The acquisition of literacy skills is a complex and multi-faceted process that begins long before typical school-based literacy instruction. The present study sought to examine and expand research regarding the independent and interactive contributions of neuropsychological development, movement, play, and music on the development of literacy…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

One hypothesis raised by Newport and Aslin to explain how speakers learn dependencies between nonadjacent phonemes is that speakers track bigram probabilities between two segments that are adjacent to each other within a tier of their own. The hypothesis predicts that a dependency between segments separated from each other at the tier level cannot…

The phonological processes known as "lenition" have traditionally been explained as articulatory effort reduction. However, such a motivation for lenition has never been directly demonstrated; in addition, there are reasons to doubt the articulatory explanation.This paper focuses on a particular type of lenition (intervocalic…

In this technical report, we describe a study examining the internal structures of the easyCBM reading measures, Grades K-5. Data were gathered from a convenience sample of 114 Kindergarten students, 43 first graders, 82 second graders, 100 third graders, 109 fourth graders, and 71 fifth graders attending schools in Oregon, Georgia, South…

The current study investigated the scope of bilingual language control differentiating between whole-language control involving control of an entire lexicon specific to 1 language and lexical-level control involving only a restricted set of recently activated lexical representations. To this end, we tested 60 Dutch-English (Experiment 1) and 64…

The goal of this research programme was to evaluate the role of word lexicality in effecting phonological change in children's sound systems. Four children with functional speech sound disorders (SSDs) were enrolled in an across-subjects multiple baseline single-subject design; two were treated using high-frequency real words (RWs) and two were…

Students entering school with little knowledge of English do not have the foundation in place to develop reading skills. This lack of foundation puts English Learners at a disadvantage that they struggle to overcome. The purpose of the quantitative study was twofold: (a) to determine whether measures of phonemic awareness are predictive of end of…

"Earobics"[R] is interactive software that provides students in pre-K through third grade with individual, systematic instruction in early literacy skills as students interact with animated characters. "Earobics[R] Foundations" is a version for pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten, and first graders. "Earobics[R]…

MEASUREMENT CRITERIA ARE DEVELOPED FOR THE QUANTIFICATION OF THE FUNCTIONAL LOAD OF THE PHONEMES OF A LANGUAGE. THE CONCEPT OF FUNCTIONAL LOAD OR YIELD, FROM CERTAIN THEORIES OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE, STATES THAT SOME CONTRASTS BETWEEN THE DISTINCTIVE SOUNDS OF A LANGUAGE DO MORE WORK THAN OTHERS BY OCCURRING MORE FREQUENTLY AND IN MORE LINGUISTIC…

STUDY OBJECTIVES WERE--(1) TO ANALYZE 5,000 ENGLISH WORDS TO FIND THE UNDERLYING PATTERNS IN THE SPELLING-TO-SOUND RELATIONSHIPS, (2) TO DEVELOP A MODEL FOR MAPPING SPELLING-TO-SOUND CORRESPONDENCES WHICH NOT ONLY DISPLAYS IN AN ECONOMICAL FASHION THE UNDERLYING SPELLING PATTERNS, BUT ALSO REFLECTS THE SPELLING-TO-SOUND HABITS OF THE MATURE…

Visual Phonics is an instructional program to provide print awareness, alphabet knowledge, and sound-letter correspondence for children with hearing loss who experience difficulty developing a foundation of phonemic awareness skills. Its purpose is "to clarify the sound symbol relationship between spoken English and print" (Waddy-Smith…

A LINGUISTIC MODEL DEVELOPMENT FOR DESCRIBING SPELLING-TO-SOUND CORRESPONDENCES WAS UNDERTAKEN AND A NUMBER OF SPELLING-TO-SOUND PATTERNS ANALYZED, CONTINUING AN EARLIER STUDY PERFORMED UNDER PROJECT NO. S-039 (ED 003 445). RESEARCH EMPHASIZED VOWEL SPELLINGS AND THE INFLUENCE OF VARIOUS CONSONANTS UPON THE PRONUNCIATIONS OF THESE SPELLINGS. IT…

THE USE OF PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING WAS INVESTIGATED, SPECIFICALLY AS TRANSCRIPTION FACILITATES AUDITORY-VISUAL RECOGNITION OF RUSSIAN SOUNDS AND SCRIPT. PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION SERVED IN THIS STUDY AS THE MEDIATING AGENT BETWEEN RUSSIAN SOUNDS AND CYRILLIC SCRIPT. THE LEARNING PROCESS WAS SET UP ON A MEDIATION CHAIN OF…