The relationship between fluency-based suprasegmentals and comprehension in oral and silent reading in Dutch speakers of English.
Item
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Title
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The relationship between fluency-based suprasegmentals and comprehension in oral and silent reading in Dutch speakers of English.
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Identifier
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AAI3310659
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identifier
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3310659
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Creator
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Anema, Inge.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Loraine K. Obler
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Health Sciences, Speech Pathology
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Abstract
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To further our understanding of second language (L2) reading, this study investigated the use of L2 English suprasegmentals and the possible link to L2 reading in Dutch learners of English. In order to determine whether the use of L2 English suprasegmentals is linked to living in an L1-speaking context or L2-speaking context, 20 Dutch-English bilinguals living in the Netherlands and 20 Dutch-English bilinguals living in the U.S., in addition to native-English-speaking controls, were tested on oral and silent reading tasks. Participants were also tested with three types of syntactically ambiguous sentences to investigate the relationship between suprasegmentals and the processing of ambiguities.;Focusing was on fluency-based suprasegmentals (e.g., reading rate, number of pauses) and their correlation with L2 reading, it was hypothesized that L2 speakers with frequent L2 exposure would demonstrate native L2 suprasegmental use and that number of pauses would be negatively correlated to L2 reading comprehension.;Correlation coefficients were calculated among the measures of fluency and text processing. Significant overall correlations were found for non-native use of suprasegmentals in oral and silent reading but not in the processing of ambiguous sentences. The performance of bilinguals living in the U.S. resembled the performance of native-English participants closely in oral and silent reading comprehension but not in ambiguity resolution. In ambiguous sentence processing, bilingual participants living in the U.S. and the Netherlands demonstrated similar attachment preferences. The data suggest that fluency-based suprasegmentals are linked to oral and silent reading comprehension, but not to the disambiguation of a subset of ambiguous sentences.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
