The literature suggests that childhood maltreatment is related to a higher probability of developing psychopathology and disease in adulthood. However, some authors have questioned the reliability of self-reports of maltreatment, suggesting that psychopathology at the time of evaluation affects self-reports. We evaluated the reliability of the self-reports of 79 young adults who were identified in childhood by Child Protective Services by comparing two moments of evaluation. Psychological and physical symptoms were tested to evaluate their interference with the reports. We found good to excellent agreement, with no significant correlation between the changes in self-reported experiences and the changes in physical and psychological symptoms, suggesting that the reliability of reports is not related to the health state at the time of the report. Keywords Adverse childhood experiences. Reliability. Retrospective reports Research has demonstrated the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and psychopathology (Herrenkohl,
In light of previous research on early bilingualism, this study investigates whether 6-11-year-old child heritage speakers (HSs) of European Portuguese (EP), living in Germany, show patterns of lexical development similar to those of monolingual EP children, both in terms of vocabulary size and of lexical composition. Moreover, it assesses the role of factors related to the quantity and quality of the input in the HSs' lexical development in EP. Twenty-three bilingual and 21 monolingual children were tested on a semi-spontaneous oral production task. The collected data were used to build a corpus composed of three subcorpora (nouns, verbs, adjectives), which served as a basis for between-and within-group comparisons. Information regarding the HSs' language experience was collected by means of a parental questionnaire. Results revealed significant between-group differences concerning the total corpus and the subcorpora of nouns and verbs. Within-group comparisons showed that both groups produced significantly more nouns than verbs and more verbs than adjectives. Correlation analyses revealed that the HSs' lexical knowledge is significantly correlated with the input and output quantity at home as well as with the number of EP-speaking parents. Parents emerge as the key players in the acquisition of EP as a heritage language.
Empirical research in the field of bi-/multilingualism has shown that the acquisition of two (or more) languages during childhood is significantly influenced by the sociolinguistic experience of each individual, namely by the quantity and the quality of language exposure to the target languages (Unsworth 2016a). In fact, the heterogeneity of sociolinguistic contexts in which bilingual acquisition takes place leads to variation in the quantity and quality of the input to which bilingual children are exposed on a daily basis, which, in turn, originates individual variation in the levels of language development in the languages under acquisition, mainly, in the minority language (also known as heritage language/HL; cf. Montrul 2016). In order to assess the effect of language experience on bilingual development, studies usually resort to sociolinguistic questionnaires, which allow the researcher to outline the sociolinguistic profile of the subjects under analysis, as well as to obtain crucial information about predictive variables of bilingual development (see Unsworth 2019). In this paper, we present a sociolinguistic questionnaire, in Portuguese, developed for the collection of data on the sociolinguistic experience of bilingual children, between the ages of six and ten, with a migration background – the Questionário Sociolinguístico Parental para Famílias Emigrantes Bilingues (QuesFEB). This parental questionnaire, intended for researchers who conduct studies in the field of heritage bilingualism, has as its main objective the collection of biographical and sociolinguistic information not only for the detailed characterisation of the context in which bilingual children acquire the heritage language, but also, and mainly, for the quantification of their language experience in the target language, enabling the assessment of the effect that variables related to input quantity and quality have on that language. Besides providing a detailed description of the content of the sections that compose the QuesFEB, we will present, in detail, the method of codification and calculation of four key variables that have been found to be predictive of HL development, namely: (i) current quantity of HL use (i.e., input and output) in the household; (ii) quantity of cumulative exposure to the HL in the household; (iii) quantity of HL use (i.e., input and output) with migrant grandparents who are native speakers of the language of origin; and (iv) richness of the language exposure to the HL.
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