1,721,032 research outputs found
Categorical and Dimensional Diagnoses of Dyslexia: Are They Compatible?
Full text linkDyslexia is often assessed using categorical diagnoses, and subtypes of dyslexia are also recognized in a categorical fashion. Children may meet the criteria for dyslexia, and they may more specifically meet the criteria for a subtype of it, and thus get a diagnosis. This approach to diagnosis clashes with the actual distribution of reading performance in children (which is normal and continuous), and it has received criticism. This article offers a conceptual framework for conciliating these two positions. In short, the proposal is to use a set of multicomponent continuous assessments of reading, rather than thresholds. The proposal is explained using original data obtained from a sample of 30 children (age 7 to 11), tested in the United Kingdom. Using an assessment based on categorical-thresholds, only five children in our sample qualify for extra assistance, and only one may get a diagnosis of dyslexia, while with the mixed system proposed, a few additional children in the gray area would receive attention. This approach would not discard previous categorical approaches such as those distinguishing between surface and phonological dyslexia, but it would rather see these subtypes of dyslexia as the instance of a lower score on the continuum obtained on a single component of the multicomponent assessment
Sensitivity to morphophonological cues in monolingual and bilingual children: evidence from a nonword task
No full textEffects of age of onset in the second language have received an increasing amount of attention in recent years in bilingualism research (Montrul, 2008). While it is becoming clear that in several linguistic domains bilingual children do not perform as monolinguals, it has also become clear that considerable variation is related to the age of onset in the second language, and the subsequent exposure to that language. Kovelman, Baker, and Petitto (2008), for example, have shown that children with an age of onset of three or below are able to attain native-like performance in phonological and in reading tasks in primary school, while children with a later age of onset may lag behind way beyond the first stages of schooling. The present study aims at investigating the role of age of onset in the acquisition of inflectional morphology. More specifically, this study examines the sensitivity to morphophonological cues in a group of Czech-English primary school bilingual children with varying ages of onset of exposure in English. Sensitivity to bound morphemes is examined using a nonword task, in order to isolate morphophonological effects from semantic and lexical effects. Since it is well attested that bilingual children have smaller lexica than monolingual children do (Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010), the use of nonwords is an attempt to control for item-familiarity confounds and focus on the actual processing of morphophonology. In other words, this study aims at offering some answers to the following questions: Are bilingual children sensitive to morphophonological cues? Is their performance comparable to that of monolingual children? Does age of onset of exposure in the second language modulate the result
Reading as a Predictor of Complex Syntax. The Case of Relative Clauses.
Full text linkBACKGROUND: The current study aims at better characterizing the role of reading skills as a predictor of comprehension of relative clauses. Well-established cross-linguistic evidence shows that children are more accurate in the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in comparison to the object-extracted counterpart. Children with reading difficulties are known to perform less accurately on object relatives at the group level compared to typically developing children. Given that children's performance on reading tasks is shown to shape as a continuum, in the current study we attempted to use reading skills as a continuous variable to predict performance on relative clauses. METHODS: We examined the comprehension of relative clauses in a group of 30 English children (7-11 years) with varying levels of reading skills. Reading skills varied on a large spectrum, from poor readers to very skilled readers, as assessed by the YARC standardized test. The experimental task consisted of a picture-matching task. Children were presented with subject and object relative clauses and they were asked to choose one picture - out of four - that would best represent the sentence they heard. At the same time, we manipulated whether the subject and object nouns were either matching (both singular or both plural) or mismatching (one singular, the other plural) in number. RESULTS: Our analysis of accuracy shows that subject relatives were comprehended more accurately overall than object relatives, that responses to sentences with noun phrases mismatching in number were more accurate overall than the ones with matching noun phrases and that performance improved as a function of reading skills. Within the match subset, while the difference in accuracy between subject and object relatives is large in poor readers, the difference is reduced with better reading skills, almost disappearing in very skilled readers. DISCUSSION: Beside replicating the well-established findings on the subject-object asymmetry, number facilitation in the comprehension of relative clauses, and a better overall performance by skilled readers, these results indicate that strong reading skills may determine a reduction of the processing difficulty associated with the hardest object relative clause condition (i.e., match), causing a reduction of the subject-object asymmetry
The role of aspect on anaphora resolution in English as a first and second language
Full text linkThis study investigates pronominal reference assignments across sentences that
contain English verbs of transfer in monolingual English speakers and second-language
(L2) learners having German as a first language and English as an L2. In a forcedchoice task, participants were presented with sentences in perfective or imperfective
aspect, like “Elizabeth took/was taking a meal to Mary” (adapted from Ferretti et al.,
2009). They were then shown sentences that contained gender-matching pronouns,
as in “She breathed in the smell of fresh basil”, and they were finally asked to choose
who performed the relevant actions: “Who breathed in the smell of fresh basil?
Elizabeth or Mary?”. We found that both groups preferred more often goal-oriented
interpretations in the perfective condition, while in the imperfective condition only
English monolingual speakers preferred more often source-oriented interpretations.
The pattern observed in the perfective condition is consistent with previous studies
and indicates that perfective aspect creates a strong bias towards end-states. For the
imperfective condition, we argue that the different pattern observed in L2 learners
may be due to some features of German, where an overall bias for end-states was
previously observed. This indicates an effect of first-language strategies on L2
processing, consistent with previous research on different languages
PROSODY FACILITATES MEMORY RECALL IN L1 BUT NOT IN L2 IN HIGHLY PROFICIENT LISTENERS
No full textAbstract Prosody is crucial for language comprehension because it highlights underlying structures. This study explores whether prosody facilitates memory recall to the same extent in L1 and L2, and whether memory recall is poorer in L2 or whether language-specific differences can mitigate L2 processing difficulties. Nineteen Greek learners of English, and a monolingual English baseline, repeated three-digit chunks with and without prosodic cues in L1 and L2. Prosody was a major facilitator of memory recall only in L1 despite the high proficiency of learners. This indicates that L2 mastery of prosody perception is hard to attain, mirroring production studies. However, when prosodic boundary cues were absent, memory recall in L2 was comparable to L1. This demonstrates that language-specific differences can attenuate more general processing difficulties in L2. This study is the first to demonstrate differences in prosodic processing in L1 and L2 resulting in poorer memory recall in L2
The role of number mismatch and exposure in the comprehension of relative clauses in bilingual children
No full textResearch on English relative clauses shows that, in most studies, subject relatives are comprehended more accurately than object relatives by both monolingual and bilingual children. The current study focuses on Czech-English bilingual children and extends this line of research in two ways. First, it includes a condition in which the noun phrases involved in the action differ in number (one is singular and the other is plural), a manipulation that was never tested on bilinguals. Second, it includes a fine-grained measure of language exposure, since the exposure has been linked to the acquisition of complex structures. Thirty-eight Czech-English bilinguals (aged 8-11 years) were tested on their comprehension of relative clauses using a picture matching paradigm. Results show that sentences with number mismatch were comprehended more accurately than match sentences and that subject relatives were comprehended more accurately than object relatives. In addition, in the subject relatives subset, higher exposure to English corresponded to poorer performance in relative clauses with number mismatch. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed
A Comparative Study
Full text linkIn Griechisch werden Transitivitätsänderungen durch non-aktives Genus Verbi (Voice) ausgedrückt, was zu einer morphologischen Unterspezifikation führt. Grundsätzlich können passive und reflexive Verben im Griechischen (neben anderen Strukturen) mit derselben Form ausgedrückt werden. Oft ist der Kontext das einzige Mittel zur Disambiguierung. Diese Studie untersucht den Erwerb von Transitivitätsalternationen (transitivity alternations) bei griechischen monolingualen Kindern im Vergleich zu zwei zweisprachigen Populationen, nämlich griechisch-deutschen und griechisch-englischen Kindern im Alter zwischen 4 und 8 Jahren. Es wird untersucht, ob beim Erwerb der jeweiligen morphologischen Systeme die dominante Sprache, in diesem Fall Deutsch bzw. Englisch, mit der Erbsprache (Heritage- sprache) Griechisch interagiert. Englisch und Deutsch unterscheiden sich vom Griechischen, indem sie Reflexivität und Passivierung anders ausdrücken, und stellen deswegen ein in- teressantes Forschungsgebiet dar. In der Studie wurden 80 zweisprachige Kinder sowie 40 einsprachige Kinder untersucht. Sie sollten die folgenden “Spiele” absolvieren: Ren- frews (1998) expressive Vokabelaufgabe, angepasst an das Griechische von Vogindroukas (2009), sowie zwei experimentelle Aufgaben: eine Wahrheitsbewertungsaufgabe (truth-value judgement task) und eine Handlungsaufgabe (act-out task). Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Passive Verben sind hingegen am schwierigsten zu verstehen und zu produzieren, sowohl für zweisprachige als auch für monolinguale griechische Kinder.In Greek, transitivity alternations are expressed using the non-active voice resulting in a morphological underspecification. Essentially, passives and reflexives in Greek, among other structures, can be expressed using the same form; context is often the only means of disambiguation. This study investigates the acquisition of transitivity alternations in Greek comparing two bilingual populations namely, Greek-German and Greek-English bilinguals between the ages of 4 and 8. This study was motivated by the lack of research on the acquisition of transitivity alternations in bilingual populations. It examines whether the dominant language, in this case German and English respectively, interacts with the heritage language, Greek, as they both evolve morphologically. English and German differ from Greek in the way they express reflexivity and passivisation and posed an interesting area of research. 80 bilingual children as well as 40 monolingual children a baseline task: Renfrew’s (1998) Expressive Vocabulary Task adapted for Greek by Vogindroukas (2009) and two experimental tasks: a truth-value judgement task (TVJT) and an act-out task (AOT). The findings show that children across populations scored worst in passives thus replicating the results in previous literature
The role of crosslinguistic influence in Greek child and adult learners’ acquisition of English as a Foreign Language
Full text linkCrosslinguistic influence (CLI) is the influence that a bilingual's first language (L1) exerts on their second language (L2) and vice versa. Most research on the causes and effects of the phenomenon focuses on simultaneous bilingual children and syntax-pragmatics interface linguistic structures that are deemed susceptible to CLI. As such, it does not determine whether the phenomenon affects the development of L2 learners and/or the use of linguistic structures that are not susceptible to CLI. To this end, this doctoral project aimed to uncover the role of CLI in Greek children and adults’ use of CLI-prone and not CLI-prone structures in English.
In Experiment 1, 140 Greek-English sequential bilingual preschool children (35 attending a total immersion programme programme and 35 attending a partial immersion programme, as well as 34 Greek monolingual and 36 English monolingual controls) were tested on their use of sentential subjects (a syntax-discourse interface structure that is susceptible to CLI), once in Greek and once in English. The bilingual children were found to omit sentential subjects in English more often than their English monolingual peers. This finding could be attributed to CLI from the children’s dominant L1 to their non-dominant L2.
Experiment 2 was conducted parallel to Experiment 1, and aimed to ascertain if the subject omissions observed in Experiment 1 were indeed due to CLI. The same children were tested on their use of the subordinate clause marker ‘to’ (a syntactic structure that is not susceptible to CLI and, thus, could serve as a control) in the two languages. The analyses revealed that bilingual children omitted more clause markers in English than their English monolingual peers. This finding hints that bilingual children are attentive to the (cross-linguistic) distributional properties of the structures they are exposed to.
Hence, Experiment 3 was designed to investigate whether the subject omissions observed in Experiment 1 also appeared at a more advanced state of L2 acquisition. To this end, a group of 31 Greek adult L2 learners were tested on their use of referential expressions, and their performance was compared to that of 30 English L1 speakers. Like their child counterparts, the adult L2 learners were also found to omit more sentential subjects from their utterances than the L1 controls – an effect attributed to CLI from the learners’ L1, Greek, to their L2, English.
Considered together, the results of these three experiments highlight that sequential bilingual children pattern with adult L2 learners in terms of their production (and CLI patterns therein). Moreover, they do not support traditional accounts of CLI which predict the phenomenon to arise in the case of structural overlap and/or just for interface linguistic structures. To provide a uniform account of omissions in L2 acquisition, the effects observed across the three experiments could be explained under a usage-based account that considers the structures’ distribution in the L1 (and L2) input as well as the attentional mechanisms that sequential bilingual and L2 learners have developed through their exposure to the L1
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