Nonword Repetition and Phonological Processing in Mandarin-speaking Preschool Children
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
Lee, Joanna C.
DOI
en-US
Abstract
The present study aims (1) to investigate the different mediation of prior linguistic knowledge in nonword repetition tasks, and (2) to examine the predictive powers of nonce-word and gap-word repetition in vocabulary learning. Thirty three-year-olds, twenty-nine five-year-olds, and fifteen adults participated in the experiment, all of who were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Children were recruited through three local kindergartens serving a middle-class population in Taipei whereas adults were randomly selected from the friends of the experimenter. Two sets of experimental tasks were adopted. In the first set, two types of nonwords were designed according to Mandarin characteristics, nonce-words and gap-words respectively. Nonce-words were composed of two real syllables without having meanings as a whole so it was very likely to retrieve similar lexical structures at the syllabic level for supporting repetition. In contrast, disyllabic gap-words were chosen from the pool of Mandarin gap syllables, the repetition of which hardly received lexical supports, and therefore, the availability of fine-grained phonological analysis ability became an important factor in facilitating the encoding efficiency. The second set was the learning task, in which three types of new words expected to be learnt were manipulated by varying the degree of phonological and semantic information in their syllables. The results showed that in addition to lexical influences on nonword repetition, the relative role of phonological analysis was found in the task, the importance of which was especially significant when linguistic information resided in nonwords was minimized. Additionally, gap-word repetition seemed to be more sensitive than nonce-word repetition to predict vocabulary learning at the initial stage of the lexicalization process. These findings appear to suggest that different phonological analysis skills adopted by children along the developmental continuum (i.e., from holistic to fine-grained analytical skills) influence the encoding efficiency of new sounds, and children with different encoding efficiency display different memory span. Moreover, the slow learning of new words may reflect the maturity of phonological analysis rather than the working memory capacity. The implications of the findings in SLI research are also discussed.
Subjects
非詞覆誦
音韻處理能力
詞彙學習
語言發展
nonword repetition
phonological processing
vocabulary learning
language development
Type
other
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