Acquiring Clitic Placement in Bilectal Settings: Interactions between Social Factors

Grohmann, Kleanthes Κ.; Papadopoulou, Evangelia S.; Themistocleous, Charalambos

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2017.00005

Cited by 23 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…Because of the complex linguistic situation in Cyprus, the language status of Greek Cypriot children in this study is referrer-to as “bilectals,” as by adopted Rowe and Grohmann ( 2013 ), a term that has been used by various other researchers in recent research on language acquisition and subsequent development (e.g., Kambanaros et al, 2013 ; Grohmann, 2014b ; Antoniou et al, 2016 ; Theodorou et al, 2016 ; Grohmann et al, 2017 ). In this context, bilectalism is used to characterize the linguistic situation in Greek-speaking Cyprus: Children of Greek Cypriot parents, with CG-speaking family and friends, grow up with CG from birth and yet, are exposed to SMG from an early age.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentence Repetition as a Tool for Screening Morphosyntactic Abilities of Bilectal Children with SLI

2017

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The clinical significance of sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) for assessing children's language ability is well-recognized. SRT has been identified as a good clinical marker for children with (specific) language impairment as it shows high diagnostic accuracy levels. Furthermore, qualitative analysis of repetition samples can provide information to be used for intervention protocols. Despite the fact that SRT is a familiar task in assessment batteries across several languages, it has not yet been measured and validated in bilectal settings, such as Cypriot Greek, where the need for an accurate screening tool is urgent. The aims of the current study are three-fold. First, the performance of a group of (Cypriot) Greek-speaking children identified with SLI is evaluated using a SRT that elicits complex morphosyntactic structures. Second, the accuracy level of the SRT for the identification of SLI is explored. Third, a broad error analysis is carried out to examine and compare the morphosyntactic abilities of the participating children. A total of 38 children aged 5–9 years participated in this study: a clinical group of children with SLI (n = 16) and a chronological age-matched control group (n = 22). The ability of the children to repeat complex morphosyntactic structures was assessed using a SRT consisting of 24 sentences. The results showed that the SRT yielded significant differences in terms of poorer performance of children with SLI compared to typically developing peers. The diagnostic accuracy of the task was validated, since regression analysis showed that the task is sensitive and specific enough to identify children with SLI. Finally, qualitative differences between children with SLI and those with TLD regarding morphosyntactic abilities were detected. This study showed that a SRT that elicits morphosyntactically complex structures could be a potential clinical indicator for SLI in Cypriot Greek. The task has the potential to be used as a referral criterion in order to identify children whose language needs to be evaluated further. Implications for speech–language therapists and policy-makers are discussed.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentence Repetition as a Tool for Screening Morphosyntactic Abilities of Bilectal Children with SLI

2017

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“…This finding may suggest that these differences on the multiple linguistic levels of language analysis between Cypriot and Standard Modern Greek do not create any such confusion for the learner in the case of subjunctive clauses. It thus stands in contrast to other instances of linguistic differences such as clitic placement (Grohmann et al, 2017). The fact that this complex syntactic structure is formed in a parallel manner across both varieties of Greek eliminates any potential confusion or complication.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

From First Steps to Full Acquisition: Comprehension of Subjunctive Clauses in Bilectal Children With Down Syndrome and Typical Language Development

Christodoulou

Grohmann

2018

Front. Commun.

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Previous work on linguistic abilities of individuals with Down syndrome (DS) suggests severe impairment of complex syntactic structures in a number of languages. Given difficulties reported with comprehension and production of relative clauses and object clitics in typically developing Greek Cypriot bilectal children (acquiring Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek), one could hypothesize that the bilectal environment in which children with DS grow up may cause an added difficulty in the acquisition of other complex syntactic structures, such that of the understudied syntactically complex subjunctives. This study examines whether Greek Cypriot bilectal children and adolescents with DS evidence an impairment with the comprehension of subjunctive clauses, corroborating arguments for an overall syntactic impairment from past research on DS. It also explores possible parallel development of subjunctives across the two groups. We aim to provide a developmental trajectory of the comprehension of subjunctive clauses for the two populations. Using an act-out priming task, followed by a picture selection task, subjunctive clauses were examined in 30 children and adolescents with DS and 53 children with typical language development. Full analysis of the comprehension data evidenced high means of accuracy, with parallel performance across the two groups. As a foretaste of this research program, a preliminary analysis on subjunctive production and comprehension in a small subgroup of five participants per group was also conducted. Results revealed that accuracy means for production were lower than those for comprehension, suggesting that both subgroups are lagging behind in performance but are acquiring the subjunctive in a parallel manner. The linguistic differences between Cypriot and Standard Modern Greek do not appear to affect the acquisition of subjunctives. Rather, it appears that the acquisition of this complex syntactic structure seems to be facilitated by the fact that the subjunctive is formed in the same way in both varieties, thus eliminating potential confusion caused by variable inputs.

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“…It is possible to draw analogies to this finding with the way humans distinguish dialects. Humans acquire sociolinguistic competence very early in their lives, and specifically their dialect (Grohmann et al, 2017), then using this information they elicit information about their social environments and become more socially aware (Labov et al, 1964;. During human speech perception, speech information is analyzed and combined in the cortex, so that subphonemic and phonemic features may arise in a compositional manner (Mesgarani et al, 2014;Binder, 2016).…”

Section: Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialect Classification From a Single Sonorant Sound Using Deep Neural Networks

Themistocleous

2019

Front. Commun.

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During spoken communication, the fine acoustic properties of human speech can reveal vital sociolinguistic and linguistic information about speakers and thus, these properties can function as reliable identification markers of speakers' identity. One key piece of information speech reveals is speakers' dialect. The first aim of this study is to provide a machine learning method that can distinguish the dialect from acoustic productions of sonorant sounds. The second aim is to determine the classification accuracy of dialects from the temporal and spectral information of a single sonorant sound and the classification accuracy of dialects using additional co-articulatory information from the adjacent vowel. To this end, this paper provides two classification approaches. The first classification approach aims to distinguish two Greek dialects, namely Athenian Greek, the prototypical form of Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek using measures of temporal and spectral information (i.e., spectral moments) from four sonorant consonants /m n l r/. The second classification study aims to distinguish the dialects using coarticulatory information (e.g., formants frequencies F1 − F5, F0, etc.) from the adjacent vowel in addition to spectral and temporal information from sonorants. In both classification approaches, we have employed Deep Neural Networks, which we compared with Support Vector Machines, Random Forests, and Decision Trees. The findings show that neural networks distinguish the two dialects using a combination of spectral moments, temporal information, and formant frequency information with 81% classification accuracy, which is a 14% accuracy gain over employing temporal properties and spectral moments alone. In conclusion, Deep Neural Networks can classify the dialect from single consonant productions, making them capable of identifying sociophonetic shibboleths.

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Acquiring Clitic Placement in Bilectal Settings: Interactions between Social Factors

Cited by 23 publications

References 50 publications

Sentence Repetition as a Tool for Screening Morphosyntactic Abilities of Bilectal Children with SLI

Sentence Repetition as a Tool for Screening Morphosyntactic Abilities of Bilectal Children with SLI

From First Steps to Full Acquisition: Comprehension of Subjunctive Clauses in Bilectal Children With Down Syndrome and Typical Language Development

Dialect Classification From a Single Sonorant Sound Using Deep Neural Networks

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