The Role of Phonological Capacity in Children

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• The Role of Phonological Capacity in Childrens
  Vocabulary Learning Process
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Introduction

• Young children display a rapid growth in
  vocabulary (Smith, 1926 Templin, 1957 Carey,
  1978).
• Word learning essentially involves a mapping
  between the sound patterns (phonological
  representations) and the meanings (semantic
  representations) of individual words.
• Fast-mapping process (Carey Bartlett, 1978)
• Nonlinguistic strategies
• Linguistic constraints

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• Mapping on the phonological end (Bishop, 1997)

permanent lexical representation
long-term storage
phonological trace in STM
short-term storage
phonological segmentation
sequence of phonemes
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• Baddeleys working memory model (Gathercole
  Baddeley, 1993)

phonological LTM
rehearsal process
phonological STM
speech perception
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Purpose

• This study aims to investigate the role of
  phonological capacity in childrens vocabulary
  learning process.
• Phonological capacity
• Production
• Discrimination

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Research question

• 1) Between speech perception and speech
  production, which component is more important for
  the success of word learning?
• 2) Which kind of word is easier to be learned?
  The one that can be discriminated easily, or the
  one that can be produced.
• 3) Other factors, such as phonological memory and
  vocabulary knowledge, are involved in the word
  learning process. What are their relative
  contributions in the word learning process?

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Method

• Subjects
• Total number 80 preschool children
• Mean age 43 (3050)
• Sex equal numbers of boys and girls
• Group K1 and K2
• Four experimental tasks
• Phonological capacity tasks
• Phonological memory task
• Vocabulary task
• Word learning task

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Tasks on phonological capacity

• Picture naming task naming pictures of familiar
  objects
• New word production task repeating minimally
  contrastive novel words
• For example

• New word discrimination task choosing proper
• referent of the target sound

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• Materials (adopted from Cheung, 2000)

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• Results

• Childrens performance in two age groups
• The result is different from that of Cheung
  Hsus study (2000).

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The Task on phonological memory

• Repeating the nonwords orderly.
• For example ba3gan1 zhau1dai3 ku4shang4
• Materials (adopted from Hu, 1999)

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• Results
• The mean score was 20.48 (Max. 36), with the
  mean accuracy of 56.9.
• Childrens performances in two age groups

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The task on vocabulary

• Materials Peabody Pictures Vocabulary
  Test-Revision (Chinese version Lu Liu, 1988)
• For example

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• Results
• The mean score was 30.88.
• Childrens performances in two age groups

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The task on word learning

• Materials
• The example of picture stories

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• Scripts of the shovel story
• The comprehension test

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• Sound category

Perception
Average
Average
Production
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• Novel words

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• Results
• The mean score was 12.68 (Max. 32), with the
  mean accuracy of 39.6, higher than the chance
  level.
• Childrens performances in two age groups

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Syntheses

• Between phonological capacity and word learning
• On individual subjects

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• Between phonological capacity and word learning
• On word items

The result of original design
The recomputed result
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• Correlational analyses

• A stepwise multiple regression

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Conclusion

• The ability to comprehend the target labels is
  plays a major role in the word learning process,
  while the ability to produce the target labels is
  important when contextual cues are limited.
• The phonological form of target words does not
  affect the word learning process.
• Vocabulary size is crucial for learning new
  words, while the role of phonological memory does
  not appear to be important in this model.

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• Thanks for your attention