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Purpose: This study aims to explore the contributions of phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA) to the reading comprehension skills of Chinese-speaking children with hearing loss (HL) and examine the possible mediation effect of vocabulary knowledge on the relationships of PA and MA with their reading comprehension. Method: The participants were 28 Chinese-speaking children with HL, who were followed from Grade 1 through Grade 2. They were administered a series of tests that measured their PA and MA at the beginning of Grade 1, vocabulary knowledge at the end of Grade 1, and reading comprehension at the end of Grade 2. Results: MA significantly accounted for additional variance in reading comprehension beyond the effect of PA but not vice versa. Both PA and MA contributed uniquely to vocabulary knowledge, which completely mediated the relationships of PA and MA with reading comprehension. Conclusions: PA and MA are both essential to the development of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking children with HL; however, MA seems to be more important than PA in their reading comprehension. PA and MA significantly affect children’s reading comprehension through their influence on vocabulary knowledge. This study has replicated previous evidence on the importance of PA, MA, and vocabulary knowledge in the reading comprehension of children with typical hearing, and has extended its significance to children with HL. In addition, the findings have the potential to inform educational practitioners regarding the importance of teaching essential reading skills to Chinese-speaking children with HL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Ethnobotanical studies on the use of plants amongst migrant populations are of great relevance to public health. Traditional health strategies, which incorporate plants as medicines, foods, or both - can play an important role in individual well-being. However, at the same time, migrant populations' traditional knowledge of such practices may be under a state of greater threat of decline due to factors such as limited access to the plant materials and physical isolation from the homeland, which serves as the primary living reservoir for this knowledge. Methods: In this study, we conducted a medical ethnobotanical survey focusing on a comparison of local medicinal food and health strategies with members of two Asian immigrant populations in metro-Atlanta: Chinese and Taiwanese. Snowball sampling techniques were employed to recruit 83 study participants, 57 of which were included in the final analysis. Semi-structured interview techniques were used to question participants about their beliefs and usage of the yin yang system, usage of Chinese herbs and medicinal foods, preference and usage of Eastern and Western medicines, and gardening for medicinal foods. Results and conclusion: Comparison of the two groups demonstrated a remarkable difference in health strategies concerning medicinal plant use, including statistically significant differences in beliefs concerning yin and yang, uses of Eastern versus Western medicine, and gardening for medicinal foods. Domestic health strategies in the form of medicinal foods play an important role in local health practices, especially among the Taiwanese participants. The collective desire for the use of both Eastern and Western medicine by both groups highlights the important role that cultural competency training will play in preparing allopathic health practitioners to serve increasingly diverse patient populations in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parent-child acculturation discrepancy has been considered a risk factor for child maladjustment. The current study examined parent-child acculturation discrepancy as an ongoing risk factor for delinquency, through the mediating pathway of parental knowledge of the child's daily experiences relating to contact with deviant peers. Participants were drawn from a longitudinal project with 4 years between data collection waves: 201 Chinese immigrant families participated at Wave 1 (123 girls and 78 boys) and 183 families (110 girls and 73 boys) participated at Wave 2. Based on the absolute difference in acculturation levels (tested separately for Chinese and American orientations) between adolescents and parents, one parent in each family was assigned to the 'more discrepant' group of parent-child dyads, and the other parent was assigned to the 'less discrepant' group of parent-child dyads. To explore possible within-family variations, the mediating pathways were tested separately among the more and less discrepant groups. Structural equation modeling showed that the proposed mediating pathways were significant only among the more discrepant parent-adolescent dyads in American orientation. Among these dyads, a high level of parent-child acculturation discrepancy is related to adolescent perceptions of less parental knowledge, which is related to adolescents having more contact with deviant peers, which in turn leads to more adolescent delinquency. This mediating pathway is significant concurrently, within early and middle adolescence, and longitudinally, from early to middle adolescence. These findings illuminate some of the dynamics in the more culturally discrepant parent-child dyad in a family and highlight the importance of examining parent-child acculturation discrepancy within family systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]