scholarly journals Does Timing in Acquisition Modulate Heritage Children’s Language Abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Christos Makrodimitris ◽  
Petra Schulz

Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures.

Author(s):  
Bernadette Witecy ◽  
Tatjana Tolkmit ◽  
Martina Penke

The present study investigated the morphosyntactic abilities of German-speaking individuals with Down syndrome (DS) employing a sentence repetition task. In addition, a nonword repetition task was used to assess verbal short-term memory. The performance of 16 children/adolescents with DS was compared to that of 10 typically developing (TD) children. Group comparisons as well as the inspection of standard scores that were determined based on nonverbal mental age indicated a significant morphosyntactic impairment in most individuals with DS that could neither be solely attributed to the general cognitive delay nor to the observed deficit in verbal verbal short-term memory. Further qualitative results are presented.


2009 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dianne F. Newbury ◽  
Laura Winchester ◽  
Laura Addis ◽  
Silvia Paracchini ◽  
Lyn-Louise Buckingham ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1S) ◽  
pp. 379-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Minkina ◽  
Nadine Martin ◽  
Kristie A. Spencer ◽  
Diane L. Kendall

Purpose This study explored the relationship between anomia and verbal short-term memory (STM) in the context of an interactive activation language processing model. Method Twenty-four individuals with aphasia and reduced STM spans (i.e., impaired immediate serial recall of words) completed a picture-naming task and a word pair repetition task (a measure of verbal STM). Correlations between verbal STM and word retrieval errors made on the picture-naming task were examined. Results A significant positive correlation between naming accuracy and verbal span length was found. More intricate verbal STM analyses examined the relationship between picture-naming error types (i.e., semantic vs. phonological) and 2 measures of verbal STM: (a) location of errors on the word pair repetition task and (b) imageability and frequency effects on the word pair repetition task. Results indicated that, as phonological word retrieval errors (relative to semantic) increase, bias toward correct repetition of high-imageability words increases. Conclusions Results suggest that word retrieval and verbal STM tasks likely rely on a partially shared temporary linguistic activation process.


CoDAS ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 422-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amalia Rodrigues ◽  
Debora Maria Befi-Lopes

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to design a short-term memory test, to describe quantitative performance in typically language developing children and to verify the relationship between the non-words repetition and oral phonological measure. METHODS: The participants included 136 typically language developing children aged from 3 years to 6 years and 11 months old in this study, who were evaluated. The test consisted of 40 non-words of one, two, three, and four syllables. The subjects' repetitions were transcribed and the number of right answers was calculated for each age range. RESULTS: The effect of age was observed in the test, as well as the effect of length, only for disyllabic non-words. The performance in the non-word repetition task showed correlation with the oral phonology measure. CONCLUSION: The test designed in this research was able to verify the short-term memory in typically language developing children and the results showed correlation between this memory and phonological performance.


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