College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item The Development of Syntactic Complexity and the Irregular Past Tense in Children Who Do and Do Not Stutter(2009) Bauman, Jessica; Ratner, Nan B; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examined spontaneous language samples and standardized test data obtained from 31 pairs of children who stutter (CWS), ages 25-59 months, and age-matched children who do not stutter (CWNS). Developmental Sentence Scores (DSS; Lee, 1974) as well as the relationships among age, DSS, and other standardized test scores were compared for both groups. No substantial differences were found between groups in the syntactic complexity of spontaneous language; however, the two groups show different relationships between age and DSS and between test scores and DSS. Additionally, observed differences between CWS and CWNS in patterns of past-tense errors and usage are discussed in light of a recent theoretical model of language performance in populations with suspected basal ganglia involvement (Ullman, 2004).Item Keep it simple: Accelerating the verb learning process(2007-05-03) Weinberg, Stephanie Michelle; Newman, Rochelle; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For early word learners, verbs are more difficult to learn than nouns. Previous research suggests that a simple agent of an action facilitates verb learning. The present investigation was designed to replicate this finding with real-world stimuli. Twenty-four 18-month-old English-learning children participated in one of two conditions. Children either saw a block (simple agent) or a woman (complex agent) perform a novel action named simultaneously as the action occurred. All children were tested in the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to determine whether they learned the verb. Verb learning was not achieved in either condition; the results indicate that the block did not provide a verb learning advantage at this age. Limitations of the present study and suggestions for future research have been highlighted.