Vietnamese Children and Language-Based Processing Tasks

Abstract

Performance on language-based processing tasks may provide valuable information for separating typically developing Vietnamese preschool children from their peers with language disorders. Practitioners should consider linguistic characteristics of target stimuli. Comparisons should include task, receptive, expressive, and APT.

Novel Morpheme Learning in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

“…Further, this was the case for both children with typical language and children with SLI. With respect to bilingual children, Hwa-Froelich and Matsuo (2005) found significant relationships between morphemelearning and fast-mapping performance in VietnameseEnglish-speaking children in their study. Conversely, Restrepo, Swisher, Plante, and Vance (1992) did not observe a relationship between children's morpheme-learning performance and their receptive vocabulary skills tested via a standardized measure.…”

“…In such studies, there is reliable evidence that children's performance on word-learning tasks is associated with their ability to retain and generalize the use of a novel morpheme (Hwa-Froelich & Matsuo, 2005;Nakamura, Plante, & Swisher, 1990;Swisher & Snow, 1994). For instance, Swisher and Snow (1994) found a nonlinear relationship between word-learning performance and generalization of the newly learned bound morpheme, such that high levels of morpheme generalization occurred only in children who attained high levels of word learning.…”

“…The children were taught a new morpheme, /ku/, denoting a part-whole distinction when added to the end of high-frequency, early acquired English nouns. Testing was conducted receptively because expressive testing measures have yielded very poor levels of morpheme-learning performance in bilingual children tested in their second language (e.g., Hwa-Froelich & Matsuo, 2005;Kohnert & Danahy, 2007). Unlike prior studies of morpheme-learning performance that targeted only accuracy at testing, we collected both accuracy data and reaction time (RT) data.…”

“…However, the use of production tasks in the second language appears to render morpheme-learning performance in typically developing bilingual children so low as to be uninterpretable (Hwa-Froelich & Matsuo, 2005;Kohnert & Danahy, 2007), and the usefulness of such production tasks in demarcating language impairment in bilingual children is also uncertain (Restrepo, 1998). In light of these considerations, in the present study, we focused on a comprehension measure as the index of morpheme-learning performance in bilingual children and asked whether comprehension performance on the morpheme-learning task would be sensitive to distinct levels of language experience within a sample of typically developing bilingual children.…”

“…For instance, Hwa-Froelich and Matsuo (2005) examined young typically developing Vietnamese children's performance on a number of learning tasks, including the novel morpheme learning task developed by Connell and colleagues (Connell, 1987;Connell & Stone, 1992;Roseberry & Connell, 1991). The children spoke some Vietnamese and some English, but Vietnamese was spoken in the homes of all the children.…”