Spoken and written narratives in Swedish children and adolescents with hearing impairment

Twenty 10- to 18-year-old children and adolescents with varying degrees of hearing impairment (HI) and hearing aids (HA), ranging from mild-moderate to severe, produced picture-elicited narratives in a spoken and written version. Their performance was compared to that of 63 normally hearing (NH) peers within the same age span. The participants with HI and NH showed similar patterns regarding intragroup correlations between corresponding measures of spoken and written narratives. However, the participants with HI had significantly less diverse language than the NH group. The participants with poorer hearing (higher best ear hearing level [BEHL]) produced spoken and written narratives comprising more content words and they also produced written narratives that were less lexically diverse than the participants with better hearing (lower BEHL). The difference as to lexical skills emphasizes the importance of focusing on these skills in the group of children with HI. However, the results give support for a quite optimistic view on the development of narration in children with HI with HA, at least for picture-elicited narratives

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217–236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output

Reading during the composition of multi-sentence texts: an eye-movement study

Writers composing multi-sentence texts have immediate access to a visual representation of what they have written. Little is known about the detail of writers’ eye movements within this text during production. We describe two experiments in which competent adult writers’ eye-movements were tracked while performing short expository writing tasks. These are contrasted with conditions in which participants read and evaluated researcher-provided texts. Writers spent a mean of around 13% of their time looking back into their text. Initiation of these look-back sequences was strongly predicted by linguistically important boundaries in their ongoing production (e.g., writers were much more likely to look back immediately prior to starting a new sentence). 36% of look-back sequences were associated with sustained reading and the remainder with less patterned forward and backward saccades between words ("hopping"). Fixation and gaze durations and the presence of word-length effects suggested lexical processing of fixated words in both reading and hopping sequences. Word frequency effects were not present when writers read their own text. Findings demonstrate the technical possibility and potential value of examining writers’ fixations within their just-written text. We suggest that these fixations do not serve solely, or even primarily, in monitoring for error, but play an important role in planning ongoing production

Mot en evidensbaserad språkvård? En kritisk granskning av några svenska klarspråksråd i ljuset av forskning om läsbarhet och språkbearbetning

Den svenska språklagens (SFS 2009:600) formulering av att offentligt språk ska vara vårdat, enkelt och begripligt har aktualiserat frågan om hur myndighetstexter ska vara utformade för att innehållet ska komma så många medborgare som möjligt till godo. Såväl Språkrådet som privata företag erbjuder därför utbildningar i och råd om att skriva begripliga texter. En viktig fråga att ställa sig för såväl forskare som praktiker inom fältet är om det finns någon, och i så fall vilken, evidens för att de språkråd som tillämpas där är valida. I den här artikeln granskar jag ett antal språkråd på ord- och meningsnivå och försöker spåra deras ursprung. Några problem som framkommer är att mycket av den forskning råden bygger på enbart behandlar engelska, huvudsakligen ur ett transformationsgrammatiskt perspektiv, att ny forskning som modifierar ursprungsexperimentens resultat inte lett till förändringar av råden samt att resultat från studier av avgränsade ord och meningar generaliseras till textförståelse i kontext. Slutligen har vissa resultat feltolkats på vägen och lett till råd som är direkt missvisande. Två av de undersökta råden verkar ha en högre validitet än de övriga: att skriva – för mottagaren – vanliga ord och att undvika att skapa alltför komplexa meningar genom bisatsinskott.Abstract:Since the Swedish government adopted the Swedish Language Act in 2009, we have seen increased debate about the use of plain language (Klarspråk). This has led to a need for clear principles on how to produce simple and easily understood texts, and many professionals offer advice and/or education designed to meet these needs. Nonetheless, what we know about the validity of such advice is limited. Based on readability and language-processing research, this study reviews the plain-language principles that are frequently used, at the word and sentence level. Three problems emerge from the data that we examined. First, most of the principles appear to stem from early psycholinguistic experiments that were grounded in transformational grammar; therefore, these Swedish principles are to a large (but not sole) extent the results of research on English-language isolated words and sentences. Second, some of these results have been modified by the findings of more recent research. Third, some of the investigated advice appears to be based on misinterpretations of the findings of the original experiments. Two types of advice stand out as more valid than the others: that which deals with word frequency, and that which deals with embedded subjunctive clauses.

Examining Pauses in Writing: Theory, Methods and Empirical Data

Abstract in UndeterminedThis chapter will address both theoretical and methodological issues in pause analysis. First, the theoretical assumptions concerning how pause analysis can contribute towards our understanding of written language production are discussed. Subsequently, some measures, methods and tools for automatic pause analysis are presented and some empirical analyses are given. Most of the analyses and tools presented will be based on the concept of a "micro-context". A micro-context is defined here as the context around a certain transition between two keystrokes. By categorising micro-contexts in terms of categories such as "within word", "between words", "between letter and punctuation mark", pause frequencies and durations in certain types of micro-contexts can easily be analysed automatically and we can quickly gain an impression of how writers use their pauses. Finally, the complexity of pause definitions and operationalisations of the same are addressed. In typing, each letter is produced as a discrete unit and each transition between two keystrokes is a possible candidate for a pause because there will always be a short inactivity between keystrokes. However, obviously not every transition should be defined as a pause. Intuitively, a pause is a transition time between two keystrokes, which is longer than what can be expected for the time needed to merely find the next key. To make a pause writers have to "interrupt" their typing considerably longer than the "normal" transition time between two keystrokes. The problem is how to define a good pause criterion, taking into account the different typing speeds of individual writers