Linguistics Colloquium: MA student presentations

There will be three talks, presented by students who recently completed their MAs: Bahaa Mahamid, Sagit Bar & Beradze Marianna

Bahaa Mahamid (Supervisor: Prof. Elinor Saiegh-Haddad)

Title: Narrative Production in Diglossic Arabic: A Comparison between Kindergarten Children with and Without Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract
The current study examined narrative production of monolingual Arabic-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (hereafter, DLD), mean age=5.6, and Typical Language Development (hereafter, TLD) age-matched controls. The main question that this study addressed is related to Arabic diglossia and the lexical-syntactic distance between Modern Standard Arabic (hereafter, MSA) and Spoken Arabic (hereafter, SpA) in narrative production. Specifically, this question addressed the use of MSA lexical and syntactic features in narrative production in two story modes among children with and without DLD. Children were asked to tell two stories, one for the generation task “the boy and the dog”, and another one for retelling of a story previously told in MSA “baby birds”. These stories have been developed as part of LITMUS-MAIN (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings- Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives: COST Action IS0804 (Gagarina et al., 2015). Moreover, the study tested macro-structure and micro-structure skills of children with and without DLD in two story modes.

Analysis of MSA lexical items was based on Saiegh-Haddad & Spolsky’s (2014) lexical distance framework which distinguishes five types of words: identical words, cognate SpA, cognate MSA, unique SpA and unique MSA words. MSA syntactic structures were analyzed in terms of whether they reflect the syntax of SpA versus MSA. Four syntactic structures were targeted: word order, negation, noun-adjective agreement, and verb inflection in MSA and SpA. Macro-structure was analyzed using the setting and Goal-Attempt-Outcome schema (GAO). Micro-structure was analyzed in terms of narrative length in Number of Total Words (NTWs), and word types in Number of Different Words (NDWs), lexical diversity in Type-Token Ratios (TTRs) and morpho-syntactic accuracy (subject-verb agreement in gender and number).

A comparison of two story modes (story generation vs. story retelling) showed that in story retelling, children in both groups produced significantly more MSA unique words and MSA word order compared to story generation. Moreover, they produced more macro-structure features (setting and Goal-Attempt-Outcome) and a higher score of micro-structure lexical diversity measured by TTR in story retelling than in story generation.

A comparison of two groups (children with TLD vs. children with DLD) showed that children with TLD produced significantly more MSA unique words and MSA word order than children with DLD. In addition, a significant group difference emerged in macro-structure and micro-structure narrative skills, with children with TLD outperforming children with DLD in the production of macro-structure features (setting and GAO schema), and in micro-structure features (NTWs, NDWs, and less errors in subject-verb gender agreement).
 

Sagit Bar (Supervisor: Dr. Natalia Meir)

Title: Requests and Apologies in Two Languages in Bilingual Speakers: A Comparison of Heritage English Speakers and English-and-Hebrew-Dominant Bilinguals

Abstract:

Although Heritage Language speakers acquire their heritage language (HL) as their native language in childhood, their linguistic performance shows high heterogeneity as compared to the baseline. Despite the rapid development of HL research, the sphere of speech act pragmatics remains neglected (Dubinina, 2021; Polinsky, 2018; Xiao-Desai, 2019).

    The current study sought innovation by investigating adult HL English speakers' usage of two speech acts: requesting and apologizing, and comparing their realization patterns in both languages (n=20) to two bilingual baseline groups: Hebrew-dominant bilinguals who were born to Hebrew-speaking families and raised in Israel (n=20), and English-dominant bilinguals who were born to English-speaking families and immigrated to Israel from an English-speaking country after the age of eighteen (n=20). The parallel discourse-pragmatic tasks consisted of 36 scenarios eliciting requests and apologies in each language while each request was followed by its apology. The participants were asked to say out-loud what they would have said if they had been one of the participants in the actual situation. The scenarios manipulated 'social status' (i.e., the relative level of respect, honor, and deference) and 'social distance' (i.e., the level of familiarity between the participants). The participants' requests were analyzed for the choice of the syntactic structure (Interrogative / Imperative / Declarative / Mixed), the use of modals, and the use of 'please'. Their apologies were analyzed for expressions of apology, number of propositions added (i.e., offering explanation, taking responsibility, offering repair or compensation, and promising forbearance), and the use of intensifications.

    The results indicated that while both baseline groups were consistent in transferring strategies from their dominant language into their weaker one, the picture was more complex for HL speakers. In some cases, HL speakers' strategies were parallel to the baseline groups' strategies, while in other cases they developed a unique hybrid linguistic style reflecting both the societal language and the HL. The study contributes to the understanding of the functions of requests and apologies from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, and it adds to the growing body of work concerning politeness and speech acts in Hebrew and English.

References

Dubinina, I. (2021). Pragmatics in Heritage Languages. In Montrul, S. & Polinsky, M. (Eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistic, 728-757. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Polinsky, M. (2018). Bilingual children and adult heritage speakers: The range of comparison. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(5), 547-563.

Xiao-Desai, Y. (2019). Heritage Learner Pragmatics. The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics, 462-478.

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Beradze Marianna  (Supervisor: Dr. Natalia Meir)

Title: Disfluency use as a window to pragmatic skills in bilingual children
with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract:

The use of disfluencies, such as silent pauses, vocalized pauses, repetitions, self-corrections, and prolongations, is one of the essential pragmatic skills in conversational reciprocity. Impairments in the pragmatic speech of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder, such as accounting for their listener's perspective, impact their ability to reciprocate effectively in conversations. It has been shown in previous studies that speakers with ASD produce different types and patterns of disfluencies than speakers with typical language development (see Lake et al., 2011; Salem et al., 2021; Wiklund & Laakso, 2019). Although bilingualism has been reported to be beneficial with regard to pragmatic abilities, little research has been conducted on the use of disfluency in bilinguals with and without ASD. The current study investigated whether bilingual children with ASD (BI-ASD, n=21) differed from their peers with TLD (BI-TLD, n=30) aged 5-9 in their production of disfluencies while telling narratives in both their languages. The results indicated that BI-TLD adapt their disfluency use to the listener by favoring different types of disfluencies in the two languages, while BI-ASD do not vary their disfluency use depending on the language used with the interlocutor. Language-specific (i.e., affected by language), as opposed to the language-universal use of disfluencies (i.e., affected by clinical status and not different across the two languages), will be discussed.

References:

Lake, J. K., Humphreys, K. R., & Cardy, S. (2011). Listener vs. speaker-oriented aspects of speech: Studying the disfluencies of individuals with autism spectrum disorders. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 18(1), 135–140.

Salem, A. C., MacFarlane, H., Adams, J. R., Lawley, G. O., Dolata, J. K., Bedrick, S., & Fombonne, E. (2021). Evaluating atypical language in autism using automated language measures. Scientific reports, 11(1), 1-12.

Wiklund, M., & Laakso, M. (2019). Ungrammatical utterances and disfluent speech as causes of comprehension problems in interactions of preadolescents with high functioning autism. Clinical linguistics & phonetics, 33(7), 654-676.