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In the fall of 1918, the First World War was drawing to a close. In the midst of Canada’s first major foray into war since Confederation, another threat became more obvious; influenza. Spanish influenza affected millions of people worldwide from 1918 to 1920 and the Canadian population was not immune to such an outbreak. This thesis uses a Mennonite population and locale, the RM of Hanover, Manitoba, as the focus for a study of influenza. In Hanover, the influenza death rate in 1918 was 13.5 deaths per 1000; double the national Canadian average of 6.1. This thesis examines how structures of healthcare networks in rural communities and tensions between provincial and federal authorities, and the Mennonite population at the end of the First World War contributed to the higher death rate amongst this ethnic group. Influenza in Hanover was a shared experience of influenza amongst a North American Mennonite diaspora. / October 2015

This thesis examines phonological awareness and literacy in monolingual and bilingual children. Experiment 1 shows that 5-6 year old Spanish-monolingual, English-monolingual and Spanish-English-bilingual children show the same pattern of development of phonological awareness. However, the degree of awareness of each unit is influenced by linguistic background. Spanish children are more aware of vowels and rimes than English children. English children are more aware of syllables than Spanish children. Bilingual children are more aware of syllables in Spanish than Spanish-monolinguals and more aware of vowels in English than English-monolinguals. Hence they show transfer of phonological awareness across languages. All three groups also show a different relationship between phonological awareness and reading. Experiment 2 shows that bilinguals are more aware than English monolinguals of vowels that exist in both languages (tense-vowels). Moreover, this enhanced awareness extends to vowels that do not exist in Spanish (lax-vowels). It is concluded that exposure to two languages enhances analysis of phonology as well as encouraging transfer of awareness. Experiment 2 also shows that Spanish-speakers read and spell vowels more accurately than English-speakers. Bilingual children read English vowels more accurately than English-monolinguals. This suggests they understand the orthographic representations of English vowels at least as well as monolinguals. However, they spell vowels less accurately. This may be because bilinguals misapply Spanish phoneme-to-graphemecorrespondences when spelling English vowels. The English and Spanish vowel systems differ more than their consonant systems. Experiment 3 shows that sensitivity to the four consonant types (stops, fricatives, nasals and liquids) is similar, and correlates with reading ability, in all groups. This suggests that bilinguals may only transfer awareness between English and Spanish of units that are linguistically dissimilar in each. Experiment 4 compared the awareness of the two consonants in word-medial double-consonants (e.g. the 'c' and 't' in mactan). Although only Spanish-speakers used syllable boundaries to analyse these consonants they made a similar number of errors to English-speakers. However, all groups used syllable boundaries to read and spell wordmedial double-consonants. Collectively, these results suggest that differences in phonological and orthographic structure between languages encourage different approaches to the acquisition of literacy. Future research should investigate how these differences may be exploited to facilitate literacy acquisition in each group.

Este estudio analiza la percepción y producción del contraste catalán entre la fricativa alveopalatal sonora y la lateral palatal por parte de bilingües de Mallorca, España: un grupo de hispano-dominantes (HD) y otro de catalano-dominantes (CD). El estudio de producción consistió en la repetición de frases en catalán. El estudio de percepción consistió en una tarea de discriminación de uno de tres sonidos que no formaba parte de la misma categoría sonora. Hubo diferencias perceptuales significativas entre los dos grupos. Esto apoya que la adquisición de una segunda lengua aun durante la infancia conlleva consecuencias durante la edad adulta de un bilingüe. Los resultados de producción concordaron con los de percepción: los CD mantuvieron el contraste, y los HD no lo mantuvieron. Se discuten las implicaciones de estos hallazgos para nuestra comprensión del bilingüismo, la adquisición de los sonidos de una L2 y el cambio lingüístico motivado por el contacto.

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