Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 2015
The Stroop Color-Word Test involves a dynamic interplay between reading and executive functioning... more The Stroop Color-Word Test involves a dynamic interplay between reading and executive functioning that elicits intuitions of word reading automaticity. One such intuition is that strong reading skills (i.e., more automatized word reading) play a disruptive role within the test, contributing to Stroop interference. However, evidence has accumulated that challenges this intuition. The present study examined associations among Stroop interference, reading skills (i.e., isolated word identification, grapheme-to-phoneme mapping, phonemic awareness, reading fluency) measured on standardized tests, and orthographic skills measured on experimental computerized tasks. Among university students (N = 152), correlational analyses showed greater Stroop interference to be associated with (a) relatively low scores on all standardized reading tests, and (b) longer response latencies on orthographic tasks. Hierarchical regression demonstrated that reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing predicted unique and significant variance in Stroop interference beyond baseline rapid naming. Results suggest that strong reading skills, including orthographic processing, play a supportive role in resolving Stroop interference.
Multiple traits of language proficiency as well as test method effects were concurrently analyzed... more Multiple traits of language proficiency as well as test method effects were concurrently analyzed to investigate interrelations of construct validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity using multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) matrices. A total of 585 test takers' scores were derived from the field test of the Pearson Test of English Academic. An MTMM confirmatory factor analysis model was parameterized using 4 traits
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 02702711 2012 684425, Jan 23, 2014
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive langua... more The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive language skills characterized by the performance of nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English in the academic context. Test scores of 585 adult NNSs were selected from Form 2 of the Pearson Test of English Academic's field-test database. A correlated two-factor model was chosen as a baseline model and was tested for multigroup invariance. The results of this study suggest that a similar factor structure underpins adult NNSs' receptive and expressive linguistic performance across gender, but a different factor structure exists for high- and low-ability groups. Limitations and implications are discussed.
Given a lack of references directly addressing obstacles in learning English as a foreign languag... more Given a lack of references directly addressing obstacles in learning English as a foreign language, the authors attempt to fill the gap by identifying specific grammatical points that are particularly difficult for Korean English language learners (ELLs) to conceptualize. In connection with the first language (L1) characteristics and dual-language operations, lexical, phrasal, conventional, and psycholinguistic complexities of English verbs are discussed. A better understanding of ELLs' L1 properties and functions, negative L1 transfer, and ELLs' persistent errors made in the production of expressive English is a necessary condition, if not a sufficient one, for ELLs' escalating English learning and acquisition. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive langua... more The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive language skills characterized by the performance of nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English in the academic context. Test scores of 585 adult NNSs were selected from Form 2 of the Pearson Test of English Academic's field-test database. A correlated two-factor model was chosen as a baseline model and was tested for multigroup invariance. The results of this study suggest that a similar factor structure underpins adult NNSs' receptive and expressive linguistic performance across gender, but a different factor structure exists for high- and low-ability groups. Limitations and implications are discussed.
This study examined the role of semantic flexibility measured using a wide range of vocabulary sk... more This study examined the role of semantic flexibility measured using a wide range of vocabulary skills and oral language proficiency in L2 reading acquisition. Eighty four children participated in the study from two international sites. The contrast provided insights into the respective contributions of Korean and English oral and reading skills to L2 reading performance. A set of regression techniques was performed. The role of vocabulary skills in auditory sentence comprehension was differentiated according to the modality of vocabulary (receptive vocabulary vs. expressive vocabulary), language to be learned (L1 vs. L2), and the learning context (Korea vs. America). As partial support for the Linguistic Threshold Hypothesis, the results of this study demonstrated that L1 oral language proficiency was a dominant predictor of L2 reading for both lower- and higher-level Korean-speaking readers. On the other hand, the English-speaking counterparts showed that English (L1) reading skill...
ABSTRACT Children from different backgrounds have disparate access to cultural capital, which may... more ABSTRACT Children from different backgrounds have disparate access to cultural capital, which may influence their academic success. The purpose of this study was to examine the links between family background, home literacy experiences, and emergent literacy skills among preschoolers enrolled in Head Start programmes. The background characteristics studied included urbanicity, maternal education, ethnicity, and family size among 112 preschool children (59 rural and 53 urban, M age = 56.78 months). Findings showed that rural and urban preschoolers may have similar literacy abilities. However, when maternal education was controlled for, family background variables and components of the home literacy environment predicted emergent literacy skills differently for the two groups. Moreover, mother's active involvement and the child's own engagement in literacy seemed to play a salient role in early literacy development across groups.
The linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH; a.k.a., Whorfian hypothesis) is reconsidered with resp... more The linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH; a.k.a., Whorfian hypothesis) is reconsidered with respect to second language (L2) acquisition. With ebbs and flows over time, the notion of LRH went through dis- missal and resurgence in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology. Empirical evidence gleaned from the pseudo-linguistic domains, such as color categorization, time perception, spatial cognition, and number recognition, supports the weak form of LRH. This article briefly reviews the conflicting views, discusses empirical evidence, and expands the premise of LRH to L2 learning. Of interest is the interface of syntax and semantics in English language learners’ (ELLs) ergative verb usage in which ELLs tend to overpassivize English ergative verbs (e.g., appear, happen, break). The source of prevalent overpassivization errors is discussed using the LRH framework.
This study examined lexical processing in English by native speakers of Korean and Chinese, compa... more This study examined lexical processing in English by native speakers of Korean and Chinese, compared to that of native speakers of English, using normal, alternated, and inverse fonts. Sixty four adult students participated in a lexical decision task. The findings demonstrated similarities and differences in accuracy and latency among the three L1 groups. The participants, regardless of L1, had a greater advantage in nonwords than words for the normal fonts because they were able to efficiently detect the illegal letter strings. However, word advantages were observed in the visually distorted stimuli (i.e., alternated and inverse fonts). These results were explained from the perspectives of the theory of psycholinguistic grain size, L1-L2 distance, and the mechanism of familiarity discrimination. The native speakers of Chinese were more sensitive to visual distortions than the Korean counterpart, suggesting that the linguistic template established in L1 might play a role in word pro...
PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to apply the Rasch model to an analysis of the psychometric pr... more PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to apply the Rasch model to an analysis of the psychometric properties of the PPVT-III Form A items with struggling adult readers. METHODS: The PPVT-IIIA was administered to 229 African-American adults whose isolated word reading skills were between third and fifth grades. Conformity of the adults' performance on the PPVT-III items was evaluated using the Winsteps software. RESULTS: Analysis of all PPVT-IIIA items combined did not fully support its use as a useful measure of receptive vocabulary for struggling adult readers who were African Americans. To achieve an adequate model fit, items 73 through item 156 were analyzed. The items analyzed showed adequate internal consistency reliability, unidimensionality, and freedom from differential item functioning for ability, gender, and age, with a minor modification. DISCUSSION: With an appropriate treatment of misfit items, the results supported the measurement properties, internal consistency reliability, unidimensionality of the PPVT-IIIA items, and measurement invariance of the test across subgroups of ability, age, and gender.
This study examined expressive vocabulary and its relationship to reading skills for 232 native E... more This study examined expressive vocabulary and its relationship to reading skills for 232 native English-speaking adults who read between the third- and fifth-grade levels. The Boston Naming Test (BNT; Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 2001) was used to measure expressive vocabulary. Participants scored lower than the normative sample of adults on all aspects of the test; they had fewer spontaneously correct answers, and were not helped by stimulus or phonemic cues. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that expressive vocabulary accounted for significant variance in both reading comprehension and exception word reading, but not for general word reading or nonword reading.
ABSTRACT Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatised naming (RAN) skills in relation to rea... more ABSTRACT Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatised naming (RAN) skills in relation to reading acquisition were examined using two languages, one with a deep orthography (English) and the other with a shallow orthography (Korean). Participants were 50 Korean American children who spoke English as a dominant language (DL) and were learning to read Korean as a sequential language (SL). Parallel measures in English and Korean assessed PA, RAN and reading skills. The results showed the similarities and differences between the DL and SL acquisition patterns for PA and RAN. While PA skills of the DL were a dominant predictor in SL reading achievement, RAN became important for the children with the higher level of SL reading performance. This cross-sectional study indicates that proficiencies of PA and RAN in the DL are the pathway to reading success in an SL. This suggests that a universal thread exists in learning dual languages, despite dissimilar orthography, phonology and writing systems.
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 2015
The Stroop Color-Word Test involves a dynamic interplay between reading and executive functioning... more The Stroop Color-Word Test involves a dynamic interplay between reading and executive functioning that elicits intuitions of word reading automaticity. One such intuition is that strong reading skills (i.e., more automatized word reading) play a disruptive role within the test, contributing to Stroop interference. However, evidence has accumulated that challenges this intuition. The present study examined associations among Stroop interference, reading skills (i.e., isolated word identification, grapheme-to-phoneme mapping, phonemic awareness, reading fluency) measured on standardized tests, and orthographic skills measured on experimental computerized tasks. Among university students (N = 152), correlational analyses showed greater Stroop interference to be associated with (a) relatively low scores on all standardized reading tests, and (b) longer response latencies on orthographic tasks. Hierarchical regression demonstrated that reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing predicted unique and significant variance in Stroop interference beyond baseline rapid naming. Results suggest that strong reading skills, including orthographic processing, play a supportive role in resolving Stroop interference.
Multiple traits of language proficiency as well as test method effects were concurrently analyzed... more Multiple traits of language proficiency as well as test method effects were concurrently analyzed to investigate interrelations of construct validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity using multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) matrices. A total of 585 test takers' scores were derived from the field test of the Pearson Test of English Academic. An MTMM confirmatory factor analysis model was parameterized using 4 traits
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 02702711 2012 684425, Jan 23, 2014
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive langua... more The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive language skills characterized by the performance of nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English in the academic context. Test scores of 585 adult NNSs were selected from Form 2 of the Pearson Test of English Academic's field-test database. A correlated two-factor model was chosen as a baseline model and was tested for multigroup invariance. The results of this study suggest that a similar factor structure underpins adult NNSs' receptive and expressive linguistic performance across gender, but a different factor structure exists for high- and low-ability groups. Limitations and implications are discussed.
Given a lack of references directly addressing obstacles in learning English as a foreign languag... more Given a lack of references directly addressing obstacles in learning English as a foreign language, the authors attempt to fill the gap by identifying specific grammatical points that are particularly difficult for Korean English language learners (ELLs) to conceptualize. In connection with the first language (L1) characteristics and dual-language operations, lexical, phrasal, conventional, and psycholinguistic complexities of English verbs are discussed. A better understanding of ELLs' L1 properties and functions, negative L1 transfer, and ELLs' persistent errors made in the production of expressive English is a necessary condition, if not a sufficient one, for ELLs' escalating English learning and acquisition. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive langua... more The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive language skills characterized by the performance of nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English in the academic context. Test scores of 585 adult NNSs were selected from Form 2 of the Pearson Test of English Academic's field-test database. A correlated two-factor model was chosen as a baseline model and was tested for multigroup invariance. The results of this study suggest that a similar factor structure underpins adult NNSs' receptive and expressive linguistic performance across gender, but a different factor structure exists for high- and low-ability groups. Limitations and implications are discussed.
This study examined the role of semantic flexibility measured using a wide range of vocabulary sk... more This study examined the role of semantic flexibility measured using a wide range of vocabulary skills and oral language proficiency in L2 reading acquisition. Eighty four children participated in the study from two international sites. The contrast provided insights into the respective contributions of Korean and English oral and reading skills to L2 reading performance. A set of regression techniques was performed. The role of vocabulary skills in auditory sentence comprehension was differentiated according to the modality of vocabulary (receptive vocabulary vs. expressive vocabulary), language to be learned (L1 vs. L2), and the learning context (Korea vs. America). As partial support for the Linguistic Threshold Hypothesis, the results of this study demonstrated that L1 oral language proficiency was a dominant predictor of L2 reading for both lower- and higher-level Korean-speaking readers. On the other hand, the English-speaking counterparts showed that English (L1) reading skill...
ABSTRACT Children from different backgrounds have disparate access to cultural capital, which may... more ABSTRACT Children from different backgrounds have disparate access to cultural capital, which may influence their academic success. The purpose of this study was to examine the links between family background, home literacy experiences, and emergent literacy skills among preschoolers enrolled in Head Start programmes. The background characteristics studied included urbanicity, maternal education, ethnicity, and family size among 112 preschool children (59 rural and 53 urban, M age = 56.78 months). Findings showed that rural and urban preschoolers may have similar literacy abilities. However, when maternal education was controlled for, family background variables and components of the home literacy environment predicted emergent literacy skills differently for the two groups. Moreover, mother's active involvement and the child's own engagement in literacy seemed to play a salient role in early literacy development across groups.
The linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH; a.k.a., Whorfian hypothesis) is reconsidered with resp... more The linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH; a.k.a., Whorfian hypothesis) is reconsidered with respect to second language (L2) acquisition. With ebbs and flows over time, the notion of LRH went through dis- missal and resurgence in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology. Empirical evidence gleaned from the pseudo-linguistic domains, such as color categorization, time perception, spatial cognition, and number recognition, supports the weak form of LRH. This article briefly reviews the conflicting views, discusses empirical evidence, and expands the premise of LRH to L2 learning. Of interest is the interface of syntax and semantics in English language learners’ (ELLs) ergative verb usage in which ELLs tend to overpassivize English ergative verbs (e.g., appear, happen, break). The source of prevalent overpassivization errors is discussed using the LRH framework.
This study examined lexical processing in English by native speakers of Korean and Chinese, compa... more This study examined lexical processing in English by native speakers of Korean and Chinese, compared to that of native speakers of English, using normal, alternated, and inverse fonts. Sixty four adult students participated in a lexical decision task. The findings demonstrated similarities and differences in accuracy and latency among the three L1 groups. The participants, regardless of L1, had a greater advantage in nonwords than words for the normal fonts because they were able to efficiently detect the illegal letter strings. However, word advantages were observed in the visually distorted stimuli (i.e., alternated and inverse fonts). These results were explained from the perspectives of the theory of psycholinguistic grain size, L1-L2 distance, and the mechanism of familiarity discrimination. The native speakers of Chinese were more sensitive to visual distortions than the Korean counterpart, suggesting that the linguistic template established in L1 might play a role in word pro...
PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to apply the Rasch model to an analysis of the psychometric pr... more PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to apply the Rasch model to an analysis of the psychometric properties of the PPVT-III Form A items with struggling adult readers. METHODS: The PPVT-IIIA was administered to 229 African-American adults whose isolated word reading skills were between third and fifth grades. Conformity of the adults' performance on the PPVT-III items was evaluated using the Winsteps software. RESULTS: Analysis of all PPVT-IIIA items combined did not fully support its use as a useful measure of receptive vocabulary for struggling adult readers who were African Americans. To achieve an adequate model fit, items 73 through item 156 were analyzed. The items analyzed showed adequate internal consistency reliability, unidimensionality, and freedom from differential item functioning for ability, gender, and age, with a minor modification. DISCUSSION: With an appropriate treatment of misfit items, the results supported the measurement properties, internal consistency reliability, unidimensionality of the PPVT-IIIA items, and measurement invariance of the test across subgroups of ability, age, and gender.
This study examined expressive vocabulary and its relationship to reading skills for 232 native E... more This study examined expressive vocabulary and its relationship to reading skills for 232 native English-speaking adults who read between the third- and fifth-grade levels. The Boston Naming Test (BNT; Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 2001) was used to measure expressive vocabulary. Participants scored lower than the normative sample of adults on all aspects of the test; they had fewer spontaneously correct answers, and were not helped by stimulus or phonemic cues. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that expressive vocabulary accounted for significant variance in both reading comprehension and exception word reading, but not for general word reading or nonword reading.
ABSTRACT Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatised naming (RAN) skills in relation to rea... more ABSTRACT Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatised naming (RAN) skills in relation to reading acquisition were examined using two languages, one with a deep orthography (English) and the other with a shallow orthography (Korean). Participants were 50 Korean American children who spoke English as a dominant language (DL) and were learning to read Korean as a sequential language (SL). Parallel measures in English and Korean assessed PA, RAN and reading skills. The results showed the similarities and differences between the DL and SL acquisition patterns for PA and RAN. While PA skills of the DL were a dominant predictor in SL reading achievement, RAN became important for the children with the higher level of SL reading performance. This cross-sectional study indicates that proficiencies of PA and RAN in the DL are the pathway to reading success in an SL. This suggests that a universal thread exists in learning dual languages, despite dissimilar orthography, phonology and writing systems.
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