Songs as Ambient Language Input in Phonology Acquisition

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Mechanical causality in children's 'folkbiology'

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Mechanical causality in children's 'folkbiology'

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Why Does Rapid Naming Predict Chinese Word Reading?

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) robustly predicts early reading abilities across languages, but its underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study found that RAN associated significantly with processing speed but not with phonological awareness or orthographic knowledge in 89 Hong Kong Chinese second-graders. RAN overlaps more with processing speed (18% of individual variation) in predicting word reading fluency, than with phonological (4%) or orthographic awareness (3%), suggesting that processing speed contributed more strongly to the RAN-reading fluency relation in Chinese. Nonetheless, RAN remained significant in predicting Chinese word-level reading fluency when all other cognitive tasks were taken into account, suggesting that no single construct can fully explain RAN’s relation to reading, but that multiple components influence this relation. Moreover, when reading abilities in second language English were considered, the association between RAN and word reading fluency was marginally stronger in Chinese than in English. Implications for mechanisms underlying the RAN-reading relation are discussed.postprin

The Effects of Perceived Parental Expectations on Chinese Children's Mathematics Performance

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Getting children to do more academic work: Foot-in-the-Door versus Door-in-the-Face

In this study we explored whether compliance-without-pressure techniques, known to encourage adults to behave more altruistically, can be used to encourage children to do more academic work. Using three different approaches - Foot-in-the-Door, Door-in-the-Face, and Single-Request - we asked 60 6- to 8-year-old Hong Kong Chinese children to complete a 20-item arithmetic worksheet. The Door-in-the-Face technique was the most effective, eliciting the highest percentage of children who agreed to do the target task, requiring the least adult input to sustain engagement in the task, and producing the greatest amount of accurate work. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.postprin

Late second language learners: what predicts good outcomes

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Children's use of information in word learning.

Whenever children hear a novel word, the context supplies information about its meaning. One way children may cope with so much information is to use whatever seems to make sense, given their prior knowledge and beliefs, while ignoring or quickly forgetting the rest. This work examined if and how children's beliefs about word meanings may affect their use of contrastive linguistic information in the input in word learning. In Study 1, some 3- and 4-year-olds were introduced to a novel material or shape name and heard it contrasted with familiar words. Others merely heard the novel word used for referring to an object. These children were then tested to determine what they had learned about their new word meaning. In Study 2, another group of 3- and 4-year-olds were asked to name the materials and shapes used for introducing these novel terms. Children made use of linguistic contrast only in some situations. They benefited more when the novel term did not overlap much in denotation with any terms commonly known by 3- and 4-year-olds. These results suggest that children can use information in the input very efficiently in learning a term for an as-yet-unnamed category, but not in learning a term similar in denotation to a word they already know. Thus, the results are consistent with the claim that children believe every word has a unique denotation.published_or_final_versio

Overhearing a second language and cognitive development

Despite its significance for understanding language acquisition, the role of early language experience has been examined almost exclusively in linguistic deprivation studies focusing on what cannot be readily learned beyond childhood. Our research focused instead on long-term effects of what can be learned best during childhood. We focused on adult learners of Spanish/Korean who had spoken Spanish/Korean as their native language before age 6 and only minimally, if at all, thereafter until they began to re-learn the language after age 13 years. They were compared with native speakers, childhood (over)hearers, and typical late-second-language (L2)-learners of Spanish/Korean. Although far from native-like, childhood speakers of Spanish reliably outperformed childhood overhearers and typical late-L2-learners on measures of grammar. Both childhood speakers and overhearers spoke Spanish with a more native-like accent than typical late-L2-learners. To date, we have documented benefits of childhood experience with Korean only in the domain of phonology. In a new line of investigation, we explore access to very early linguistic experience by focusing on adults adopted under age 12 months from Korea by families in the U.S. Preliminary findings suggest early learning about ambient language can be accessed in adulthood upon re-learning.postprin

Early childhood language memory in the speech perception of international adoptees

It is as yet unclear whether the benefits of early linguistic experiences can be maintained without at least some minimal continued exposure to the language. This study compared 12 adults adopted from Korea to the US as young children (all but one prior to age one year) to 13 participants who had no prior exposure to Korean to examine whether relearning can aid in accessing early childhood language memory. All 25 participants were recruited and tested during the second week of first-semester college Korean language classes. They completed a language background questionnaire and interview, a childhood slang task and a Korean phoneme identification task. Results revealed an advantage for adoptee participants in identifying some Korean phonemes, suggesting that some components of early childhood language memory can remain intact despite many years of disuse, and that relearning a language can help in accessing such a memory. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009.published_or_final_versio