DiapixUK: task materials for the elicitation of multiple spontaneous speech dialogs

The renewed focus of attention on investigating spontaneous speech samples in speech and language research has increased the need for recordings of speech in interactive settings. The DiapixUK task is a new and extended set of picture materials based on the Diapix task by Van Engen et al. (2010) where two people are recorded while conversing to solve a ‘spot the difference’ task. The new task materials allow for multiple recordings of the same speaker pairs due to a larger set of picture pairs which have a number of tested features: equal difficulty across all twelve picture pairs, no learning effect of completing more than one picture task and balanced contributions from both speakers. The new materials also provide extra flexibility making them useful in a wide range of research projects; they are multi-layered electronic images that can be adapted to suit different research needs. This paper presents details of the development of the DiapixUK materials along with data taken from a large corpus of spontaneous speech which demonstrate its new features. Current and potential applications of the task are also discussed

Conversation versus narration in pre-school children with language impairment

he study focuses on two elicitation methods for language sampling in children with language impairment: conversation and narration. It has been noted in other studies on different clinical groups that language elicited in different speaking contexts varies in aspects such as MLU, fluency and syntactic complexity. The purpose of this study was to compare genre effects on different aspects of language production in a group of pre-school children with language impairment. The results show that there are differences in language production during conversation compared with narration. Intelligibility and fluency were found to be higher in conversation than in narration, whereas MLU in words was higher in narration. The narrative task elicited more phrasal expansions and grammatical morphemes per utterance than the conversation. However, the children used more complex verb forms in conversation than in narration. The results are discussed in relation to recent research

Rhyme Awareness in Children With Normal Hearing and Children With Cochlear Implants: An Exploratory Study.

Phonological awareness is a critical component of phonological processing that predicts children\u27s literacy outcomes. Phonological awareness skills enable children to think about the sound structure of words and facilitates decoding and the analysis of words during spelling. Past research has shown that children\u27s vocabulary knowledge and working memory capacity are associated with their phonological awareness skills. Linguistic characteristics of words, such as phonological neighborhood density and orthography congruency have also been found to influence children\u27s performance in phonological awareness tasks. Literacy is a difficult area for deaf and hard of hearing children, who have poor phonological awareness skills. Although cochlear implantation (CI) has been found to improve these children\u27s speech and language outcomes, limited research has investigated phonological awareness in children with CI. Rhyme awareness is the first level of phonological awareness to develop in children with normal hearing (NH). The current study investigates whether rhyme awareness in children with NH (n = 15, median age = 5; 5, IQR = 11 ms) and a small group of children with CI (n = 6, median age = 6; 11.5, IQR = 3.75 ms) is associated with individual differences in vocabulary and working memory. Using a rhyme oddity task, well-controlled for perceptual similarity, we also explored whether children\u27s performance was associated with linguistic characteristics of the task items (e.g., rhyme neighborhood density, orthographic congruency). Results indicate that there is an association between vocabulary and working memory and performance in a rhyme awareness task in NH children. Only working memory was correlated with rhyme awareness performance in CI children. Linguistic characteristics of the task items, on the other hand, were not found to be associated with success. Implications of the results and future directions are discussed

Om äktenskap, äkenskapsskillnad och förmynderskap enligt svensk-internationell rätt. I: Bidrag till tolkningen af konventionerna af 12. juni 1902 och 17. juli 1905 samt lagstiftningen af 8. juli 1904

Includes legislationMode of access: Internet.Signature of Hugo Ericson on t.