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This article addresses the conceptualizations of written language held by Mayan children who attend bilingual elementary school. The article's attempt to show the results of psycholinguistic research carried out with Mayan children follows the conviction that school-age Maya speakers play an important role in generating knowledge of literacy proposals in the context of bilingual education. By being in contact with two languages (the native language and Spanish), the Mayan children make precise linguistic reflections on Spanish that allow them to infer principles of the graphic and orthographic system of their own language. This article explains those reflections.
Our aim was to characterise the relationships between literacy practises developed in Portuguese kindergartens and children's conceptualisations about the functions and nature of written language. The participants were 16 kindergarten teachers and 160 five-year-old children—i.e. a 1:10 teacher/child ratio. We developed an observation grid to characterise their literacy practises. It covers two main aspects of the teachers' work: reading, writing and metalinguistic practises (14 items) and ways of supporting children's attempts to read and write (16 items). It was used by two observers who spent two weeks in the kindergartens. The kindergarten teachers were divided into three groups depending on their literacy practises. In order to characterise the children's conceptualisations about written language, in October and May we assessed both their perceptions of the objectives and functions of written language and their invented spelling. The results show that there are close relationships between literacy practises pursued by the three groups of kindergarten teachers and the children's conceptualisations about written language.
When children learn to write, they must ask themselves two basic questions: what part of the language is represented and how is it represented. Their answers are the source of their invented writings. This article reports data from interviews of Mexican Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 5 and 12 and analyses the child’s point of view about the necessity or the possibility of representing stress and some intonational oppositions. Both processes present undifferentiated writings which reveal that for children, at a given evolutionary stage, contrasts in stress and intonation are not retained in writing (which can be considered as an invented "non-writing"). Likewise, there are invented writings that show original ideas about what and how to represent in writing the linguistic contrasts proposed for their reflection; finally, quasi-conventional or conventional writings appear. Reflections on the universality of learning, problems with comparing graphic systems and their respective acquisition processes are also discussed, as serious consideration should be given to the concept that written languages are mixed and linked systems and not monolithic systems.
This article reports the results of developmental test analyses on literacy conducted with children with intellectual disabilities in Quebec and Brazil. Grounded on studies carried out in Argentina by Ferreiro and Teberosky (1986), with children without intellectual disabilities, we deal, comparatively, with three aspects in the development of literacy in children with intellectual disabilities: their interpretation of fragments of writing, the connection they establish between letters and numbers, and their knowledge of letters. The level of intellectual disability just as the stimulation to reading are taken into account in the analysis of data related to the three aspects previously mentioned. Children with intellectual disabilities develop, in many aspects, similarly to the children without intellectual disabilities during emergent literacy. Nevertheless, they are less consistent in the use of writing classifying criteria, as well as in their discriminating letters from numbers. Although, the level of intellectual disability influenced the children's progress greatly, the acquisition of the knowledge of letters differed mostly in accordance to the level of stimulation to reading.
This study examines the developmental stages of spelling ability focusing on the learning process of the Japanese orthographic system for native speakers of Japanese. After first providing a basic explanation of the Japanese orthographic system, issues regarding the acquisition of Japanese spelling are discussed. Next, in order to clarify the acquisition of writing skills in the introductory stage of Japanese spelling, data from prior case studies and this investigation are examined. From these results, a new proposal for developmental stages of orthographic concepts is suggested. This study also examines strategies of invented spelling and the relationship between developmental stages and learning ages. Children had learned a considerable amount of hiragana spelling before entering first grade, and by the end of first grade (late March) had reached the point where they were mostly able to write phrases in both hiragana and katakana. The developmental stages were as follows:
Stage1: Hiragana spelling not yet acquired
Stage2: Hiragana spelling acquisition (unvoiced, voiced, semi-voiced)
Stage3: Hiragana spelling acquisition (special syllable markers)
Stage4: Katakana spelling acquisition (unvoiced, voiced, semi-voiced)
Stage5: Katakana spelling acquisition (special syllable markers)
Stage6: Combined usage of hiragana and katakana acquisition
Stage7: Kanji spelling not yet acquired (includes kanji learning stages).
Researchers working on acquisition of written language by children are traditionally more interested in reading than in writing even if, today, spelling and writing have become common subjects of research and the themes of academic conferences. A country as large as Japan, as Tsukada says (in this issue), is just beginning to consider writing as an object of investigation, even though reading is a classic concern in his country. One of the most heuristic research methodologies in spelling is "invented spelling". It is a very simple situation in which a child – most often 4 or 5 years old – is asked to spell words or sentences that s/he has never been taught. These written productions are very meaningful in the eyes of a researcher.
This paper attempts to present an overview of studies that have been conducted in Greece during recent years on the subject of emergent literacy and, more precisely, on preschoolers' acquisition of writing. Its aim is to present the studies focusing on the subject from an "invented spelling" perspective and to discuss the results obtained. Results seem to be in accordance with the results obtained by similar studies in other countries and in different languages, thus supporting the idea of the existence of a universal character to the ways preschool children conceptualise writing.
Many studies note the difficulties experienced by young children in learning deep writing systems (such as English and French) compared to those for which the link between the spoken and the written is shallower (e.g., Spanish and Italian). A large percentage of these studies are focused on English. As such, more research needs to be conducted with other first languages such as French. The present exploratory study seeks to understand the effects of these kinds of linguistic variable, along with the impact (which has received little attention) of instructional factors, on the competencies of first-grade, Frenchlanguage writers. Two kinds of instructional context are examined (integrated approach vs code-oriented approach) in two countries (France and Quebec, Canada). The main findings for invented spelling situations within an integrated-approach framework reveal that French and Quebec pupils construct a more complete view of the writing system. This construction includes both units involving the transcription of phonemes by phonograms and units involving the treatment of inaudible, semiographic information by morphograms.
Linguistic factors and invented spelling in children: The case of French beginners in children
(2007)
Most studies in the field of first writing experiences in kindergarten have focused on the behaviour of young English-language writers (Treiman & Bourassa, 2000). By considering increasingly acknowledged linguistic factors in spelling development (Seymour, Aro & Erskine, 2003), the present study seeks to contribute to existing studies of young French-language children in Europe by examining the case of young French-Canadian writers (North America). Drawing on 202 kindergarten children, this study seeks to provide a better understanding of the impact of linguistic characteristics on the production of graphemes in an invented spelling task involving the writing of six words. Firstly, it analyzes the "word" effect on the participants' capacity to produce the appropriate graphemes to represent the phonological information of words (exhaustiveness of the graphemes). Secondly, there is an analysis of unconventional graphemes in order to identify the causes of the deviation from the expected norm. Generally speaking, the findings support the relevance of taking into account the particularities of written French in the spelling development of young French-language children as well as the constructivist view that deviations from the norm are often indicative of difficulties arising from the nature of the writing system to be learned.
The present report is an overview of six studies that share a common theme: What is the contribution of shared reading to child outcomes. The first three studies are experimental in nature and show that the number of times as well as the manner in which the adult reads to the child will affect children's acquisition of comprehension and spoken vocabulary. The fourth study is an intervention with children who have poor vocabulary skills. The findings revealed that care givers can enhance children's spoken vocabulary by reading books to them in an interactive manner, but that simply reading in their customary fashion may not promote vocabulary acquisition. Finally, the last two studies are correlational in nature. They provide converging evidence that shared reading predicts children's vocabulary, and that, children's vocabulary is a robust predictor of reading comprehension. These latter studies also show the limits of shared reading because parent reports of shared reading did not predict children's early literacy skills or word reading at the end of grade 1.
Collaboration between the International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education (IAIMTE) and the Education Department of the University of Toulouse II has existed for several years now. Such collaboration has resulted in a desire for face to face contact: the IAIMTE was intent on increasing its French audience,while the French team was able to grasp the opportunity to exchange their French-speaking studies in a broad international context. Thus, the IAIMTE requested the team from Toulouse organise the fifth conference in France (Albi) in 2005. For this conference, we invited specialists from French-speaking countries to present their research and reflections on the role of literature both inside and outside school. This issue presents the corresponding papers.
Reading at home in France: A psycho-sociological look at youth literature, youth and their families
(2006)
The reading and the readings of young people are at the crossroads of social and cultural mediations in which the school institution and the family share the first role. During decades, work on the reading of the young people distinguished the readings for leisure and the readings for school. Since about fifteen years, this cleavage does not correspond any more to reality. Well before the learning of the reading, the desire of reading takes its source in the exercise of the mother tongue and in the family uses of print. Reading skills come to reinforce it. The acquisition of a reading practice and the construction of a reader behaviour take place at home according to the choices of youth literature generally presented by the primary school and the beginning of secondary school. With the age of the secondary school, the reader builds two different universes of reading. One is composed of texts prescribed by the teachers and the other of readings called "for oneself". Whatever the age and skills, the dynamics of the activity of reading remains fragile. It rests on emotional investments.
Children in Greece are exposed to a unique literary situation as they live in a monolingual society which uses two different alphabetical systems: the Greek alphabet and the Roman alphabet. Since the school curriculum of preschool education does not include the teaching of Greek or non-Greek letters, environmental print is mainly responsible for primitive hypotheses about letters. In this research 504 preschoolers were tested regarding their ability to differentiate between the two alphabets which circulate widely in the Greek urban print environment. It was showed that preschoolers, although unable to read, were able to differentiate between texts written with Greek or Roman letters. This gives strong evidence for the conclusion that, apart from the major role that visual language plays in the reading of environmental print, information about actual letters is also absorbed by preschoolers.
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.