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The Study Of Preschool Children's Reaction Time In Quick Phonetic Repetition

Posted on:2011-08-07Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:K ZhangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360305468144Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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The method of quick phonetic repetition, especially non-word repetition, has been frequently used in language tests (Gathercole, willis, Baddeley & Emslie 1994; Dollaghan & Campbell 1998). For instance, we can find research about using non-word repetition to measure reaction time (Dillon et al.2004), accuracy (Marton et al.2003; Li 2005), or both reaction time and accuracy (Coady et al.2008).This paper aims to explore the use of quick phonetic repetition to measure Chinese preschool children's reaction time, and to test whether the statement that the prevalence of SLI is about 7%(Leonard 2000) is true or not. Among the recording data of 161 children aged from 3 to 5, there were 49 three-year-olds,60 four-year-olds, and 52 five-year-olds, and all of them have no hearing or intelligence problem. Four groups of materials were tested in the experiment, the first group was consisted of common words in Chinese, the second group was composed of syllables in Chinese with no meaning as a whole, the third group was constituted of syllables that can not be spelled out in Chinese, while the fourth group was composed of Japanese words, which belong to the same language family as Chinese does. The last three groups are nonwords to preschool children.The experimental results showed that there was significant difference between the materials and children's age but no significant difference between the materials and gender. And then norms for three age groups were set up. Before building the norms, I first used P-P probability plots to test the probability of forming norms, and then we found that the data had normal distribution. Therefore three norms for three age groups were set up, that is, the norm of Age Group 3 was 0.383s±0.1345s, the norm of Age Group 4 was 0.3645s±0.098s and the norm of Age Group 5 was 0.33s±0.115s. From this we can find out that the children's reaction time became shorter as they grow older. According to these norms,7 children's (including three 3-year-olds, three 4-year-olds and one five-year-old) reaction time was longer, to be specific, the 3-year-olds'reaction time was 0.0389s±0.013s longer than the norm, the 4-year-olds' was 1.4346s±0.4782s longer than the norm, and the 5-year-old's was 0.175s longer than the norm. After analyzing the data, We got 10 children's test results were not incongruous:7 children's reaction time were longer than that of the norms, and 2 children did not speak clearly in the whole process though they spoke very fast, and one child did not finish the whole recording process (only half of it). As for the statement that the prevalence of SLI is about7%, we can see that 10 children's experimental results were screened out from the whole, and the percentage of this was 6.2%. Though we are not quite sure if all of them were SLI children, this result did prove the experiment's differentiating effects.
Keywords/Search Tags:quick phonetic repetition, non-word repetition, reaction time, norm
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