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

This thesis is based on the recorded speech and field notes of the author's three-year-old child who was acquiring three languages simultaneously (Chichewa, Chitumbuka and English). Chichewa is his mother's first language, Chitumbuka is his father's first language and English is both the language of the preschool that he was attending and the official language in Malawi. This study was unusual in that it involved African languages that are under-researched in the field of language acquisition and dealt with two cognate languages (Chichewa and Chitumbuka) and a non-cognate language, English. The fact that Chichewa and Chitumbuka strongly resemble each other may have made movement between the two easier for the child. The analysis of the child's recorded speech shows that he mixed more at the lexical level (64.2%) and less at the phonological level (6.3%). The findings demonstrate that what the child had learnt at school in English fulfilled a booster function when either Chichewa or Chitumbuka was used. The results also reveal that the child's language mixing was influenced by the topic of discussion, the context and the interlocutor's mixed input. The interlocutor's discourse strategies also had an impact on the child's use of mixing. The results therefore provide support for the bilingual bootstrapping hypothesis, the modeling hypothesis and the discourse hypothesis. The results also demonstrate that Chichewa was generally the matrix or host language when mixing occurred. At school, however, where only English was permitted, the question of a matrix language did not occur. Furthermore, the combination of lexical and grammatical morphemes demonstrates that Chichewa was dominant in the child's speech, in terms of the dominant-language hypothesis proposed by Petersen (1988). This study challenges the Free Morpheme Constraint and the Equivalence Constraint in that they do not appear to be universally applicable. Instead, the Matrix Language Frame Model is supported as it applies to code-mixing involving English and Bantu languages. This model was relevant, as the speech analyzed in this study involved code-mixing between English and the two Bantu languages, Chichewa and Chitumbuka. However, it was difficult to apply the Matrix Language Frame Model to some of the child's mixed utterances because the MLU was low. It is hoped therefore that researchers will create further models that will allow for an analysis of the mixed morphemes in single word utterances, especially for the Nguni African languages, which are agglutinative by nature. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

Typescript (Photocopy) / Bibliography: leaves 239-260 / ix, 260 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dept. of Psychology, University of Adelaide, 1990

Thesis (M. Communication Pathology)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Summary in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Dept. of Psychology, University of Adelaide, 1990. / Typescript (Photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 239-260).

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1991. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2751. Abstract precedes thesis as [3] preliminary leaves. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 39-45).

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2005. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references (p.64-67).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Göteborg. / Added t.p. with abstract and errata slip (3 p.) inserted. "(Section 1.3 in cooperation with Peter de Chateau, M.D.)." Includes bibliographical references (p. 212-217).