Graduate studies
Congratulations to Leon Lee on his MA defence
The Department is proud of Ka Keung (Leon) Lee for successfully defending his MA thesis, The Effects of Congruent and Systematic Grapheme to Phoneme Correspondences on Novel Word Learning.
The Committee Chair, Ashley Farris-Trimble, praised Leon for a job well done. Similarly, committee members Henny Yeung (Supervisor), Yue Wang (Professor, SFU Linguistics), and Rachel Hayes-Harb (external examiner from the University of Utah), were all pleased with the quality of Leon's research and his efforts during the defence.
On behalf of the Department of Linguistics, a big congratulations to Leon Lee!
Keywords
Consonant; Dual Route Cascaded (DRC) Model; Grapheme-Phoneme; Correspondence (GPC); Second Language Acquisition (SLA); Vowel; Word Learning.
Abstract
Previous studies report that learning new words is helped when supplemented with written forms, but only if grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) mappings are the same (congruent) as the learners鈥� native languages, and in a one-grapheme-to-one-phoneme relation (systematic). In contrast, orthographic input is detrimental if GPC mappings are incongruent or non-systematic. No studies have carefully investigated the potential interaction of Congruency and Systematicity, or differences when mappings are placed on consonants and vowels. To fill this gap, this study reveals that incongruent orthographic input hindered English-speaking learners from acquiring the consonants of novel words, but did not affect vowel learning. Moreover, a facilitating congruent effect was not replicated for either consonants or vowels, likely due to ceiling effects for consonants, and less well-established CGP mappings for vowels. This thesis concludes with a discussion of how the processing of consonants and vowels may affect the use of orthographic input in word learning.