Singaporean kindergartners' phonological awareness and English writing skills

This article describes the phonological awareness and English writing skills among a sample of 297 Singaporean kindergarten children, stratified by ethnicity (Chinese, Malay, and Indian), and examines the relationship between oral language and writing skills in this multilingual population. Overall, Singaporean kindergartners, nearly all of whom were bilingual, scored higher on English writing but lower on English oral language skills than U.S. norms. Despite literacy instruction that emphasized whole-word memorization, phonological awareness statistically significantly predicted English writing scores, controlling for English vocabulary, ethnicity, sex, and an interaction between English vocabulary and sex. The current study's findings highlight the possibility of developing high literacy skills among bilingual learners with low oral language skills. In addition, the study demonstrates children's development of phonological awareness in the absence of phonological awareness or phonics instruction and supports the theory that both alphabetic (phonological) processes and logographic (whole-word) processes contribute to successful English literacy achievement.     

汉语儿童的语音加工技能与其单词朗读技能的关系研究

以121名小学五年级学生为被试,采用测验法,考察了汉语儿童的语音技工技能与其英文单词朗读技能的关系。结果表明:语音加工技能的三种成分均能够对英文单词朗读技能产生影响,其中,语音意识对单词朗读技能具有重要影响,快速命名能力和语音工作记忆也能够对单词朗读技能产生影响。     

工作记忆容量的差异对第二语言句法歧义句加工的影响

采用眼动技术, 以句子阅读过程中, 句子不同区段的首次注视时间作为句子即时性加工的指标, 回扫次数和总的注视时间作为句子非即时加工的指标, 考察了非熟练的汉-英双语者, 工作记忆容量的差异对第二语言(英语)暂时句法歧义句加工的影响。结果显示: 高工作记忆容量的被试, 在句子不同区段的首次注视时间和总的注视时间均短于低工作记忆容量的被试; 高、低工作记忆容量被试的回扫模式相似。研究结果表明, 对于非熟练的汉-英双语者, 工作记忆容量的差异既影响英语句法歧义句即时性的加工, 也影响非即时性的加工, 即工作记忆容量的差异既影响英语句法歧义句初始的句法加工过程, 也影响句法的重新分析过程。研究结果在一定程度上支持工作记忆容量限制的理论。     

汉语儿童英语语音意识与拼写的关系

对92名二到四年级的汉语儿童进行英语语音意识和英语拼写测试,探索汉语儿童英语拼写的发展特点以及语音意识中的不同成分对其拼写的影响作用。结果发现：（1）汉语儿童的英语拼写成绩随着年级和学习经验的增多而提高,其中二年级到三年级是英语拼写能力发展的关键时期,女生的拼写成绩优于男生。（2）语音意识中的首音韵音意识对汉语儿童的英语拼写有较强的影响作用,此外,拼音和工作记忆也是影响汉语儿童英语拼写的重要因素。     

英文短文写作元认知、动机性因素与作文成绩之间关系的研究

随机选取大一、大二和大三学生共1043人为被试,采用协方差结构模型考察了非英语专业大学生英文写作元认知、自我效能、任务价值、成就目标、归N和英语作文成绩之间的关系。研究结果表明：（1）自我效能、任务价值、成就目标、归N两两相关且对英文写作元认知有直接影响,并通过英文写作元认知对英语作文成绩有间接影响;（2）英文写作元认知和自我效能对英语作文成绩有直接影响;（3）自我效能对英文写作元认知的影响力最大。     

英语语音意识在汉语儿童英语单词阅读及拼写中的作用

本研究考察了英语语音意识在小学汉语儿童英语单词读写学习中的作用。对189名小学儿童的研究表明:(1)一、二、五年级在首音和韵脚意识上差异显著;在音位意识上,一、二年级差异不显著,五年级显著高于其他两个年级;(2)各年级儿童的语音意识与其英语单词读写均存在显著相关;(3)控制英语口语词汇量后,一年级的首音意识显著解释其单词读写的变异,二年级的首音意识显著解释其单词拼写的变异,五年级的音位意识显著解释其单词读写的变异;(4)各年级的语音意识对单词拼写较之于阅读都具有更强的变异解释力。可见,小学汉语儿童的英语语音意识与其单词读写存在密切联系,语音意识与拼写的关系相对更为紧密;首音意识对早期读写发展具有重要意义,而音位意识在后期读写学习中的作用更为突出。     

Graded representations in the acquisition of English and German transitive constructions

English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., ‘The frog is pushing the lion’, when the lion was actually the ‘agent’ or ‘doer’ of the pushing). These verbs were then elicited in new sentences. All children mostly corrected the familiar verb (i.e., they used the agent as the grammatical subject), but there were cross-linguistic differences among the two-year-olds concerning the novel verb. When English 2-year-olds used the novel verb they mostly corrected. However, their most frequent response was to avoid using the novel verb altogether. German 2-year-olds corrected the novel verb significantly more often than their English counterparts, demonstrating more robust verb-general representations of agent- and patient-marking. These findings provide support for a ‘graded representations’ view of development, which proposes that grammatical representations may be simultaneously abstract but ‘weak’.     

The processing of English regular inflections: Phonological cues to morphological structure

Previous studies suggest that different neural and functional mechanisms are involved in the analysis of irregular (caught) and regular (filled) past tense forms in English. In particular, the comprehension and production of regular forms is argued to require processes of morpho-phonological assembly and disassembly, analysing these forms into a stem plus an inflectional affix (e.g., {fill}+{-ed}), as opposed to irregular forms, which do not have an overt stem+affix structure and must be analysed as full forms [Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1997). Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature, 387, 592-594; Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1998). Rules, representations, and the English past tense. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2, 428-435]. On this account, any incoming string that shows the critical diagnostic properties of an inflected form - a final coronal consonant (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/) that agrees in voicing with the preceding segment as in filled, mild, or nilled - will automatically trigger an attempt at segmentation. We report an auditory speeded judgment experiment which explored the contribution of these critical morpho-phonological properties (labelled as the English inflectional rhyme pattern) to the processing of English regular inflections. The results show that any stimulus that can be interpreted as ending in a regular inflection, whether it is a real inflection (filled-fill), a pseudo-inflection (mild-mile) or a phonologically matched nonword (nilled-nill), is responded to more slowly than an unambiguously monomorphemic stimulus pair (e.g., belt-bell). This morpho-phonological effect was independent of phonological effects of voicing and syllabicity. The findings are interpreted as evidence for a basic morpho-phonological parsing process that applies to all items with the criterial phonological properties.     

Discrimination of coronal stops by bilingual adults: the timing and nature of language interaction

The current study was designed to investigate the timing and nature of interaction between the two languages of bilinguals. For this purpose, we compared discrimination of Canadian French and Canadian English coronal stops by simultaneous bilingual, monolingual and advanced early L2 learners of French and English. French /d/ is phonetically described as dental whereas English /d/ is described as alveolar. Using a categorial AXB task, the performance of all four groups was compared to chance and to the performance of native Hindi listeners. Hindi listeners performed well above chance in discriminating French and English /d/-initial syllables. The discrimination performance of advanced early L2 learners, but not simultaneous bilinguals, was consistent with one merged category for coronal stops in the two languages. The data provide evidence for interaction in L2 learners as well as simultaneous bilinguals; however, the nature of the interaction is different in the two groups.     

小学儿童语音意识与汉语拼音能力的关系

探讨了小学一、三、五年级儿童汉语和英语语音意识与汉语拼音水平的关系。结果发现 ,无论是汉语还是英语语音意识都与汉语拼音水平有显著的相关 ;拼音水平高与低组儿童在汉语和英语语音意识上差异显著 ;汉语拼音成绩较高地预测了汉语语音意识的水平 ,而对英语语音意识没有预测力。