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Background and aims: Persons with aphasia (PwA) have considerable difficulties in formulating discourse, which affects their everyday interactions. Thus, development of discourse skills must be one of the goals of speech-language therapy for PwA. This study is grounded in the Linguistic Underpinnings of Narrative in Aphasia (LUNA) framework [1] analysing two categories – propositional and linguistic. The aim of the study is two-folded: to compare the ability of PwA and healthy speakers (HS) to form main concepts in a spoken discourse and to investigate the relationship between the number of main concepts and several language measures in PwA. Methods: 39 PwA and 39 HS, matched in age, gender, and education, were included in the study. They orally described a picture from the Croatian version of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT-HR ; [2]). The narratives were transcribed and evaluated in terms of main concepts and language measures of productivity (N words, N verbs), informativeness (N CIU), and grammaticality (N clauses, N T-units, clausal density). Coding procedures proposed by [3] and [4] were utilised. Results and main contribution: PwA produce fewer, less accurate and more incomplete main concepts than HS. They also show lexical retrieval problems, have difficulty producing verbs and marking their argument structures. Only N CIU and N clauses were correlated with the number of main concepts. Lack of correlations with other language measures reflects the way that PwA shape a discourse. Conclusions: PwA have somewhat limited ability to recognize and define main concepts relevant for the story which also causes their reduced language production. Even when they understand and recognize the main concept, their language disorder disrupts them to linguistically mark it. Implications: By using a task from CAT-HR, we show that assessment instruments can be used as a valuable source of information of functional communication of PwA, and guide SLTs in designing therapy goals aimed at encouraging functional communication.

Personal narratives, defined as monologues about a personal event, are important for social and language development as they help children understand and process positive and negative experiences. The aim of this study was to determine whether schoolchildren’s personal narratives differ according to their age and the emotional valence of the experience evoked. For this purpose, personal narratives of 60 typically developing Croatian-speaking children aged 7 to 13 years, divided into three groups (mean age 7 ; 7, 10 ; 0 and 12 ; 3), were elicited with emotional prompts using the Global TALES protocol. Children's personal narratives were analysed for lexical diversity and syntactic complexity, as well as for coherence using the Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme on three dimensions: context, chronology, and theme. First, a MANOVA was conducted to determine how children differed on the combination of narrative measures. Then, a 3x3 mixed ANOVA design was conducted in which three different emotional prompt conditions (positive, negative, neutral) were manipulated within three age groups of children. The results showed that age group could explain 18% of the variance in the ability to form personal narratives. Both lexical diversity and coherence were influenced by the emotional valence of the narrative, while syntactic complexity was influenced only by age.

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.

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.

The present study investigated the degree to which an infants’ use of simultaneous gesture–speech combinations during controlled social interactions predicts later language development. Nineteen infants participated in a declarative pointing task involving three different social conditions: two experimental conditions (a) available, when the adult was visually attending to the infant but did not attend to the object of reference jointly with the child, and (b) unavailable, when the adult was not visually attending to neither the infant nor the object; and (c) a baseline condition, when the adult jointly engaged with the infant's object of reference. At 12 months of age measures related to infants’ speech-only productions, pointing-only gestures, and simultaneous pointing–speech combinations were obtained in each of the three social conditions. Each child's lexical and grammatical output was assessed at 18 months of age through parental report. Results revealed a significant interaction between social condition and type of communicative production. Specifically, only simultaneous pointing–speech combinations increased in frequency during the available condition compared to baseline, while no differences were found for speech-only and pointing-only productions. Moreover, simultaneous pointing–speech combinations in the available condition at 12 months positively correlated with lexical and grammatical development at 18 months of age. The ability to selectively use this multimodal communicative strategy to engage the adult in joint attention by drawing his attention toward an unseen event or object reveals 12-month-olds’ clear understanding of referential cues that are relevant for language development. This strategy to successfully initiate and maintain joint attention is related to language development as it increases learning opportunities from social interactions. This research was funded by a Recercaixa 2013–2015 project to Pilar Prieto and two projects from the Spanish MINECO (BFU2012-31995 to Pilar Prieto and PSI-2011-25376 to Laura Bosch). We would like to thank all GrEP and APAL Lab members for their support and comments to earlier versions of this paper, and especially Jorgina Solé for help in sample recruitment and testing assistance, and Joan Borràs-Comes for his help with the statistical analysis of the data. We are grateful to all the subjects and their families for having participated in this longitudinal study.

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.