No description available.

The purpose of this study is to attempt to determine what influence configuration and/or letter sequence have on the recognition thresholds of words. It is felt that low configuration and/or rare letter sequences will result in lower recognition thresholds, while high configuration and/or common letter sequence will result in higher recognition thresholds when stimulus words are presented to subjects by means of a tachistoscope.

No description available.

The brain's neural responses to words of different frequencies provide information on lexical organization and the cognitive processes involved in word identification and retrieval of meaning. Monolingual research has shown that exposure to high frequency words yields less cognitive difficulty than low frequency words as demonstrated by smaller N400 waves within even-related potential (ERP) methodology. The purpose of the present study was to compare frequency effects in adult native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers of English during a sentence reading task embedded with high and low frequency word-pairs. Both L1 and L2 groups produced N400 waves of larger amplitudes for high frequency words compared to low frequency words that peaked around the 400 ms time mark. Group comparison found no significant difference in N400 wave amplitude and peak latency between both groups. The results are discussed with respect to theories of L2 word learning and lexical organization.

This project sought to find a rigorous and manageable method for measuring the difficulty of texts in te reo Māori written for children, beyond junior reading material in Māori-medium educational settings. The project examined a range of readability measures based on semantic and/or syntactic features of text, following the work of Warwick Elley (1969) and Richard Benton et al. (1995). Features such as the difficulty of content words, average sentence length, standardised type:token ratios and the use of function words were used in different combinations to create seven methods to measure text difficulty. Teachers’ and students’ ratings of text difficulty, and students’ scores on reading comprehension tasks related to the texts were used as criteria to examine the validity of the readability methods. The findings revealed that indices of either vocabulary load or lexical density when used in combination with the number of function types in the text, produce statistical significance with the criterion measures. Further research is needed to confirm their validity for use in Māori –medium classroom settings. The Māori word lists developed for this project as the basis of the readability approaches have the potential for more widespread analyses of language proficiency measures for students in Māori-medium settings.

This study is an examination of how a word’s syntactic category, word length, and usage frequency might impact a speaker’s use of communicative pause. Previously collected between and within utterance language samples from 21 people with aphasia (Harmon, 2018) were evaluated in this study. Participants consisted of 11 individuals diagnosed with mild or very mild aphasia and 10 individuals with moderate aphasia;15 who exhibited fluent subtypes and 6 non-fluent subtypes of aphasia. Data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was used to code the word frequency and syntactic category of each word in the language samples. Generally, speakers with both non-fluent and fluent aphasia produced more monosyllabic words of very high frequency with a greater percentage of function words than content words. Analyses revealed no significant correlations between the pause duration for either the word length or word frequency for either group of speakers. In relation to syntactic category, no significant differences in pause duration were found between content and function words in the between utterance condition. However, non-fluent speakers preceded content words with significantly shorter pause durations within utterances when compared with the function words. Due to differences in sample sizes between the speaker and syntactic groups, non-parametric statistics were used for some comparisons. In addition, this study does not fully account for the influence of fillers and incomplete words. Despite these limitations, this study will contribute to the research regarding communicative speech pause in speakers with aphasia and provide insight into more useful diagnostic and treatment strategies.

When people predict recognition performance, they wrongly predict that high frequency words will produce better recognition than low frequency words. To examine whether familiarity was the heuristic behind these inaccurate predictions, participants saw some words prior to study to increase their familiarity. We found that familiarity influences predictions, but word frequency has the greater influence. Research has shown that these inaccurate predictions can be corrected with test experience. Subsequent predictions are more accurate, but it is unclear whether participants learn that low frequency words are always better for memory or that participants had learned that low frequency words are only better for recognition and high frequency words are better for recall. We resolved this issue by giving a forced-choice recognition test after the single-item recognition test to determine what participants learned after the first test, and we found that participants learned that low frequency words facilitate recognition but not recall.

黎同濟. / Thesis (M.A.)--香港中文大學硏究院敎育學部. / Reprint. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-143). / Li Tongji. / Thesis (M.A.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue yan jiu yuan jiao yu xue bu. / Chapter 第一章 --- 導言 --- p.1 / 問題說明 --- p.1 / 文獻回顧 --- p.4 / 術語解說 --- p.27 / 研究目的 --- p.30 / Chapter 第二章 --- 研究方法 --- p.31 / 研究假設 --- p.31 / 研究設計 --- p.32 / 研究對象 --- p.34 / 研究工具 --- p.35 / 研究過程 --- p.37 / 資料整理 --- p.38 / 統計分析 --- p.43 / Chapter 第三章 --- 結果與討論 --- p.45 / 結果 --- p.45 / 討論 --- p.94 / Chapter 第四章 --- 摘要、結論與建議 --- p.124 / 摘要 --- p.124 / 結論 --- p.129 / 建議 --- p.134 / 參考文獻 --- p.137 / 附錄 / Chapter 一 --- 中文詞匯研究小組委員會（1987）的劃定詞語原則 --- p.144 / Chapter 二 --- 初中學生作文用詞研究教師問卷 --- p.146 / Chapter 三 --- 初中學生作文佳妙用詞鑑定準則問卷調查及結果及 --- p.147

L2 (second or foreign language) research indicates that vocabulary knowledge is not only the “single best predictor of text comprehension,” but also a strong indicator of listening, speaking, and writing proficiency (Alderson, 2000, p. 35). Understanding the development of vocabulary knowledge, including both vocabulary size and vocabulary depth, or quality of vocabulary knowledge—is therefore essential to the building of an overall insight into L2 proficiency. This study aims to explore the developmental status of vocabulary depth among postsecondary CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners of higher proficiency levels who have studied Chinese for over four years. In particular, it focuses on these learners' identification of two types of word association—synonym and collocational associations and how factors such as association type and target-word frequency impact association identification. The process and strategy use that are involved in the inference of word association are also explored. For these purposes, this study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Cross-sectional data were collected through a paper-and-pencil test of Chinese word associates from seventeen learners within five postsecondary CFL programs in the U.S. Each participant worked on two test booklets assessing synonym and collocational associates respectively for the same 44 adjectives selected from the three word frequency levels of below 1000, between 1000 and 5000, and above 5000. A two-factor within-subjects ANOVA revealed both significant main effects for association type and word frequency on association identification and a significant interaction between the two. Simple effect analysis and pair-wise comparisons further revealed that association identification became increasingly stronger with the increase of word frequency for collocational association, yet remained non-impacted by frequency before reaching the mid- to high-frequency transition for synonym association. Meanwhile, CFL learners' collocational knowledge was significantly higher than synonym knowledge at mainly the medium- and high-frequency levels. These reslts indicate that synonym knowledge seemed to lag behind in development as familiarity with words increased, but began to catch up at higher-frequency levels. Interview data collected from six CFL learners show that they employed a wide variety of knowledge sources, such as radical knowledge, morphological knowledge, contextual clues, sound information, or L1 in inferring word association. Inference success seemed to be influenced not only by their preexisting word knowledge, but also an integrated and flexible use of linguistic and contextual information in the inference process. Implications of these findings are discussed in relevance to curriculum and pedagogical development of CFL teaching and the understanding and definition of CFL proficiency in general. This study fills a gap in CFL vocabulary research by building a tentative measure of vocabulary depth and bringing greater insights into the developmental status of higher-level CFL learners in synonym and collocational association as well as the process that is involved in inference of word association.

Thesis (M.S.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Psychology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.