …

The Eiios Task: Executive Function And Word Learning At 18-Months, Leslie A. Patton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study was an investigation of the association between executive functioning (EF) ability and language development in the latter half of the second year. Fifty-five typically developing 18- month-olds were brought into the lab. The elicited imitation with inappropriate object substitution (EIIOS) task was used as a developmentally sensitive measure of EF. Language acquisition was assessed using a real-time word learning task as well as a parent report measure of vocabulary size (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences Version). Contrary to expectations, very few statistically significant associations were found between the EF measure and either language measure. Despite these …

Effective Co-Viewing: Preschoolers’ Learning From Video After A Dialogic Questioning Intervention, Gabrielle Strouse, Katherine O'Doherty, Georgene Troseth

School of Education Faculty Publications

Young preschoolers rapidly acquire new information from social partners but do not learn efficiently from people on video. We trained parents to use Whitehurst’s dialogic reading questioning techniques while watching educational television with their children. Eighty-one parents coviewed storybook videos with their 3-year-old children in 1 of 4 conditions: dialogic questioning (pause, ask questions, and encourage children to tell parts of the story), directed attention (pause and comment but do not ask questions), dialogic actress (show the videos with dialogic questioning by an on-screen actress embedded in them), or no intervention (show the videos as usual). After 4 weeks, children …

Phonological Memory And Broader Language Development: Longitudinal And Etiologic Relations, Robin Leonhardt Peterson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current research investigated the relationship of phonological memory (PM) to vocabulary and syntax learning in school-age children with and without language disorders. Previous research has established that PM and broad oral language skills covary, but disagreement remains about the reason for this association. Opposing theoretical viewpoints emphasize the importance of either bottom-up (PM influences vocabulary and syntax acquisition) or top-down (vocabulary growth influences PM skill) factors. In three longitudinal studies, we tested competing bottom-up and top-down explanations of the PM-broad language link. Study 1 utilized a structural equation modeling approach to understand PM and broad language relations from age …