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Heritage speakers (HSs) are known to differ from monolingual speakers in various linguistic domains. The present study focuses on the syntactic properties of monolingual and heritage Russian. Using a corpus of semi-spontaneous spoken and written narratives produced by HSs of Russian residing in the US and Germany, we investigate HSs’ word order patterns and compare them to monolingual speakers of Russian from Saint Petersburg. Our results show that the majority language (ML) of HSs as well as the clause type contribute to observed differences in word order patterns between speaker groups. Specifically, HSs in Germany performed similarly to monolingual speakers of Russian while HSs in the US generally produced more SVO and less OVS orders than the speakers of the latter group. Furthermore, HSs in the US produced more SVO orders than both monolingual speakers and HSs in Germany in embedded clauses, but not in main clauses. The results of the study are discussed with the reference to the differences between main and embedded clauses as well as the differences between the MLs of the HSs., Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Projekt DEAL

In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview of the results from studies that have used the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to investigate comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure (story structure) to date. We show the wide range of research in which MAIN has been used through summaries of core results from studies that investigated age effects, and studies that compared monolinguals with bilinguals, bilinguals’ two languages, and typically-developing (TD) children with children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Results from studies including factors that influence bilinguals’ narrative skills (e.g., language skills, language input) are also covered, as are those that deal with methodological aspects and more specifically, task effects, i.e., how the choice of elicitation mode (telling; retelling; model story) and story (Cat/Dog; Baby Birds/Baby Goats) influence story structure and story comprehension. As concluding remarks, we summarize the state-of-the-art of narrative research using MAIN and outline possible directions for future studies.

This special issue investigates the use of referential expressions in elicited picture-based narratives by children with and without developmental language disorders, across a range of languages and language combinations. All contributions use the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2012, 2019). The studies featured in this issue cover monolingual and bilingual children aged 4–11 years, but focus mainly on age 4–7, a period in a child’s life where great strides are made in the development of narrative skills. This collection of papers offers a new perspective on referentiality for several reasons: all studies use the same stimuli and by and large the same procedure for the elicitation of narratives. The stimuli, four picture-based stories, are controlled for comparability of protagonists, plot and story structure. They were designed as a ‘visual’ representation of a multidimensional model of story grammar. This methodological and theoretical base allows for a comparative investigation of referentiality (including reference introduction, maintenance and reintroduction) in narratives, across languages and populations. This introduction addresses theoretical aspects of referentiality in decontextualised discourse and reviews the literature regarding the impact of language-specific referential systems and the age and path of acquisition in typically developing children and children with developmental language disorders. We also discuss methodological aspects of eliciting referentiality in narratives in detail. This introduction thus seeks explanations for the diverse and sometimes contradictory empirical results regarding children’s mastery of referentiality. Finally, an overview of the contributions in the special issue is given. uppsala universitet https://doi.org/10.13039/501100007051

Individual differences in early language abilities are an important predictor of later life outcomes. High-quality, easy-access measures of language abilities are rare, especially in the preschool and primary school years. The present study describes the construction of a new receptive vocabulary task for children between 3 and 8 years of age. The task was implemented as a browser-based web application, allowing for in-person as well as remote data collection via the internet. Based on data from N = 581 German-speaking children, we estimated the psychometric properties of each item in a larger initial item pool via Item Response Modeling. We then applied an automated item selection procedure to select an optimal subset of items based on item difficulty and discrimination. The so-constructed task has 22 items and shows excellent psychometric properties with respect to reliability, stability and convergent and discriminant validity. The construction, implementation, and item selection process described here makes it easy to extend the task or adapt it to different languages. All materials and code are freely accessible to interested researchers. The task can be used via the following website: https://ccp-odc.eva.mpg.de/orev-demo/.

This volume contains ten papers that report on recent developments and new language versions of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Eight papers describe a MAIN language version, including the typological characteristics of the language, the cultural context in which the language is used, and the processes of translating and adapting MAIN to the language. Some also present results from pilot studies or summaries of already published studies where the language version was used. The two final papers report on research conducted with MAIN, and discuss important methodological issues, for example concerning different elicitation methods.

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word omissions were analyzed. Serial order effects were found in both languages: medial errors made up the largest percentage of errors. Then, the position of omissions was compared to visuo-verbal n-back working memory and non-verbal visual forward short-term memory scores using stepwise hierarchical linear regression models, taking into account demographic variables and receptive language. The interaction differed between languages: there was a significant negative association between omissions in the medial position in German and the final position in Russian and the visuo-verbal n-back memory score. Our study contributes to the understanding of how working memory and language are intertwined in sentence repetition.

ZusammenfassungWährend für den monolingualen Erwerb des Türkischen ausreichend Evidenzen vorliegen, dass Kasus innerhalb der ersten drei Lebensjahre erworben wird und Erwerbsprobleme ein sicherer Indikator für SSES sind, ist dies für den bilingualen Erwerb nicht ausreichend geklärt. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht in longitudinalen Daten von ungestörten 18 zwei- bis vierjährigen bilingual türkisch-deutsch-sprachigen Kindern die Korrektheitswerte, Entwicklungsmuster und Fehlertypen in einem Elizitierungstest für Akkusativ und Dativ in der Erstsprache Türkisch. Auch nach dem vierten Lebensjahr sind die getesteten Bereiche nicht von allen Kindern vollständig erworben. Der Kasus ist demnach unter bilingualen Erwerbsbedingungen ein vulnerabler Bereich und als alleiniger Marker nicht geeignet, um zwischen gestörter und ungestörter bilingualer Sprachentwicklung zu unterscheiden. Das häufige Ausweichen auf pronominale Reaktionen und andere Wörter auf Grund lexikalischer Unsicherheiten, verdeutlicht die Notwendigkeit von erstsprachlichen Kompetenzen bei der Beurteilung der Korrektheit der Reaktionen.

Aims and objectives: The current study examines the role of grammatical and positional parallelism on ambiguous German pronoun resolution in monolingual speakers and highly proficient L2 speakers with L1 Georgian. In particular, the study asks whether an object pronoun ihn in a sentence initial position could refer to the non-subject antecedent in a preceding subject–verb–object sentence. Furthermore, it investigates whether L1 and L2 speakers show similar preferences when resolving ambiguous object pronouns. Methodology: Two visual world eye-tracking and two offline experiments were conducted with L1 and L2 speakers of German. During the eye-tracking session, the task was simply to look and listen, while in the offline test, participants were required to decide on the assumed referent of the ambiguous pronoun. Data and analysis: Linear-mixed effect models were applied to the eye-movement data. Two-sample t tests were used in the analysis of the offline data. Findings and conclusions: Eye-movement results revealed a bias toward the subject antecedent in L1 speakers, while the L2 speakers showed a non-subject preference when resolving the referent of the object pronoun. The offline experiments supported the eye-tracking findings of both groups, particularly as regards the role of grammatical parallelism in the resolution of ambiguous pronouns by the L2 speakers. These findings are interpreted in the context of language-specific processing strategies in anaphora resolution. It appears that L1 and L2 speakers may be using different information-structural cues to resolve ambiguous pronouns. Concretely, a less strongly internalized knowledge of the target language or the influence of the first language may produce alternative processing mechanisms in L2 speakers. Originality: This study fills the research gap on ambiguous object pronoun resolution of L1 and L2 speakers of German. Implications: The findings of this study add additional information to the growing body of research into pronoun resolution. It focuses on the resolution of the German object pronoun within an information-structural framework of language processing in L1 and L2.

The goal of this study was to trace the dual language development of the narrative macrostructure in three age groups of Russian–German bilingual children and to compare the performance of simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. Fine-grained analyses of macrostructure included three components: story structure, story complexity, and internal state terms. Oral narratives were elicited via the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Fifty-eight Russian–German speaking bilingual children from three age groups participated: preschoolers (mean age = 45 months) and elementary school pupils (mean age first grade = 84 months, mean age third grade = 111 months); and there were 34 simultaneous and 24 sequential bilinguals. The results showed significant improvement for all three components of macrostructure between the preschool and first-grade period. Additional significant development from first to third graders was found only for story complexity in Russian. This is explained by the Russian curriculum explicitly teaching narrative skills during early literacy training. In the two older groups, simultaneous bilinguals showed advantages over sequential bilinguals, for story complexity only. This finding suggests considering bilingual type when evaluating narrative skills of bilinguals. The results indicate cross-language association of only some components of narrative score across languages. The findings support the examination of various constituents of macrostructure when evaluating its development as well as the progression of narrative skills.

WOS: 000368762000005, Two studies examined the effects of age, gender, and task on Turkish narrative skills of Turkish-German bilingual children. In Study 1, 36 children (2 years, 11 months [2;11]-7;11) told stories in two conditions ("tell-after model" and "tell-no model") and answered comprehension questions. In Study 2, 13 children (5;5-7;11) participated in two conditions ("tell-no model" and "retell") and were compared to Study 1 participants' on tell tasks. The studies showed significant age effects on story complexity and comprehension, but not story structure and internal state terms. There were no significant effects for gender. Comprehension was significantly better in the "tell-after model" than in the "tell-no model" condition (Study 1). For production (storytelling), a trend favoring retell over tell was found (Study 2)., TUBITAK-COST [109K001]; COST, We thank the following people who helped with the study or preparation of the paper: Ozlem Unal, Didem Akyildiz, and Gulce Tuzuner from Anadolu University, Center for Speech and Language Disorders, in Eskisehir. Deniz Akpinar and her colleagues from the Berliner Interdisciplinary Alliance for Multilingualism provided great assistance in collecting the data in Germany. We gratefully acknowledge this support for the research for this paper from Grant 109K001 from TUBITAK-COST 2515 (to. I.M. and M.T.). Some studies were done in collaboration with researchers working at ZAS; many thanks to Duygu Yelegen, Tanja Rinkers, and Natalia Surmeli who helped us in collecting data in Berlin and Konstanz and in the preparation of this paper. We acknowledge Sharon Armon-Lotem and the project team of COST Action, who gave us an opportunity to participate and share our studies in the meetings in COST Action IS0804 (Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment), where portions of this study were presented. It was very fruitful and enjoyable to work with all colleagues in the Working Group for Narrative and Discourse. Financial support by COST is hereby gratefully acknowledged. We owe many thanks to the children and families who participated willingly in our assessments in Germany and in Turkey.

The number of bilingual children is growing dramatically all over the world. In 2010 the International Organization of Migration documented 214 million migrants worldwide, many bilingual (Koser & Laczko, 2010). One of the challenges arising from the rapid increase of bilingual children is scientifically grounded assessment of linguistic proficiency in both of a child's languages in various language domains. Assessment in both languages is especially important to avoid misdiagnosis of language impairment. Specific language impairment (SLI) is among the most prevalent impairments, estimated to affect 7%–10% of children entering formal education (Grimm, 2003; Tomblin, Smith, & Zhang, 1997). Assessment tools for bilinguals in both the home language and the majority language are often lacking (for exceptions, see Gagarina, Klassert, & Topaj, 2010; Schulz & Tracy, 2011).

Comprehension of sentences in the non-canonical word order usually poses problems for preschoolers (e.g., Slobin, Dan I. and Thomas G. Bever. 1982. Children use canonical sentence schema: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections.Cognition12. 229–265). These problems may be modulated by information structure, such as the presence of an appropriate context licensing the non-canonical word order and the type of referring expression. We examined the impact of the given-new order, induced by a context sentence, and the type of referring expression realizing the given referent (NP vs. pronoun) on the comprehension of SVO and OVS sentences in monolingual Russian-speaking 4- to 5-year-olds and adults. Children and adults showed high comprehension accuracy for SVO and OVS sentences, with accuracy rates above 80 % for OVS sentences. Context and the type of referring expression had no effect. Compared to a similar experiment conducted in German, Russian-speaking children outperformed their German-speaking peers. This difference may result from the earlier acquisition of the case system and a stronger given-before-new preference in Russian compared to German. Our data suggest that as soon as children rely more on morphological information during processing and employ adult-like processing strategies, their offline comprehension performance depends less on contextual and information structure factors.

WOS: 000382653900026, PubMed ID: 26276517, We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the orders of ratings across the 25 languages. The data were then analyzed (1) to ascertain how the demographic characteristics of the participants influenced AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of the target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare the ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). All 299 words were judged as being acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the raters' social or language status, but not with the raters' age or education. Parents reported words as being learned earlier, and bilinguals reported learning them later. Estimations of the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes., Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education [809/N-COST/2010/0]; Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, This study was designed as part of a multilingual parallel construction procedure of the LITMUS Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks within the networking program COSTAction IS0804 "Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment" (www.bi-sli.org; 2010-2013). The research (website design and maintenance) was supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (Grant No. 809/N-COST/2010/0, awarded to the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, in cooperation with Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University; Principal Investigators: Ewa Haman & Zofia Wodniecka). We are grateful to all assistants who contributed to participant recruitment and to all informants in the 25 languages who participated in the study.

13th International Congress for the Study of Child Language -- JUL, 2014 -- Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS, WOS: 000415973600002, PubMed ID: 28441085, This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations., Berliner Senate and Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Germany [01UG1411]; Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme [223265]; National Science Centre, Poland [809/N-COST/2010/0]; Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education [0046/DIA/2013/42]; Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw [BST2015-1744/4]; Ministry for Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia [175012]; Slovak Research and Development Agency [APVV-0410-11]; Harry Crossley Foundation; National Research Foundation of South Africa [88631]; Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Spain [FFI2014-56968-C4-1-P]; Ake Wiberg Foundation [H14-0104]; Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation (Sweden) [S14-14]; International Visegrad Fund [21420015], The research presented here was partially supported by Berliner Senate and Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Germany [grant number 01UG1411]; the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme [grant number 223265]; the National Science Centre, Poland [grant number 809/N-COST/2010/0]; Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education [grant number 0046/DIA/2013/42]; Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw [grant number BST2015-1744/4]; Ministry for Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia [grant number 175012]; the Slovak Research and Development Agency [grant number APVV-0410-11]; Harry Crossley Foundation and National Research Foundation of South Africa [grant number 88631]; Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Spain [grant number FFI2014-56968-C4-1-P]; and Ake Wiberg Foundation [grant number H14-0104], Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation (Sweden) [grant number S14-14]. We also acknowledge support from International Visegrad Fund partially enhancing collaboration reported in this article [grant number 21420015]. All pictures used for CLTs are subject of copyright of University of Warsaw (Poland).

A report on a conference initiated by the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA) Research Network (ReN) on Social and Affective Factors in Home Language Maintenance and Development. The HOLM 2016 conference, held in Berlin in February 2016, attracted close to 70 scholars and practitioners from over 20 countries interested in home language maintenance and development who met over a period of two days to exchange ideas and discuss projects.

The present study investigates the influence of word category on naming performance in two populations: bilingual and monolingual children. The question is whether and, if so, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children differ with respect to noun and verb naming and whether a noun bias exists in the lexical abilities of bilingual children. Picture naming of objects and actions by Russian–German bilingual children (aged 4–7 years) was compared to age-matched monolingual children. The results clearly demonstrate a naming deficit of bilingual children in comparison to monolingual children that increases with age. Noun learning is more fragile in bilingual contexts than is verb learning. In bilingual language acquisition, nouns do not predominate over verbs as much as is seen in monolingual German and Russian children. The results are discussed with respect to semantic-conceptual aspects and language-specific features of nouns and verbs, and the impact of input on the acquisition of these word categories.

This paper evaluates the contribution of external background factors which pertain to the child’s environment (e.g., parents’ education, parents’ occupation, family size, etc.), and internal ones which reflect the child’s time related experience with language (e.g., chronological age, age of L2 onset, etc.) to the development of linguistic skills in the two languages of bilingual children. 65 Russian-German (Mean age: 66mo, Range: 47-86mo) and 78 Russian-Israeli migrant children (Mean age: 70mo, Range: 58-81) with comparable mean length of L2 exposure (M=37mo) and family size (1.88 children) but different Socio-Economic Status (SES), were tested with a battery of language tasks and their parents were interviewed. Overall, internal, temporal, factors showed a stronger relationship to language measures than external, environmental, factors: age of L2 onset and length of L2 exposure correlated with L2, while parents’ education/occupation showed positive correlations with both L1 and L2 measures. In the Russian-German cohort, which had a sub-group with relatively lower SES, SES positively correlated with L1 success as well.

The important role that pragmatics plays in the acquisition of morphology has been hardly studied. In this contribution we focus on the pragmatic strategies of adult caretakers in their reactions to children's early morphological productions in three different languages (French, German, Lithuanian). The most relevant distinction proposed is that between metadiscursive and conversational reactions, i.e. between reactions on linguistic form and on content. In contrast to the latter, the former represent interruptions of the flow of interaction. The distribution of these two types of reactions provides the child with abundant direct and indirect positive and negative evidence about whether his/her preceding morphological production has been well formed or ill formed. Among these reactions, which may consist in reformulations, expansions, and others, we emphasize particularly repetitions and their pragmatic functions and show that they are partially specific to child-directed speech. A special type of young children's morphological productions are bare infinitives. In contrast to their grammar-theoretical accounts in generative studies, we follow a pragmatic approach, based on child-directed speech and caretakers’ reactions, which evidences the caretakers’ tolerance of ambiguity and thus the importance of inferential work in child-adult interactions. Despite great grammatical differences between French, German and Lithuanian, the pragmatic strategies used by caretakers are very similar in quality and quantity.