Human Development & Quantitative Methodology
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2248
The departments within the College of Education were reorganized and renamed as of July 1, 2011. This department incorporates the former departments of Measurement, Statistics & Evaluation; Human Development; and the Institute for Child Study.
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item The Influence of Orthographic Experiences on the Development of Functional Phonological Unit in Spoken Word Production(2015) Li, Chuchu; Wang, Min; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The current dissertation project examined the influence of orthographic experiences on the development of the functional phonological unit in spoken word production in native Mandarin-speaking children. Functional phonological unit refers to the first selectable phonological unit after lexical selection in the planning of spoken word production. Previous research has shown that the acquisition of orthographic knowledge restructures literate speakers’ phonological representation and in particular, the acquisition of alphabetic orthographic knowledge improves children’s phonological awareness at the phonemic level. However, few studies have investigated the influence of orthographic experiences on phonological retrieval and encoding in spoken word production. The goal of this dissertation is to fill this gap. Four experiments were carried out to conduct the investigation. Participants consisted of native Mandarin speakers from four age groups with different orthographic experiences, including 1) Grade 1 children, who were comparatively more exposed to alphabetic Pinyin and had very limited Chinese character knowledge, 2) Grade 2 and Grade 4 children, who had better character knowledge and more exposure to characters, and 3) adult readers, who had the highest level of character knowledge and the most exposure to characters. Experiment 1 investigated whether the onset served as the functional phonological unit in producing monosyllables; Experiment 2 investigated whether the role of the onset in phonological retrieval and encoding was sustained when producing disyllabic words; Experiment 3 examined the role of the syllable segment (i.e., a syllable whose tone is indeterminate or an atonal syllable) in producing disyllabic words; Experiment 4 examined the role of the tonal syllable (i.e., tonal information is also included) in producing disyllabic words. Results showed that only Grade 1 children selected the onset as the functional phonological unit regardless of the word length during spoken word production and that additionally, they might process the rime segment and tone as a cohesive unit. By contrast, Grade 4 children and adults selected the syllable segment as the functional phonological unit. Grade 2 children were in their transitional stage of development, and they selected tonal syllable as the functional phonological unit. The different orthographic experiences of the four groups might contribute to the above differences. The current dissertation has important theoretical and pedagogical implications. The aforementioned findings help us better understand the mechanism of phonological processing, and as a result, may help educators develop more efficient pedagogical approaches to improve children’s phonological processing ability.Item The processing of past-tense inflection in first language (L1) and second language (L2)(2012) Kim, Say Young; Wang, Min; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The present dissertation research investigates how morphologically complex words are processed in isolation and in sentential context by native speakers and second language learners, and how four critical factors in morphological processing (regularity, stem frequency, whole-word frequency, and orthographic similarity) influence this processing. For comparisons between different first languages (Korean L1 and English L1) and between first and second languages (English L1 and English L2), Native Korean Speakers (Exp.1 and 3), Native English Speakers (Exp. 2a and 4a), and Korean Learners of English (Exp. 2b and 4b) were tested. In order to compare the priming effects from words in isolation and words in sentences, sets of inflectional prime and target pairs, one for each language, were used both in a masked priming lexical decision task (Exp.1 and 2) and a self-paced reading task with mask priming (Exp. 3 and 4). The results showed priming effects from inflectional prime and target pairs in both Korean L1 and English L1 when the pairs were presented in isolation, showing morphological sensitivity in both L1 groups. However, when the pairs were embedded in sentences, the priming effect was found only in native English speakers but not in native Korean speakers, implying language-specific differences between Korean and English in processing of inflectional words in sentences. Moreover, even though a similar pattern of priming effects was found for words in isolation, English L2 showed no significant priming effect for words in sentences, consistent with past literature demonstrating less sensitivity to morphological structure in L2. The different patterns of priming effects between the two tasks as well as across the three language groups in the present research were also analyzed in terms of the four morphological factors, and discussed from the perspective of language-specific characteristics. In summary, the present dissertation research examined morphological processing of two typologically different languages in two different reading contexts. The results suggest the importance of language-specific characteristics in various reading conditions in enhancing our understanding of morphological processing in the human mind.Item PROCESSING OF COMPOUND WORDS BY ADULT KOREAN-ENGLISH BILINGUALS(2011) Ko, In Yeong; Wang, Min; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this dissertation study is to investigate how Korean-English bilinguals process compound words in both English and Korean. The major research question is: when Korean-English bilinguals process Korean or English compound words, what information is used to segment compound words into their constituents and, in particular, does morphological information play an independent role irrelevant to the form and semantic information? Four masked priming experiments were conducted with adult Korean-English bilinguals. Compound words (e.g., bedroom, deadline) and monomorphemic words with a compound-like structure (e.g., hammock) served as targets and were preceded by brief masked primes corresponding to the constituent of the target stimulus (e.g., bed, room, dead, and mock). In Experiments 1 and 2, within-language prime-target pairs (Korean-Korean for Experiment 1 and English-English for Experiment 2), co-varying morphological decomposability, semantic and form relatedness were presented. In Experiments 3 and 4, cross-language prime-target pairs (Korean-English for Experiment 3 and English-Korean for Experiment 4), varying morphological decomposability, semantic and phonological form relatedness were presented. In Experiment 1, results showed that morphological information plays a role independent of the form information when Korean-English bilinguals decompose compound words into their individual constituent morphemes in their L1 (Korean). In Experiment 2, however, there was no significant priming effect in all conditions, indicating that morphological decomposition is not relied upon in their L2 (English) processing. In Experiment 3, morphological information plays an independent role in the early stage of cross-language activation irrelevant to the semantic factor at the prime duration of 36 ms. However, morphological decomposition is constrained by semantic transparency in the later stage of cross-language activation at the prime duration of 48 ms and 100 ms. There was no significant priming effect at the two short prime durations (both 36 ms and 48 ms). However, there was a marginally significant priming effect in the +M+S-P condition at the longest prime duration (100 ms) in Experiment 3. Based on the pattern of these results, it seems that at the earlier stage of processing, phonological relatedness was important for morphological processing. In Experiment 4, there were no significant priming effects in all conditions across all of the prime durations. These findings together point to a clear asymmetry in the masked cross-language priming between L1-L2 and L2-L1 directions.