scholarly journals Complexity of syntactic structure in non-native language in bilingual children

Norma ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Jelena Vrućinić ◽  
Vesela Milankov ◽  
Ivana Matić ◽  
Staša Ivezić ◽  
Milica Stelkić
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Production Test ◽  
Assessment Instruments ◽  
Sentence Structure

Serbian and Slovak are related languages and both languages belong to the group of Slavic languages. It is important to point out that bilingualism can have a negative impact on children's education, especially when they are not equally exposed to the use of both languages, as is the case with Slovaks in the Republic of Serbia. The aim of this paper is to determine the complexity of the syntactic structure in the non - mother tongue in bilingual children whose mother tongue is Slovak. The sample of children included forty children aged 7 years. The research was conducted at the Elementary School "Ljudovit Stur" in Kisac, and at the Elementary School "Jozef Marchok Dragutin" in Glozan. The assessment instruments used were: "Speech-language production test" and a bilingual questionnaire. The results obtained in this research speak in favor of a more complex syntactic sentence structure in bilingual children in their mother tongue compared to their non-mother tongue. We can conclude that bilingualism as a phenomenon has a great influence on the development of language, and thus on syntactic development. Slow language development can often occur due to the complexity of acquiring two languages at the same time.

Similarities in the Syntactic Structure of the German and Croatian Language

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-118
Author(s):  
Manuela Svoboda
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
German Language ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Subordinate Clauses

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to analyse any potential similarities between the Croatian and German language and present them adopting a contrastive approach with the intent of simplifying the learning process in regards to the German syntactic structure for Croatian German as foreign language students. While consulting articles and books on the theories and methods of foreign language teaching, attention is usually drawn to differences between the mother tongue and the foreign language, especially concerning false friends etc. The same applies to textbooks, workbooks and how teachers behave in class. Thus, it is common practice to deal with the differences between the foreign language and the mother tongue but less with similarities. This is unfortunate considering that this would likely aid in acquiring certain grammatical and syntactic structures of the foreign language. In the author's opinion, similarities are as, if not more, important than differences. Therefore, in this article the existence of similarities between the Croatian and German language will be examined closer with a main focus on the segment of sentence types. Special attention is drawn to subordinate clauses as they play an important role when speaking and/or translating sentences from Croatian to German and vice versa. In order to present and further clarify this matter, subordinate clauses in both the German and Croatian language are defined, clarified and listed to gain an oversight and to present possible similarities between the two. In addition, the method to identify subordinate clauses in a sentence is explained as well as what they express, which conjunctions are being used for each type of subordinate clause in both languages and where the similarities and/or differences between the two languages lie.

Early emergence of syntactic awareness and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s judgments

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra Foursha-Stevenson ◽  
Elena Nicoladis
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Language Choice ◽  
Preschool Age ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Syntactic Awareness ◽  
Grammaticality Judgment ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
French And English ◽  
Better Than

Bilingual children sometimes perform better than same-aged monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tasks, such as a grammaticality judgment. Some of these differences can be attributed to bilinguals having to learn to control attention to language choice. This study tested the hypothesis that bilingual children, as young as preschool age, would score overall higher than monolingual children on a grammaticality judgment test. French–English bilingual preschoolers judged the acceptability of three constructions in French and English (i.e. adjective–noun ordering, obligatoriness of a determiner, and object pronoun placement). Their performance was compared with that of a group of age-matched English monolinguals. The results showed that the bilingual children scored higher than the monolingual children. These results demonstrate that syntactic awareness develops quite early for bilinguals. Additionally, the bilingual children demonstrated cross-linguistic influence of core syntactic structure in French, as their judgments were affected by English acceptability.

Connective use in the narratives of bilingual children and monolingual children with SLI

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELENA TRIBUSHININA ◽  
WILLEM M. MAK ◽  
ELIZAVETA ANDREIUSHINA ◽  
ELENA DUBINKINA ◽  
TED SANDERS
Keyword(s):  
Structural Properties ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Error Rates ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Input Quantity ◽  
Frequency Distributions ◽  
Bilingual Group ◽  
Crosslinguistic Influence ◽  
Discourse Connectives

Differences between monolinguals and bilinguals are often attributed to crosslinguistic influence. This paper compares production of discourse connectives by Dutch–Russian bilinguals (Dutch-dominant), typically-developing Dutch/Russian monolinguals and Russian-speaking children with SLI. If non-target-like production in bilinguals is due to crosslinguistic influence, bilinguals should perform differently from both impaired and unimpaired monolinguals. However, if differences between bilinguals and monolinguals are due to other factors (e.g., input quantity, processing capacities), bilinguals’ language production might be similar to that of children with SLI. The results demonstrate that language dominance determines the direction of crosslinguistic influence. In terms of frequency distributions of Russian connectives across pragmatic contexts, the bilingual group performed differently from both monolingual groups and the differences were compatible with the structural properties of Dutch. However, based on error rates and types bilinguals could not be distinguished from the SLI group, suggesting that factors other than crosslinguistic influence may also be at play.

scholarly journals A Self-Supervised Representation Learning of Sentence Structure for Authorship Attribution

2022 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Fereshteh Jafariakinabad ◽  
Kien A. Hua
Keyword(s):  
Structural Information ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
Authorship Attribution ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Vector Representation ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Neural Models ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
Classification Tasks

The syntactic structure of sentences in a document substantially informs about its authorial writing style. Sentence representation learning has been widely explored in recent years and it has been shown that it improves the generalization of different downstream tasks across many domains. Even though utilizing probing methods in several studies suggests that these learned contextual representations implicitly encode some amount of syntax, explicit syntactic information further improves the performance of deep neural models in the domain of authorship attribution. These observations have motivated us to investigate the explicit representation learning of syntactic structure of sentences. In this article, we propose a self-supervised framework for learning structural representations of sentences. The self-supervised network contains two components; a lexical sub-network and a syntactic sub-network which take the sequence of words and their corresponding structural labels as the input, respectively. Due to the n -to-1 mapping of words to their structural labels, each word will be embedded into a vector representation which mainly carries structural information. We evaluate the learned structural representations of sentences using different probing tasks, and subsequently utilize them in the authorship attribution task. Our experimental results indicate that the structural embeddings significantly improve the classification tasks when concatenated with the existing pre-trained word embeddings.

scholarly journals The Current Situation, Characteristics, and Countermeasures of the Verbal Abuse to Students by Elementary School Teachers: An Empirical Study of Four Provinces and Cities in China

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 739-752
Author(s):  
Qiran Wang ◽  
Yang Li
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Academic Performance ◽  
Elementary School Teachers ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Psychological Trauma ◽  
Verbal Abuse ◽  
Occurrence Rate ◽  
School Teachers ◽  
Poor Academic Performance ◽  
The Government

The negative impact of the verbal abuse on student by the elementary school teachers is a big issue. A total of 416 students from four provinces and cities in China were enrolled in this study. We found that the occurrence rate of the verbal abuse by elementary school teachers was not high, whereas it still caused psychological trauma to students once happened by manifesting as the frustration of learning efficacy, self-confidence and interrelationship. Regarding the causes, student’s poor academic performance was the major reason, and it was significantly related to students’ gender, i.e., male students who had poor academic performance were far more vulnerable to be verbally abused by their teachers. Further, the study also found that students who were verbally abused by teachers were more easily bullied at school. The findings suggest that the government and schools should take joint measures to clarify the specific boundaries of teachers’ verbal punishment to students and standardize their verbal behavior to get teachers respect and care for students and create a healthy learning environment.

Subjecting Sentences: Syntax and Power in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Meliora ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia D'Urso
Keyword(s):  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Grammar Rules ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Subject

Ocean Vuong’s semi-autobiographical novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous opens as a letter to the narrator, Little Dog’s, mother—it is a letter she’ll never be able to read, as she is illiterate in both her Vietnamese mother tongue and the limited English she has learned following her immigration to America. Little Dog, having learned both languages, resists the rigidity of their respective, repressive syntaxes; if syntax functions as ideology—as an imagined set of rules and processes which govern a structure of sentences within a language and, in turn, the subjected bodies which are interpellated by the literal and subsequently constructed Subject of such sentences—then Little Dog opposes such ideology by subverting the hierarchical Subject/subject relationships created within the subject/object sentence structure. Rather than align with Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist argument towards language as based in such hierarchical binary oppositions, Little Dog searches for a new language—one that can truly act as a bridge, rather than a border—often intentionally breaking prosaic form and grammar rules in an effort to unearth it. 

Scoring Second Signed Language Assessment

2021 ◽  
pp. 315-328
Author(s):  
Tobias Haug ◽  
Eveline Boers-Visker ◽  
Wolfgang Mann ◽  
Geoffrey Poor ◽  
Beppie Van den Bogaerde
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
Interrater Reliability ◽  
Language Assessment ◽  
Rating System ◽  
Assessment Instruments ◽  
Validity And Reliability ◽  
Rater Reliability ◽  
Signed Language ◽  
Assessment Research

There exists a scarcity in signed language assessment research, especially on scoring issues and interrater reliability. This chapter describes two related assessment instruments, the SLPI and the NFA, which offer scoring criteria. Raters are provided with scales for evaluating the different components of the language production of the candidate. Through its use, the rating system has been proved successful; there is, however, hardly any data on interrater reliability. In this chapter, the authors describe reliability issues with attention to raters’ training and score resolution techniques and discuss how to identify and increase rater reliability. The dearth of knowledge on signed language assessment, and in particular its validity and reliability, indicates an urgent need for more research in this area.

scholarly journals The role of local and global syntactic structure in language production: Evidence from syntactic priming

2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 974-1010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly P. Branigan ◽  
Martin J. Pickering ◽  
Janet F. McLean ◽  
Andrew J. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Syntactic Priming
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