Effects of mobile-assisted reading materials on children's L1 lexical development.

Despite the wide and extensive use of mobile-assisted devices, the effectiveness of children's L1 learning with these mobile-assisted technologies has been less discussed. This study aims to explore the effects of mobile-assisted reading materials on Chinese children's L1 vocabulary learning. We adopted a longitudinal and quasi-experimental design consisting of an experiment group using the mobile-assisted materials and a control group using the traditional paper materials, and took children's lexical development as indexed by assessing the parameter, lexical diversity, in different testing times. The results showed that (1) children's L1 vocabulary learning effectiveness of using mobile-assisted materials is as similar as that of using conventional paper materials in general, and (2) the changing patterns of children's L1 lexical development using mobile-assisted materials in different testing times are various. Specifically speaking, (a) in the posttest 1 (the first month), compared with the traditional paper reading materials, the mobile-assisted reading materials have a facilitating effect on the primary school students' L1 vocabulary learning; (b) in the posttest 2 (the second month), children's vocabulary learning effectiveness is inhibited by the mobile-assisted reading materials; (c) in the delayed posttest (the fourth month), there is no difference in the learning effectiveness by these two different kinds of learning materials and the lexical diversity increases slowly but steadily. We analyzed the results from research-design factors and learner-related factors, hoping to shed light on children's mobile-assisted language learning research.

To space or not space? Interword spacing effects on Chinese children's reading materials.

This study investigated different Chinese on-screen text layouts to see if they improved the reading speed and comprehension of Taiwanese children. A number of different experimental treatments were used. These were: interword spacing (unspaced, semi-spaced and fully-spaced), text difficulty (easy and difficult) and text direction (vertical and horizontal). The experiment involved 84 children aged between 10 and 11 years old. In the experiment the children were asked to read articles. The time they took to read these articles was recorded. The children also partook in comprehension tests to determine how much they had understood about the articles they had read. The results showed that horizontal text was read more quickly than vertical text and was better comprehended. The results also showed that fully-spaced difficult text was read more quickly than semi-spaced difficult text, and unspaced difficult text was also better comprehended. Practitioner Summary: This experiment was conducted to explore the affects of interword spacing, text direction and text difficulty on the reading speeds and comprehension of on-screen traditional Chinese characters by Taiwanese children. It found that fully-spaced, horizontal text was the quickest and most comprehendible to read, regardless of text difficulty.

The Validity of New Material for Nasalance Evaluation and Nasalance Gender Score Differences / 听力学及言语疾病杂志

Objective This study aimed to develop reading material for nasalance evaluation ,and find out na-salance scores associated with genders .Methods The NasalView ? (Tiger Electronics Inc .,Seattle ,USA) was used to obtain nasalance values in the new and old material .A total of 102 subjects (51 males ,51 females) who have lived in Beijing for 18 years or longer at the time of the experiment received the tests ,the results from two pieces of material and the mean nasalance gender score differences were compared .Results The mean nasalance scores of sen-tences were 56 .58% ± 3 .43% for'Nasal sentence',33 .86% ± 5 .24% for'Oral sentence',and 49 .49% ± 4 .13% for'Oro -nasal sentence'respectively in the new material .The mean nasalance scores of sentences were 54 .31% ± 4 .43% for'Nasal sentence',35 .64% ± 5 .90% for'Oral sentence',and 47 .12% ± 4 .96% for'Oro-nasal sentence're-spectively in the old material .There were significant differences between males and females through materials .The nasalance gender score differences showed that females were bigger than males (P<0 .01) .This study found a cor-relation between the new and old materials :'Nasal sentence'(r=0 .899 ,P< 0 .01) ,'Oral sentence'(r= 0 .850 ,P<0 .01) ,and'Oro -nasal sentence'(r=0 .851 ,P<0 .01) .The standard error difference showed that the new was smaller than the old (P<0 .01) .Conclusion The new material for nasalance evaluation has a better test validity ,and there is a high correlation between the old materials .The usage of the new material for nasalance evaluation will produce more accurate results with higher credibility .Normal female's nasalance scores were higher than males .