Despite claims by some theorists to the contrary, investigators have shown that information about grammatical errors is available to young children learning language via the conversational responses of their parents. The present study described five categories of responses in the conversations of working mothers and fathers to their normally developing two-year-old sons, and investigated whether any of these responses were differentially related to well-formed vs. ill-formed child utterances. Subjects were six middle-class, monolingual (English) parent-child dyads. Parents worked full-time jobs and the children were enrolled in full-time daycare. Within a two week period, four 20-minute conversational samples were audio and video recorded for each dyad in the subjects' homes during freeplay activities of the subjects' choice. Results indicated that the pattern of responses for these six parents was very similar to that reported for other parent-child dyads. The most frequent type of response for all parents was one that continued the conversation without either repeating or clarifying the child's previous utterance. The least frequent type of response was one that explicitly corrected portions of the child's utterance. Of all responses, repetitions--both clarifying and nonclarifying--appeared to be the type of response most differentially related to well-formed and ill-formed child utterances. Exact repetitions were more likely to follow well-formed utterances, while the remaining repetitions were more likely to follow ill-formed utterances. This pattern of differential responses was similar for all six dyads. Very few differences regarding the style or pattern of interaction were noted for fathers and mothers. Implications were drawn regarding the nature of linguistic input that is available to two-year-old children learning language.

by Pun Shiu Kau. / Thesis (M.A.Ed.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1990. / Bibliography: leaves 92-98. / LIST OF TABLES --- p.i / LIST OF FIGURES --- p.iii / Chapter CHAPTER 1 --- THE PROBLEM --- p.1 / Background --- p.1 / Purpose of the Study --- p.3 / Significance of the Study --- p.3 / Chapter CHAPTER 2 --- REVIEW OF LITERATURE --- p.4 / Cognition and Metacognition --- p.4 / Metalinguistic Awareness --- p.5 / Linguistic and metalinguistic awareness --- p.5 / Types of metalinguistic awareness --- p.6 / Metalinguistic awareness of cognitive development --- p.7 / Awareness in Speech Segmentation --- p.10 / Segmentation of speech sound --- p.10 / Development of segmental abilities --- p.11 / Perception of Speech Sounds --- p.14 / Acoustic-phonetic relationship --- p.14 / Perception of vowels --- p.15 / Perception of consonants --- p.15 / Categorical perception --- p.19 / Perceptual unit in speech perception --- p.20 / Perception of Written Language --- p.23 / Comparison between listening and speaking --- p.23 / Perceptual unit in reading --- p.24 / Writing Systems --- p.28 / Variety and universality of writing systems --- p.28 / Psychological characterization of orthographies --- p.30 / The psychology of reading Chinese --- p.35 / Phonemic Segmental Awareness and Reading Acquisition --- p.39 / Phenemic segmental awareness in relation to reading acquisition --- p.39 / Effect of phonemic segmental awareness on reading acquisition --- p.43 / Effect of literacy on phonemic segmental awareness --- p.45 / Chapter CHAPTER 3 --- METHOD --- p.47 / Hypothesis --- p.47 / Subjects --- p.48 / Instruments --- p.49 / Research Design --- p.54 / Procedure --- p.59 / Chapter CHAPTER 4 --- RESULTS --- p.62 / Academic Results --- p.62 / Intelligence --- p.64 / English Spelling-sound Proficiency --- p.64 / Chinese Task 1 ： Classifying Character Sounds --- p.65 / Chinese Task 2 ： Fanqie - Manipulation of Chinese Phonemes --- p.67 / Relations between Intelligence and Phonemic Segmental Awareness --- p.70 / Relations between English Spelling-sound Proficiency and Academic Results --- p.71 / Relations between Chinese Phonemic Awareness and Academic Results --- p.73 / Relations between English Spelling-sound Proficiency and Chinese Phonemic Awareness --- p.74 / Chapter CHAPTER 5 --- "DISCUSSION, SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION" --- p.79 / Discussion --- p.79 / "Academic results, sex, intelligence and phonemic awareness" --- p.79 / Proficiency in English spelling-sound rules --- p.80 / Chinese phonemic segmental awareness --- p.81 / Relations between proficiency in English spelling-sound rules and academic results --- p.83 / Relations between Chinese phonemic segmental awareness and proficiency in English spelling-sound rules --- p.84 / Summary --- p.88 / Conclusion --- p.90 / REFERENCES --- p.92 / APPENDICES --- p.99

The phonological awareness skills of children with language disorders has been well addressed throughout the literature. Research into the phonological awareness skills of children with highly unintelligible speech, however, is still in its infancy. One published study has looked at the relationship between phonological awareness skills in children with persistent phonological impairments and in children with normal phonology (Webster & Plante, 1992). Significantly higher scores were recorded on three of the four phonological awareness measures for the children with normal phonology As phonology improved, so did the children's phonological awareness skills. The purposes of the present study were to determine if there is an improvement in phonological awareness skills of children with highly unintelligible speech who receive speech sound intervention services, and to determine if there is a difference in phonological awareness skills between children who receive a phoneme-oriented treatment approach and those who receive a phonological cycling treatment approach. Children who took part in a larger study (Buckendorf, 1996) in which the effectiveness of the two treatment approaches was examined, were given the Assessment of Metaphonological Skills-Prekindergarten (Hodson, 1995) early in the course of treatment and again 2 to 3 months later. The following specific questions were addressed: 1. Is there an increase in phonological awareness skills for children who receive articulation/phonological intervention? 2. Is there a difference in the amount of improvement of phonological awareness skills for children who receive a phoneme-oriented treatment approach as compared with children who receive a phonological cycling treatment approach? To test if the subject's phonological awareness skills improved from pretest to posttest, a one tailed !-test for paired differences, and the Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed-Ranks test were performed. Results on both of these analyses indicated a statistically significant improvement between pretest and posttest scores. To test if there is a difference in the improvement of phonological awareness skills between the two groups, a !-test for independent samples of group and the Mann-Whitney LI-Wilcoxon Rank Sum W-Test were performed on pretest, posttest, and pretest-to-posttest. Results on both analyses indicated no statistically significant differences between the two groups on any of these variables.

Children with slow expressive language development often catch up to their normally developing peers in expressive language, but may still exhibit difficulties with metalinguistic skills. Research shows that children who have difficulty with phonemic awareness also have difficulty with reading, which is important for success in school. Speech-language pathologists assist children who have difficulty with expressive oral language and facilitate language development in children who have difficulties with learning metalinguistic skills, such as phonemic awareness. The purpose of the present study was to compare the phoneme segmentation skills in three groups of children: (a) children with a history of oral expressive language delay (HELD) (n= 22) who were identified as toddlers with slow developing expressive language, but caught up to their normally developing peers by first grade; (b) children identified as toddlers with slow developing oral expressive language and by first grade still maintained the expressive language delays (ELD) (n= 7); and (c) children who were identified at age two as developing normal oral expressive language and maintained normal oral expressive language development (NL) (n= 23) in first grade. The children participated in a phonological segmentation test. The study answered four questions: Is there a significant difference among the three groups of children in the number of correct responses on a phonological segmentation test at ( 1 ) the one phoneme level, (2) the two phoneme level, (3) the three phoneme level, and ( 4) the total number of correct responses. Utilizing an ANOVA test, a significant difference was found among the groups at the two phoneme level, with a trend toward a significant difference at the one phoneme level. Other significant differences were not found. The difference at the two phoneme level was between the ELD group and the normal group, as well as between the ELD group and the HELD group.

No description available.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Calgary (Canada), 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Three studies were conducted in which Quebec French, first grade children's ability to categorize vowels was examined. The children were tested on several aspects of vowel phoneme representation before they had any literacy skills, at the beginning of the school year, and again sis months later, after they had learned all of the spelling-sound correspondences for vowels. In Study 1, the focus was on children's phonemic and orthographic representation of nasal vowels. Performance on an AXB categorization task revealed that six-year-olds have considerable difficulty in discriminating the nasal feature on minimal and near-minimal oral-nasal vowel pairs. This ability did not improve after six months of schooling. In contrast to their performance on AXB, these same children performed very well on nasal vowel spellings. These results suggest that perceptually-based categorization ability and the ability to represent nasal vowels in spelling develop independently of each other. Study 2 examined children's categorization of self-generated productions of front-unrounded, nasal, and, back-nonhigh vowels. The influence of a number of variables on vocalic representation, such as articulatory complexity, spectral proximity, and syllable structure, was also examined. The children's performance on this explicit task varied as a function of the vowel set. Specifically, whereas articulatory complexity did not have a negative effect on categorization ability, spectral proximity of vowels did appear to hinder performance; syllable structure negatively affected oral but not nasal vowel categorization performance. Schooling, and exposure to literacy evidently had a strong impact on this type of phoneme categorization/representation ability as children's overall performance improved significantly from the first to the second testing period. In Study 3, children's ability to categorize vowel allophones which were spoken in two dialects was examined. Again, performance varied by the typ