The thesis deals with the communication of children with Tourette's syndrome. The first part of the thesis, the theoretical part, defines the basic terms concerning specifically the manifestations of Tourette's syndrome. An integral part of Touret-te's syndrome are psychiatric diseases, behavioral disorders and learning disor-ders that children suffer from. The theoretical part of the text is mainly from the study of literature. The second part, the analytical part, is composed of semi-structured interviews, with mothers who are willing to share their experiences with children having Tou-rette's syndrome. All mothers agreed with to beeing recorded and and anonymous proccesing of results for the purpose of the thesis. Keywords Tourette's syndrome, communication, vocal tics, children communication

This study investigates the patterns in nonword repetition performance of children with a developmental language disorder and bilingual children. It has been shown by previous research that both children with developmental language disorder and bilingual children tend to perform poorly in nonword repetition tasks. As these tasks are one of the tools often used for diagnosing markers of DLD in young children, diagnosing bilinguals with DLD proves to be difficult, since both of the groups exhibit a poor performance. An analysis of the patterns found in NWR performance of bilingual children and children with DLD might shed more light onto the issue. The study focuses on analysing the performance in a widely used assessment task - The Children's Test of Nonword Repetition. Three samples of data were analysed. The first sample of data consisted of monolingual English-speaking children diagnosed with a developmental language disorder. The second sample of data consisted of Czech-English bilingual children from international schools in Prague who started acquiring English at the time of birth, i.e. simultaneous bilinguals. The third and final sample consisted of Czech- English bilingual children from international schools in Prague who started acquiring English after one year of age, i.e. sequential bilinguals....

This thesis examines the differences between the Czech and Cuban phonological inventory. It aims to give a theoretical overview of both systems, to define phonemes, which do not exist in Cuban Spanish, and based on recordings of Cuban speakers living in Prague to give evidence of how they pronounce these phonemes. The paper is divided into two parts: in the theoretical part, the inventory of vowels and consonants in both Czech and Cuban language is thoroughly described, consequently the differences between those two inventories, and then the phonemes problematic for Cuban speakers are identified. In the experimental part, all the realizations of Czech phonemes appearing in the recordings are described. The paper looks at the realizations of Czech vowels and consonants in light of four main variables (level of Czech language, length of stay in Czechia, language used at home, and language used at work). Finally, the results of the research are summarized. Even though, there are quite a few different variations of the pronunciation, as the level of language goes up (also because of other variables), the number of variations is decreasing, in certain cases to only one variation that is corresponding with the pronunciation of the Czech speakers. Keywords Contrastive Phonetics; Czech; Cuban Spanish;...

Grammar acquisition is a widely researched area in international psycholinguistics. A great amount of research has focused on determining the order of acquiring grammatical words and forms in individual languages (e.g. Bloom et al., 1980; Brown, 1973; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1973). By contrast, as regards Czech, to this day there has been only a limited amount of data on the process of the acquisition of grammar words and forms based on empirical research or sourced from an adequate number of child respondents. Some findings about Czech grammar acquisition were introduced e.g. by Pačesová (1979), Chejnová (2016a) or Smolík (2002). The present dissertation therefore aims to collect descriptive data on the acquisition of grammatical words and forms in Czech. It also determines whether these grammar acquisition data can be collected using parent reports (e.g. Fenson et al., 1993, 2007; Rescorla, 1989), a method which has been used primarily to monitor the acquisition of lexis. Grammar acquisition has been examined through parent reports only to a limited extent. The dissertation comprises five parent report surveys, aimed at the acquisition of noun and adjective cases, verb forms, prepositions, interrogative expressions, conjunctions and linking expressions. Data were collected from a total of 580...

The thesis presents a pragmatic analysis focused on the repertoire of communicative intents in the speech of a child from the 23rd to the 29th month of its life. The work is based on a case study of one child. The theoretical part of the work in chapters 1-3 is based on the study of literature, especially the literature of communication intentions, pragmatic functions and their expression and relevant literature of language and communication of 2 years old children. Before the start of recording we have obtained informed consent from the parents of a child whose communication were analysed. Basic material for the analysis are the video recordings of family communication of the child in various situations, the material was supplemented by observations and interviews with parents. Video recordings are transcribed according to the principles of CHAT (corpus CHILDES) and then (in chapters 4 and 5) is analysed in terms of recorded communication situations and communicative intents expressed by a child. The results of our work we compare with the results in existing literature.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to describe the realizations of consonant clusters in an age- homogenous group of Czech-speaking children. The theoretical part of this thesis deals with the syllable and consonant clusters as language universals, as well as with the syllable structure and consonant clusters in Czech. Furthermore, some theories of speech acquisition which take combinations of segments and forming of syllable structure in children's speech into account are also presented. A number of studies in consonant cluster acquisition is also summarized. The practical part of this work consists of an experiment in which consonant clusters in 16 typically developing Czech children aged 3;8-4;9 ( x = 4,4) were analysed. Eleven various two-element consonant clusters were selected according to their frequency of occurrence in the corpus of written Czech. Clusters were placed in 30 real words and 30 pseudowords - the pseudowords had the same structure as real words. Imitation was used as a elicitation method. Pictures were used only as complementary elements. The entire sample consisted of 461 consonant clusters realized in real words and 464 clusters realized in pseudowords. We described the structure of the target consonant clusters (i.e. manner and quality/accuracy of realizations) and their...

This diploma thesis deals with the use of the TPR method (Total Physical Response) where the principle is a student who does not speak, only reacts nonverbally to verbal instructions given by a teacher e.g. by moving, drawing, colouring. This method is based on a similarity with learning the mother tongue. The work is divided into a theoretical part consisting of the theoretical background of the given method and the comparison with the process of learning the mother tongue, and a practical part which contains a research survey about the knowledge of using the TPR method at a particular primary school, it also contains general typology of TPR activities and specific examples and an analysis to each type of an activity.

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The present thesis examines the influence of Czech nouns frequency features on their acquisition by non-native speakers. The first theoretical part summarizes the ongoing discussion regarding the importance of frequency for the entrenchment of grammatical categories in one's mind as outlined by cognitive and psycho-linguists abroad. The second introduces the research methodology, collection method and annotation of 20 lemmas obtained from non-native Czech speaker corpus CzeSL-SGT. Subsequently, an analysis of selected nouns is carried out with regard to their grammatical profiles (comprising two or three most frequent case forms as found in SYN2015). Based on its results, the production of non-native speakers shows a tendency to follow grammatical profiles as demonstrated by high correspondence of frequency features of nouns on the one hand and by low error rate in morphology of most frequent forms on the other. Additionally, cases where lower rate does not correspond to the above mentioned model can be explained using type frequency, i.e. the productivity of particular declension models having simultaneously more far-reaching effect, and higher relevance of nominative as the default form for non-native speakers.

This Master's thesis deals with the phenomenon of learning Dutch as a foreign language. The paper draws upon the fundamental theories and methods associated with applied linguistics on second language acquisition, in particular on the interlanguage hypothesis. The theoretical basis to this study comes from psycholinguistic processes that accompany the second language acquisition, such as language transfer, fossilization, overgeneralization and variability. This section is followed by a brief summary of the theory of the Dutch article, in contrast with an outline on how definiteness and indefiniteness are expressed in Czech. The paper also mentions some recent findings on article acquisition by second language learners. The practical part describes and analyses a small corpus of written utterances by Czech students who followed courses of Dutch language and literature at three Czech universities. The corpus consists of utterances made by speakers at two levels of language proficiency. The thesis seeks to observe the differences between lower intermediate and upper intermediate students. The research focuses mainly on general tendencies in article use. Various factors that influence the use of this grammatical category are discussed. Based on the collected data, a number of hypotheses are formulated,...