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Adapting MAIN to Arabic
(2020)
The adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN; Gagarina, et al., 2019) to Catalan contributes to advancing our knowledge of the development of children’s narrative skills in a diversity of languages using the same protocol, making it possible to evaluate narratives also in Catalan-speakers. The adaptation of MAIN will be very useful in Catalonia, because it is a region where two official languages (Catalan and Spanish) coexist, Catalan being the language of schooling, so that most of the population is bilingual. However, currently there is no instrument for assessing narrative skills that allows for parallel assessment of Catalan in bilingual children. For these reasons, this adaptation will be of great value to promote the study of narratives in the bilingual population considering Catalan within the possible language combinations. The present paper describes the process of adapting MAIN to Catalan and reports results from the first pilot study using the Catalan MAIN.
This paper describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Danish and the use of MAIN in a Danish context. First, there is a brief description of the Danish language followed by details of the process of translating and adapting the MAIN manual to Danish. Finally, we briefly describe some of the research contexts in which the current and previous MAIN materials have been piloted and applied.
This contribution provides an overview of the current state of affairs with respect to the Dutch version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). We describe properties of the Dutch MAIN, the creation of the Dutch MAIN, and the results of recent research with this new instrument to measure narrative competence.
This paper describes the revision of the Vietnamese version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We first introduce the Vietnamese language and Vietnamese-speaking populations after which we describe the translation and adaptation process of the Vietnamese MAIN and present results from monolingual and bilingual children.
Torwali, a Dardic language of the Indo-Aryan family spoken in the District Swat in Pakistan, is an endangered language that lacks a literary tradition. This paper gives a background on the Torwali language and people, and describes the development of an orthography for Torwali and the establishment of Torwali-medium schools by the local organization Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi ‘institute for education and development’ (IBT). Finally, the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instruments for Narratives (MAIN) to Torwali is outlined.
This paper introduces the Mandarin version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) and describes the adaptation process. The Mandarin MAIN not only extends the empirical coverage of MAIN by including one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but also offers an important tool to assess the narrative abilities of monolingual and bi-/ multi- lingual children acquiring Mandarin as a first, heritage, second, or additional language across the globe.
This paper presents the Croatian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), outlines its development and describes the research that has used it to assess narrative skills in monolingual and bilingual speakers. The Croatian version of MAIN has so far been used in three research projects and results have been presented in five peer-reviewed articles (published or in press) covering a total of 175 children in the age range from 5;0 to 9;0 (20 with developmental language disorder) and 60 adults, age range from 22 to 76. The accumulated results indicate that MAIN can differentiate narrative skills of speakers in distinct age groups and can distinguish children with language disorders form children with typical language development.
Immigration in Iceland has a short history and so does the Icelandic language as an L2. This paper gives a brief introductory overview of this history and of some characteristics of the Icelandic language that constitute a challenge for L2 learners but also make it an interesting testing ground for cross-linguistic comparisons of L1 and L2 language acquisition. It then describes the adaptation process of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Icelandic. The Icelandic MAIN is expected to fill a gap in available assessment tools for multilingual Icelandic speaking children.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), an assessment tool in the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery, aims to improve the assessment of bilingual children. This paper describes the process of adapting MAIN to Urdu. Given the lack of language assessment tools for Urdu-speaking children, the Urdu MAIN is an important new instrument that is made widely and freely accessible to researchers and practitioners, allowing them to examine the narrative abilities of children acquiring Urdu as a first, heritage, second, or additional language.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) was developed to assess the narrative abilities of bi- and multilingual children in the various languages that they speak. This paper presents the details of the adaptation of MAIN to three Indian languages, Kannada, Hindi and Malayalam. We describe some typological features of these languages and discuss the challenges faced during the process of adaptation. Finally, we give an overview of results for narrative comprehension and production from Kannada-English and Hindi-English bilinguals aged 7 to 9.
This paper provides the background to the process of translation and piloting of the Serbian version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN), Multilingvalni Test za Procenu Narativa (MTPN). Our review of the sparse research literature on Serbian children’s narrative abilities reveals a need for a well-designed narrative instrument, which will enable researchers and practitioners to assess the production and comprehension of narratives in children of a wide age range, typically and atypically developing, monolingual and bilingual, crucially allowing for cross-linguistic comparisons. We encountered two kinds of challenges during the process of translation and adaptation of the instrument from English into Serbian. The first concerned the lack of established Serbian technical terminology needed to describe test administration to the future users of the test: researchers and practitioners working in different disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, Speech and Language Therapy. The second challenge concerned the translation of linguistic structures required to produce a successful rendition of the narrative: in contrast to English, but in line with other Slavic languages, Serbian relies heavily on verbs marked for perfective aspect in story-telling. Our discussion of preliminary data from four Serbian monolingual children, aged 5;5-10, demonstrates that MTPN is a successful tool in assessing narrative abilities in children acquiring Serbian.
This paper presents an overview of the adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives in Greek, focusing on its use in Greek academic and diagnostic settings. A summary of the properties of the Greek language and the concomitant challenges these language-specific properties posed to MAIN adaptation are presented along with a summary of published studies with monolingual Greek-speaking children and bilingual children with Greek as L2, with and without Developmental Language Disorder.
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.
This paper briefly presents the current situation of bilingualism in the Philippines, specifically that of Tagalog-English bilingualism. More importantly, it describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Tagalog, the basis of Filipino, which is the country’s national language. Finally, the results of a pilot study conducted on Tagalog-English bilingual children and adults (N=27) are presented. The results showed that Story Structure is similar across the two languages and that it develops significantly with age.
In this paper, we present some features of the European Spanish adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN), most of them related to specificities of the Spanish grammar as compared to English, the source language of the original MAIN (Gagarina et al., 2012). These two languages differ in e.g. 1) the use of 3rd grammatical person to address the hearer; 2) the ways of maintaining nominal cohesion: English (non-pro drop) vs. Spanish (pro-drop); 3) the verbal paradigm with regard to morphological tense and aspect morphology. Finally, preliminary results for micro- and macrostructure measures in the narratives of children with Spanish as L1 and L2 confirm their consistency across MAIN stories and procedures.
This paper presents a short overview of Turkey and the Turkish language, and then outlines the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to Turkish and how the Turkish MAIN has been used with monolingual and bilingual children. The grammatical features of Turkish, the critical points in the adaptation process of MAIN to Turkish and our experiences of extensive piloting of the Turkish MAIN with typically developing monolingual children are described.
The adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) for use with Slovak speaking children is a vital step in the process of creating a transparent evaluation of children’s narrative abilities. Since its first translation and adaptation in 2012, new pilot data from different groups of children has been collected in Slovakia. This paper describes the process of adapting the instrument to fit the Slovak language and reports on analyses of narrative production in monolingual (103 Slovak-speaking children) and bilingual (37 Slovak-English speaking) pre-school children. Within a pilot study, the story elicitation method was also compared (telling vs. retelling) within a small sample of 10 monolingual Slovak-speaking children. All results show transparent and detailed possibilities in terms of finding a meaningful evaluation that can evaluate a child’s complex narrative abilities.
Using MAIN in South Africa
(2020)
South Africa is a country marked by cultural and linguistic diversity with 11 official languages. The majority of school children do not receive their formal schooling in their home language. There is a need for language assessment tools in education and rehabilitation contexts to distinguish between children with language learning problems and/or SLI, and language delay as a result of limited exposure to the language of learning. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) provides clinicians and researchers with an appropriate and culturally relevant tool to assess bilingual children in both languages. So far MAIN has been widely used in Afrikaans-English bilingual children. However, translating and adapting MAIN to our other nine official languages to achieve functional and cultural equivalence is more challenging.
This paper describes in detail the development of the Polish version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We first describe its two earlier versions, the unpublished version and the published version, developed in 2012, as well as the revised version. We also justify the differences between the unpublished Polish version developed in 2012 and the original MAIN. Then we summarize the results from studies that used the unpublished version of the Polish MAIN. We end with outlining a study that could be conducted to compare the two slightly different procedures in order to examine whether the results obtained with MAIN are resistant to changes in the procedure details.
This paper describes the experience of using the Norwegian and Russian versions of LITMUS-MAIN to elicit narrative data from bilingual Norwegian-Russian children as well as from Norwegian- and Russian-speaking monolinguals (Rodina 2017, 2018). The paper reports on the slight adaptations to the standardized design, procedure and analysis that were done to make the tasks more suitable for this specific population. It highlights the advantages, challenges, and potential associated with the task against a backdrop of the research conducted with Norwegian-Russian bilinguals in Norway.
This paper describes the current state of affairs concerning the West Frisian adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). We provide a short description of the West Frisian language, the process of adapting MAIN into West Frisian and the results of recent research using this adaptation.
This paper presents the adaptation of MAIN to Gondi (Dantewada), Halbi and Hindi for Gondi-Hindi and Halbi-Hindi bilinguals. The Gondi and Halbi communities and the context in which Gondi-Hindi and Halbi-Hindi bilingual children are growing up are described, and the adaptation process is outlined together with its theoretical underpinnings. Finally, results from a study of 54 Halbi-Hindi bilinguals from Grade 3 (Mean age = 8.5 years), Grade 5 (Mean age = 10.9 years) and Grade 7 (Mean age = 12.9 years) are presented. The results showed that, for the macrostructure of Grade 3 and Grade 5, L1 retelling was significantly better than L2 retelling, though this pattern was not found in Grade 7 where the performance was at the same level across languages for retelling. Narrative macrostructure was consistently higher in tellings than in the retellings regardless of languages and grades.
Irish (Gaeilge) is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland. It is a fast-changing, endangered language. Almost universal bilingualism (i.e. almost all Irish speakers also speak English), frequent code-switching to English, and loan words are features of the sociolinguistic context in which the language is spoken. This paper describes the adaptation of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings - Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2019) to Irish. Data was collected using the retell mode (Cat story) and the comprehension questions. Eighteen children participated ranging in age from 5;3 to 8;7 (six female and 12 male). Results suggest that story structure is not sensitive to exposure to Irish at home and indicate that MAIN Gaeilge (Irish) is a promising tool for assessing language in Irish-speaking children from a range of Irish language backgrounds.
This paper describes the rationale for the adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) (Gagarina et al., 2012, 2015, 2019) to Scottish Gaelic (Gaelic) and presents some preliminary results from the macrostructure measures. Gaelic is a heritage minority language in Scotland being revitalised through immersion education, which spans across all levels of compulsory education (preschool, primary and secondary level). MAIN was adapted to Gaelic for two reasons: (i) to gauge the language abilities of children attending Gaelic immersion schools using an ecologically valid test, and (ii) to help identify areas of language impairment in children with Developmental Language Disorders within a broader battery of language tasks. Preliminary results from the macrostructure component indicate a wider range of Gaelic language abilities in six- to eight-year-old typically developing children in Gaelic-medium education. These results set the stage for future use of the tool within this context.
This paper presents the Italian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), describes how it was developed and reports on some recent uses of MAIN within the Italian context. The Italian MAIN has been used in different research projects and for clinical purposes; results have been presented at conferences and in peer reviewed papers. The results indicate that MAIN is an appropriate assessment tool for evaluating children’s narrative competence, in production and comprehension from preschool age (5 years) to school age (8 years) in typical language development, bilingual development and language delay/disorders.
This paper describes the addition of Luxembourgish to the language versions of MAIN, the adaption process and the use of MAIN in Luxembourg. A short description of Luxembourg’s multilingual society and trilingual school system as well as an overview of selected morphosyntactic and syntactic features of Luxembourgish introduce the Luxembourgish version of MAIN.
This paper introduces the Kam version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). Kam is a minority language in southern China which belongs to the Kam-Tai language family and is spoken by the Kam ethnic minority people. Adding Kam to MAIN not only enriches the typological diversity of MAIN but also allows researchers to study children’s narrative development in a sociocultural context vastly distinctly different from the frequently examined WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. Moreover, many Kam-speaking children are bilingual ethnic minority children who are “left-behind” children living in Mainland China, growing up in a unique socio-communicative environment
A translation process is often seen as only a simple code exchange, but, in fact, it always requires an adaptation of terms, expressions, and structures, which is not exactly straightforward. This paper describes the process of translating and adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Brazilian Portuguese. A brief description of the project, concerning both historic and linguistic aspects, was done in order to emphasize the cultural and linguistic challenges faced during the process.
This paper gives an introduction to the Cantonese adaptation of Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), which is part of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery. We here discuss the motivation for adapting this assessment instrument into Cantonese, the adaptation process itself and potential contexts for use of the Cantonese MAIN.
This paper describes Estonian version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Estonian. A short description of Estonian, some challenges in the adapting MAIN to Estonian, the first experiences of using the Estonian MAIN and a summary of the first results are presented.
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.
The paper presents results from a combined production and comprehension study addressing some of the factors which guide the establishment of intersentential pronominal reference in child and adult Bulgarian. We investigate the time course and different stages in the acquisition of null, personal and demonstrative pro-nouns and their specific anaphoric functions. We target possible age-induced changes in the salience hierarchy of referent features such as animacy and grammatical role. Following the general consent in the field of anaphora research, we assume a division of labour between different pronominal forms with respect to the salience of their referents. Based on the data of Bulgarian preschool children we investigate the validity of this form-function relation, its language-specific shape and its developmentally induced variation. The results reveal an initial prominence of animate referents which later on develops into preference for animate subjects. Although the investigated 3 to 5 year old Bulgarian children do not stick to the adult anaphora resolution strategy, they comply with the principle of the reversed mapping within the range of tested pronouns and react according to their salience criteria which promote animate subjects as the most prominent co-reference candidates.
In anaphora resolution theory, it has been assumed that anaphora resolution is based on a reversed mapping of antecedent salience and anaphora complexity: minimal complex anaphora refer to maximal salient antecedents. In order to ex-amine whether and by which developmental steps German children gain command of this mapping maxim we conducted an experiment on production and comprehension of intersentential pronouns including the three pronoun types zero, personal, and demonstrative pronoun. With respect to antecedent salience, the experiment varied syntactic role (subject/object) and in/animacy. Six age groups of children (age range from 2;0 to 6;0) and an adult control group has been tested. The hypothesis arising from the mapping maxim is that zero pronoun correlates with more salient antecedents than personal and demonstrative pronoun, the latter correlating with the least salient antecedents. The results are: In production, children first establish the opposition of zero pronoun with animate antecedents vs. demonstrative pronoun with inanimate antecedents. In a next step, syntactic role comes into play and a more complex system opposing the three presented pronoun types is established. In comprehension, however, the effect of pronoun type re-mains weak and antecedent features remain a strong factor in reference choice. However, also adults employ pronoun type and antecedent features. The oldest children and the adults show variation in personal pronoun resolution according to the animacy pattern of the potential antecedents. In case of identical animacy features, the subject is the preferred candidate; in case of distinct animacy features, there is a tendency to choose the object antecedent.
It is well known that English children between the age of 4 and 6 display a so-called Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in that they allow pronouns to refer to a local c-commanding antecedent. Their guessing pattern with pronouns contrasts with their adult-like interpretation of reflexives. The DPBE has been explained as resulting from a lack of pragmatic knowledge or insufficient cognitive resources. However, such extra-grammatical accounts cannot explain why the DPBE only shows up in particular languages and in particular syntactic environments. Moreover, such accounts fail to explain why the DPBE only emerges in comprehension and not in production. This paper hypothesizes that the presence or absence of the DPBE can be explained from the properties of the grammar. Fischer's (2004) optimality-theoretic analysis of binding, explaining cross-linguistic variation, and Hendriks and Spenader's (2005/6) optimality-theoretic account of the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives are combined into a single model. This model yields testable predictions with respect to the presence or absence of the DPBE in particular languages, in particular syntactic environments, and in comprehension and/or production.
This paper presents results of corpus analytic investigations of children's use of referring expressions and considers possible implications of this work for questions relating to development of theory of mind. The study confirms previous findings that children use the full range of referring forms (definite and indefinite articles, demonstrative determiners, and demonstrative and personal pronouns) appropriately by age 3 or earlier. It also provides support for two distinct stages in mind-reading ability. The first, which is implicit and non-propositional, includes the ability to assess cognitive statuses such as familiarity and focus of attention in relation to the intended referent; the second, which is propositional and more conscious, includes the ability to assess epistemic states such as knowledge and belief. Distinguishing these two stages supports attempts to reconcile seemingly inconsistent results concerning the age at which children develop theory of mind. It also makes it possible to explain why children learn to use forms correctly be-fore they exhibit the pragmatic ability to consider and calculate quantity implicatures.
This paper deals with the development of discourse competence in German-, Russian- and Bulgarian-speaking children. In particular, it examines the use of anaphoric pronominal reference in elicited narrations of children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. As the pronominal (and nominal) systems of target German, Russian and Bulgarian differ in the repertoire and functions of anaphoric elements we will examine which kind of noun phrases children use to make reference to story participants. In a second step of the analysis, we will investigate how pronominal expressions relate to antecedents. In this respect the pronominal form of the anaphor, the syntactic function of the antecedent and the distance between antecedent and anaphor will be analyzed. The findings will be discussed with regard to predictions made by proposals such as the Complementary Hypothesis (Bosch, Rozario, and Zhao 2003) which assumes an asymmetry between the use of personal pro-nouns and demonstrative pronouns when referring back to subject or object antecedents.
It has been shown that visual cues play a crucial role in the perception of vowels and consonants. Conflicting consonantal stimuli presented in the visual and auditory modalities can even result in the emergence of a third perceptual unit (McGurk effect). From a developmental point of view, several studies report that newborns can associate the image of a face uttering a given vowel to the auditory signal corresponding to this vowel; visual cues are thus used by the newborns. Despite the large number of studies carried out with adult speakers and newborns, very little work has been conducted with preschool-aged children. This contribution is aimed at describing the use of auditory and visual cues by 4 and 5-year-old French Canadian speakers, compared to adult speakers, in the identification of voiced consonants. Audiovisual recordings of a French Canadian speaker uttering the sequences [aba], [ada], [aga], [ava], [ibi], [idi], [igi], [ivi] have been carried out. The acoustic and visual signals have been extracted and analysed so that conflicting and non-conflicting stimuli, between the two modalities, were obtained. The resulting stimuli were presented as a perceptual test to eight 4 and 5-year-old French Canadian speakers and ten adults in three conditions: visual-only, auditory-only, and audiovisual. Results show that, even though the visual cues have a significant effect on the identification of the stimuli for adults and children, children are less sensitive to visual cues in the audiovisual condition. Such results shed light on the role of multimodal perception in the emergence and the refinement of the phonological system in children.
While the perilinguistic child is endowed with predispositions for the categorical perception of phonetic features, their adaptation to the native language results from a long evolution from the end of the first year of age up to the adolescence. This evolution entails both a better discrimination between phonological categories, a concomitant reduction of the discrimination between within-category variants, and a higher precision of perceptual boundaries between categories. The first objective of the present study was to assess the relative importance of these modifications by comparing the perceptual performances of a group of 11 children, aged from 8 to 11 years, with those of their mothers. Our second objective was to explore the functional implications of categorical perception by comparing the performances of a group of 8 deaf children, equipped with a cochlear implant, with normal-hearing chronological age controls. The results showed that the categorical boundary was slightly more precise and that categorical perception was consistently larger in adults vs. normal-hearing children. Those among the deaf children who were able to discriminate minimal distinctions between syllables displayed categorical perception performances equivalent to those of normal-hearing controls. In conclusion, the late effect of age on the categorical perception of speech seems to be anchored in a fairly mature phonological system, as evidenced the fairly high precision of categorical boundaries in pre-adolescents. These late developments have functional implications for speech perception in difficult conditions as suggested by the relationship between categorical perception and speech intelligibility in cochlear implant children.
The goal of our current project is to build a system that can learn to imitate a version of a spoken utterance using an articulatory speech synthesiser. The approach is informed and inspired by knowledge of early infant speech development. Thus we expect our system to reproduce and exploit the utility of infant behaviours such as listening, vocal play, babbling and word imitation. We expect our system to develop a relationship between the sound-making capabilities of its vocal tract and the phonetic/phonological structure of imitated utterances. At the heart of our approach is the learning of an inverse model that relates acoustic and motor representations of speech. The acoustic to auditory mappings uses an auditory filter bank and a self-organizing phase of learning. The inverse model from auditory to vocal tract control parameters is estimated using a babbling phase, in which the vocal tract is essentially driven in a random manner, much like the babbling phase of speech acquisition in infants. The complete system can be used to imitate simple utterances through a direct mapping from sound to control parameters. Our initial results show that this procedure works well for sounds generated by its own voice. Further work is needed to build a phonological control level and achieve better performance with real speech.
Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit dem muttersprachlich Erwerb (L1) des Genus im Deutschen. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht die Frage, wie ein Kind aus dem ihm angebotenen Sprachinformationen das komplexe System der Genusmarkierung erwirbt. Sie wird anhand von Daten aus einer Langzeitstudie eines monolingual aufwachsenden deutschen Kindes erörtert. Der Rahmen dieser Arbeit erforderte bei ihrem Aufbau gewisse Einschränkungen. So habe ich mich in der Auswertung der Erwerbsdaten auf den bestimmten Artikel als Genusanzeiger konzentriert. Als Artikel zeichnet er sich gegenüber den ebenfalls genusabhängigen Adjektiven dadurch aus, dass er eine meist obligatorische Konstituente einer Nominalphrase (NP) mit einem Substantiv darstellt. Der bestimmte Artikel wiederum ist einerseits der frequenteste unter den Artikelwörtern und weist andererseits das differenzierteste Formeninventar auf, wobei er als einziger Artikel im Nominativ alle drei Genera differenziert. Auch habe ich mich entschlossen, auf eine Gegenüberstellung und Diskussion verschiedener Spracherwerbstheorien zu verzichten und stattdessen ausführlicher auf die Aspekte, die im Erwerbsprozess selbst und somit für die Datenanalyse relevant sind, einzugehen. Dabei sollen unterschiedliche Ansätze berücksichtigt sowie die aktuelle Forschungslage dargestellt werden.
Ziel der Untersuchung ist der Erwerb von aspektuellen Markierungen im Bulgarischen. Da Bulgarisch über ein nominales Artikelsystem und über eine verbale Aspektkategorie verfügt, liefert es eine ausgezeichnete Gelegenheit, die Verwendung von nominalen und verbalen Aspektmarkierungen im frühen Spracherwerb aufzuzeigen. Der Artikel präsentiert die Daten aus einer Langzeitstudie und einer experimentellen Testreihe. Die Ergebnisse belegen, dass die bulgarischen Kinder am Anfang vom Prinzip der Aspektkomposition Gebrauch machen. Aspektuell unmarkierte Verben werden durch definite Objekte ergänzt, um begrenzte Handlungen auszudrücken. Der schnelle Erwerb der Aspektmorphologie verschiebt die Gewichtung im Satz von den nominalen zu den verbalen Aspektmarkern. Im Alter von zweieinhalb Jahren beherrschen die bulgarischen Kinder die sprachspezifische syntaktische Anforderung, dass perfektiv markierte Prädikate quantitativ definite Argumente verlangen.
We argue that Malagasy (and related W. Austronesian languages!) has a positive setting for a macro-parameter RICH VOICE MORPHOLOGY which builds complex predicates that code the theta role of their argument: S = [[PreN(6) + (X)] + DP]. Manifestations of this parameter are: (1) Case and theta role are assigned in situ in nuclear clauses with no movement or co-indexing to a topic position. (2) Relative Clauses (and other "extraction" structures) satisfy the "Subjects Only" constraint, again with no movement or indexing. (3) UTAH is freely violated, as theta role assignment derives from compositional semantic interpretation. Predicates resemble lexical Ns in assigning case directly to arguments without using Prepositions and in combining directly with Dets to form DPs that include tense and negation (Keenan 1995, 2000). The major Predicate-Argument type is modeled on the Noun+Possessor one, not the Verb+Object one.
The purpose of this research was to trace the developmental steps in the acquisition of aspectual oppositions in Russian and to examine the validity of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis for L1-speaking children. Imperfective/perfective verbs and their inflections, as well as aspectual pairs, were analysed in the first five months of verb production (and the respective months in the input) in three children. Additionally, the first four months of verb production were investigated in one boy with less data. Verb forms marked for the past and for the present occur simultaneously in all children. These early forms relate to 'here and now' situations: verbs marked for the past denote 'resultative' events that are perceived by the children as occurring during the speech time or immediately before it, while verbs marked for the present typically denote on-going events. Thus, with early tense oppositions (or tense morphology) children mark aspectual contrasts in the moment of speech: evidence in favour of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis.
A strong preference in using the perfective aspect for the past and the imperfective aspect for the present events has been found in both adults and children. Further, only very few aspectual pairs were documented within the analysed period (from the onset of verb production to the period when children produce rule-driven inflectional forms). The productive use of the finite forms of perfective and imperfective verbs doesn't concord with the ability of the productive use of the contrastive forms of one lemma. Data suggest that children (start to) learn aspectual forms in an item-based manner. The acquisition of aspectual oppositions (aspectual pairs) is lexically dependent and is guided by the contextual 'thesaurus'. Aspectual pairs are learned in a peace-meal way during much longer, than observed for this article, period of time. Generally, aspect is not learned as a rule, also because there are no (uniform) rules of forming of aspectual pairs, but as the 'satellite' of the inherent lexical meaning of verbs of diverse Aktionsarten.
The issues addressed here are relevant for other Slavic languages, exhibiting the morphological category of aspect.
Der Beitrag referiert Ergebnisse eines mit Erwachsenen durchgeführten Experiments zum Verständnis des bestimmten Artikels. Das Testmaterial entstammt einem für Kinder konzipierten Blickpräferenzexperiment. Die Durchführung des Tests mit Erwachsenen diente als Kontrolle der Verwendbarkeit der Materialien und der Überprüfung folgender Hypothese: Die referentielle Grundfunktion des Artikels besteht im Verweis auf begrenzte Ganze bzw. einen bestimmten (=begrenzten) Umfang einer Entität. Der interessante Aspekt des Experiments war, dass die Entscheidung zwischen [+begrenzt] vs. [-begrenzt] innerhalb einer pluralischen Kondition fallen musste, die Begrenztheitslesart wurde also nicht durch einzahlig auftretende zählbare Objekte erzeugt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die pluralische Kondition sich auf das Antwortverhalten der Probanden auswirkte. Probanden mit durchschnittlich längerer Reaktionszeit entscheiden sich anders als Probanden mit vergleichsweise kurzer Reaktionszeit. Während von der Gruppe mit spontanerem Entscheidungsverhalten die Hypothese im Hinblick auf den Artikel bestätigt wurde, scheint sich die Gruppe mit höheren Reaktionszeiten für das prototypischere Bild innerhalb der Pluralkondition zu entscheiden.
The study examines the hypotheses that the acquisition of the finite verb is an indispensable and linking constituent of the development of SVO utterances. Four apparently separate or at least separable processes are analysed over 6 months in one Russian and one German child: a) the emergence of verbs in the child’s utterances, b) the occurrence of correctly inflected (finite) verb forms, c) the development of multi-component utterances containing a verb, and c) the emergence of (potential) subjects and objects. Russian and German exhibit rich verb morphology, and in both languages finiteness is strongly correlated with inflectional categories like person, number and tense. With both children we find a correlation in the temporal order of these four processes and – what is more relevant for our study – a dependency of a certain development on the utterance level on the emergence of finite verbs. Further, our investigation shows that language-specific development comes in to play already when children start to acquire verb inflection and becomes more contrastive when we observe the onset of the production of the SVO utterances.
In the following, we will discuss the acquisition of plural forms in German from the unified perspective of the two, in our opinion compatible, approaches, on the basis of a longitudinal data sample of eight children. There are at least six recordings of each child, all of whom are girls. Together, the data cover the acquisition period from 1;11 to 2;10. One may thus anticipate that the data sample under investigation reflects the transition from purely lexical memorization to the acquisition of regularities or patterns.
This paper deals with the emergence of verb morphology in one German child up to the time mini-paradigms occur in the data. I will focus on the role of protomorphology as a transitional stage between rote learning and the productive use of morphological distinctions.