UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Fast mapping in linguistic context: Processing and complexity effects(2015) Arnold, Alison Reese; Huang, Yi Ting; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Young children readily use syntactic cues for word learning in structurally-simple contexts (Naigles, 1990). However, developmental differences in children's language processing abilities might interfere with their access to syntactic cues when novel words are presented in structurally-challenging contexts. To understand the role of processing on syntactic bootstrapping, we used an eye-tracking paradigm to examine children's fast-mapping abilities in active (structurally-simple) and passive (structurally-complex) sentences. Actions after sentences indicated children were more successful mapping words in passive sentences when novel words were presented in NP2 ("The seal will be quickly eaten by the blicket") than when novel words were presented in NP1 ("The blicket will be quickly eaten by the seal"), indicating presenting more prominent nouns in NP1 increases children's agent-first bias and sabotages interpretation of passives. Later recall data indicate children were less likely to remember new words in structurally-challenging contexts.Item Adult Readers' Calibration of Word Learning(2011) Parkinson, Meghan; Alexander, Patricia A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The current study examined undergraduates' metacognitive processes during word learning, a crucial component of building representations of key concepts from text. Noticing the need to construct meaning for unknown words requires metacognitive monitoring. Constructing meanings for those words requires regulation of cognition. Fukkink (2005) provided a model for word learning, based on think aloud data that represented a series of metacognitive activities word learners engaged in when faced with an unknown word. The evaluation process within Fukkink's (2005) model related to the judgments learners made about new word meanings and how accurate they believed those judgments to be. A specific aspect of metacognitive evaluation is calibration, or the accuracy with which learners asses their knowledge on a particular cognitive task (Glenberg & Epstein, 1985; Lichtenstein & Fischhoff, 1977). The current study more closely examined word learning and calibration, while addressing some gaps in the literature and offering a model of influences on word learning to complement Fukkink's process model. The current study sought to answer questions related to the following goals: 1. To determine the influence of several factors related to adult readers' word learning and calibration of word learning. 2. To assess empirical evidence relative to a model of reading skill, vocabulary knowledge, passage comprehension, and metacognitive evaluation related to word learning using methods that directly measure word learning and metacognitive evaluation. 3. To determine which text factors influenced the ease with which word learners could derive meaning while reading and evaluate their level of performance on a word knowledge test. A measured variable path analysis showed a similar goodness of fit for both the incidental word learning condition and the intentional word learning condition. Prior word knowledge was found to be positively related to judgments of learning, but negatively related to calibration of word learning within the path model. Think-aloud data did not illuminate a connection between passage comprehension, strategic processing, and word learning. However, think-aloud data did reveal that students who decreased in performance from word knowledge pretest to posttest self-reported challenge while reading more frequently than other students. Finally, repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed differences in passage comprehension and JOLs between passages, prompting an analysis of specific text features underlying text difficulty that were not represented with a readability formula.Item Infant speech perception in noise and vocabulary outcomes(2008) Singer, Emily R.; Newman, Rochelle; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study attempted to investigate the relationship between infant speech perception in noise and vocabulary outcomes. Newman (2005) conducted a series of studies to determine if infants were able to perceive their own name in the context of background noise. It was found that at five months, infants could perceive their own name when the signal-to-noise ratio was at least 10 dB and at thirteen months, infants were able to perceive their own name with a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 5 dB. Children who had participated in this study as infants returned to be assessed in terms of vocabulary and non-verbal intelligence at approximately five years of age. Children were divided into two groups depending on their success as infants and compared on these measures. No significant relationship was found between any of the measures of vocabulary or non-verbal intelligence and initial performance on the speech perception task.