Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-136).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-143).

Bilingual children represent a large population of preschool and school-aged children in the United States. Challenges may arise when the verbal community in which a child spends most of his or her time does not reinforce his or her primary language. Previous research has shown that children adjust their language to match the language of their listener (Genesee, Boivin, & Nicoladis, 1996). It is possible that having a native-language communication partner at school would improve child engagement, as measured by child mean length of utterance and quantity of child initiations. The purpose of this study is to examine whether listener language has an effect on number of child initiations and mean length of utterance. A secondary purpose is to replicate and extend previous research on children matching their language to that of their listener in Spanish-speaking preschoolers. Four preschoolers who were exposed to Spanish at home and English in their instructional setting were recruited. Their language proficiency was assessed with the preLAS and they were exposed to Spanish-speaking communication partners and English-speaking communication partners in a multielement design. Results suggest that the language of the listener had implications for amount of child initiations and mean length of utterance. This was not always predicted by the language proficiency assessment. Also, children were more likely to use their dominant language in the non-dominant language context than use the non-dominant language in the dominant language context. These results may have implications for best practices in educational settings for Spanish-speaking preschoolers.

In Chinese, a large percentage of the vocabulary consists of compound words where exemplars in the same taxonomic category often share the same head noun (Chen & Chen, 2006; Chow, McBride-Chang, Cheung, & Chow, 2008). This structural characteristic may facilitate an early understanding of the noun taxonomy. The current study aims to investigate taxonomic development in a group of Mandarin-English speaking children in the United States. A contrast association task (i.e., "A dog is not a ____") and a category association task (i.e., "A dog is a kind of ____") were used to elicit responses from different levels of the taxonomic hierarchy (e.g., coordinates, superordinates). Participants were 25 bilingual children aged 3 to 8 and 25 English monolingual age matches. It was predicted that the bilingual group would produce more task-specific taxonomic responses (i.e., coordinates in contrast association; superordinates in category association) than their monolingual counterparts. The results, however, were somewhat opposite to this prediction. Monolinguals were found to, in general, perform better in the category association tasks and the two groups performed similarly in the contrast association task. When English vocabulary size was taken into consideration, there was no statistically significant difference between the monolingual and bilingual children on the category association task. Factors which possibly explain such a difference between the two language groups in the two tasks, or the absence of a significant difference when vocabulary size was incorporated as a covariate are discussed. / text

Our study investigated the processing of compound vocabulary of bilingual (BL) Mandarin-English children and their performance in comparison to monolingual (ML) English children. From this study, we sought to determine (a) how the BL children performed in Mandarin compared to English (b) how the BL children performed compared to the ML children, and (c) how background factors, such as language use and vocabulary size affect compound processing. We predicted that the BL children would show an advantage on compound processing tasks over the ML children due to the importance of compounding in word formation in Mandarin Chinese. In addition, we also used performance on picture vocabulary tasks as covariates to take into consideration potential differences in vocabulary size, as BL children often have a smaller vocabulary in each language because of distribution across languages. Data were collected from 25 BL Mandarin-English children (between 40 to 104 months of age) who were matched within three months to 25 ML English children (between 40 to 105 months of age). Children participated in a compound analogy task, in which they produced novel compounds after a model; and a compound knowledge task, in which they explained real compounds. Comparing performance across languages, results showed that the BL children demonstrated higher performance in the dominant language (English) than in the nondominant language (Mandarin). The BL children were more likely to accurately produce novel compounds, but also more likely to make errors that involved the use of compounds. No significant difference was found in BL and ML performance on compound knowledge tasks. Significant relationships were found for some of the participant characteristics for both the BL and ML children and performance. In particular, age, picture identification, and picture naming performance were correlated with compound performance for the BL participants; performance on the picture identification task and compound processing tasks were correlated with each other for the ML participants. These findings provided limited support for our hypothesis. Future investigations should include BL participants who have a more balanced proficiency in both languages, as well as examine factors that were found to influence ease of compound processing. / text

Transnational Mexican-origin Families is a qualitative study of four working class, Mexican-origin families who resided in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. region and who also made return visits to Mexico at least every two years. Through critical ethnographic case studies, the researcher worked with the families for over two years in multi-sited ethnography, with locations in the U.S. and Mexico. The dissertation examines the following question: What are the ways of knowing of Mexican-origin transnational students and their families in the Washington, D.C. area, and how do these transnational families experience their ways of knowing regarding education in formal schooling contexts? Using transnational theory and Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento, or knowing, this study shows how transnational families’ ways of knowing are situated in three mutually-constituted domains. They are: 1) chained knowing, including the ways participants are chained to the Mexican-U.S. border and to their communities in Mexico and the U.S., 2) sobrevivencia or survivalist knowing, in terms of how the families both survive and thrive, highlighting what I call their “underdog mentality” as well as the matters of life and death on both sides of the border, and 3) Nepantlera knowing, or an in-between knowing, which allows for attempts at bridge buildings and creation of Third Spaces. In regards to schooling, the transnational aspects of these families’ lives remained hidden, despite the students’ eagerness to share about their transnationalism. Schools tended to respond to their transnational families along the “continuum of the comfortable,” or a line where schools increased their outreach to these families only moderately and only along their terms. The intention of this research is to disrupt assimilationist discourses about immigrants, particularly in light of the need to be able to navigate an increasingly globalized world. Preliminary findings suggest the need to begin to reframe immigrants as transnational, value their language heritages, disrupt the comfort of educators in their outreach to transnational families, and for educators, in particular, to learn to do the work of border crossing in their outreach to transnational families. / text

The purpose of this analysis was to define norms for grammatical morpheme development in Spanish for Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4;0-7;6 relative to their use of Spanish. This study uses secondary data analysis based on two existing datasets. Participants included 334 Spanish-English bilingual children that were recruited from school districts in Texas, Utah, and Pennsylvania. Grammatical morpheme accuracy was determined by performance on the BESA (Bilingual English Spanish Assessment) (Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen et al., in preparation). Percentage of current use of Spanish was estimated based on a parental interview in which parents estimated children language input and output. The average percent accuracy of grammatical morphemes was calculated and analyzed as a function of current use of Spanish and of chronological age. Results show that the percentage of accurately produced morphemes has a general upward trend as Spanish use and age increases. These findings will help define expectations for bilingual children that in turn can inform the development of intervention goals. / text

This paper aims to explore the connections and parallels between Longus' Daphnis and Chloe and Ovid's Metamorphoses. The conclusions reached should provide fertile ground for further studies in the intertextual play between novels and Latin poetry. To reach these conclusions, there will be a multi-pronged approach at analyzing the questions and implications raised by the potential connections. First Longus' novel will be situated within a context of Greek literature under the Roman Empire that consciously utilized Vergilian poetry. Having done that, I will turn to the similar methods that each author uses to play with genre and the visual worlds in his work, a process that shows that Longus was using Ovid as a definite model/kindred spirit for his novel's approach to these topics. Following that, there will be an extended examination of specific episodes in Daphnis and Chloe through which Longus reveals his knowledge of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Finally, this paper will attempt to situate the arguments and conclusions that are made in the context of the current debates over the readership of the novel to present a strong case for bilingualism in the ancient world. / text

No description available.

Previous research has studied the relationship between bilingualism and cognitive abilities. In some of those studies results have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals in visual Simon tasks (i.e. they are less distracted by the incongruent stimuli). The aim of the current study is to see if a similar effect can be found in Simon tasks using the tactile and auditory sensory modalities. In this study bilingual participants (36 university students) with different proficiency in their second language performed a Simon task employing two intensities of vibration and two different sounds as the relevant stimuli. The results indicated no negative correlation between either bilingual proficiency and Simon effect or daily use of the second language and Simon effect when controlling for working memory. Without controlling for working memory a negative correlation for the tactile condition and a positive correlation for the auditory condition between Simon effect and daily use of the second language was found. It’s concluded that the statistical power of this study suffers from a lack of participants and that if the test was reproduced with more participants with a greater spread in their language abilities a stronger effect might be seen. Also concluded is that more cross-modal studies need to be performed before conclusions about general cognitive effects of bilingualism can be drawn. / Tidigare forskning har studerat sambandet mellan tvåspråkighet och kognitiva förmågor. Vissa av dessa studiers resultat har visat att tvåspråkiga individer presterar bättre än enspråkiga i visuella Simon-uppgifter (dvs. de blir mindre distraherade av inkongruenta stimuli). Syftet med den aktuella studien är att se om man kan hitta en liknande effekt i Simon-uppgifter inom de taktila och auditiva sensoriska modaliteterna. I denna studie fick tvåspråkiga deltagare (36 universitetsstudenter) med olika kunskaper i sitt andraspråk utföra en Simon-uppgift där två intensiteter av vibrationer och två olika ljud används som relevanta stimuli. När resultaten var kontrollerade för arbetsminne så visades ingen negativ korrelation mellan varken tvåspråkig förmåga och Simon effekt eller daglig användning av det andra språket och Simon effekt. Utan att kontrollera för arbetsminne så fanns det en negativ korrelation för den taktila betingelsen och en positiv korrelation för den auditiva betingelsen mellan daglig användning av andra språk och Simon effekt. Slutsatsen dras att den statistiska kraften i denna studie lider av brist på deltagare och att om testet reproduceras med fler deltagare, med en större spridning i språkförmåga, så skulle en starkare effekt kunna ses. Det konkluderas även att fler tvärmodala studier behöver utföras innan slutsatser om generella kognitiva effekter av tvåspråkighet kan dras.