Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Bilingualism. Vocabulary'

Trabalho de Projecto apresentado para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtençao do grau de Mestre em Didáctica do Inglês,
In the modern scientific world, linguists have made a big buzz about the notion of bilingualism. Such a situation is the result of a persistent call of the European community for bilingualisation, which is dictated by a constant mobility of people around Europe. In order to grasp the nature of bilingualism, a vast majority of scientific papers have been published which rest upon the results of an enormous number of action researches held. But these papers deal primarily with the notion of bilingualism itself. Also, constant attempts to subdivide bilingualism can be found. If we will speak about the world of education, lots of linguists (not even practitioners) give you advice on how to foster a bilingual child. In this paper, through a detailed analysis of the relevant literature, we will try to understand what to do if you are working with children who happen to be bilinguals, what role bilingual education programs play in modern educational system, and what their objectives are. Also, how being bilingual will influence a child’s cognitive processes and their intelligence and how teachers can benefit from a child’s bilingualism. By means of an action research we will try to clarify how being bilingual will help children acquire vocabulary.

This study investigated the vocabulary abilities of bilingual Portuguese-English-speaking children compared to their monolingual peers. Parental Report Surveys were conducted using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs), which are standardized norms for vocabulary assessment. Electronic versions of the “Words and Sentences CDI” in English and Brazilian-Portuguese were used in order to assess the vocabulary of children between the ages of 16 and 36 months. Parents answered the surveys online. Different vocabulary score types were used in order to evaluate the children’s lexicons: The Total Vocabulary score, the Conceptual Vocabulary scores, and the Total Modified Vocabulary. The analyses of the results showed that bilinguals had fewer words than the monolinguals in each language separately, but no significant differences between bilinguals and monolinguals when the two languages of the bilinguals were compared together to the monolinguals'. An analysis of cognates and translation equivalents showed that cognates help with the acquisition of words.

This dissertation is on the subject of bilingual vocabulary acquisition, specifically regarding children between the age of 12 and 20-24 months, and presents a longitudinal case study of a Cantonese-English bilingual child. We begin by questioning the role of exposure (in terms of number and frequency of utterances) as a reliable indicator of vocabulary acquisition at such a young age. While exposure is undoubtedly a good indicator of acquisition from age 2;0 upwards (Huttenlocher, Haight, Byrk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991, David & Li, 2008), we suggest that other more specific factors are more crucial at earlier stages, when the rate of vocabulary growth is slower. As such, using a parental diary and a series of video experiments, we propose and test hypotheses concerning the roles of child directed speech (CDS), salience of exposure, emotional arousal and phonological complexity in early language acquisition. Regarding CDS, results taken from the parental diary show apparent selection and adaptation of vocabulary to fit reduplicated forms between the ages of 1;0 and 1;5. In conjunction with previous research, we propose that, between 1;0 and 1;5, during the whole-word stage (Vihman & Croft, 2007), salience and phonological simplicity of exposure are key factors in vocabulary acquisition. This hypothesis points to a likely initial Cantonese dominance in English-Cantonese bilinguals, which is supported by our data. Our results from video experiments appear to support hypotheses concerning positive emotional arousal as a facilitator of vocabulary acquisition prior to 20-24 months, and also of a child’s ability to acquire language with minimal exposure, in a similar but not identical process to fast mapping (Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We propose as such that emotional arousal is a key component in language acquisition before age 2;0, and link this type acquisition to flashbulb memories (Brown & Kulik, 1977). Finally we show that our parental diary data corroborates the well documented verb and noun biases in Chinese (Choi & Gopnik, 1995) and English (Bornstein et al., 2004) respectively. We question what these conflicting biases may mean for a bilingual child in terms of language dominance and code mixing, and also discuss potential reasons for, and implications of, these biases.
published_or_final_version
Linguistics
Master
Master of Arts

The effectiveness of a bilingual and a monolingual treatment condition was compared in the receptive training of novel action words presented to two bilingual, Spanish-dominant, minority-language preschoolers. In the bilingual condition, one set of actions and referents was trained in Spanish (L1) followed by training in English (L2). In the monolingual condition, another set of actions and referents was trained in L2 alone. For one child, superior L2 learning occurred in the bilingual condition, results consonant with reports by Garcia (1983a) and by Oskarsson (1975). For the other child, unexpectedly, the monolingual condition resulted in superior L2 learning. Her findings suggest that the effect of preference to learn in L2 may result in behavior which runs counter to expectations of performance based on observed dominance. Generalization of receptive learning to expressive performance was also assessed. Both children performed at sufficient levels to indicate learning was generalized from reception to expression.

Morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge are two (among many) components of multi-faceted word knowledge critical for language development and ultimately, academic performance, as they strongly correlate with other essential, literacy-related skills, such as spelling, writing and reading comprehension (Ramirez, Chen, Geva & Kiefer, 2010). Developing these types of knowledge is a non-linear process for school-age children: morphological awareness, in particular, involves long-term learning towards a full mastery beginning in mid-dle childhood and continuing through adolescence. Such learning processes can pose significant challenges especially for children attending a school entirely in a second language (L2) while speaking, as a first language (L1), a language which is ethno-linguistically minority in status in the larger (L2) society. Despite globally growing populations of L2 children in school settings, little is known about the nature of morphological/vocabulary knowledge in one language, relative to the other, especially when children are learning two typologically distant languages with different writing systems. The current study, situated within the theoretical framework of multicompetence (Cook, 2003), set out to investigate specific aspects of vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness in different groups of English- and Japanese-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, whilst also examining the extent to which English morphological awareness influences/or is influenced by Japanese morphological awareness among the bilingual sample. The purpose of the study is largely three-fold. One was to examine the children’s ability to understand and express a connection between a word and its meaning. The former taps into receptive vocabulary knowledge, whereas the latter expressive vocabulary knowledge. Two vocabulary tests were administered to three groups of children per language: two bilingual groups (24 Japanese learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) and 21 learners of Japanese as a Heritage Language (JHL)) and a group of 25 English Language Monolinguals (ELMs) (English); and ESLs, JHLs and a group of 27 Japanese language Monolinguals (JLMs) (Japanese). The second purpose was to investigate the children’s ability to identify morphemes included in a word and also to produce inflectional and derivational forms of a word, using two morphological tasks per language – a Word Segmentation (WS) task and a Word Analogy (WA) task. Lastly, the current study examined, through statistical analyses, the nature of an association between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge in each language, and also whether morphological awareness in one language could act as a significant predictor of morphological awareness in the other, i.e., cross-linguistic influence. Four key findings were obtained. First, the patterns in which each group demonstrated vocabulary knowledge through English tests contrasted with the pattern observed in the Japanese results. In English, the ESL group scored more highly on the receptive test than the expressive test, whereas the reverse pattern was the case for the ELM group. The JHL group yielded comparable scores across tests. In Japanese, in contrast, all three groups (ESL/JHL/JLM) scored more highly on the expressive test than on the receptive test. Second, all groups of children typically demonstrated higher degrees of an awareness of inflectional morphemes than of derivational morphemes in the English morphological tasks (both the WS and WA tasks) and the Japanese WA task. A slightly different pattern was observed in the Japanese WS task, where the performances of ESL and JLM children were not sensitive to morpheme type, whereas the JHL group yielded higher scores on the inflectional morphemes than the root morphemes. As regards the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge in each language, in English, it was the ability to produce morphologically complex items, as opposed to recognising morphemes, that was positively related to vocabulary knowledge in all three groups (ESLs, JHLs & ELMs). In Japanese, in contrast, both morpheme recognition and production were positively related to vocabulary knowledge in all Japanese-speaking groups (ESLs, JHLs & JLMs). Lastly, the bilingual data identified a reciprocal nature of morphological transfer (Japanese -> English) only in the ESL group. More specifically, the ESL children’s ability to identify morphemes in Japanese words through segmentation may have a positive influence on the ability to produce English inflectional and derivational items. The latter ability is, in addition, likely to play a positive role in its Japanese equivalent, namely, the ability to produce Japanese inflectional and derivational items. No transfer effects were established in either direction for the JHL group. These within-language and cross-linguistic investigations of the nature of, and the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge are discussed in terms of the existing evidence in the literature (e.g., Carlisle, 2000; Ramirez at al.,2010) and are graphically illustrated via the integration continuum based on the notion of multicompetence (Cook, 2003). Several limitations of the current study are reviewed and discussed, fol-lowed by the Conclusion chapter, where the unique contribution of the current study to the literature is revisited, together with a brief remark about its indirect links with the field of educational research in Japan and suggestions for future research.

Vocabulary is well acknowledged as playing a critical role in language and reading development for young children, particularly for children learning English as an Additional Language (EAL) in school (Scarborough, 2001; Stahl & Nagy, 2005). However, most previous research on vocabulary has focused on measuring individual words and failed to examine knowledge of multi-word phrases, despite corpus evidence that these items are common in the English lexicon (Erman & Warren, 2000). The nature of multi-word vocabulary knowledge and its possible contribution to literacy skills among children remains underexplored, possibly due to a lack of available suitable measures. The current thesis details the development and administration of an original multi-word phrase task containing transparent, semi-transparent and non-transparent verb + object phrases to 108 British monolingual English speakers and learners with EAL in school years 3, 4 and 5. Results showed a strong effect of item transparency, even greater than frequency. Year 4 monolingual English speakers had significantly higher scores than year 3 monolingual learners on non-transparent items, while among learners with EAL year 3 and 4 performances were similar and year 5 learners’ scores were significantly higher. The second phase of the study explored the contribution of multi-word phrase knowledge to reading among 40 year 4 monolingual English speaking children and Bengali speakers with EAL. Multiple regression analysis showed that multi-word task performance accounted for a significant amount of variance in reading scores, when controlling for non-verbal intelligence, receptive and expressive single word vocabulary and language background. These findings are of import for increasing our understanding of vocabulary development among young learners and provide insight into the particular needs of learners with EAL.

This thesis suggests that the range of vocabulary in an individual’s lexicon has an influence on in their assessment of nonword wordlikeness. The study included thirteen Spanish-English bilinguals who participated in a language dominance questionnaire, standardized assessments of Spanish and English vocabulary knowledge, and Spanish and English wordlikeness judgment tasks. Resulting data demonstrated moderate correlations between vocabulary knowledge and performance on nonword wordlikeness judgement tasks in Spanish and English. Participants with larger lexicons appeared more tolerant of less probable nonwords, those with low phonotactic probability, while those with smaller lexicons were less accepting of nonwords with low phonotactic probability. The results suggest that an individual’s processing of low probability phonological constituents is influenced by the diversity and complexity of their linguistic knowledge and specifically, their vocabulary acquisition.

L’objectif de cette recherche est d’étudier le développement du vocabulaire en production et en compréhension orales en turc (L1) et en français (L2) des enfants bilingues franco-turcs âgés de 6 à 10 ans en France en comparaison aux enfants monolingues français et turcs. Le test allemand « Wortschatz- und Wortfindungstest für 6- bis 10-Jährige » (Glück, 2011) a été utilisé. Celui-ci a permis d’analyser les stratégies de réponses en fonction de six types de questions posées, les différentes catégories lexicales (1 : vie quotidienne / famille ; 2 : non spécifique et 3 : école), les phénomènes sémantiques, les items connus et non connus des enfants ainsi que leur répertoire linguistique. Le corpus est constitué de 180 enfants dont 60 bilingues, 60 monolingues français et 60 turcs fréquentant le CP, le CE2 et le CM2. Les résultats révèlent un meilleur niveau en L1 en CP puis une amélioration en L2 en CE2 et un écart rapproché en CM2. Les questions difficiles sont les Types 1, 2, 4 et 5 dans les deux langues pour les CP ; 1, 4 et 6 pour les CE2 en L2 et 1, 2, 4 et 5 en L1 alors que pour les CM2, il s’agit du Type 1. Les catégories sémantiques les mieux réussies en L2 sont les 1 et 3 alors qu’en L1, il s’agit de la 2. Les sous-extensions sont nombreuses en CE2 et CM2 dans la L2 alors que les CP ont tendance à sur-extendre. Les bilingues font davantage appel à des stratégies de compensation comme la catégorisation, l’approximation ou la traduction. Le retard constaté pour le vocabulaire total chez les CP est vite rattrapé en CE2. De fortes et positives corrélations (Pearson et al., 1993) ont été constatées entre les langues : plus la L1 est maîtrisée, plus la L2 l’est aussi
This research examine lexical development in receptive and expressive skills in Turkish (L1) and French (L2) of French-Turkish bilingual children aged between 6 and 10 years in France compared to French and Turkish monolinguals. The German test scale “Wortschatz- und Wortfindungstest für 6- bis 10-Jährige” (Glück, 2011) allowed to analyze spoken vocabulary, production and comprehension strategies according to 6 question types, different categories (1: everyday life/family; 2: general; 3: school), semantic phenomena, known and unknown items and their linguistic repertoire. The sample consists of 180 children, including 60 bilinguals, 60 French and 60 Turkish monolinguals composed of first, third and fifth grade pupils. Results show that bilingual have better vocabulary level in their L1 in the first grade and they made good progress in L2 in the third grade and the lexical gaps are significantly reduced in the fifth grade. The most problematic clauses are Types 1, 2, 4 and 5 in the first class; 1, 4 and 6 in L2 and 1, 2, 4, 5 in L1 in the third class whereas they are Type 1 in the fifth class. The most successful semantical category in L2 are the 1 and 3 whereas they are the 2 in L1. The under-extension is more in L2 in the third and fifth classes while the over-extension is more for the first class. Bilinguals make more use of compensation such as categorization, approximation and translation. Bilinguals’ total vocabulary is lower than monolinguals’ however the delay is regain in the third grade. According to the correlation (Pearson et al., 1993), there is a strong and positive correlation between two languages: the more we promote L1 development, the more we promote L2
Bu çalışma Türkiye ve Fransa’daki 6 ile 10 yaş arası çift dilli çocukların tek dilli çocuklara kıyasla anadilleri olan Türkçe ve ikinci dilleri olan Fransızcada anlama ve kullanma becerilerindeki kelime gelişimini araştırmaktır. Kullanılan Alman testi « Wortschatz- und Wortfindungstest für 6- bis 10-Jährige » (Glück, 2011), 6 soru türüne göre sözcük stratejilerinin, 3 farklı kategorinin (1: günlük yaşam/aile; 2: genel; 3: okul), çocukların anlamsal olgularının, bilinen ve bilinmeyen öğelerinin ve dil repertuvarlarının analizlerini yapmamızı sağlamıştır. Derlemimiz 180 çocuktan oluşup 60’ı çift dilli, 60’ı tek dilli Fransız ve diğer 60’ı ise tek dilli Türk birinci, üçüncü ve beşinci sınıf öğrencileridir. Çift dillilerin ilkokul birde ana dillerinde iyi bir sözcük seviyesine sahip olduklarını, üçte ise ikinci dillerinde ilerleme kaydettiklerini ve beşinci sınıfa gelince ise sözcük yetisi farkının azaldığını ortaya koymaktadır. En zor soru türleri birler için 1., 2., 4. ve 5. olurken, üçler için Fransızcada 1., 4. ve 6. Türkçede ise 1., 2., 4. ve 5. olmaktadır. Beşler için her iki dilde 1. soru türüdür. Fransızcadaki en iyi bilinen tümceler 1. ve 3. kategorilerine aittir, oysaki anadilde 2. kategoridir. Anlam daralması üçüncü ve beşinci sınıfta daha fazladır. Birinci sınıfta anlam genişlemesi daha çoktur. Çift dilliler kategorilere ayırma, tahmin etme, çeviri gibi telafi stratejilerine başvurmaktadırlar. Kelime hazinesi daha zayıf öngörülen birinci sınıf çift dilliler, bu farkı üçüncü sınıfta telafi etmekte. Her iki dil arasında müspet ve güçlü bir bağlantı (Pearson et al., 1993) olduğu tespit edilmiştir: anadile ne kadar hakim olunursa ikinci dile de o kadar hakim olunur

A dissertation submitted to The Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology School of Human and Community Development Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand In fulfilment of the requirements of the degree Master of Arts in Speech-Pathology March, 2017
Purpose: There is a need to develop and refine assessment measures on bilingual children, since language measures used on monolingual individuals cannot and should not be directly applied to the bilingual population (Hoff et al., 2012; O’Brien, 2015). The occurrence of Afrikaans-English bilinguals in South Africa provides a rewarding area of investigation for the Speech-Language Therapist (SLT) (Penn & Jordaan, 2016), as the Afrikaans language is well-researched and many individuals from this population are considered to be more balanced bilinguals than other bilingual groups (Coetzee-Van Rooyen, 2013).The assessment of vocabulary in bilingual children has received particular attention because limited vocabulary is one of the first signs of language impairment (Ellis & Thal, 2008). This research aimed to determine how Grade 1 Afrikaans-English bilingual children perform on a bilingual vocabulary assessment. Design: A quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional and comparative design was used in this study. Method: The Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test 4 (EOWPVT-4) (Martin & Brownell, 2011a) and the Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test 4 (ROWPVT-4) (Martin & Brownell, 2011b) were used to assess 30 grade 1 Englishspeaking monolinguals. In addition an adapted Afrikaans expressive one word vocabulary test based on the EOWPVT-4 and an adapted Afrikaans receptive one word vocabulary test based on the ROWPVT-4 were used to assess 30 grade 1 Afrikaans-English bilinguals. Permission from the schools involved, informed consent from the parent/s or guardian/s as well as child assent were obtained. The data gathered from testing was tabulated, interpreted with the use of mean scores and standard deviations (SD) and analysed using within- and between -group statistical comparisons. Mean raw scores were converted to percentages for ease of comparison between receptive and expressive scores. Results: Within-language comparisons revealed that on the English test, receptive and expressive scores within both the English monolingual and bilingual groups were significantly correlated. Expressive scores could therefore be predicted from receptive scores or vice versa in both the English monolingual and bilingual groups. However, the receptive and expressive score on the Afrikaans tests were not significantly correlated. In the bilingual group, the receptive score in Afrikaans was significantly higher than the expressive score suggesting that although the bilingual participants had good knowledge of Afrikaans vocabulary they could not always express this in a naming test. They frequently used the English word. Afrikaans is possibly being used less in the home and school environments so that the English words are more familiar. Nonetheless, both the monolingual and bilingual participants had significantly higher scores on the receptive vocabulary assessment than on the expressive vocabulary assessments in both English and Afrikaans. Between-group comparison revealed that the differences between the scores of the English monolingual and Afrikaans-English bilingual learners were not significant on either the receptive or expressive vocabulary measure in English. The bilingual group performed as well as the English participants on the English tests, suggesting that they are not disadvantaged in the language of instruction. The norms used in the EOWPVT and the ROWPVT were applicable to both the monolingual and bilingual groups’ scores for the age range of the participants and highlighted that these tests were suitable in assessing an English monolingual and Afrikaans-English bilingual child in South Africa. When composite scoring was used the bilinguals scored significantly better than their monolingual peers on both the receptive and expressive measures, which confirmed the premise behind this study- that composite scoring should be used to gain an accurate assessment of a bilingual child’s vocabulary. Adaptation of the English tests into Afrikaans, as opposed to O’Brien’s study (2015), which adapted English tests into isiZulu, may have positively affected the results as all English words had direct translation equivalents in Afrikaans, which was not the case in isiZulu. The comparison between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals within the bilingual group demonstrated that the simultaneous bilinguals’ mean receptive and expressive scores surpassed those obtained by the sequential bilingual participants. A significant difference was identified between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals’ composite receptive scores and Afrikaans expressive scores. Finally, only one monolingual participant scored below the peer group mean on both the receptive and expressive vocabulary tests, indicating low proficiency in English and risk of language impairment; however no bilingual participants were found to be language impaired when composite scoring was used. Conclusion: Bilingualism remains a rewarding area of investigation in South Africa. Afrikaans-English bilingual children performed significantly better than O’Brien’s (2015) isiZulu-English participants on a translated, originally English vocabulary test. Throughout this study the refinement of valid assessment tools for accurate description of bilingual children’s vocabulary was highlighted. The well-researched technique of composite scoring has proven to be valuable in avoiding overdiagnosis in South African bilingual children.
MT2018

The current study investigated the effectiveness of a Literacy Based Intervention (LBI) on English Language Learners (ELLs) with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Specifically this report focuses on the effects of LBI on vocabulary skills (e.g. naming and defining). Nineteen ELLs (ages 74 to 104 months) participated in the intervention study, which lasted eight weeks and consisted of 50-minute sessions, three times a week. The LBI focused on rich vocabulary instruction of words that were from storybook readings. Vocabulary naming and definition probes were used to assess vocabulary progress. Results revealed that vocabulary increases did not occur until the second half of the intervention (e.g. week six or seven). LBI shows promise to be successful for increasing vocabulary skills in ELLs with SLI.
text

Our study investigated the processing of compound vocabulary of bilingual (BL) Mandarin-English children and their performance in comparison to monolingual (ML) English children. From this study, we sought to determine (a) how the BL children performed in Mandarin compared to English (b) how the BL children performed compared to the ML children, and (c) how background factors, such as language use and vocabulary size affect compound processing. We predicted that the BL children would show an advantage on compound processing tasks over the ML children due to the importance of compounding in word formation in Mandarin Chinese. In addition, we also used performance on picture vocabulary tasks as covariates to take into consideration potential differences in vocabulary size, as BL children often have a smaller vocabulary in each language because of distribution across languages. Data were collected from 25 BL Mandarin-English children (between 40 to 104 months of age) who were matched within three months to 25 ML English children (between 40 to 105 months of age). Children participated in a compound analogy task, in which they produced novel compounds after a model; and a compound knowledge task, in which they explained real compounds. Comparing performance across languages, results showed that the BL children demonstrated higher performance in the dominant language (English) than in the nondominant language (Mandarin). The BL children were more likely to accurately produce novel compounds, but also more likely to make errors that involved the use of compounds. No significant difference was found in BL and ML performance on compound knowledge tasks. Significant relationships were found for some of the participant characteristics for both the BL and ML children and performance. In particular, age, picture identification, and picture naming performance were correlated with compound performance for the BL participants; performance on the picture identification task and compound processing tasks were correlated with each other for the ML participants. These findings provided limited support for our hypothesis. Future investigations should include BL participants who have a more balanced proficiency in both languages, as well as examine factors that were found to influence ease of compound processing.
text

The purpose of the study was to examine the feasibility of a dialogic book-reading intervention for bilingual preschool children with expressive vocabulary delays. The intervention was provided in English and Spanish concurrently to an experimental group of six children, while six children were in a delayed treatment control group. Dialogic book-reading has been shown previously to be effective with monolingual children, and the current study was the first to extend it to bilingual children. The children participating in the study were 22 – 41 months-old and were recruited from the waiting list of an agency providing speech-language services. The intervention was provided in English in the children’s homes by the primary investigator and in Spanish by the children’s mothers, who were trained in the techniques of dialogic book-reading. Thirty fifteen-minute sessions in each language using dialogic book-reading strategies were provided to each child in the intervention group over six weeks. The study examined the acquisition of ten target words selected for each child in English and Spanish separately, in addition to overall increases in the children’s vocabularies. The children in the intervention group learned significantly more target words in each language following the intervention than did the children in the control group. The children in the intervention group were also able to produce the acquired words at a delayed posttest six weeks following the posttest. The intervention also led to an improvement in the ability of the children in the intervention group to stay focused on book-reading tasks. The gains in the overall vocabulary of the children in the two groups did not differ significantly. The mothers’ evaluations of the intervention revealed their satisfaction with the approach. The mothers were successful in learning dialogic book-reading strategies and stated that they felt empowered to improve their child’s vocabulary development.

Diplomová práce se zabývá základní slovní zásobou standardní češtiny ve vztahu mluvčím češtiny jako zd d ného jazyka. Jedná se o druhou generaci mluvčích češtiny, kte í vyr stali v N mecku, konkrétn v ezn a okolí. Cílem práce je identifikovat oblasti základní slovní zásob češtiny, které si uvedení mluvčí neosvojili p i ne ízené akvizici Teoretická část práce v první ad vysv tluje pojmy zd d ný jazyk, mluvčí migračním pozadím, nedokonalé osvojení jazyka a základní slovní zásoba s ohledem na né mluvčí. Dále na základ zahraniční odborné literatury popisuje problematiku vymezení základní slovní zásoby a tyto poznatky aplikuje na češtinu. T žišt m teoretické části práce je vymezení aktivní a pasivní slovní zásoby češtiny a její rozsah a základní slovní zásobu češtiny je nahlíženo jak z frekvenčního, tak z komunikačn pragmatického pohledu. Pro účel tohoto výzkum k výb ru základní slovní zásoby následn zvolen frekvenční p ístup s využitím Českého národního korpusu. Empirická část práce popisuje experimentální výzkum, ve kterém byla zkoumána aktivní i pasivní slovní zásoba a schopnost mluvčích češtiny jako zd d ného jazyka používat synonyma. Z výzkumu vychází, že tito mluvčí mají osvojené p ibližn čty i p tiny základní slovní zásoby standardní češtiny. Mezi nejobtížn jší slova pro tyto mluvčí pat í tzv. "faux amis"...

This dissertation presents results from a study on the expression of emotions in a second language in order to address two overarching research questions: 1) What does the acquisition of L2 emotion lexicon and discourse features tell us about the pragmatic and communicative competence of late learners and the internalization of L2-specific concepts, and 2) Knowing that expressing emotions in L2 is one of the most challenging tasks for L2 learners (Dewaele, 2008), what can late L2 learners do at end-state, with regards to ultimate attainment and the possibility of nativelikeness? Narratives of positive and negative emotional experiences were elicited from late L2 learners of English and French at end-state, both in their L1 and L2. First, the acquisition of L2 emotion words was analyzed through the productivity and lexical richness of the emotion vocabulary of the bilinguals. Analysis of L2 emotion concepts was also conducted through the distribution of emotion lemmas across morphosyntactic categories. Lexical choice of emotion words was also investigated. Results showed that although L2 English and L2 French bilinguals' narratives were shorter than the monolinguals' and the proportion of emotion word tokens were fewer than that of monolinguals', bilinguals showed greater lexical richness than the monolinguals. In terms of morphosyntactic categories, bilinguals behaved in a nativelike pattern such that L2 English bilinguals favored adjectives and L2 French bilinguals preferred nouns/verbs. This pattern was held constant across the first languages of the bilinguals. With respect to lexical choice, bilinguals used the same emotion lemmas used the most by monolinguals. On occasion, non-nativelike patterns also emerged, suggesting both L1 transfer on L2 (L2 English bilinguals favoring nouns/verbs) and L2 transfer on L1 (L1 English bilinguals favoring nouns/verbs). However, these rare instances could be explained by individual and typological variability. The findings suggest that late L2 learners can achieve nativelike levels of attainment in L2, providing evidence against the existence of a critical period for the acquisition of L2 pragmatics and culture-specific L2 lexicon. In a separate analysis, the L2 discourse of emotion was investigated under a corpus linguistic framework, in order to shed some light into the ways late L2 learners of English and French talk about emotions in narratives of personal stories. The use of stance lemmas and tokens, and the distribution of these stance markers across categories of certainty and doubt evidentials, emphatics, hedges, and modals, as well as lexical choice of stance were analyzed. This was followed by an analysis of discourse features, such as figurative language, reported speech, epithets, depersonalization, and amount of detail. Results showed that although bilinguals produced significantly less stance lemmas and tokens than monolinguals, in terms of the distribution of stance categories, the French group (L2 French and L1 French bilinguals) behaved in a nativelike pattern, favoring emphatics, certainty evidentials, doubt evidentials, hedges, and modals. The English group's results, on the other hand, were somewhat inconsistent, in that neither L2 English bilinguals, nor L1 English bilinguals followed the distribution pattern of English monolinguals. In terms of nativelike performance, we conclude that the L2 French bilinguals did perform nativelike with regards to stance marking, and that L2 English bilinguals also performed nativelike, but only for certain categories of stance. Also, L2 English transfer on L1 French was evidenced for L1 French bilinguals. Analysis of discourse features revealed between 1 up to 10 bilinguals (L2 English or French) out of 31 who used those features which were only evidenced in native speech in previous research. The findings here, once again suggest that late L2 learners can acquire aspects of L2 discourse to a nativelike degree.
text

The present study seeks to explore if the bilingual advantage and disadvantage of children who are natively bilingual in English and Spanish extends to children who gain exposure to and eventually become bilingual in these languages beginning at ages 5 and 6. Specifically, the study compares executive control, vocabulary, and verbal fluency for three groups of children: a) native Spanish-English bilinguals, b) late bilinguals that have completed at least 5 years of a 50-50 dual language immersion program in English and Spanish in school, and c) English monolinguals that have not had second language instruction. The proposed study seeks a better understanding of the unique cognitive skill sets of native and late bilingual and monolingual children, and to inform educational policy related to bilingual students.
text

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the characteristics of vocabulary use of seven- to nine-year-old bilingual children with and without language impairment. 74 participants (37 typically developing and 37 language impaired) ranging from age 7;0 to 9;11 years were matched based on age, language dominance and when they first began speaking English. The Test of Narrative Language (TNL) was administered to the participants in English and Spanish. The three oral narratives of the English and Spanish TNL were transcribed and scored. A prototypical word list was derived from 10 high scoring students from the normative data set. Word lists from both the TD and LI participants in English and Spanish were compared to the prototypical word list. Results indicated that the participants produced more prototypical words when telling stories in English than in Spanish. TD participants also produced more prototypical words than LI participants overall. The results have implications for both assessment and intervention and add to our knowledge of word selection in bilingual children with and without LI.
text