Acquisition of Greek phonology: an overview

This series consists of unpublished working- papers. They are not final versions and may be superseded by publication in journal or book form, which should be cited in preference. All rights remain with the author(s) at this stage, and circulation of a work in progress in this series does not prejudice its later publication. Comments to authors are welcome. This is a draft of a chapter that appears in Sharynne McLeod (Ed.) The International Guide to Speech Acquisition Thomson Delmar Publishing (ISBN 1-4180-5360-0) published in 2007. The International Guide to Speech Acquisition, Part II. Delmar Thomson, 398-411. Greek speech acquisition.Modern Greek (henceforth Greek) is the descendent of Ancient Greek. It is spoken by most inhabitants of Greece (approximately 11 million speakers) and is the official language of Greece. The linguistic situation in Greece has been characterized by diglossia from the middle of the 19th century until 1976. The two varieties of Greek diglossia are called Katharevousa and Dhimotiki. Katharevousa was created during the early 19th century and was the midpoint between Ancient and Modern Greek. It had many archaized forms of modern words and an archaic grammar. Dhimotiki was the variety spoken by Greeks in their daily lives and it became the official language in 1976 when Katharevousa was officially abolished. However, remnants of Katharevousa have remained in the Greek language, particularly in its written form.caslunpub153unpubWP-1

Investigating Use of a Parent Report Tool to Measure Vocabulary Development in Deaf Greek-speaking Children with Cochlear Implants

Objective: There are very few measures of language development in spoken Greek that can be used with young deaf children. This study investigated the use of Cyprus Lexical List (CYLEX), a receptive and expressive vocabulary assessment based on parent report that has recently been adapted to Standard Greek, to measure the vocabulary development of deaf Greek-speaking children with cochlear implants. Design: A Standard Greek version of CYLEX was used to collect data on receptive and expressive vocabulary development from parents of thirteen deaf children with cochlear implants aged between 21 and 71 months. These data were compared with data collected previously from typically developing hearing Greek-speaking children. Results: Use of the test by parents of deaf children was found to be reliable. No correlation was found between children's vocabulary scores and chronological age. A positive correlation was however found between children's post-implant age and expressive vocabulary. The vocabulary skills of implanted children with a mean post-implant age of 20 months were not significantly different from those of typically developing hearing children of similar chronological age. Conclusion: CYLEX is a reliable and useful tool for exploring vocabulary development with this clinical group. Findings confirm the results of other studies in indicating that the vocabulary size of implanted pre-school-aged deaf children is related to the amount of time that children have used their implant, rather than chronological age

Speech patterns in Cypriot Greek late talkers

The investigation longitudinally examined the phonetic skills of Cypriot-Greek children with late onset of expressive vocabulary. The rate of phonological development within short time increments and the identification of possible speech constraints motivating slow development of expressive language were examined. Participants were seven Cypriot-Greek children identified as late talkers, and seven age-matched normally developing counterparts. Phonetic skills were examined at ages 30, 33, and 36 months for both groups based on spontaneous language samples. Phonological analyses focused on the construction of all subjects’ phonetic inventories over time. Both groups exhibited an increase of specific phoneme use over time. Late talkers had significantly poorer phonetic inventories when compared to the control group. Within the experimental group the analysis revealed the persistent omission of word-initial consonants. Results are discussed in terms of language-specific phonological constraints and their relation to slow development of speech

Greek speech acquisition.

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Teacher perceptions of communication impairment at screening stage in preschool children living in Patras, Greece

The general aim was to obtain piloting data for a series of experiments about the prevalence of communication impairment in preschool children in Greece. At this screening stage of the overall project, teacher perceptions of communication impairment in 57 kindergartens servicing 1113 children were examined via a questionnaire distributed in the urban region of Patras. The specific research goals were (1) to screen for specific categories of communication impairment such as articulation/phonology, receptive language, expressive language and pragmatics, hearing, stuttering, and voice, as they appear in the mainstreamed kindergarten population and (2) to offer comparative information on sex differences in communication impairment(s). The information was gathered by administration of a Greek-adapted version of the Communication Checklist for Pre-school Teachers, which was administered three times to obtain validity and reliability measures. The results were analysed separately for two studies (original and follow-up) and indicated teacher estimates of 14.4Þ18.7% for communication impairment in kindergarten children of the Patras region. Prevalence was higher for boys than for girls. Analysis of specific communication areas revealed that prevalence varies according to gender and category of communicative impairment. The limitations and follow-up needs of this study are discussed