Thesis (M.C.S.)--Regent College, Vancouver, BC, 1998. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-149).

published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

by Victoria Po-tong Cheung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1982 / Bibliography : leaves 158-162

published_or_final_version / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Science in Audiology

The risk perception as presented by the media is important because it is usually through the media that the general population first receives information about an important event or crisis. The unique position of the media comes with a responsibility to provide a ‘communication bridge’ between the government and the general population. However the editorial choices determining the appropriateness of source, amount, and type of information conveyed to the public during a crisis is influenced by the contextual environment. The issue attention framework proposed by Downs was used to explore the possible links between the trajectory of a crisis and the media response may shed some light on the populations perception of risk during a crisis (the Hong Kong SARS epidemic in 2003) in which WiseNews was used to search the grey literature. The articles identified were classified into 4 categories: incidence, public health information, economy, and sensationalism by date of publication. These categories were then plotted on the Hong Kong hospital admissions and deaths epidemic curves. The study explored the potential link between key events during the Hong Kong SARS epidemic and the specific content of the medial publications. / published_or_final_version / Community Medicine / Master / Master of Public Health

The main objective of the present thesis was to examine whether and how do different aspects of oral language skills have important contribution for the development of reading comprehension among young Chinese children. In Study 1, a three-wave longitudinal study (from K2 to P1) was conducted with 91 Chinese children, to whom measures of oral language (vocabulary, grammar and narrative discourse), word-level skills (phonological, orthographic, and morphological skills), and word reading were administered at all three time points, and reading comprehension at K3 and P1. This study found that K2 oral language skills explained considerable variance in subsequent word reading and reading comprehension two years later, and their longitudinal contribution appeared to be more important than that of K2 word-level skills. Moreover, it was found that the first-graders showed rudimentary abilities in some higher-order text comprehension skills in spoken language (e.g., sentential ambiguity detection and monitoring of textual coherence), and these language skills were highly associated with children’s reading comprehension. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that these skills had unique contribution to reading comprehension at P1 over and above that of word reading, word-level skills, and general oral language skills (i.e., vocabulary, grammatical and narrative discourse skills). The longitudinal data further demonstrated the unique prediction of sentential ambiguity detection over time. Overall, SEM analyses revealed that although the role of word reading ability was prominent to beginning reading comprehension, children’s early oral language skills at preschool were found to make an independent path to later reading comprehension through facilitating the subsequent development of higher-order comprehension skills at both sentence- and discourse-level. Since Study 1 demonstrated the importance of sentential ambiguity detection to reading comprehension, Study 2 focused on examining the emerging development of this skill in Chinese children from K2 to P1. A phase model was proposed which hypothesized that children gradually acquired the three sub-skills of sentential ambiguity detection (i.e., homophone detection, lexical ambiguity detection in sentence, and structural ambiguity detection in sentence) through successive phases. Study 2 further demonstrated the contribution of vocabulary, grammatical, and lexical compounding skills for the early acquisition of ambiguity detection in Chinese children. In Study 3, one of its aims was to determine the extent to which different kinds of preschool cognitive skills significantly predicted later word reading difficulties at the end of first grade. The results highlighted the important predicting role of meaning-related cognitive skills (i.e., vocabulary, lexical compounding, and homophone detection skills) in addition to that of phonological and orthographic skills. Apart from focusing on children’s word reading problems, Study 3 further used K-mean cluster analysis to identify a group of children at first grade, whose reading comprehension fall short of their average or good word reading ability. It was found that these unexpected poor comprehenders showed weaknesses in skills that are specifically related to text comprehension: sentential ambiguity detection, comprehension monitoring, and working memory. The practical implications for early literacy instructional approaches and early identification of children with reading difficulties were discussed. / published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Anthony Chan Yuk Cheung. / Theses (M.Ed.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Bibliography: leaves [57]-60.

Sin Yee Prudence, Lau. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Introduction Page / Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1.1 --- Causativity and causative constructions --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1.2 --- A Typology of causative alternations --- p.4 / Chapter 1.2 --- Research focus: Causative alternation in Hong Kong Sign Language --- p.9 / Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis Outline --- p.9 / Chapter 1.4 --- A brief note on the transcription convention --- p.11 / Chapter 1.5 --- Linguistic research on Hong Kong Sign Language --- p.13 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Argument Structure approach to causative alternation / Chapter 2.0 --- Introduction --- p.16 / Chapter 2.1 --- Various approaches to causative alternations --- p.16 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- The Unaccusativity Hypothesis and Burzio´ةs Generalizations --- p.16 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Various approaches to causative alternations --- p.17 / Chapter 2.2 --- The concept of argument structure --- p.22 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- A semantic approach --- p.23 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- A syntactic approach --- p.27 / Chapter 2.3 --- The semantics of causative alternation --- p.33 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Causative alternation in English --- p.33 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Causative alternation in Chinese --- p.40 / Chapter 2.4 --- Causative alternation in signed languages --- p.44 / Chapter 2.4.1 --- Classifiers in signed languages --- p.44 / Chapter 2.4.2 --- Causative alternation in American Sign Language (ASL) --- p.50 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Causative alternation in Hong Kong Sign Language / Chapter 3.0 --- Introduction --- p.55 / Chapter 3.1 --- Experiment: picture-description task --- p.55 / Chapter 3.2 --- Results: --- p.58 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Volitional agents as external arguments --- p.58 / Chapter 3.2.1.1 --- Lexical causative variants with unaccusative counterparts --- p.60 / Chapter 3.2.1.2 --- Unaccusative variants without lexical causative counterparts --- p.71 / Chapter 3.2.1.3 --- Lexical causative variants without unaccusative counterparts --- p.85 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Natural forces and instruments as external arguments --- p.92 / Chapter 3.2.2.1 --- Unaccusative variants without lexical causative counterparts --- p.92 / Chapter 3.3 --- More evidence on lexical causative constructions --- p.99 / Chapter 3.4 --- Interim discussion --- p.109 / Chapter 3.5 --- Chapter summary --- p.118 / Chapter Chapter 4: --- The syntax of causative alternation in HKSL / Chapter 4.0 --- Introduction --- p.119 / Chapter 4.1 --- The X-bar theory --- p.120 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- The checking theory --- p.125 / Chapter 4.2 --- The derivation pattern of causative/unaccusative pairs in HKSL --- p.128 / Chapter 4.3 --- The abstract causative morpheme and feature checking --- p.135 / Chapter 4.4 --- Verbal classifiers as a functional projection --- p.140 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Functional categories and lexical categories --- p.141 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- The functional projection - verbal classifier phrase (VCLP) --- p.148 / Chapter 4.5 --- An alternative approach --- p.157 / Chapter 4.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.163 / Chapter Chapter 5: --- Suggestion for future research --- p.164 / Appendix I: Notational conventions / Appendix II: Verb classes for the experiment / Appendix III: Picture stimuli for the experiment / Appendix IV: Figures / References