Einblicke in die sprachlichen Leistungen türkischer Kinder mit Deutsch als Zweitsprache

Im Beitrag werden Ergebnisse eines Projekts präsentiert, in dem der Pluralerwerb bei türkischen Kindern mit Deutsch als Zweitsprache untersucht worden ist. Ziel ist es, bei türkischen Kindern mit Deutsch als Zweitsprache sowie bei einsprachig deutschen Kindern die Pluralverarbeitung zu untersuchen. Es wird die Hypothese zugrunde gelegt, dass die zweisprachigen Kinder in Abhängigkeit von ihrem Alter eine Verletzung des Plurals zunächst lexikalisch, dann zunehmend grammatisch verarbeiten: Das heißt, dass beispielsweise der Plural von Auto ("Autos") anfangs als Einzeleintrag im Lexikon (also lexikalisch) gespeichert wird und erst später die grammatische Regel "Auto" plus Pluralendung "s" (wird zu "Auto-s") greift. Dieser Prozess geht mit einer zunehmenden Effizienz des Lexikons einher, da nicht jedes Wort zusätzlich im Plural gespeichert werden muss. Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob eine Verletzung des deutschen Plurals eine lexikalische oder eine grammatische elektrophysiologische Reaktion hervorruft. Zusätzlich werden neben einer ausführlichen Testung der deutschen sowie türkischen Sprachkenntnisse zahlreiche Hintergrundvariablen der Kinder (z. B. Entwicklung des Kindes, sprachliches Umfeld etc.) erfasst, so dass umfassende Analysen möglich sind. (ICF2

The impact of typological similarities and differences between German and Italian on the acquisition of language-specific phonetic cues in bilingual children: insights from the T-complex

IntroductionLateral temporal neural measures (Na and T-complex Ta and Tb) of the auditory evoked potential (AEP) index auditory/speech processing and have been observed in children and adults. While Na is already present in children under 4 years of age, Ta emerges from 4 years of age, and Tb appears even later. The T-complex has been found to be sensitive to language experience in Spanish-English and Turkish-German children and adults. In particular, Ta elicited to a vowel has been found to be sensitive to language experience in bilingual preschool children. This paper examines neural responses in 4-to-6-year-old Italian-German bilingual and German monolingual children using language-specific phonetic cues for voicing.MethodsWe tested children's processing of voicing features in bilabial stop consonants in relation to (1) their language status (i.e., being monolingual vs. bilingual) as well as to (2) their relative amount of current exposure to the heritage (Italian) and the societal language (German). Italian-German bilingual and German monolingual children were hypothesized to encode the temporal properties of a set of Voice Onset Time (VOT) stimuli differently as indexed by Ta and Tb.ResultsThe results revealed no main effects of language group, but interactions of group with hemisphere and stimulus. In particular, bilingual children showed less hemispheric differentiation and an attenuated (less positive) response at the right site (T8) for the 0 ms VOT stimulus during the Ta-Tb time window. Children with more German (and consequently, less Italian) input showed a more positive T8 response for the Na, Ta and Tb time intervals.DiscussionThese findings partially replicated previous studies, but also revealed that stimulus factors modulate the response. They suggest that a delay in commitment is found only in bilinguals with less input in the target language, and those who are strongly dominant in one of the two languages will resemble monolinguals in the development of T-complex responses. However, the finding of greater Na positivity for German-dominant bilinguals suggests that their specific experience also influences processing, but perhaps via a different mechanism than found for the more balanced bilinguals

Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from cross-linguistic lexical tasks (LITMUS-CLT)

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations

Age of Acquisition Norms for Nouns and Verbs in 22 Languages

Word characteristics such as frequency, imageability, concreteness and length are considered good predictors of performance in lexical tasks like picture naming, word comprehension or lexical decision-making. There is also evidence that the age of acquisition (AoA) of words can partly explain aspects of word processing behaviour in later childhood and adulthood (Morrison et al., 1992; Brysbaert & Cortese, 2010).In the present study, we collected AoA norms for 158 nouns and 142 verbs in 22 languages: Afrikaans, British English, Catalan, Danish, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Irish, IsiXhosa, Italian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, South African English, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. In a preparatory picture naming procedure, adult native speakers of 34 languages were asked to name 508 object and 504 action pictures. Words shared among the target languages were retained for the final corpus. Our study followed the typical procedure for establishing AoA (see Morrison et al. 1997) and was performed on-line (see www.words-psych.org). 804 adult participants (at least 20 for each language) were asked to specify the age at which they learned the words in their native language. The vast majority of words were rated as acquired by the age of 7 years, demonstrating overlap in early vocabulary across diverse languages. Significant correlations between all language pairs point to a similar developmental sequence for the words under investigation. No previous study has compared AoA judgements on a shared set of words in a wide range of languages. 'The AoA data collected in the 22 languages provides word characteristics that should assist the design of cross-linguistic psycholinguistic experiments and the preparation of materials for use in the assessment and treatment of language disorders in preschool children. The AoA data are currently being used to control for AoA in the construction of cross-linguistic lexical tasks assessing word knowledge in monolingual and bilingual children

Auditive Verarbeitung bei Kindern mit Spezifischer Sprachentwicklungsstörung (SSES) : eine elektrophysiologische Studie

For several decades, the etiology of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) has been associated with an auditory processing deficit. A failure to perceive and process verbal and non-verbal material has been theorized as responsible for the disruption of normal language development in affected children. The aim of this thesis was to contribute to the current understanding of the nature of the auditory processing deficit by applying electrophysiological methods, in particular the Mismatch Negativity (MMN). The MMN is an attention-independent component of the event-related potential (ERP) that is particularly suited to the investigation of auditory processing in clinical populations. A total of 48 boys between the ages of 7-11 underwent behavioral testing. Criteria for inclusion were a non-verbal IQ above 85 and no further disorders as well as 2 SD below the mean on an expressive or receptive language test for children with SLI. Thus, 13 control children and 15 children with SLI underwent electrophysiological testing. Four different MMN-paradigms were applied that were expected to show differences between the clinical group and the controls: A sine tone paradigm investigated the frequency discrimination abilities of SLI children (700 Hz versus 750 Hz tones), two different minimal pair paradigms examined speech-specific processing ("Bass" versus "Bus" and "Riss" versus "Biss"), and a non-verbal rule paradigm tested the extraction of a rule (15 ascending and 15 descending tone pairs). The frequency discrimination differences and the lexical processing differences between children with SLI and controls were confirmed, while contrary to the hypothesis, the results of the rule-extraction paradigm did not show group differences.Seit einigen Jahrzehnten wird als Ursache der Spezifischen Sprachentwicklungsstörung (SSES) ein auditives Verarbeitungsdefizit diskutiert. Es wird angenommen, dass dieses Defizit Auswirkungen auf die gesamte Sprachentwicklung der betroffenen Kinder hat und für ihre Schwierigkeiten bei der Verarbeitung von sprachlichem und nicht-sprachlichem Material verantwortlich sein könnte. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit war, anhand elektrophysiologischer Methoden die Grundlagen dieses auditiven Verarbeitungsdefizits zu untersuchen. Insbesondere die Mismatch Negativity (MMN), eine aufmerksamkeitsunabhängige Komponente des Ereigniskorrelierten Potentials (EKP), eignet sich zur Untersuchung der auditiven Verarbeitung bei klinischen Gruppen. Insgesamt 48 Jungen zwischen sieben und elf Jahren wurden anhand von Sprach- und IQ-Tests getestet. Einschlusskriterien waren ein non-verbaler IQ über 85 und keine weiteren Auffälligkeiten sowie zwei Standardabweichungen unterhalb der Norm in einem Test der expressiven oder rezeptiven Fähigkeiten bei SSES-Kindern. Somit wurden 13 Kontroll– und 15 SSES-Kinder im EEG getestet. Es wurde von der Hypothese ausgegangen, dass SSES-Kinder im Vergleich zu Kontrollkindern bei den vier folgenden MMN-Paradigmen Unterschiede in der auditiven Verarbeitung zeigen würden: Bei einem Tonparadigma (700 Hz versus 750 Hz), das die Frequenzdiskriminationsfähigkeiten der SSES-Kinder testete, bei zwei verschiedenen Minimalpaar-Paradigmen, die die sprachliche Verarbeitung untersuchten („Bass“ versus „Bus“ und „Riss“ versus „Biss“), sowie bei einem nonverbalen Paradigma, das die Extraktion einer Regel erforderte. Die Gruppenunterschiede in der Frequenzdiskrimination und in der lexikalischen Verarbeitung konnten bestätigt werden; entgegen der Hypothese ergaben sich allerdings keinerlei signifikante Gruppenunterschiede bei der Ableitung von Regeln