Phonological assessment and analysis of bilingual preschoolers' Spanish and English word productions.

Purpose: The major purpose of this study was to examine Spanish and English phonological productions (patterns/deviations) of typically developing bilingual preschool children. Phonological scores were compared in order to determine if significant differences exist between (a) boys and girls, (b) 4- and 5-year-olds, and/or (c) their productions of Spanish and English words.

Method: Fifty-six bilingual 4- and 5-year-old children (27 boys and 29 girls) who attended Head Start programs named stimulus items for Spanish and English phonological assessment instruments that were similar in procedures and analyses.

Ways of knowing and willingness to argue.

Willingness to argue is associated with higher level thinking. The authors tested the relation between ways of knowing-involving separate knowing (i.e.

An examination of phonological awareness treatment outcomes for seventh-grade poor readers from a bilingual community.

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine posttreatment outcomes following direct, systematic phonological awareness instruction for seventh-grade poor readers, most of whom had English as their second language.

Method: The treatment group (n = 35) participated in small-group instruction sessions that emphasized phonological awareness at the phoneme level and incorporated explicit linkages to literacy. The treatment, which was administered in the participants' school setting over a 12-week period, involved approximately 45 hr of contact with a trained instructor.

Performance on phonological and grammatical awareness metalinguistic tasks by children who stutter and their fluent peers.

Unlabelled: This study was undertaken to examine the performance of 23 children who stutter (CWS) and 23 children who do not stutter (CWNS) on three metalinguistic tasks. These included two phonological awareness assessment procedures (The Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test (LAC) and a Phoneme Reversal Task) and one modified Grammar Judgments Task where syntactic and semantic appropriateness of sentences was evaluated. Differences between groups were significant for the grammar judgment task, where CWNS outperformed CWS in judging syntactically and semantically anomalous sentences.

Epistemological beliefs and thinking about everyday controversial issues.

The authors investigated the relationship between individuals' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and the nature of learning (epistemological beliefs) and their thinking about everyday controversial issues. Adults (N = 174) ranging in age from 17 to 71 years old with a mean age of 38 completed the Schommer Epistemological Questionnaire (M. Schommer, 1990), which assessed their beliefs in the certainty and organization of knowledge and the speed and control of learning.