Receptive and expressive vocabulary skills in preschoolers are predictors of later literacy skills. Research shows that children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds are generally behind their peers in the area of vocabulary skills when they enter school. Many preschool programs now focus on increasing these skills through shared book reading interventions. The purpose of the current research is to study the efficacy of a specific shared book reading intervention, dialogic reading, with low-income preschoolers in the area of vocabulary development. The search yielded 10 intervention studies that utilized dialogic reading strategies in interventions with the target population. Studies yielded mixed results but generally found that dialogic reading intervention does have significant positive effects on receptive and expressive vocabulary. Limitations and implications for practice are discussed. / text

Purpose: This study examined the effects of conceptual scoring on vocabulary performance of bilingual children with and without language impairment and the classification accuracy of an expressive vocabulary test across four scoring methods, single language and conceptual scoring, for bilingual (English-Spanish) children with and without language impairment. Method: Participants included English speaking monolingual children (n=14) and Spanish-English bilingual children (n=116) ages 5-11. Children completed the English and bilingual versions of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test. Four different scores were derived representing monolingual scores in English and Spanish, and three conceptual scores. Within-test conceptual scores credited children’s other language responses during the test; and across-test conceptual scores compiled a conceptual score across Spanish and English administrations of the test. Results: Across-test conceptual scoring resulted in better overall classification, sensitivity, and specificity than within-test conceptual scoring, which resulted in better overall classification, sensitivity, and specificity than monolingual scoring; however, neither method achieved minimum standards of 80% accuracy in sensitivity and specificity. Conclusions: Results suggest that bilingual children are not always able to readily access their second language in confrontation naming tasks. Priming or inhibition may play a role in test performance. Cross-test conceptual scoring yielded the highest classification accuracy and is the recommended method for clinical practice. / text

published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

For children who are learning to read, it is of the upmost importance that vocabulary knowledge is acquired in a timely fashion. Adequate vocabulary knowledge enables children to comprehend the majority of words in a text and this, in turn, influences reading and overall school success. Children who have delayed vocabulary at the point of school entry may increasingly fall behind their peers as reading demands increase. The identification of these children is necessary, yet despite its importance, vocabulary development is not being assessed in a systematic manner in new entrant classrooms. In this study, five receptive vocabulary tests were piloted with 46 new entrant children from four primary schools in the Christchurch area. The purpose of the study was to determine whether it was possible to develop a procedure that could identify children with delayed vocabulary development in an accurate and economical way. The results suggested that none of the four piloted tests were suitable for screening new entrants. These results highlight the need for a closer look at vocabulary testing at this age level.

There is significant variability in the ability of listeners to perceive degraded speech. Existing research has suggested that vocabulary knowledge is one factor that differentiates better listeners from poorer ones, though the reason for such a relationship is unclear. This study aimed to investigate whether a relationship exists between vocabulary knowledge and the type of lexical segmentation strategy listeners use in adverse conditions. This study conducted error pattern analysis using an existing dataset of 34 normal-hearing listeners (11 males, 23 females, aged 18 to 35) who participated in a speech recognition in noise task. Listeners were divided into a higher vocabulary (HV) and a lower vocabulary (LV) group based on their receptive vocabulary score on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Lexical boundary errors (LBEs) were analysed to examine whether the groups showed differential use of syllabic strength cues for lexical segmentation. Word substitution errors (WSEs) were also analysed to examine patterns in phoneme identification. The type and number of errors were compared between the HV and LV groups. Simple linear regression showed a significant relationship between vocabulary and performance on the speech recognition task. Independent samples t-tests showed no significant differences between the HV and LV groups in Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS) ratio or number of LBEs. Further independent samples t-tests showed no significant differences between the WSEs produced by HV and LV groups in the degree of phonemic resemblance to the target. There was no significant difference in the proportion of target phrases to which HV and LV listeners responded. The results of this study suggest that vocabulary knowledge does not affect lexical segmentation strategy in adverse conditions. Further research is required to investigate why higher vocabulary listeners appear to perform better on speech recognition tasks.

This thesis extends a previous pilot study with children who stutter (CWS) to include children with specific language impairment (CSLI). The current study examines lexical-semantic organization in these two clinical populations in hopes of comparing and contrasting behavioral profiles. The study employed a list-recall task to assess the lexical-semantic organization of 9 CWS, 5 CSLI, and 20 typically developing children matched for age and vocabulary. Similar to previous investigations, our child participants demonstrated the well-documented list position effects. With regard to recall accuracy, by-participant analyses revealed significant differences between CSLI and their age-matched peers; however, they did not reveal significant differences between the CWS and either of their control groups nor between the CSLI and CWS groups. Further, inspection of error distribution suggested significant differences in the number and types of errors the CSLI and control groups produced. The prevalence of unrelated and previous list errors in CSLI suggest that deficits in inhibitory processes as well as perseveration may have affected their performance. Areas of overlap and divergence in the profiles of CWS and CSLI indicate continuity in the degree of lexical-semantic weakness as well as differences in lexical retrieval and executive functions among CSLI and CWS. / text

The present study seeks to explore if the bilingual advantage and disadvantage of children who are natively bilingual in English and Spanish extends to children who gain exposure to and eventually become bilingual in these languages beginning at ages 5 and 6. Specifically, the study compares executive control, vocabulary, and verbal fluency for three groups of children: a) native Spanish-English bilinguals, b) late bilinguals that have completed at least 5 years of a 50-50 dual language immersion program in English and Spanish in school, and c) English monolinguals that have not had second language instruction. The proposed study seeks a better understanding of the unique cognitive skill sets of native and late bilingual and monolingual children, and to inform educational policy related to bilingual students. / text

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

This study aims to find research relating to the use of children’s literature to promote vocabulary development in young children, particularly English language learners in Sweden. The main questions address how (methods) children’s literature can be used and why (reasons) children’s literature is often recommended for the teaching of vocabulary to young learners. The study also aims to explore reasons against the use of children’s literature in vocabulary teaching found in previous research. A systematic literature review was carried out, including results from five empirical studies. The studies involved native speakers, second language learners and foreign language learners from various backgrounds. The results suggest that while research has shown children’s literature to be a good tool to use with young learners, careful lesson planning needs to be carried out. Direct instruction and scaffolding using pictures, technology and gestures is recommended. Hence, the teacher plays an important part for the vocabulary development using children’s literature in the classroom.