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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.
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.
Bestimmte seit den sechziger Jahren zur Analyse früher kindlicher Äußerungen benutzte Beschreibungsmodelle unterschätzen die sprachliche Kompetenz des Kindes, indem sie die Struktur seiner Äußerungen auf Distributionsphänomene der Oberflächenstruktur reduzieren, andere Modelle überschätzen diese Kompetenz, indem sie kindlichen Äußerungen mehr sprachliche Information zuschreiben, als sie enthalten. Wenn außersprachliche Information auf systematische Art und Weise in die Untersuchung der sprachlichen Kommunikation zwischen Kind und Erwachsenem einbezogen wird, findet einerseits die Tatsache eine Erklärung, daß diese Kommunikation in so erstaunlichem Maße erfolgreich ist, andererseits erlaubt diese Beschreibungsweise es aber, frühe kindliche Äußerungen als sprachlich so undeterminiert darzustellen, wie sie sind.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was designed in order to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. MAIN is suitable for children from 3 to 10 years and evaluates both comprehension and production of narratives. Its design allows for the assessment of several languages in the same child, as well as for different elicitation modes: Model Story, Retelling, and Telling. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. The instrument has been developed on the basis of extensive piloting with more than 550 monolingual and bilingual children aged 3 to 10, for 15 different languages and language combinations. Even though MAIN has not been norm-referenced yet, its standardized procedures can be used for evaluation, intervention and research purposes. MAIN is currently available in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
updated version --
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was designed in order to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. MAIN is suitable for children from 3 to 10 years and evaluates both comprehension and production of narratives. Its design allows for the assessment of several languages in the same child, as well as for different elicitation modes: Model Story, Retelling, and Telling. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. The instrument has been developed on the basis of extensive piloting with more than 550 monolingual and bilingual children aged 3 to 10, for 15 different languages and language combinations. Even though MAIN has not been norm-referenced yet, its standardized procedures can be used for evaluation, intervention and research purposes. MAIN is currently available in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was designed in order to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. MAIN is suitable for children from 3 to 10 years and evaluates both comprehension and production of narratives. Its design allows for the assessment of several languages in the same child, as well as for different elicitation modes: Model Story, Retelling, and Telling.
MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness.
The instrument has been developed on the basis of extensive piloting with more than 550 monolingual and bilingual children aged 3 to 10, for 15 different languages and language combinations.
Even though MAIN has not been norm-referenced yet, its standardized procedures can be used for evaluation, intervention and research purposes. MAIN is currently available in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It has been previously reported that in languages demonstrating the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage the use of RIs is characterized by two properties: these forms are overwhelmingly eventive and have, in the majority of instances, a modal interpretation. Hoekstra and Hyams (1998, 1999) have proposed a theory stating that these two properties of RIs are co-dependent in that the application of the modal reference restriction limits the use of the aspectual verbal classes to eventive predicates. Furthermore, this theory assumed that the described mutual dependency of these constraints was valid cross-linguistically.
In this paper, we investigate the application of this theory to the case of RIs in Russian, one of the languages exhibiting the RI Stage. Using new longitudinal data from two monolingual Russian-speaking children, we demonstrate that the predictions of Hoekstra and Hyams’ approach are not realized for Russian child speech. While the constraint requiring that Ris have a modal reference does not seem to apply in Russian since the infinitival forms do receive past and present tense interpretation, these predicates are still overwhelmingly eventive and stative predicates appear mostly as finite verbs. Having shown that a theory connecting the application of the two restrictions on RIs does not account for the Russian data, we examine several alternative analyses of Russian RIs. We arrive at a conclusion that an explanation based on the lack of the event variable in stative predicates (Kratzer 1989) necessary for the interpretation of RIs in discourse (Avrutin 1997) succeeds in handling the Russian data presented in this article.
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.
On the early development of aspect in greek and russian child language, a comparative analysis
(2003)
The category of aspect is grammaticized in both Greek and Russian opposing perfective and imperfective verb forms in all inflectional categories except the nonpast (‘present’). Despite these similarities there are important differences in the way the aspectual systems function in the two languages. While in Greek nearly all verbs oppose a perfective to a given imperfective grammatical form, Russian aspect is more strongly lexicalized with pairs of imperfective and perfective lexemes not only differing aspectually, but also as far as their lexical meanings are concerned. This is especially true of perfective verbs formed by prefixes as compared to their imperfective bases. Thus, in pairs of prefixed and unprefixed dynamic verbs, the derived prefixed (perfective) member has a telic meaning while its unprefixed (imperfective) counterpart is atelic (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. jest’ (IPF) ‘to eat’). Such derived perfective verbs may in turn be “secondarily” imperfectivized by suffixation furnishing the only “true” perfective/imperfective pairs of verbs (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. sjedat’ (IPF) ‘to eat up’ (iterative)). “Secondary” imperfectives do not occur in our child data.
In this pilot study, we will analyze the tense-aspect-mood forms of the 20 most frequent verbs with equivalent meanings occurring in the longitudinal audiotaped data of a Greek and a Russian boy between 2;1 and 2;3 (their entire lexical inventories comprise approx. 100 verbs each).
We adopt a constructivist perspective on the development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language and will show that in spite of a broad inventory of imperfective and perfective verb forms to be found in the speech of both children aspect has not yet developed into a generalized grammatical category, but is strongly dependent on aktionsart (stative/dynamic, telic/atelic) in both languages. While this results in a strong preference for perfective verb forms of telic verbs and of imperfective forms of atelic ones in the speech of the Greek boy, the Russian child tends to use the unmarked members.
This paper studies the acquisition process of Spanish verbal morphology in a monolingual child. The study focuses on the period of the first 50 verb lemmas. This covers the period from age 1;7 till 1;10.
The data shows that the verb acquisition process of this Spanish child follows three main stages:
1. A lexical stage in which verbs are only acquired as a lexical element.
2. A syntactic stage in which the verb, still contemplated as a non-split word, becomes the main element in the development of thematic and semantic relations.
3. A morphological stage in which verb suffixes begin to be analysed separately. At this stage, the relationship between form and meaning starts and the functional categories linked to the verb (tense, aspect, agreement, mood... ) begin to be acquired. Just at this moment, the first miniparadigms appear, which suggests that the acquisition process of verb morphology has started.
The first two stages are premorphological and cover in our child the period till 1;9. In the last stage, which begins at 1;10, the child enters the protomorphological stage.
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.