The impact of syntactic and lexical trainings on capitalization of nouns in German in grade five

Many orthographies include syntactic markers not represented in phonology. In general, to correctly use these syntactic markers, learners have to analyze and understand the syntactic context of the word to be written. Capitalization of nouns, a syntactic marker in German, involves marking heads of noun phrases and is challenging for learners. The aim of this intervention study was to evaluate the effects of syntactic and lexical based trainings on capitalization of nouns. 114 Luxembourgish fifth-graders were assigned to two syntactic groups, a lexical group and a passive control group. The syntactic groups focused on two variants of training syntactic structures within the noun phrase. The lexical group focu-sed on lexical characteristics of nouns and the control group received reading input. The posttest results show that the students in the intervention groups profited from the syntactic-based training. The follow-up test shows that the intervention was sustainable, as the improvement remains stable. The study indicates that a greater focus on syntactic structures can effectively enhance the use of syntactic markers of capitalizations. Although this approach is initially harder to acquire, it covers all cases of capitalization

The effect of a French intervention on children´s spelling of morphosyntactic agreement.

The purpose of our project MorphoSyn is to gain insights into the morphosyntactic processing involved in spelling in second languages. We conduct our study in the complex language context of Luxembourg which has two written school languages (German and French) and a large variety languages spoken at children´s home. More specifically, we investigate how an explicit teaching of morphosyntactic structures in written German and French enhance the spelling competence of 5th grade students. During our intervention we focus on two orthographic features: the capitalisation of nouns in German and subject-verb agreement and the agreement within nouns phrases in French. Studies from Germany and France show that the acquisition of these features pass quite difficultly, because they are inaudible and, to grasp them, students need knowledge that goes beyond phoneme-grapheme correspondences. We predicted that our multilingual pupils will encounter the same problems that have been detected for French and German monolingual children. Our recently conducted pilot study confirmed this assumption: many children still omit plural/feminine markers in French and fail to capitalize abstract nouns or nominalisations in German. Our paper will present the outcome of the pre-test administrated to 250 Luxembourgish students (listening comprehension and dictation in German and French). It will show the orthographic skills pupils have acquired during primary school in their school languages German and French and indicate how far they are using morphosyntactic information while spelling

insights from different stages of language acquisition

Solving arithmetic problems is a cognitive task that heavily relies on language processing. One might thus wonder whether this language-reliance leads to qualitative differences (e.g., greater difficulties, error types, etc.) in arithmetic for bilingual individuals who frequently have to solve arithmetic problems in more than one language. The present study investigated how proficiency in two languages interacts with arithmetic problem solving throughout language acquisition in adolescents and young adults. Additionally, we examined whether the number word structure that is specific to a given language plays a role in number processing over and above bilingual proficiency. We addressed these issues in a German–French educational bilingual setting, where there is a progressive transition from German to French as teaching language. Importantly, German and French number naming structures differ clearly, as two-digit number names follow a unit-ten order in German, but a ten-unit order in French. We implemented a transversal developmental design in which bilingual pupils from grades 7, 8, 10, 11, and young adults were asked to solve simple and complex additions in both languages. The results confirmed that language proficiency is crucial especially for complex addition computation. Simple additions in contrast can be retrieved equally well in both languages after extended language practice. Additional analyses revealed that over and above language proficiency, language-specific number word structures (e.g., unit-ten vs. ten-unit) also induced significant modulations of bilinguals' arithmetic performances. Taken together, these findings support the view of a strong relation between language and arithmetic in bilinguals

Language influences number processing: the case of bilingual Luxembourg

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Identifying Math and Reading Difficulties of Multilingual Children: Effects of Different Cut-offs and Reference Groups

Extensive research is available on language acquisition and the acquisition of mathematical skills in early childhood. But more recently, research has turned to the question of the influence of specific language aspects on acquisition of mathematical skills. This anthology combines current findings and theories from various disciplines such as (neuro-)psychology, linguistics, didactics and anthropology

Einfluss des Faktors Wortfrequenz auf die satzinterne Großschreibung bei Fünftklässler:innen

Frequenz ist ein vielbeachteter Faktor, wenn es darum geht, zu erklären, warum manche Wörter und Teilbereiche von Wörtern eher fehleranfälliger sind als andere. In regelhaften Bereichen der Orthographie haben viele Studien zudem gezeigt, dass Frequenz einen größeren Einfluss auf Richtigschreibungen haben könnte als regelbasiertes Lernen. Der vorliegende Beitrag nimmt dies zum Ausgangspunkt und untersucht, ob der Faktor der Wortfrequenz in der satzinternen Großschreibung eine Rolle spielt. Die Arbeit umfasst zwei Forschungsfragen: (1) Sagt die Wortfrequenz von Nomen deren Großschreibung voraus, wenn man Konkretheit kontrolliert? und (2) Sagt die Frequenz von Verben und Adjektiven in Bezug auf die Frequenz der entsprechenden Nominalisierungen die Großschreibung letzterer voraus? Für die Untersuchung wurde die Großschreibung von 185 luxemburgischen Fünftklässler:innen in Lücken- und Satzdiktaten analysiert. Die Frequenz wurde aufgrund von drei Korpora berechnet. Die Regressionsanalysen zeigen das frequente Nomen eher großgeschrieben werden als seltene Nomen. Allerdings verschwindet dieser Effekt, wenn der lexikalisch-semantische Typ (Konkreta, Abstrakta, Nominalisierungen) in die Analysen einbezogen wird. Der ausschlaggebende Faktor für die Großschreibung in dieser Studie war schließlich Konkretheit, nicht Frequenz

Do learners need semantics to spell syntactic markers? Plural spellings in real vs. pseudowords in a French L2 setting

Inaudible syntactic markers are especially difcult to spell. This paper examines how 455 fourth graders spell silent French plural markers in a dictation with real and pseudowords after one year of formal French instruction (L2). The Generalized Linear Mixed Model analysis shows frst that noun plural spelling (real and pseudo) is a strong predictor for verb and adjective plural spelling. Second, the performance on real verb plural is higher than the performance on real adjective plural. In con‑ trast, the performance on pseudoadjective plural is higher than on pseudoverb plural. Our fndings indicate the strong infuence of semantics and frequency in instruction input on plural spelling: noun plural is semantically grounded, and nouns are most frequent in the curriculum. Verbs and verb plural are also frequent, and infection is mostly taught by means of memorizing the verb infection paradigm. Adjectives are taught least frequently. The fndings are discussed in the context of French L2 instruction, as the extremely low results on adjectives and pseudoverbs seem to be a consequence of instruction methods