Thesis (M.S.)--Villanova University, 2006. / Psychology Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.W.)--Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, Mass., 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-64).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 2007. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-133)

Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.D.)—Boston University

Previous research has revealed that very young infants discriminate most speech contrasts with which they are presented whether the contrasts are native or non-native while adults have difficulty discriminating non-native speech contrasts but easily discriminate those contrasts holding meaningful (phonemic) status in their native language. Several studies have shown that this reorganization in phonetic perception from language-general perception to language-specific perception occurs at about 10 to 12 months: infants this age attend only to native phonemic contrasts. It is of interest to determine if exposure to a phonetic variant plays an important role in influencing perception. We know from previous research that absence of exposure does not always lead to a lack of discrimination. This thesis was designed to determine if exposure per se maintains discriminability. To this end English-speaking adults and infants were tested using a phonetic distinction that does not hold phonemic status in English but does occur in English. This distinction involves the phonetic variants [da] and the stop produced following /s/ transcribed as [ta]. When tested in an identification procedure, English-speaking adults identify both [da] and (s)[ta] as members of one English phonemic category (i.e. [da]). When tested in a discrimination procedure and a category change procedure, adults discriminate (s) [ta] from [da] (albeit not as well as would be expected for a native phonemic contrast). With respect to infants, 6- to 8-month-olds discriminate this distinction revealing further support for broad-based phonetic perception at this age. However, 10- to 12-month-old infants do not discriminate, suggesting that the native phonemic status of the contrast (but not exposure) is the important factor in the reorganization. Discussion centers around how these results add to the existing literature and why infants of 10- to 12-months would fail to discriminate a native phonetic distinction. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Fourteen-month-old infants raised in a monolingual English environment confuse phonetically similar words in a word-object association task (Stager & Werker, 1997); however, older infants, who are more proficient at word learning, do not (Werker, Corcoran, Fennell, & Stager, 2000). This temporary confusion of phonetic detail occurs despite the fact that 14- month-old infants still have the ability to discriminate native language phonemes in speech perception tasks not involving word learning. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that 14- month-olds fail because linking words to objects is difficult at the beginning stages of word learning, leaving infants with insufficient attentional resources to listen closely to the words. Extending this hypothesis to infants raised in a bilingual environment generates two possibilities. (1) Bilingual infants will not show the temporary deficit at 14 months. As a function of growing up with two languages, they will have already developed a greater awareness of the sounds of words because more detail is needed to discriminate words in two languages. (2) Bilingual infants will perform at least as poorly as infants being raised with only English because of the cognitive load of learning two languages. Bilingual infants of 14 months were tested in the word-object association task using the phonetically similar labels 'bih' and 'dih' paired with two distinct and colourful moving objects. Following habituation, infants were tested on their ability to detect a 'switch' in the word-object pairing. Bilingual language exposure was assessed with a structured parental interview. The 16 infants included in the sample had been exposed to two languages from birth and had at least 30% exposure to one language and no more than 70% to the other. The results showed that, like the monolingual-learning infants of the same age, the 14-month-old bilingual-learning infants confused similar sounding words. These data are consistent with the cognitive load hypothesis, and argue against the proposition that early bilingual exposure facilitates metalinguistic awareness. Future research with slightly older bilingual word learners who have reached the age at which monolingual infants can successfully learn phonetically similar words will help to clarify if these bilingual infants maintain, or diverge from, a monolingual pattern of development. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

The greatest less of infant life occurs around the time of birth (Eliet, 1958) and the mortality rate for first day deaths has shown less improvement than for any other time during the first year (Arey and Dent, 1953). "Once the human feetus has attained a gestational age permitting extra-uterine survival, neonatal death may be more commonly associated with failure of respiratory adaptation than with any other adaptational failure" (Smith, 1964). About two-thirds of all deaths in the newborn are associated with respiratory failure (Briggs and Nogg, 1958; Drissell and Smith, 1962). Hutchisen et al (1962) stated that the pulmonary syndrome of the newborn is probably the major problem of present day neonatal paediatries.

The purpose of this study was to examine students’ beliefs and practices about developmentally appropriate practice with infants and toddlers. This study examined whether coursework in child development, combined with a lab experience engaging with children of the same age group, was related to developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices of student teachers. In particular, the study examined how coursework and practicum taken concurrently may have differed from taking the coursework alone. The relationships between descriptive data and student teachers’ developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices were also of interest. A total of 390 college students participated in this study. These students were enrolled in an undergraduate Infancy and Early Childhood course and some were also enrolled in an Infant Toddler Lab. The students completed a questionnaire at the beginning of the semester and again at the end, which was designed to measure teachers’ developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices in an early childhood classroom. The results showed that there were no statistically significant relationships between college major, marital status, or number of children and pretest beliefs scores. Individual means on practices scores also showed very little difference. The results demonstrated that beliefs about developmentally appropriate practice increased for all of the participants from the beginning of the semester to the end, with those in the class and lab increasing slightly more. On the practices items some of the developmentally appropriate scores went up and some went down. These findings have implications for infant toddler teacher training. When participants were compared based on group membership, whether they were in the class alone or took the lab concurrently, results showed that while not statistically significant, belief scores were higher for those who were in the class and lab combined. Many specific practices items were statistically significantly different between groups, especially at posttest, where those in the class and lab had higher scores of developmentally appropriate practice. However, some results indicate that idealized postulations of developmentally appropriate practice may not be realistic in actual classrooms. Suggestions of how these findings can be used in the training of early childhood teachers are presented. (103 pages)