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Tests of verbal fluency are presumed to measure executive dysfunction yet in practice are sensitive to brain damage <i>per se</i>, and the <i>comparability</i> of fluency based on phonemic and semantic criteria has been questioned.  Relative to healthy controls, the effect size for each type of fluency was quantified for patients with focal cortical lesions, and using the random effects meta-analytic model, mean effects calculated for sub-groups stratified according to lesion location and laterality. Focal frontal patients were comparably impaired on both measures (<i>rs</i> = .48 and .47 respectively), but semantic fluency was relatively more dependent on temporal structures (.63), and associated with a deficit substantially in excess of the corresponding phonemic fluency deficit (.47).  Thus, whilst both types of fluency place comparable demands on executive processes, semantic fluency is relatively more dependent on semantic memory.  Phonemic fluency deficits qualified as <i>differential </i>deficits (i.e. they exceeded the averaged performance deficit across a range of other cognitive tasks) for frontal, but <i>not </i>non-frontal or specifically, temporal patients.  Fluency deficits were then quantified for patients with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT), schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease (PD) and depression.  AS for frontal patients TBI was associated with comparable phonemic and semantic fluency deficits (<i>rs =</i> .46 and .43 respectively), and for moderate and severe injuries these deficits were differential deficits.  For patients with DAT, schizophrenia and depression there was evidence of generalised cognitive dysfunction, but for each disorder semantic fluency was more impaired than phonemic fluency.  However, <i>differential </i>deficits on tests of semantic memory only emerged when there were also substantial demands on effortful retrieval and/or cognitive speed.  Finally, both demented and non-demented PD patients were also more impaired on semantic relative to phonemic fluency.  However, semantic memory was impaired even when demands on effortful retrieval and cognitive speed were minimal.

— Ce travail portera sur le cas de l’adaptation de deux sociolectes, l’anglais standard d’Écosse (« Standard Scottish English »), des dialectes écossais régionaux, ainsi que de l’anglais afro- américain sur l’Internet dans des communautés virtuelles. Ces parlers sont représentés sur ce média, dans des discussions asynchrones entre leurs locuteurs, ou sur des sites de découverte de ces sociolectes. On se demandera dans quelle mesure les locuteurs de ces variétés de l’anglais l’utilisent pour communiquer par écrit, ce qu’ils perçoivent de leur idiolecte, et comment ils adaptent un parler, pour lequel les connaissances sont souvent orales, en un moyen de communication écrit. En effet, il existe une différence entre l’écrit et l’oral, et la « conversion » du parler est un des sujets les plus importants: existe-t-il une règle phonographématique qui sous-tend les transformations, commune aux formes de l’anglais étudiées ? Est-ce que le discours ainsi produit est intelligible pour les locuteurs d’autres formes d’anglais ? Est-ce que l’âge et l’utilisation du dialecte à l’oral ont un rapport avec la propension à utiliser une forme dialectale de l’anglais sur Internet ? La phonologie de l’afro-américain et de l’anglais d’Écosse seront donc étudiées pour vérifier les hypothèses mises en jeu par ce travail : d’abord, le profil moyen des utilisateurs sera dégagé, et les productions écrites seront comparées avec leurs productions orales. Ensuite, les systèmes phonographématiques et grammaticaux de ces formes de l’anglais, telles qu’elles sont décrites dans des ouvrages de référence, seront mis en parallèle avec les exemples du corpus afin de voir si les dialectes ont évolué grâce à l’oral, ou grâce à l’utilisation du média internet. Enfin, des extraits des corpus seront présentés à des locuteurs d’anglais tandard, pour estimer le degré d’opacité de ces dialectes pour les non-locuteurs et déterminer si la forme écrite est plus intelligible forme orale. / This dissertation deals with two minority languages spoken in English-speaking countries, Scots and African American vernacular, used on two niche forums whose population is interested in Scottish culture for the former, Scotster, or mainly African American for the latter, Black Planet. The two linguistic domains which will be summoned are phonology dealing with minority languages and English, because both are discernible within alternative spellings ; as well as discourse analysis, because these asynchronous discourses allow unique data mining and insights into the creation of new lexical or graphic forms, which are more common on online communities they appear on. Thanks to a contrastive corpus made of works of fiction produced by native speakers, the grapho-phonemic traits of the two minority languages can be predicted on internet forums. The use of billboards also allows to study discursive phenomena which are specific to their ecology.The two languages practiced there are not used the same way : the users of Scots tend to teach it to others, while speakers of African American use it as a socio-cultural marker. This dissertation’s intent is to show that discourse practices on a forum create a platform-specific lect, called a communaulect. It is partly noticeable through alternative spellings. These are harbored by a will to lessen the difference between spelling and sound, and are even more detectable because members of BP and SC use a minority language they are mostly exposed to orally, hence twisting words more dramatically.

The present study is an investigation of certain aspects of the relationship which exists between the development of language of a child and the speech of his mother. An attempt was made to investigate the evolving speech pattern of the child as he is influenced by the speech patterns of his mother. Can one determine the age at which infants begin to develop speech similar to the speech patterns (intonation, phonemic content, distinctive feature content, place and manner of articulation) of their mother's speech?

This paper is an attempt to investigate the significance of the phonological component for the successful reading process at the elementary stage of learning a foreign language. Phonological awareness, the ability to segment language into smaller components and consciously manipulate them, together with the phonemic awareness, i.e. the ability to discriminate the individual phonemes within words, have been extensively studied since the 1980’s. Their causal role in reading acquisition is considered to be the single most powerful advance in the science and pedagogy of reading this century. However, this phonological component of reading skills formation has not yet been extensively examined in Lithuanian schools, while a number of scholars have proved the inter-relationship of the above mentioned skills by different experiments, conducted in foreign countries. The paper comprises three parts. In the first part Reading as a Cognitive Process the views about the cognitive process of reading of such scholars as G. V. Rogova, J. Harmer, F. Davies and many others are discussed. The second part of the paper, The Taxonomy of Phonological Awareness, deals with the phonological as well as phonemic awareness and their role in reading acquisition. The scholars K. Hempenstall, P.E. Bryant, R. Sensenbaugh, and some others are analysed here. In The Experimental Part of the paper, the hypothesis, that the presence of phonological awareness stimulates reading skills and vice versa, the... [to full text]

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Phonemic awareness is the ability to attend to the formal, phonetic or phonemic, aspects of spoken language. Skill in analysis of speech sounds and synthesis of phonetic segments into real words has often been found to correlate with success in reading acquisition. The nature of this relationship was investigated by postulating a causal model for the effect of phonemic awareness in kindergarten on reading and spelling skill in the first school years. The quantitative implications of this model were estimated with path-analysis in a kindergarten - grade 3 passive observational study. In order to experimentally test the effect of phonemic awareness a 8 week training program in kindergarten was evaluated using a quasi- experimental design in field settings. The effects of this program were evaluated in kindergarten, in grade 1 and in grade 2. Methodological problems in evaluation research were discussed. The results from the quasi- experimental study was further elucidated applying structural equation modeling with latent variables (LISREL). Clear effects of the training program were found on phonemic awareness tasks in grade 1 and on spelling in grade 2. More subtle effects were found on reading and spelling of simple words in grade 1. No effect was found on rapid silent word decoding. The LISREL analysis was interpreted in favour of a model with phonemic awareness effecting phonological processing which in turn is essential for the early reading development. The results were interpreted as supporting an interactive-compensatory limited capacity model of reading. Phonemic awareness helps the child to understand the alphabetical principle and ensures the development of an effective system for representing written language. Trained children find it easier to learn spelling-sound relations. / <p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Univ., härtill 5 uppsatser.</p> / digitalisering@umu

Converging evidence suggests that phonological awareness is at the core of reading ability. Rapid automatized naming (RAN), defined as how quickly individuals can name continuously presented familiar visual stimuli, is also known to be a strong predictor of reading performance, and reading fluency in particular. The double deficit hypothesis suggests RAN deficits represent an additional core deficit associated with the reading process. Although there are many ways to measure RAN (e.g., using letters, numbers, pictures, objects), not well established is which RAN task is most predictive of the reading fluency skills of clinic referred children. Further research is also needed to understand the relationship between RAN and general processing speed, and the extent to which RAN tasks uniquely predict the reading fluency of clinic-referred children. The purpose of the current study is to determine a) the relationships among phonemic awareness, RAN, general processing speed, and reading fluency; b) the predictive value of phonemic awareness and RAN tasks in determining reading fluency performance; c) which RAN task best predicts reading fluency; and d) if RAN tasks continue to predict reading fluency while controlling for general processing speed. 64 children from a university reading clinic were used as participants in this study. The results suggest that alphanumeric RAN task performance --and letter naming in particular-- are unique contributors to reading fluency performance in dysfluent readers. Further, the results indicate that this contribution to reading fluency extends beyond that of other theoretical components of fluency. / School of Education / School Psychology / PhD / Dissertation

This quantitative study has been derived from a five-year federal experimental research project entitled English and Literacy Acquisition (ELLA- R305P030032) which targeted Spanish-speaking English Language Learners (ELLs) receiving services in English immersion and bilingual program models. The purpose of this study was to investigate the predictive power of Spanish phonemic awareness in kindergarten on Spanish reading ability in first grade among Spanish-speaking ELLs. Fifty-five students from typical practice bilingual classrooms were included in this study. Phonemic awareness skills were measured using blending phonemes and segmenting words, two subtests from Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (C-TOPP). Reading ability was measured using letter-word identification and passage comprehension, two subtests from Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised (WLPB-R). Data of phonemic awareness skills were collected at the beginning and end of kindergarten and data of reading ability were collected at the beginning and end of first grade. Correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis were performed to address the research questions. The data from this study present a picture of a predictive power of phonemic awareness skills on reading comprehension in Spanish. Results from this study suggest that both skill areas of phonemic awareness in kindergarten have a moderate predictive effect on reading ability at the beginning of first grade. However, phonemic awareness skills in kindergarten did not show a statistically significant relationship to Spanish literacy at the end of first grade. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

This dissertation is an examination phonemic awareness and its relationship to reading ability in literate adults. Phonemic awareness is an indisputable predictor of reading ability in children, but whether the same relationship between phonemic awareness and reading exists in adult readers is unknown. All alphabetically literate adults are understood to be phonemically aware to a certain degree. Moreover, adults pay attention to sound/symbol relationships when reading. Yet, the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in alphabetically literate adults has not been explicitly studied, even though phonemic awareness is understood to be a key component of reading strategy and proficiency. A study was conducted on phonemic and syllabic awareness in adults. The results indicate that adults, despite years of alphabetic reading experience, are differentiated with regard to phonemic awareness and are more syllabically aware than phonemically aware. Additionally, the study demonstrates that phonemic awareness is associated with reading ability in adults, though syllabic awareness is not. Implications and directions for future study are discussed.