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Language sample analysis provides rich information about the language abilities in the written or spoken text produced by a speaker in response to a language task. Language sample analysis is generally used to assess the abilities of children during language acquisition, but also the abilities of adult speakers across the lifespan. Its wide range of uses also allows for the assessment of language abilities in educational contexts such as second language acquisition or fluency, the abilities of bilingual speakers in general, and it is also used for diagnosis in speech and language pathology. Various computer programs have been developed to assist in the language sample analysis. However, these programs have been developed mainly for English and are often not fully open-access or do not provide data on population metrics, history of data uploaded by a user, and/or improvements in basic language measures. The time needed for transcription and the linguistic knowledge required for manual analysis are considered to be the main obstacles to its implementation The goal of this paper is to present a web-based application MultiDis intended for the analysis of language samples at the microstructural text level in Croatian. The application is still under development, but the current version fulfils its main purpose – it enables the (semi-) automatic calculation of measures reflecting language productivity, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and discourse cohesion in spoken language, and provides users with socio-demographic and linguistic metadata as well as the history of uploaded transcripts. We will present the challenges we have faced in developing the application (e.g., annotation system, text standardisation), future improvements we plan to make to the application (e.g., syntactic parsing, speech-to-text, multilingual analysis), and the possibilities of its use in the wider scientific and professional community.

Individuals produce discourse for various purposes as part of their daily functioning. Therefore, the ability to form a discourse should be one of the main goals of functional speech-language therapy for persons with aphasia (PwA). In addition to assessing the language skills required to form a discourse, it is important to analyse how PwA form general ideas that need to be narrated. This study had two specific aims: (1) to investigate the ability of PwA, with special consideration to the stage of their recovery—the acute and the chronic phase—to form main concepts in a discourse, and (2) to examine the relationship between the number of main concepts and different types of language measures related to productivity, informativeness, and grammaticality in all tested groups. Participants included a total of 38 persons with mild and moderate aphasia (19 in the acute and 19 in the chronic phase of recovery) and 38 healthy speakers (HS) who were matched in age, gender, and level of education. In order to effectively compare the discourse produced by the groups, a single structured stimulus was used, whereby all participants were asked to orally describe a picture from the Croatian version of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test. Compared to the HS, the main concepts produced by PwA were different in number, as well as in terms of their accuracy and completeness. However, when analysing the success in the production of the main concepts with regard to the time post-stroke—acute and chronic—the difference was not confirmed, indicating great individual differences between PwA that undermine the differences on a group level. Linguistic measures of informativeness (CIUs and CIU/words) and only one measure of grammaticality (number of clauses) showed a significant correlation with the number of main concepts in PwA. When analysing correlations for PwA in the acute and chronic phases, only CIU showed a significant association with MC, confirming it as a robust measure of discourse production in PwA. PwA did not produce long and complex sentences, and they showed difficulties in the use of verbs and the marking of argument structures.

Language proficiency is crucial for migrants’ social position in the labour market and therefore plays a key role in the (re-)production of social inequalities in modern societies. There are different ways of capturing language skills in quantitative studies. However, it is important to question the extent to which existing language measures mirror migrants’ realities and relevant linguistic everyday life practices. In our paper, we contribute to this question by disentangling various measures of language proficiency. We use a large sample of migrants in Germany (GSOEP) that contains numerous language measures. We conduct detailed quantitative analyses on how various language variables influence migrants’ social position, by which we mean migrants’ socioeconomic status (as measured by ISEI). The ISEI is mainly based on occupation, but also on education and income. Our findings indicate that especially the self-assessed German speaking proficiency is an important and parsimonious predictor for migrants’ social position in Germany.

Článek uvádí na základě široké excerpce názory současných českých spisovatelů na jejich těsnou spjatost s mateřským jazykem, s rodnou zemí a kulturou a na kvality češtiny. Všímá si také postojů spisovatelů k jazykovým prostředkům, které jsou pro český jazyk charakteristické. Spisovatelé při svém vyjadřování o češtině často reflektují její vztah k cizím jazykům. On the basis of the extensive excerption, the article deals with the contemporary Czech writers’ opinions of on their close connections with their mother-tongue language, native country and its culture and the qualities of the Czech language. The author focuses also on the attitudes of the writers to the means of language that are characteristic of the Czech language. In connection with the Czech language, the writers often reflect their relationship to foreign languages.