Search results for "cross-linguistic"
showing 10 items of 11 documents
Exploring the cross-linguistic transfer of reading skills in Spanish to English in the context of a computer adaptive reading intervention
2017
ABSTRACTWe explore the potential of a computer-adaptive decoding game in Spanish to increase the decoding skills and oral reading fluency in Spanish and English of bilingual students. Participants were 78 first-grade Spanish-speaking students attending bilingual programs in five classrooms in Texas. Classrooms were randomly assigned to the treatment (i.e., where students played Graphogame Spanish) for 16 weeks for ten minutes per day (n = 3) versus business as usual instruction (n = 2). Results indicate that students at some risk on Spanish pseudoword reading appeared to benefit the most from playing the game. Analysis of gains suggests a potentially small, but meaningful educational effect…
Brain event-related potentials to phoneme contrasts and their correlation to reading skills in school-age children
2017
Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the speech processing mechanisms for common and uncommon sound contrasts (/ba/-/da/-/ga/ and /ata/-/at: a/) with respect to the native language of school-age children in Finland and the US. In addition, a comprehensive behavioral test battery of reading and phonological processing was administered. ERPs revealed that the children could discriminate betw…
Mediation in practice in an ESAP course : Versions of the Medical English student conference
2021
The Medical English course at the University of Oulu (Finland), which is compulsory for 200 first-year medical students, is designed to enhance professional English language communication focusing on work life relevance. The course design utilized the action-oriented approach promoted by CEFR CV (2018), to support the active use of language through various simulation activities. This paper describes specifically the final assignment of the Medical English course, which is integrated with the Clinical Psychology course. Having discussed topics in Finnish in groups, complementing the lectures in the Clinical Psychology course, students present in English what they have learnt in these discuss…
The Syntax–Pragmatics Interface in Heritage Languages: The Use of anche (“Also”) in German Heritage Speakers of Italian
2023
This paper deals with the use of anche (“also”) by German heritage speakers of Italian (“IHSs”). Previous research showed that anche and its German counterpart auch share many features but also display language-specific characteristics. According to previous research on bilingualism, heritage speakers show cross-linguistic influence (“CLI”) when a linguistic phenomenon is at the syntax–pragmatics interface and there is a partial overlap in the two languages at stake. Therefore, we expect the use of anche in IHSs to be influenced by CLI. By analysing data from a semi-spontaneous corpus, we investigate the production of anche in order to understand which factors shape the grammar of the IHSs.…
The Argument Dependency Model
2015
This chapter summarizes the architecture of the extended Argument Dependency Model (eADM), a model of language comprehension that aspires toward neurobiological plausibility. It combines design principles from neurobiology with insights on cross-linguistic diversity. Like other current models, the eADM posits that auditory language processing proceeds along two distinct streams in the brain emanating from auditory cortex: the antero-ventral and postero-dorsal streams. Both streams are organized hierarchically and information processing takes place in a cascaded fashion. Each stream has functionally unified computational properties congruent with its role in primate audition. While the dorsa…
Screening for Slow Reading Acquisition in Norway and Finland : a Quest for Context Specific Predictors
2020
Early identification of children at risk of developing reading difficulties is crucial for effective interventions. While orthographies and educational contexts differ, predictors included in early at-risk screening tend to remain rather homogeneous across countries. In this study, we compared longitudinal prediction patterns of being among the 20 percent lowest performing in reading fluency by the end of Grade 1 in Norway (N = 918) and Finland (N =378). The two countries differ in orthographic consistency (semi-transparent versus transparent), age at school entry and pre-primary education. Letter knowledge, phoneme isolation and rapid automatized naming (RAN) were unique predictors in the …
Perceived similarity between written Estonian and Finnish : Strings of letters or morphological units?
2017
The distance or similarity between two languages can be objective or actual, i.e. discoverable by the tools and methods of linguists, or perceived by users of the languages. In this article two methods, the Levenshtein Distance (LD), which purports to measure the objective distance, and the Index of Perceived Similarity (IPS), which quantifies language users’ perceptions, are compared. The data are the quantitative results of a test measuring conscious perceptions of similarity between Estonian and Finnish inflectional morphology by Finnish and Estonian native speakers (‘Finns’ and ‘Estonians’) with no knowledge of and exposure to the other (‘target’) language. The results show that Finns s…
Costs and Benefits of Orthographic Inconsistency in Reading: Evidence from a Cross-Linguistic Comparison.
2016
We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, …
Lexical cross-linguistic influence in the written English production of Finnish 6th grade pupils
2014
Kielten väliset vaikutteet (transfer) ovat monitahoinen ilmiö, jota on tutkittu kielen oppimisen viitekehyksessä aktiivisesti 1900-luvun puolivälistä lähtien. Transfer-tutkimuksessa on kuitenkin perinteisesti keskitytty tutkimaan lähinnä äidinkielen vaikutuksia opittavaan vieraaseen kieleen. Useamman vieraan kielen vaikutukset toisiinsa ovat tuoreempi ja etenkin suomalaisessa kontekstissa/tutkimusympäristössä vielä niukasti tutkittu tutkimuskohde. Tässä tutkielmassa tarkasteluun on sen vuoksi valittu äidinkielen tuomien vaikutusten lisäksi myös vieraan kielen vaikutukset englannin kielen sanaston oppimiseen ja käyttöön. Tarkasteltavina lähdekielinä ovat suomi ja ensimmäisenä tai toisena vie…
Cross-linguistic variation in the neurophysiological response to semantic processing: Evidence from anomalies at the borderline of awareness
2014
The N400 event-related brain potential (ERP) has played a major role in the examination of how the human brain processes meaning. For current theories of the N400, classes of semantic inconsistencies which do not elicit N400 effects have proven particularly influential. Semantic anomalies that are difficult to detect are a case in point ("borderline anomalies", e.g. "After an air crash, where should the survivors be buried?"), engendering a late positive ERP response but no N400 effect in English (Sanford, Leuthold, Bohan, & Sanford, 2011). In three auditory ERP experiments, we demonstrate that this result is subject to cross-linguistic variation. In a German version of Sanford and colleagu…