abstract: Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine how vocabulary size and inhibitory control affect word learning in bilingual (English-Spanish) children with hearing loss. Experiment 1 examined whether children with larger vocabularies learn and retain more words than children with smaller vocabularies. Experiment 2 examined whether children with better inhibitory control learn and remember more words than children with poorer inhibitory control. In addition, monolingual and bilingual children with and without hearing loss were compared on word learning and inhibitory control tasks. Method: Seventy-three children between 8 and 12 years of age participated in the study. Forty children had normal hearing (20 monolingual and 20 bilingual) and 33 had hearing loss (20 monolingual and 13 bilingual). For Experiment 1, children completed a receptive vocabulary test in English and Spanish and three word learning tasks consisting of a training and a retention component in English, Spanish, and Arabic. For Experiment 2, children completed the flanker task for inhibitory control. Results: In Experiment 1, larger total (English + Spanish) receptive vocabularies were predictive of better word training outcomes in all languages and better Spanish word retention, after controlling for age, degree of hearing loss, and maternal education. Children with hearing loss performed more poorly in Spanish and Arabic word training and retention than children with normal hearing. No differences were observed between children with normal hearing and hearing loss in English word learning. In Experiment 2, inhibitory control only predicted English retention outcomes. Children with hearing loss showed poorer inhibitory control than hearing peers. No differences were observed between monolingual and bilingual children, with and without hearing loss, in word learning or inhibitory control. Conclusions: Language experience (measured by total vocabulary size) helps children learn new words and therefore children with hearing loss should receive well-fitted hearing aids and school accommodations to provide them with access to spoken language. Bilingual exposure does not impair nor facilitate word learning. Bilingual children showed similar difficulties with word learning and inhibitory control as monolingual peers with hearing loss. Hearing loss, probably via language deprivation, has broad effects on children’s executive function skills. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Speech and Hearing Science 2019

Thesis advisor: Mariela Páez / In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated persistent educational inequities and added exponentially to the existing “education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Public schools’ sudden shift to remote learning marginalized a large population of students, including young bilingual children from immigrant backgrounds. These students are among the most vulnerable when it comes to remote learning not only because of accessibility issues, but also because many of these students’ families live in underserved and under-resourced communities that were negatively affected by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and persistent systemic racism (Fortuna et al., 2020; Schmit et al., 2020). Hence, there is an urgent need to understand pandemic-related experiences of immigrant families with young bilingual children and to respond with educational strategies that strive to mitigate the negative effects of this educational crisis. This dissertation study comprised of three papers addresses this need through a collaborative project with 20 immigrant families with 42 young bilingual children and two community organizations from the Metro and Greater Boston Area. Paper 1 used sequential mixed methods to provide an in-depth account of immigrant families' remote learning experiences and investigate structural barriers such as lack of support and oppressive practices that hindered the establishment of home-school connections during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paper 2 employed transformative mixed methods to document the development, implementation, and evaluation of a family engagement and remote learning program—the Home Connection. This program was firmly grounded in the equitable collaboration framework of family engagement to build a strong partnership with the family participants and to recognize the crucial roles of the families as co-designers, co-educators, co-researchers, and co-evaluators. Paper 3 is a practitioner inquiry reflecting on what I have learned as a teacher-researcher implementing culturally sustaining pedagogy to partner with immigrant families and teach young bilingual children from diverse backgrounds during pandemic remote learning. Findings from this dissertation documenting the struggles, resistance, and solidarity of these immigrant families will help inform educators, administrators, and policymakers in their planning and delivering of learning experiences and family engagement initiatives that center on the motivation, needs, and assets of diverse students and their families. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

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Research suggests that children are only able to flexibly apply more than one label (e.g. mouse and animal) in one situation with one conversational partner after they pass standard false belief tasks. Both abilities have been attributed to the understanding of perspective. The aim of the studies was to extend previous research to examine the disambiguation effect, children’s tendency to select an unfamiliar object in the presence of another but familiar object as referent for a novel word. Theoretical considerations suggest this effect initially results from a lack of understanding perspective. Five studies were conducted in Scotland and Austria, involving 243 children between the ages of 2.5 and 6.5. Studies 1 to 3 compared the standard disambiguation task with a task in which a strong pragmatic cue indicates the familiar object is the correct referent. Performances on these tasks were compared with performances on the false belief task, the alternative naming task, as well as tests of executive functioning. Studies 4 and 5 extended these methods to examine bilingual children’s metacognitive abilities in relation to word learning. Children become able to suspend the disambiguation effect when presented with strong pragmatic cues at the same time as they pass false belief and alternative naming tasks (Experiment 1). This can neither be attributed to impulsivity or the ability to inhibit a response, nor order effects of pragmatic cues and novel words (Experiment 2). Children’s ability to apply two labels to one object in a correction task also related to their perspectival understanding. Previous findings that suggested that younger children could produce multiple labels in a misnaming paradigm were not replicated (Experiment 3 a, b). The developmental change in children’s metalinguistic behaviour was demonstrated to follow the same trajectory in monolinguals, bilinguals and children exposed to another language (Experiment 4 and 5). Bilinguals show a marginally better ability to recall novel foreign language labels. The disambiguation effect is the result of cognitive immaturity in young children. Older children show a change in behaviour at the same time as they present more metacognitive maturity. Common development with theory of mind and metalinguistic abilities is attributed to an understanding of perspective.

A considerable amount of research has been done surrounding education in classrooms from kindergarten to Grade 12, but little research has been done surrounding early childhood education (ECE) beginning with birth to age 4. As a result, research is needed that examines interventions aimed to improve the quality of early childhood education for young bilingual learners at the earliest stages of schooling. The present study examines current efforts to serve the specific population of young bilingual children entering classrooms in an urban school district in North Texas. The focus of this study includes the access and examination of quality ECE programs (defined by the extent to which bilingual children have access to bilingual education programming). The present study also observes the visibility of young bilingual children who receive services that are responsive to their characteristics, experiences, and specific needs. Lastly, this study used a multiple regression analysis to examine the Kindergarten Early Assessment test that has been put in place to measure the school readiness performance of bilingual children in this urban district. Specifically, the analysis included program type, language of assessment, socio-economic status and gender variables.

Clinicians and teachers may associate slow speech rate with low language ability during assessment in bilingual children. The goals of this thesis are a) to understand the relationship between speech rate and perceived language ability, and b) to understand the causes of within-utterance pauses and between-utterance pauses. English narratives for 116 Spanish–English bilingual 4–6-year-olds were analyzed for speech rate and pause time. Modifiability scores for each child were obtained. There was a low but significant correlation between speech rate and child responsivity. The distribution of between-utterance pauses was significantly different for children with high speech rates and children with low speech rates. An average of 56.5 wpm was found, confirming speech rates averages found in similar studies. These findings suggest that speech rate is one feature that SLPs attend to when considering the responsiveness of a child. Also, long between-utterance pauses can be used as an indicator of low speech rate. / text

Theories of bilingual language production suggest that codeswitching is either a characteristic of limited language or a productive characteristic suggesting enhanced executive control and language proficiency. Since codeswitching patterns of typically developing and language impaired bilingual children are not thoroughly understood, utterances with codeswitches may be disregarded during language evaluations. Codeswitching frequency and types of codeswitches were analyzed in language samples of 12 bilingual children at high and 12 at low risk for specific language impairment (SLI). Results indicated that the frequency of codeswitching was similar for both risk groups in Spanish, but not in English. In English, the high risk group codeswitched significantly more than the typically developing group (18.76% vs 7.20%, p<.05). The types of codeswitches most often produced also differed by language and risk group. In Spanish, single-word lexical codeswitches were preferred significantly more than syntactical or lexical-syntactical, but no differences were found between risk groups. In English, syntactical codeswitches were preferred significantly more than lexical or lexical- syntactical. That the children at high risk for SLI codeswitched more in their second language and that their patterns were similar to the typically developing group might suggest that codeswitching in bilingual children with SLI might be used as a productive strategy to fill in linguistic ‘gaps’ and that codeswitching should be recognized and given credit for in language evaluations. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-18T21:11:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 Carolina Thiaru Kuriyama1.pdf: 1706540 bytes, checksum: 669cf1eef65a291125a647657e7377ed (MD5) Carolina Thiaru Kuriyama2.pdf: 1339277 bytes, checksum: 9c402b76dc92189c7b078d999a592483 (MD5) Carolina Thiaru Kuriyama3.pdf: 907703 bytes, checksum: c1000ca2a132abf388b65df1f2f150ce (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-01-22 / Fundo Mackenzie de Pesquisa / During the last decades the number of transcultural researches has been increasing. This growth created the need of developing worldwide assessment tools. Consequently, specific models for translation and adaptation have been created to standardize these procedures, such as International Tests Guidelines. The translation followed by specific steps, allow assessment of the same phenomenon, as literacy ability, in other cultures. Researches that use Literacy Assessment Test (BALE) have been showing efficacy in assessing literacy of Brazilian listeners and deaf students, so, it can be used as a diagnostic method of assessment for Brazilian children in Japan with literacy problems. The aim of the present work is to translate and culturally adapt BALE to hiragana. With this purpose the steps of the International Test Guidelines were followed. During the pilot project sixty Brazilian students from the first four initial grades in a public school in Japan were assessed. The children were assessed using the computerized versions of Silent Reading Competence Test of Word (TECOLESI), Sentence Reading Comprehension Test (TCSE) and Sentence Listening Comprehension Test (TCSF) in hiragana, the Non-Verbal Intelligence Test (TONI) and the Peabody Imaging Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The children were assessed in the classroom groups inside their school, the assessment took two sessions of one hour each. The results showed significance in the correlations for the three BALE tests in hiragana and the intelligence test and the vocabulary one. The hiragana versions of the TECOLESI and TCSE have shown similar patterns to Brazilian listeners and deaf, as well as German listeners. These results show evidence on the validity of BALE in hiragana and they made possible the development new version of the test. / Nas últimas duas décadas houve um grande aumento no número de pesquisas transculturais. Tal crescimento tem criado a necessidade de desenvolvimento de instrumentos de medidas mais universais. Conseqüentemente, modelos específicos para tradução e adaptação cultural de testes têm sido criados a fim padronizar esses procedimentos, tal como as Diretrizes Internacionais de Testes. A tradução quando seguida de etapas criteriosas, permite avaliar o mesmo fenômeno em outra cultura, como a habilidade de leitura e escrita. Pesquisas utilizando a Bateria de Avaliação de Leitura e Escrita (BALE) têm mostrado eficácia na avaliação de leitura e escrita de ouvintes e surdos brasileiros, podendo ser um instrumento eficaz no diagnóstico de dificuldade de leitura em crianças brasileiras no Japão com problemas de alfabetização. O objetivo deste trabalho foi traduzir e adaptar culturalmente a BALE para o hiragana. Para isto, foram seguidas as etapas das Diretrizes Internacionais de Testes. O teste piloto contou com setenta crianças brasileiras das quatro séries iniciais do Ensino Fundamental, de uma escola pública no Japão. As crianças foram avaliadas, na versão computadorizada do Teste de Competência de Leitura de Palavras (TECOLESI), Teste de Compreensão de Sentenças Escritas (TCSE) e Teste de Compreensão de Sentenças Falada (TCSF) em hiragana, o Teste de Inteligência Não-Verbal (TONI) e o Teste de Vocabulário por Imagens Peabody (PPVT). Foram feitas aplicações coletivas na sala de informática do próprio colégio, em duas sessões de uma hora cada. Os resultados mostraram correlações positivas e significativas entre os três testes da BALE em hiragana e os testes de inteligência e de vocabulário. As versões em hiragana do TECOLESI e o TCSE mostraram padrões de respostas semelhantes aos de escolares ouvintes e surdos brasileiros, bem como de ouvintes alemães. Tais resultados apontam para evidências de validade externa da BALE em hiragana e possibilitaram a criação de uma nova versão do teste.