As the population of Spanish-English bilingual children in the United States steadily grows, the importance of accurately assessing and diagnosing developmental language disorder (DLD) has also grown. Understanding a child's underlying language learning system is critical in this process. Several studies have demonstrated the efficacy of nonword repetition (NWR) tasks in bilingual children across a wide range of development, however there is little information regarding guidelines for interpretation of NWR performance or analyzing error patterns. This study was conducted to address these gaps in the research. A sample of 26 Spanish-English bilingual school aged children (6;0-9;4) were administered English and Spanish NWR, recalling sentences, and narrative tasks. Total errors, as well as errors of omission and substitution were examined across tasks, languages, and language group (typically developing-TD and developmental language disorder- DLD). Descriptive statistics revealed that DLD children made a higher number of errors across language tasks in Spanish and English than their TD peers. Group membership predicted total errors in the Spanish NWR task while controlling for age and language proficiency. Language proficiency was not a significant predictor for any of the error types above and beyond group membership. Therefore, when age and language input/output were controlled for, language ability was best predictor of the number of errors. Additionally, results showed stronger correlations between Spanish across all three language tasks in TD children and in English across two language tasks in DLD children. According to the results of the current study, total errors is the only effective error measure of language ability. However, looking at error patterns across language and language group can be informative regarding bilingual children's language learning systems. Future research should be conducted to repeat the study with a larger sample size and investigate the difference in error patterns between languages in TD and DLD children.

No description available.

Previous computerized models of child language acquisition have sought to determine how children acquire grammatical word categories (GWCs). The current study seeks to determine if statistical structure can be corroborated as a factor in GWC acquisition. Previous studies examining statistical structure have dealt with word order rather than GWC order and only examined an overall success rate. The present study examines how well a computer model of child acquisition of GWCs was able to reorganize scrambled sentences back into the correct GWC order using transitional probabilities extracted from adult language input. Overall, a 50% success rate was obtained, but when broken down by utterance length, utterances up to eight words in length had a success rate much higher than chance. Thus, it is likely that statistical structure informs children's acquisition of GWCs.

La langue maternelle (L1) peut faciliter l’apprentissage du genre grammatical (GG) en langue seconde (L2), d’autant plus si, d’après certains chercheurs, les deux systèmes de genre présentent des similitudes. Les études – relativement peu nombreuses (par ex. Sabourin et al. 2006, Ellis et al. 2012, et Ragnhildstveit 2017) – comparant l’appropriation du genre en L2 à partir de plus de deux groupes d’apprenants avec différentes L1, appréhendent souvent différents phénomènes morphosyntaxiques sous la même rubrique d’« accord grammatical » en genre. Aussi s’attardent-elles peu sur les critères utilisés pour déterminer le degré de proximité ou d’éloignement de la L1 à la L2. La présente recherche applique une approche différente des études précédentes en distinguant la maîtrise de trois sous-systèmes du GG en français langue seconde (FL2), à savoir l’assignation (SA), l’accord (SAC) et la reprise pronominale (SRP) du GG, et elle étudie la maîtrise du genre en français L2 à partir de plusieurs L1 à l’aide d’une grille paramétrique définissant le degré de proximité ou d’éloignement des langues considérées pour chaque sous-système. Notre recherche porte sur un corpus de productions orales de trois groupes d’apprenants âgés entre 9 et 11 ans (n=75) de L1 différentes, à savoir l’allemand (25), l’anglais (25) et l’espagnol (25). Tous ont bénéficié d’un input comparable en français comme première langue étrangère et sont scolarisés dans un contexte d’apprentissage plurilingue identique. Les résultats globaux, qui se concentrent sur la maîtrise de ces trois sous-systèmes du GG en FL2, indiquent qu’il existe un lien entre le degré de précision atteint pour ces sous-systèmes en FL2 et les différences paramétriques observées entre le système de GG de la L1 et celui du français. Les données confirment néanmoins que l’étendue de l’impact de la L1 sur les taux de précision du GG en FL2 n’est pas parallèle selon le sous-système envisagé pour chaque groupe d’apprenants. / Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The creation of word embeddings is one of the key breakthroughs in natural language processing. Word embeddings allow for words to be represented semantically, opening the way to many new deep learning methods. Understanding what information is in word embeddings will help understanding the behaviour of embeddings in natural language processing tasks, but also allows for the quantitative study of the linguistic features such as grammatical gender. This thesis attempts to explore how grammatical gender is encoded in word embeddings, through analysing the performance of a neural network classifier on the classification of nouns by gender. This analysis is done in three experiments: an analysis of contextualized embeddings, an analysis of embeddings learned from modified corpora and an analysis of aligned embeddings in many languages. The contextualized word embedding model ELMo has multiple output layers with a gradual increasing presence of semantic information in the embedding. This differing presence of semantic information was used to test the classifier's reliance on semantic information. Swedish, German, Spanish and Russian embeddings were classified at all layers of a three layered ELMo model. The word representation layer without any contextualization was found to produce the best accuracy, indicating the noise introduced by the contextualization was more impactful than any potential extra semantic information. Swedish embeddings were learned from a corpus stripped of articles and a stemmed corpus. Both sets of embeddings showed an drop of about 6% in accuracy in comparison with the embeddings from a non-augmented corpus, indicating agreement plays a large role in the classification. Aligned multilingual embeddings were used to measure the accuracy of a grammatical gender classifier in 24 languages. The classifier models were applied to data of other languages to determine the similarity of the encoding of grammatical gender in these embeddings. Correcting the results with a random guessing baseline shows that transferred models can be highly accurate in certain language combinations and in some cases almost approach the accuracy of the model on its source data. A comparison between transfer accuracy and phylogenetic distance showed that the model transferability follows a pattern that resembles the phylogenetic distance.

Students who speak local varieties (i.e., dialects) of English that differ from the codified variety promoted in school are at a disadvantage. Research illustrates that differences in sound systems, grammar, vocabulary, and usage can negatively affect literacy development and achievement in math and science, and lead to misunderstandings and changes in teacher attitudes toward students. Moreover, the use of inappropriate assessment tools may result in unnecessary pathologization and inappropriate pedagogical approaches. Since many Indigenous children may speak local varieties, it is reasonable to assume that the same issues that hinder school success for speakers of other varieties affect many Indigenous students in Canada in similar ways. However, to date, research concerning Indigenous Englishes in Canada is scant. Similarly, virtually no empirical evidence has been gathered on use in Canadian schools. By extension, the trajectory of use of features as children progress through grades remains unknown. The goal of this research was to begin to address the crucial necessity of learning more about Indigenous English varieties, in order that appropriate language assessment and pedagogical practices can be implemented. The research, conducted in a remote community in Northern British Columbia, Canada, concentrates on differences in grammar used by a group of First Nations school-aged children. I analyzed oral narrative language samples of Kindergarteners, and oral and written narrative language samples of students in Kindergarten to Grade 5, over a three-year period. Results reveal the presence of at least 23 distinct grammatical features, many of which may have been influenced by the structure of the ancestral language. At school entry, students used grammatical features at high rates, regardless of whether or not they later required speech-language pathology or special education services. As children progressed through the grades, the rate at which they produced features appeared to follow a curvilinear trajectory, declining until grades 3 and 4 and then gradually rising again in middle school. A preference for using shorter sentences with less use of subordination and embedding of clauses also appears to be a feature of this variety. Most of the features the children used in their speech, they also used in their writing. Children had the most difficulty switching to standard English forms of verb tense, and so verb tense may require more direct instruction. While my results may not be directly generalizable to other First Nations communities, it is anticipated that educators will use them as a guide in their practice and instruction, so they can cease confusing features of a local variety with errors requiring “correction”, avoid unnecessary pathologization, and adjust expectations regarding the rate at which children can be expected to acquire the codified standard language model. It is also hoped that this study will contribute to the preservation and celebration of the unique ways of speaking English that have evolved in northern communities. / Graduate / 2021-09-16

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This diploma thesis deals with the grammar curriculum of Russian language in the Czech teaching resources for B1 level and compares it with the requirements of the Standard for teaching Russian as a foreign language. The theoretical part of the thesis defines terms related to grammar; it describes and compares Czech and Russian curriculum documents and concerns with the Russian grammar teaching in the communicative approach. The last chapter of this part discusses the role of a teaching resource in the teaching process, the selection of such a resource and the description of individual resources for B1 level. The practical part presents the results of the content analysis of the teaching resources with respect to their minimum required grammar, which is first described individually for each resource and then compared with the requirements of the Standard for teaching Russian as a foreign language. Afterwards, the results are clearly summarized. KEY WORDS: minimum required grammar, morphology, syntax, teaching grammar, positive transfer, negative transfer, analysis

Noun clauses are grammatical constructions that are of relevance both to typical language development and impaired language development. These clauses have been part of published techniques for the clinical analysis of language samples, and computer software for the automated analysis of clinical language samples has attempted to identify noun clauses, with limited success. The present study examined the development and clinical use of noun clauses as well as the automated identification of these clauses. Two sets of language samples were examined. One set consisted of 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI) whose age ranged from 7;6 to 11;1 (years;months), 10 peers matched for language development equivalence, and 10 peers matched for chronological age. The second set of samples were from 30 children considered to be typically developing, who ranged in age from 2;6 to 7;11. Language sample utterances were manually coded for the presence of noun clauses (including wh- noun clauses, that- noun clauses, and gerunds.) Samples were then automatically tagged using software. Results were tabulated and compared for accuracy. ANCOVA revealed that differences in the frequencies of WH-infinitive noun clauses and gerunds were significant between the matched groups. "Zero that clauses" (that-noun clauses containing no subordinator that) and gerunds were significantly correlated with age. Kappa levels revealed that agreement between manual and automated coding was high on WH-infinitive clauses, gerunds, and finite wh-noun clauses.

Research has shown that children with Language Impairment (LI) struggle with social communication skills in addition to their characteristic syntactic difficulties. This pilot study analyzed the potential change in grammatical complexity in narratives of five children with LI when enrolled in a social communication intervention. The intervention itself focused on teaching emotion understanding by reading and reenacting children’s stories and journaling. Grammatical limitations were indirectly addressed by clinician modeling of complex forms during the intervention sessions. Each child’s productions were assessed and analyzed for grammatical complexity during retelling a book in the Mercer Mayer “a boy, a dog, and a frog” series. The children performed this task once a week during the course of the intervention. Specific measures used included the average length of terminable unit (T-unit) and the number of subordinate clauses used in each narrative. Three students’ productions remained steady throughout the course of the interventions; their grammatical complexity neither increased nor decreased. One student’s production showed a clear decrease in complexity but was explained by an obvious and arguably more creative change in her language output. One student’s grammatical complexity increased throughout the sessions as indicated by a steady increase in the average length of T-unit. Thus, the results of this study were equivocal. There were several limitations, however, that might be addressed in future intervention studies.