Ivanova and Hallowell
2013
emphasise the importance of reporting on test development and psychometric properties of tests in international journals. Such documentation may serve as references for ...other test developers and enable researchers and clinicians to assess reliability and validity issues in tests made for a language unknown to them.
The CAT (Comprehensive Aphasia Test) is a general aphasia test which examines linguistic skills broadly, within the cognitive neuropsychological tradition; it has been and is being adapted to a number of languages.
The aim of this article is to document the statistical procedures used in the development and standardisation of the Norwegian adaptation of the CAT (CAT-N), to document its psychometric properties, and to discuss validity and reliability issues.
The adaptation of the CAT-N involved careful design of subtests and test items, taking into account features like word frequency, imageability and phonological and other language-specific linguistic variables. The prototype was tested on a normative sample of 85 persons with aphasia and a control group of 84 persons without aphasia. The items of some subtests were reordered based on the norming. A new scoring scheme was developed for two subtests of Picture description. The CAT-N includes the Aphasia Impact Questionnaire (AIQ), which is a new patient reported outcome measure developed for the CAT.
Statistical methods are documented and discussed. Descriptive statistics for subtests and linguistic domains are presented. Internal consistency and partial inter-rater and intra-rater reliability aspects are investigated and documented. Construct validity is investigated and documented by factor analysis. Sensitivity and specificity are investigated through pairwise comparisons for subtests and domains and the use of normal-language cutoff values. Concurrent validity is investigated through comparisons with results from an existing aphasia test for Norwegian (NBAA).
The CAT-N is shown to have good reliability and validity, and it distinguishes well between persons with and without aphasia. The article provides explicit documentation of design decisions which may be useful in future adaptations of the CAT.
The cognate continuum Strangmann, Iris M.; Antolovic, Katarina; Hansen, Pernille ...
The mental lexicon,
10/2023, Volume:
18, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
Cognates, words that are similar in form and meaning across two languages, form compelling test cases for bilingual access and representation. Overwhelmingly, cognate pairs are subjectively ...selected in a categorical either- or manner, often with criteria and modality unspecified. Yet the few studies that take a more nuanced approach, selecting cognate pairs along a continuum of overlap, show interesting, albeit somewhat divergent results. This study compares three measures that quantify cognateness continuously to obtain modality-specific cognate scores for the same set of Norwegian-English word-translation pairs: (1) Researcher Intuitions – bilingual researchers rate the degree of overlap between the paired words, (2) Levenshtein Distance – an algorithm that computes overlap between word pairs, and (3) Translation Elicitation – English-speaking monolinguals guess what Norwegian words mean. Results demonstrate that cognateness can be ranked on a continuum and reveal measure and modality-specific effects. Orthographic presentation yields higher cognateness status than auditory presentation overall. Though all three measures intercorrelated moderately to highly, Researcher Intuitions demonstrated a bimodal distribution, yielding scores on the high and low end of the spectrum, consistent with the common categorical approach in the field. Levenshtein Distance would be preferred for fine-grained distinctions along the continuum of form overlap.
Young children simplify word initial consonant clusters by omitting or substituting one (or both) of the elements. Vocalic insertion, coalescence and metathesis are said to be used more seldom ...(McLeod, van Doorn & Reed, 2001). Data from Norwegian children, however, have shown vocalic insertion to be more frequently used (Simonsen, 1990; Simonsen, Garmann & Kristoffersen, 2019). To investigate the extent to which children use this strategy to differing degrees depending on the ambient language, we analysed word initial cluster production acoustically in nine Norwegian and nine English speaking children aged 2;6-6 years, and eight adults, four from each language. The results showed that Norwegian-speaking children produce significantly more instances of vocalic insertions than English-speaking children do. The same pattern is found in Norwegian- versus English-speaking adults. We argue that this cross-linguistic difference is an example of the influence of prosodic-phonetic biases in language-specific developmental paths in the acquisition of speech.
In this paper, we investigate a prosodic-phonetic feature in child-directed speech within a dynamic, complex, interactive theoretical framework. We focus on vocalic intrusions, commonly occurring in ...Norwegian word initial consonant clusters. We analysed child-directed speech from nine Norwegian-speaking mothers to their children, aged 2;6, 4, and 6 years, and compared the incidence and duration of vocalic intrusions in initial consonant clusters in these data with those in adult-directed speech and child speech. When viewed overall, vocalic intrusion was found to be similar in incidence in child- and adult-directed speech. However, closer examination revealed differential behaviour in child-directed speech for certain conditions. Firstly, a difference emerged for one particular phonetic context: While vocalic intrusions in /Cr/ clusters are
frequent
in adult-directed speech, their presence is
near-categorical
in child-directed speech. Secondly, we found that the duration of vocalic intrusions was longer in child- than in adult-directed speech, but only when directed to 2;6-year-olds. We argue that vocalic intrusions in child-directed speech may have both a bonding as well as a didactic function, and that these may vary according to the age of the child being addressed.
Social sciences researchers emphasize that new technologies can overcome the limitations of small and homogenous samples. In research on early language development, which often uses parental reports, ...taking the testing online might be particularly compelling. Due to logistical limitations, previous studies on bilingual children have explored the language development trajectories in general (e.g., by including few and largely set apart timepoints), or focused on small, homogeneous samples. The present study protocol presents a new, on-going study which uses new technologies to collect longitudinal data continuously from parents of multilingual, bilingual, and monolingual children. Our primary aim is to establish the developmental trajectories in Polish-British English and Polish-Norwegian bilingual children and Polish monolingual children aged 0-3 years with the use of mobile and web-based applications. These tools allow parents to report their children's language development as it progresses, and allow us to characterize children's performance in each language (the age of reaching particular language milestones). The project's novelty rests on its use of mobile technologies to characterize the bilingual and monolingual developmental trajectory from the very first words to broader vocabulary and multiword combinations.
Although it is well documented that children undergo a productive vocabulary spurt late in the second year, it is unclear whether this development is accompanied by equally significant advances in ...receptive word processing. In the present study, we tested an electrophysiological procedure for assessing receptive word learning in young children, and the impact of productive vocabulary size for performance in this task. We found that 20-month-olds with high productive vocabularies displayed an N400 incongruity effect to violations of trained associations between novel words and pictures, whereas 20-month-olds with low productive vocabularies did not. However, both high and low producers showed an N400 effect for common real words paired with an incongruous object. These findings indicate that there may be substantial differences in receptive fast mapping efficiency between typically developing children who have reached a productive vocabulary spurt and typically developing children who have not yet reached this productive spurt.
Imageability ratings across languages Rofes, Adrià; Zakariás, Lilla; Ceder, Klaudia ...
Behavior research methods,
06/2018, Volume:
50, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Imageability is a psycholinguistic variable that indicates how well a word gives rise to a mental image or sensory experience. Imageability ratings are used extensively in psycholinguistic, ...neuropsychological, and aphasiological studies. However, little formal knowledge exists about whether and how these ratings are associated between and within languages. Fifteen imageability databases were cross-correlated using nonparametric statistics. Some of these corresponded to unpublished data collected within a European research network—the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists (COST IS1208). All but four of the correlations were significant. The average strength of the correlations (rho = .68) and the variance explained (
R
2
= 46%) were moderate. This implies that factors other than imageability may explain 54% of the results. Imageability ratings often correlate across languages. Different possibly interacting factors may explain the moderate strength and variance explained in the correlations: (1) linguistic and cultural factors; (2) intrinsic differences between the databases; (3) range effects; (4) small numbers of words in each database, equivalent words, and participants; and (5) mean age of the participants. The results suggest that imageability ratings may be used cross-linguistically. However, further understanding of the factors explaining the variance in the correlations will be needed before research and practical recommendations can be made.
The mental lexicon is dynamic and changes throughout the lifespan, but how does it begin? Previous research has established that children's first words depend on their communicative needs, but also ...on their phonetic repertoire and phonological preferences. In this paper, we focus on the phonological characteristics of children's first words, primarily looking at word-initial labials and word length in Norwegian children's first words, as well as at how parents accommodate to child patterns in their speech. Comparing the Norwegian child data with data from children speaking five different languages, we examine how the child's emergent lexicon is on the one hand shaped by the input of the ambient language, but on the other hand limited by more common phonological characteristics of child speech. Based on data from parental reports (CDI), we compared the 50 first words in Norwegian to those in Danish, Swedish, English, and Italian, analyzing two phonological aspects: word initial bilabials and word length in syllables. We found that Norwegian-speaking children follow the children speaking these other languages in having an affinity for word initial bilabials, but that the proportions of mono-, di-, and polysyllables vary depending on the language acquired. Comparisons of the Norwegian child data with samples of adult directed speech (ADS) and child-directed speech (CDS) revealed more word-initial bilabials and shorter words among children than among adults. The CDS was more similar to children's speech than ADS concerning the two phonological aspects dealt with here, which suggests that parents accommodate to children in phonologically detailed ways.
In this article, we report the results of a large-scale population study based on the Latvian adaptation of Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) - a parental report tool aimed at mapping the ...lexical and grammatical development of children under the age of three. Two CDI forms are discussed: CDI I: 'Words and Gestures' (8-16 months), and CDI II: 'Words and Sentences' (17-36 months). This article discusses the Internet-based methodology used for the data collection, reports the main developmental trends of the lexical development of Latvian children, and compares these trends to analogous data from American English, Norwegian, and Russian.
5p deletion syndrome is a rare genetic condition associated with severe speech and language problems. In general, research on speech and language skills is scarce, but there is more knowledge on ...phonetic and phonological skills than on lexical and grammatical skills. And till now no studies have addressed the relationship between grammar and vocabulary. Therefore, in this study, we address aspects of this relation based on longitudinal parent-reported data (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories) from two children with this syndrome aged 2;0-7;3, and 1;11-7;1, respectively. We examine the development of the vocabulary size in each child, seen in relation to the development of grammar (inflections, combinations of words, complexity, and productivity), and see to what extent they can be compared to typically developing children. Results show that they follow a similar pattern to typically developing children but are delayed and have slightly different individual profiles.
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