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Bulgarian belongs to the South Slavic language group but exhibits specific linguistic features shared with the non-Slavic languages of the Balkan Sprachbund. In this paper, we discuss linguistic and cultural aspects relevant for the Bulgarian adaptation of the revised English version of The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We address typological properties of the verbal system pertaining to a differentiated aspectual system and to a paradigm of verbal forms for narratives grammaticalized as renarrative mood in Bulgarian. Further, we consider lexical, derivational and discourse cohesive means in contrast to the English markers of involvement and perspective taking in the MAIN stories.
Adapting MAIN to Arabic
(2020)
Preface: New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives - revised
(2020)
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is a theoretically grounded toolkit that employs parallel pictorial stimuli to explore and assess narrative skills in children in many different languages. It is part of the LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) battery of tests that were developed in connection with the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (2009−2013). MAIN has been designed to assess both narrative production and comprehension in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. Its design allows for the comparable assessment of narrative skills in several languages in the same child and in different elicitation modes: Telling, Retelling and Model Story. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence based on a theoretical model of multidimensional story organization. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. As a tool MAIN had been used to compare children’s narrative skills across languages, and also to help differentiate between children with and without developmental language disorders, both monolinguals and bilinguals.
This volume consists of two parts. The main content of Part I consists of 33 papers describing the process of adapting and translating MAIN to a large number of languages from different parts of the world. Part II contains materials for use for about 80 languages, including pictorial stimuli, which are accessible after registration.
MAIN was first published in 2012/2013 (ZASPiL 56). Several years of theory development and material construction preceded this launch. In 2019 (ZASPiL 63), the revised English version (revised on the basis of over 2,500 transcribed MAIN narratives as well as ca 24,000 responses to MAIN comprehension questions, collected from around 700 monolingual and bilingual children in Germany, Russia and Sweden between 2013-2019) was published together with revised versions in German, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish for the bilingual Turkish-Swedish population in Sweden. The present 2020 (ZASPiL 64) volume contains new and revised language versions of MAIN.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is part of LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings). LITMUS is a battery of tests that have been developed in connection with the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (2009−2013).
For this study one hundred sixty-seven Russian-/Turkish-German preschool children were tested with a battery of language proficiency tests in both languages. On the basis of 1.5 SD below monolingual norm for L2 German and 1.25 SD below bilingual mean for either home language, 9 children at risk of developmental language disorders (DLD) (mean age of 4 years and 5 months) were identified and 16 age-matched TD children were selected out of the cohort. All these children were tested with the LITMUS-MAIN and –SR tests in German. The results across TD and at risk of DLD group were compared. TD clearly outperformed at risk of DLD in SR. In elicited narratives, macrostructure and microstructure were scrutinized across groups. Similar to the previous findings, our results show significant differences between at risk of DLD und TD in the microstructure, e.g. total number of word tokens and verb-based communication units and SR. For the macrostructure, TD outperformed at risk children only for story complexity. The study expands our knowledge on the cut-off criteria for the identification of bilinguals at risk of DLD, scrutinized very early narratives for bilinguals at risk of DLD features and questions the similarity of cognitive skills in TD and at risk of DLD children.
This paper focuses on morphological verb errors in elicited narratives of Russian-German primary school bilinguals. The data was collected from 37 children who were separated into four groups according to the age and language acquisition type (simultaneous and successive). The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) (Gagarina et al. 2012) was used for data collection. The narratives produced in mode telling after listening to a model story were analysed and morphological verb errors in Russian and German were classified. Therefore, the error classification of Gagarina (2008) for Russian monolingual children was expanded and for the classification of German errors an own classification was suggested. Errors in Russian typically produced by monolinguals and unique bilingual errors as well were documented. The results show that the language of the environment (German) increases with age. Older children make fewer errors than younger ones. Nevertheless, a strong heterogeneity between children within each group can be observed.
This study explores the relation between the development of narrative skills at the macrostructural level and the productive lexical abilities (verbs) of German-Russian children. The narratives are elicited using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) and the lexical abilities are assessed using different tests. Twenty-one preschoolers (mean age: 3;9), forty-four 1st graders (mean age: 6;11) and twenty-two 3rd graders (mean age: 9;3) were included in the study. Correlation analyses were performed between verb lexicon and the following macrostructural components: Story Structure, Structural Complexity and Internal State Terms. The analysis also targets cross-language effects. In addition, the production of verbs within the elicited narratives was taken into account. Some positive correlations were found; however, no clear pattern across age groups and languages was observed. It is suggested that cognitive abilities might be a more decisive factor than lexical abilities and/or that the verbs assessed via the vocabulary tests are more specific than the ones required to achieve high scores for macrostructure.
A growing body of evidence shows a positive relation between the language skills of a child and the socio-economic status (SES) of his/her parents. These studies have mainly been conducted in an American English monolingual context. The current paper addresses the question of whether SES has a comparable impact on the simultaneous bilingual language acquisition. In this study, noun and verb test scores of German simultaneous bilingual children with Turkish and Russian as heritage languages are related to the SES of their parents – to verify the existence and the nature of a common pattern. The results do not show common patterns across the two heritage language groups, suggesting the existence of other confounding factors.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the development of narrative macrostructure and the impact of socio-economic status (SES) and home literacy environment (HLE) on the narrative macrostructure of monolingual preschoolers in Germany when retelling and telling a story. The analysis of narrative macrostructure includes three components: story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension. Oral narratives were elicited via Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). 198 monolingual children between age 4;6 and 5;11 participated (M=63 months, SD=5 months). The comparison of narrative macrostructure in three age groups (4;6 to 4;11 years, 5;0 to 5;5 years, 5;6 to 5;11 years) illustrate significant age effects in story structure, story complexity and story comprehension skills. There were weak significant positive correlations of some of these skills with aspects of socio-economic status and home literacy environment, for example between story comprehension skills and the educational background, the frequency and duration of the child’s exposure to books and the number of books in the household.