Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 49-52).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-187). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D., Stockholm University, 1997). / Includes bibliographical references (p. [302]-319).

Thesis (M.S.)--Missouri State University, 2009. / "May 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 22-23). Also available online.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, May, 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

[pt] Assumindo uma perspectiva interacionista do desenvolvimento, acredita-se que no processo de aquisição e desenvolvimento da linguagem, biologia, natureza e cultura não podem ser consideradas como elementos separados dentro do desenvolvimento humano. Sendo assim, pressupõe-se que o contato com membros da sua comunidade linguística e, principalmente, a figura materna, são de fundamental importância para o desenvolvimento da linguagem infantil. O presente estudo longitudinal buscou investigar, a partir de aspectos sintáticos e semânticos, qual o papel da fala materna nesse processo. Para isso, participaram quatro díades mãe-bebê – uma menina e três meninos – que foram filmados uma vez por semana, durante quarenta minutos. A fala materna foi transcrita e analisada, bem como o desenvolvimento da linguagem do bebê, que foi medido através do MacArthur Inventary of Communicative Abilities (Inventário do desenvolvimento de habilidades comunicativas). Com os resultados, foram observadas algumas semelhanças e distinções entre as díades. Houve o predomínio de emissões maternas afirmativas para as quatro díades estudadas. As emissões negativas foram as que menos apareceram na fala materna. Sobre os aspectos semânticos, identificou-se o predomínio da fala materna relacionada ao contexto, seguida pela fala relacionada à criança e, por último, a fala relacionada à díade, em todas as díades observadas. Ademais, houve um aumento significativo no número de palavras produzidas pelas crianças participantes ao longo dos seis meses. Acredita-se que esse estudo possa colaborar e acrescentar na literatura referente ao desenvolvimento da linguagem infantil e, principalmente, contribuir com dados do contexto brasileiro sobre o papel da fala materna nesse processo. / [en] Assuming an interactionist perspective of development, it is believed that in the process of acquisition and development of language, biology, nature and culture can not be considered as separate elements within human development. Thus, it is assumed that the contact with members of their linguistic community and, especially, the maternal figure, are of fundamental importance for the development of children s language. The present longitudinal study sought to investigate, from syntactic and semantic aspects, the role of maternal speech in this process. For this, four mother-baby dyads - one girl and three boys - were filmed once a week for forty minutes. The maternal speech was transcribed and analyzed, as well as the development of the baby s language, which was measured through the MacArthur Inventary of Communicative Abilities. With the results, some similarities and distinctions between the dyads were observed. There was a predominance of affirmative maternal emissions for the four dyads studied. Negative emissions were the ones that least appeared in maternal speech. On the semantic aspects, we identified the predominance of maternal speech related to the context, followed by speech related to the child and, finally, the speech related to the dyad, in all the dyads observed. In addition, there was a significant increase in the number of words produced by the participating children over the six months. It is believed that this study can collaborate and add in the literature regarding the development of children s language and, mainly, contribute with data from the Brazilian context on the role of maternal speech in this process.

Anna Jagošová, Současný dětský folklor Abstract The diploma thesis deals with the current form of children's verbal folklore. It focuses specifically on children's games, , taunts and marginally rhymes and songs with a steady and mostly rhyme structure. The aim of this thesis is to compare the expression of current children's verbal folklore with the expression of traditional children's verbal folklore. Describe their characteristics and compare with the already proposed categorization (Jelínková, 1952, Tucker, 2008), or eventually propose own categorization, and primarily to analyze the expression of children's verbal folklore in terms of the Czech language. Attention will be also paid to the context of children's folklore expressions in the school environment, whether as part of teaching or a leisure activity. The diploma thesis aims to follow current (and traditional) children's folklore interdisciplinary insert of Czech studies and ethnology. Due to ongoing exceptional situation related to Covid - 19 pandemic which limits the possibilities of field research, the main starting material is the already existing collections of children's folklore, especially sources published in books (eg. Votruba 2009 and Votruba 2010), and internet resources. These should be presented in the thesis as a new field for...

The aim of this Master thesis is to present language situation in relation to mother tongue of students of Czech school without borders (abbreviated as CSBH Paris). The thesis is divides into two parts -theoretical and practical. In the first part, we define terms such as mother tongue, the first language and the second (foreign) language. This thesis deal with bilingualism and multilingualism, which are important for determination of the target group of pupils of the CSBH Paris. With use of questionnaires applied on students and parents we can determine specific czech-french bilingualism of students of CSBH Paris. In the second part we analyze educational materials - textbooks that are used by teachers at CSBH Paris, and at the end we get to the subject of your practical research, outline specific teaching methods and design teaching materials that can be used in Czech language classes with regard to linguistic reality of pupils in the second grade of the Czech School without borders Paris. Key words: mother tongue, bilingualism, curriculum, Czech school without borders, teaching materials, textbooks

Studies of Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian language learners converge on the finding that morphological features of nouns are first generalized to word clusters of high morpho-phonological similarities such as diminutives, that grammatical categorisation is are more easily applied to novel words that fall into these clusters. The present thesis explores whether the facilitating effect of diminutives on the acquisition of complex noun morphology can be extended to Serbian, a south Slavic language, morphologically similar to Russian and Polish. Specifically, the thesis explores the role of parameters responsible for the obtained diminutive advantage: high frequency of a particular cluster of words in child-directed speech (CDS) and morpho-phonological homogeneity within this cluster. A corpus analysis of the distribution of diminutives in Serbian CDS indicated a rather unexpected difference in frequency relative to Russian and Polish CDS, despite the high similarity of the diminutive derivation across these three Slavic languages. Out of the total number of nouns in Serbian CDS only 7% were diminutives, compared to 20-30% in Polish and 45% in Russian. Two experimental studies explored whether the low frequency of diminutives in Serbian CDS attenuates the diminutive advantage in morphology learning compared to Russian and Polish. In the first two experiments, Serbian children exhibited a strong diminutive advantage for both gender agreement and case marking in the same range as Russian children, indicating that morpho-phonological homogeneity within the cluster of diminutives may play as important a role as their frequency for grammatical categorisation of novel nouns. A third study investigated in more detail the effects of morpho-phonological homogeneity on the emergence of the diminutive advantage using a gender-agreement task with novel nouns in simplex and pseudo-diminutive form over four sessions with Serbian children. The results showed a pseudo-diminutive advantage for gender agreement by Session 2, suggesting that the categorisation of nouns into grammatical categories is based on morpho-phonological homogeneity of the word cluster, emerges relatively fast, and can occur despite the much lower frequency of diminutives in Serbian CDS. Finally, a series of neural network simulations designed to capture the pattern of results from the third experimental study was used to examine to what extent a simple associative learning mechanism, relying on morpho-phonological similarity of the noun endings, can explain the findings. The performance of three models, a whole-word feed-forward network, a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) and a last-syllable feed-forward network, was compared to the experimental data. The superior fit of the SRN suggests that gender learning is based on a very fast sequential build-up of representations of the entire word, allowing the system to exploit the predictive power of word stems to anticipate regularised endings. Overall, the findings of this thesis contribute to our general understanding of mechanisms responsible for the acquisition of complex inflectional noun morphology in two ways. First, by extending experimental studies and neural network simulations to Serbian, the results underline the universality of the idea that noun morphology is learned and processed through a single-route associative mechanism based on the frequency and morpho-phonological structure of nouns. More specifically, the results from experimental studies and neural network simulations demonstrate that for diminutives, the low-level grammatical categorisation is based mainly on the morpho-phonological similarity of word endings, and can emerge after just a few exposures. And second, the neural network simulations suggest that during the process of categorisation of nouns into gender categories, learners rely not only on predictable information from the noun endings, but also on phonological regularities in the stems of nouns. Taken together, these findings contribute also to a better understanding of the facilitating role of CDS in morphology acquisition.

<p>Language impairment affects the ability to communicate. Children with languageimpairment have difficulties in using language in interaction to various degrees, and the contributions of the conversational partner are of great importance. The use of languagein interaction can be analysed by means of conversation analysis. The purpose of thepresent study was to study interaction of a group of pre-school children with language impairment with four different conversational partners. These were a peer with languag eimpairment, a peer with typical language development, a pre-school teacher and a parent. This study also intended to analyze the conversations in terms of similarities and differences between the participation frameworks. In all, 12 conversations were analyzedby using conversation analysis. A number of phenomena of interest were identified. The frequency of occurence of some of these phenomena was calculated to complement the qualitative analysis. The results show a number of phenomena occurring where mutualunderstanding is present and when it is limited. These phenomena are sequencing in theform of initiative-response and question-answer, back-channelling, development of conversational topic, breakdown, non-sequencing, topic drift, repair, clarification requestand confirmation. The results also demonstrate differences in the conversations betweenthe participation frameworks with reference to the frequency and the distinction of thephenomena. The greatest differences are found between child-child and adult-childconversations. The pre-school teacher and the parents ask more questions and use more clarification requests and confirmations than the children with language impairment. The development of conversational topics is more distinct in child-adult conversations. The development of conversational topics also occurs to some extent in conversations between two children with language impaiment. In conversations between a child withlanguage impairment and a child with typical language development this phenomenon isgenerally indistinct. Utterances lacking topical coherence in relation to each other areonly distinctly occuring in conversations between two children with language impairment. The pre-school teacher and the parents all perform more distinct other repairsthan the children with language impairment.</p> / <p>En språkstörning påverkar den kommunikativa förmågan. Barn med språkstörning harolika grad av svårighet i språklig interaktion med andra människor och samtalspartnern spelar en betydande roll. Samtalsanalys är ett sätt att analysera den faktiskaspråkanvändningen. Syftet med föreliggande studie var att studera interaktion hos engrupp förskolebarn med språkstörning i fyra olika deltagarstrukturer. De olika deltagarstrukturerna var samtal med ett annat barn med språkstörning, ett barn medtypisk språkutveckling, en person ur förskolepersonalen samt en förälder. Vidare syftade studien till att analysera likheter och skillnader i samtalen mellan de olika deltagarstrukturerna. Totalt analyserades 12 samtal med samtalsanalys, conversationanalysis (CA). Under analysen valdes ett antal fenomen ut och kompletterandeberäkningar gjordes på några av de utvalda fenomenen i samtalen. Resultatet visar att detfinns ett antal fenomen som belyser samförståelse och begränsad samförståelse i samtalen. Dessa fenomen utgörs av sekvensering i form av initiativ-respons och frågasvar, återkoppling, utvecklande av samtalsämne, sammanbrott, icke-relevant svar, yttrande som inte ämnesmässigt koherent i förhållande till föregående yttrande, ämnesglidning, reparation, begäran om förtydligande samt bekräftande av föregående yttrande. I resultatet framkommer skillnader i samtalen mellan de olika deltagarstrukturerna med avseende på hur ofta dessa fenomen förekommer och hur tydliga de är. De största skillnaderna återfinns mellan barn-barn- och barnvuxensamtalen. Personalen och föräldrarna ställer fler frågor samt begär förtydligande och bekräftar föregående yttrande i större utsträckning än barnen med språkstörning. Utvecklande av samtalsämne är tydligast i barn-vuxensamtalen. Utvecklande av samtalsämne förekommer också i viss utsträckning i deltagarstrukturen barn med språkstörning-barn med språkstörning. I deltagarstrukturen barn med språkstörning-barn med typisk språkutveckling är detta fenomen generellt otydligt. Yttranden som saknar ämnesmässig koherens i förhållande till varandra är endast tydligt förekommande ideltagarstrukturen barn med språkstörning-barn med språkstörning. Personalen och föräldrarna utför tydligare annan reparationer än barnen med språkstörning.</p>