factor analysis, higher-order factor models, hierarchical factor models, bi-factor solutions, general factor, model equivalence,

No abstract

The perception of the distinction between /r/ and /l/ by native speakers of American English and of Japanese was studied using natural and synthetic speech. The American subjects were all nearly perfect at recognizing the natural speech sounds, whereas there was substantial variation among the Japanese subjects in their accuracy of recognizing /r/ and /l/ except in syllable-final position. A logit model, which additively combined the acoustic information conveyed by F1-transition duration and by F3-onset frequency, provided a good fit to the perception of synthetic /r/ and /l/ by the American subjects. There was substantial variation among the Japanese subjects in whether the F1 and F3 cues had a significant effect on their classifications of the synthetic speech. This variation was related to variation in accuracy of recognizing natural /r/ and /l/, such that greater use of both the F1 cue and the F3 cue in classifying the synthetic speech sounds was positively related to accuracy in recognizing the natural sounds. However, multiple regression showed that use of the F1 cue did not account for significant variance in natural speech performance beyond that accounted for by the F3 cue, indicating that the F3 cue is more important than the F1 cue for Japanese speakers learning English. The relation between performance on natural and synthetic speech also provides external validation of the logit model by showing that it predicts performance outside of the domain of data to which it was fit.

Development of three component skills in reading Chinese was examined in primary school children in Hong Kong. Feature analysis skills, syntax knowledge, and semantic analysis skills were found to differ in their contribution to reading proficiency at different grades. Visual processing skill was not at all a good predictor for reading proficiency, but the phonological access skill was important in predicting children's reading proficiency before grade three. It was an ineffective predictor beyond grade three. Skill in semantic analysis, on the other hand, was insignificant as a predictor at younger grades but it became an important predictor after grade two. Syntax knowledge was an important predictor of reading proficiency in the first grade and remained a significant predictor of reading proficiency right up to grade six. The present data support the idea that some preliminary component processes of reading may become automatic with increasing experience in reading and that this automatization of component processes will leave more resource capacity for higher‐order analyses. Chinese reading shares much in common with English reading in terms of the component processes involved at different stages of reading proficiency.

In a two-way cross table, the association between two ordinal variables can be assessed by different measures such as Goodman and Kruskal's gamma (y) and Kendall's tau-b (tb). When sample size is large, the independence hypothesis between the row and the column variables can be tested by the traditional asymptotic test (TAT). TAT, however, fails to work satisfactorily when sample size is small because the theoretical distribution of the test statistic may only hold asymptotically. In this study, two bootstrap-based tests (BBTs) are proposed for testing the independence hypothesis. Monte Carlo studies are used to compare the TAT with the BBTs at small to moderate sample sizes. The BBTs are superior to the TAT in two aspects: The control of Type I error rate by the BBTs is more accurate, and the BBTs are more powerful because they are more likely than the TAT to reject false null hypotheses.