Ocena zasobu słownictwa u dzieci w wieku przedszkolnym – nowe narzędzie testowe

Assessment of vocabulary size – a new tool for testing preschool childrenThe paper presents the first phase of research aimed at the construction of Picture Vocabulary Test (part I – Comprehension; OTS-R). Development of a mental lexicon is one of the basic components of linguistic and communicative competence (Michnick-Golinkoff et al., 2000; Hall and Waxman, 2004). Vocabulary size affects other aspects of language acquisition e.g. grammar (Dale et al., 2000; Dionne et al., 2003). Presented measure aims at the assessing word comprehension in preschool Polish children. In this phase of research, 351 children (age 2–6) took part in the study. Word comprehension was assessed by a picture choice task. Children were presented with a series of four pictures charts, each containing pictures depicting a target word (noun, verb, or adjective) and three distractors related to the target word phonetically, semantically, and thematically. Results show a gradual increase of vocabulary with age, better understanding of verbs over nous and adjectives, and a greater proportion of semantic errors over the other two types of errors. The study enabled the preparation of a new version of assessment tool which is going to be used in the subsequent phase of the research (norming study)

Co rodzice wiedzą o zasobie słownictwa swoich dzieci? Kwestionariuszowe badanie rozwoju słownika dzieci 2–6-letnich

What do parents know about their children’s vocabulary? A questionnaire/checklist study of lexical development in children aged 2–6The paper presents a study on lexical development of Polish children aged 2–6. Three tools were constructed for this purpose: “The Child Lexicon Development Questionnaire/Checklist”, “The Questionnaire: Communication and Family Routines“ and a personal questionnaire. All were filled in by children’s parents. The first tool comprised nouns, verbs and adjectives drawn in a layered drawing from the Frequency List of Polish Language Corpus (PWN, 2004). The next two consisted of questions related to interactions in the family, social environment and family SES. Data from 148 children were analyzed. Results revealed non-linear lexical growth with age, positive impact of diversified interactions with parents as well as of a number of different games/play situations with peers on children’s vocabulary. Interactions with parents mainly affected noun and adjective vocabulary, while the number of plays with peers affected verb vocabulary

Book reviews

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43178/1/24_2004_Article_BF00879508.pd

Natural and anthropogenic causes of climate changes

The paper gives a short review of the basic physical mechanisms responsible for climate changes with particular attention paid to the structure of the Atmosphere–the Rest of the Earth dynamical system and its chaotic nature. The essence of "greenhouse effect" is explained and input of various natural and anthropogenic factors into it is presented. Problems, difficulties and uncertainties connected with reconstruction of past climates and and forcasting the future are discussed. Particular role of mathematical modelling in understanding and predicting the evolution of climate is emphasized

Ocena zasobu słownictwa u dzieci w wieku przedszkolnym – nowe narzędzie testowe

Assessment of vocabulary size – a new tool for testing preschool childrenThe paper presents the first phase of research aimed at the construction of Picture Vocabulary Test (part I – Comprehension; OTS-R). Development of a mental lexicon is one of the basic components of linguistic and communicative competence (Michnick-Golinkoff et al., 2000; Hall and Waxman, 2004). Vocabulary size affects other aspects of language acquisition e.g. grammar (Dale et al., 2000; Dionne et al., 2003). Presented measure aims at the assessing word comprehension in preschool Polish children. In this phase of research, 351 children (age 2–6) took part in the study. Word comprehension was assessed by a picture choice task. Children were presented with a series of four pictures charts, each containing pictures depicting a target word (noun, verb, or adjective) and three distractors related to the target word phonetically, semantically, and thematically. Results show a gradual increase of vocabulary with age, better understanding of verbs over nous and adjectives, and a greater proportion of semantic errors over the other two types of errors. The study enabled the preparation of a new version of assessment tool which is going to be used in the subsequent phase of the research (norming study)

Co rodzice wiedzą o zasobie słownictwa swoich dzieci? Kwestionariuszowe badanie rozwoju słownika dzieci 2–6-letnich

What do parents know about their children’s vocabulary? A questionnaire/checklist study of lexical development in children aged 2–6The paper presents a study on lexical development of Polish children aged 2–6. Three tools were constructed for this purpose: “The Child Lexicon Development Questionnaire/Checklist”, “The Questionnaire: Communication and Family Routines“ and a personal questionnaire. All were filled in by children’s parents. The first tool comprised nouns, verbs and adjectives drawn in a layered drawing from the Frequency List of Polish Language Corpus (PWN, 2004). The next two consisted of questions related to interactions in the family, social environment and family SES. Data from 148 children were analyzed. Results revealed non-linear lexical growth with age, positive impact of diversified interactions with parents as well as of a number of different games/play situations with peers on children’s vocabulary. Interactions with parents mainly affected noun and adjective vocabulary, while the number of plays with peers affected verb vocabulary

Editorial: On the development of space-number relations: linguistic and cognitive determinants, influences, and associations

Editorial on the Research Topic: On the Development of Space-Number Relations: Linguistic and Cognitive Determinants, Influences, and Association

The plural counts: Inconsistent grammatical number hinders numerical development in pre-schoolers — a cross-linguistic study

The role of grammar in numerical development, and particularly the role of grammatical number inflection, has already been well-documented in toddlerhood. It is unclear, however, whether the influence of grammatical language structure further extends to more complex later stages of numerical development. Here, we addressed this question by exploiting differences between Polish, which has a complex grammatical number paradigm, leading to a partially inconsistent mapping between numerical quantities and grammatical number, and German, which has a comparatively easy verbal paradigm: 153 Polish-speaking and 124 German-speaking kindergarten children were tested using a symbolic numerical comparison task. Additionally, counting skills (Give-a-Number and count-list), and mapping between non-symbolic (dot sets) and symbolic representations of numbers, as well as working memory (Corsi blocks and Digit span) were assessed. Based on the Give-a-Number and mapping tasks, the children were divided into subset-knowers, CP-knowers-non-mappers, and CP-knowers-mappers. Linguistic background was related to performance in several ways: Polish-speaking children expectedly progressed to the CP-knowers stage later than German children, despite comparable non-numerical capabilities, and even after this stage was achieved, they fared worse in the numerical comparison task. There were also meaningful differences in spatial-numerical mapping between the Polish and German groups. Our findings are in line with the theory that grammatical number paradigms influence the development of representations and processing of numbers, not only at the stage of acquiring the meaning of the first number-words but at later stages as well, when dealing with symbolic numbers.</p

The plural counts: Inconsistent grammatical number hinders numerical development in pre-schoolers — a cross-linguistic study

The role of grammar in numerical development, and particularly the role of grammatical number inflection, has already been well-documented in toddlerhood. It is unclear, however, whether the influence of grammatical language structure further extends to more complex later stages of numerical development. Here, we addressed this question by exploiting differences between Polish, which has a complex grammatical number paradigm, leading to a partially inconsistent mapping between numerical quantities and grammatical number, and German, which has a comparatively easy verbal paradigm: 153 Polish-speaking and 124 German-speaking kindergarten children were tested using a symbolic numerical comparison task. Additionally, counting skills (Give-a-Number and count-list), and mapping between non-symbolic (dot sets) and symbolic representations of numbers, as well as working memory (Corsi blocks and Digit span) were assessed. Based on the Give-a-Number and mapping tasks, the children were divided into subset-knowers, CP-knowers-non-mappers, and CP-knowers-mappers. Linguistic background was related to performance in several ways: Polish-speaking children expectedly progressed to the CP-knowers stage later than German children, despite comparable non-numerical capabilities, and even after this stage was achieved, they fared worse in the numerical comparison task. There were also meaningful differences in spatial-numerical mapping between the Polish and German groups. Our findings are in line with the theory that grammatical number paradigms influence the development of representations and processing of numbers, not only at the stage of acquiring the meaning of the first number-words but at later stages as well, when dealing with symbolic numbers.</p