This study evaluates the ability of different measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to predict l... more This study evaluates the ability of different measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to predict lexical outcomes for preschoolers raised in a context of nationwide bilingualism. The participants were 58 children aged 3;11–4;3 from Maltese-dominant homes who attended state preschools. Receptive picture name judgement and picture naming, in Maltese and English, were employed to measure receptive and expressive lexical abilities, respectively. Lexical outcomes for four individual SES variables and a single composite SES measure were similar but not directly interchangeable. The composite SES variable emerged as most strongly predictive of children's lexical performance. Receptive judgement of phonological accuracy improved similarly in both languages with higher composite SES. Naming skills increased significantly in English but not in Maltese, suggesting differences in English input related to parental SES. A focus on SES in relation to lexical skills in two majority languages is novel and adds to current understanding of normative bilingual acquisition.
BackgroundAlthough parental checklists are well-known for their potential in indexing young child... more BackgroundAlthough parental checklists are well-known for their potential in indexing young children’s lexicon size, they can also be used to track children’s acquisition of individual words. Word-level data can be used to identify the checklist words most and least commonly employed across groups of children. Like parent-completed vocabulary checklists, samples of spontaneous language use collected from multiple children can also generate measures of word commonality, concerned with the numbers of children producing individual words. To our knowledge, comparisons of word usage as determined by parental checklist and language sample data obtained in parallel from the same children have not been carried out. Also scarce in the empirical literature are item-level analyses of early bilingual lexicons that explore word usage across two emerging languages. The present study aimed to contribute toward bridging both gaps through the analysis of data generated by a bilingual Maltese-English...
This paper describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narrative... more This paper describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to Maltese. The language-learning context in Malta is introduced, followed by an overview of the main typological characteristics of Maltese. A detailed account of the adaptation process is then given. Theoretical and clinical applications of the Maltese adaptation of the MAIN are discussed and current research projects in which the Maltese adaptation is being employed are briefly described.
A delay in expressive language in children with Down Syndrome (DS) is common, and often a major c... more A delay in expressive language in children with Down Syndrome (DS) is common, and often a major challenge of the condition. This study aimed to investigate the early expressive vocabulary skills of Maltese children with DS, whose first languages were either Maltese or English, while taking into account chronological age. Language preference was further explored in the context of a bilingual environment. A multi-method design was implemented across seven participants whose language abilities ranged from the expression of single words in isolation to simple word combinations. The expressive vocabularies of four boys and three girls between 2;10 and 11;9 years were assessed through caregiver report, picture naming and language sampling. Performance of the children was analysed in relation to local findings on lexical production in typically-developing children. The study revealed that productive vocabularies of Maltese bilingual children with DS escalated with increasing age, notwithst...
Auditory processing disorder is described as a mixture of unrefined listening skills which, despi... more Auditory processing disorder is described as a mixture of unrefined listening skills which, despite normal hearing, causes poor speech perception. These difficulties have also been reported in children with a diagnosis of language impairment (LI), literacy difficulties (LD)1, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The purpose of this study is to describe and compare the listening performance of typically developing (TD) children with those diagnosed with LI, LD, and ADHD on an assessment battery of auditory processing (AP) and language processing (LP). One hundred and one TD children and 53 children with a clinical diagnosis were assessed using four subtests of AP presenting linguistic stimuli, three AP subtests with non-linguistic stimuli and an assessment of LP. Parents of all children were required to fill in a questionnaire related to their listening difficulties. Parental report for the TD group on average yielded the lowest score, indicating fewer difficulties wi...
Response_Data.csv: Participant responses ('correct' or 'incorrect') to sentences ... more Response_Data.csv: Participant responses ('correct' or 'incorrect') to sentences with quantifiers ('all', 'none', 'some', 'some...not', 'most') in 31 languages presented in the context of different visual displays. Item_Coding.csv: How sentences with quantifiers ('all', 'none', 'some', 'some...not', 'most') were coded.
There is a paucity of research addressing the lexical skills of Maltese school-aged children. For... more There is a paucity of research addressing the lexical skills of Maltese school-aged children. For the clinical population, the only available standardised assessment that addresses lexical skills, alongside morphosyntactic and narrative abilities, derives naturalistic measures from a story re-tell task (Grech, Franklin and Dodd, 2011). Although clinically useful, the procedure involved is laborious and time-consuming. Assessment tools for Maltese children that specifically address vocabulary size through a structured approach are not available. This paper reports on the comprehension and expression of nouns and verbs in 56 typicallydeveloping Maltese children aged between 5;0 and 5;6 years who were attending their first year of primary schooling. Depending on their bilingual status, each participant was assigned to one of three sub-cohorts, a Maltese-dominant sequential bilingual group (N = 20), an English-dominant sequential bilingual group (N = 15) and a simultaneous bilingual gro...
A longstanding puzzle in developmental linguistics is why children are more permissive than adult... more A longstanding puzzle in developmental linguistics is why children are more permissive than adults in assigning distributive interpretations to sentences with the universal quantifiers each, every, and all under certain experimental conditions. One well-known controversial issue in this area is children’s symmetrical judgments of universally quantified sentences. Symmetrical judgments are elicited when a child is asked to judge if a sentence including a universal quantifier describes a visual context depicting an incomplete distributive relation. The following three judgment types have been included in the set of symmetrical judgment types in the literature (examples from Kang, 2001).
This study evaluates the ability of different measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to predict l... more This study evaluates the ability of different measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to predict lexical outcomes for preschoolers raised in a context of nationwide bilingualism. The participants were 58 children aged 3;11–4;3 from Maltese-dominant homes who attended state preschools. Receptive picture name judgement and picture naming, in Maltese and English, were employed to measure receptive and expressive lexical abilities, respectively. Lexical outcomes for four individual SES variables and a single composite SES measure were similar but not directly interchangeable. The composite SES variable emerged as most strongly predictive of children's lexical performance. Receptive judgement of phonological accuracy improved similarly in both languages with higher composite SES. Naming skills increased significantly in English but not in Maltese, suggesting differences in English input related to parental SES. A focus on SES in relation to lexical skills in two majority languages is novel and adds to current understanding of normative bilingual acquisition.
BackgroundAlthough parental checklists are well-known for their potential in indexing young child... more BackgroundAlthough parental checklists are well-known for their potential in indexing young children’s lexicon size, they can also be used to track children’s acquisition of individual words. Word-level data can be used to identify the checklist words most and least commonly employed across groups of children. Like parent-completed vocabulary checklists, samples of spontaneous language use collected from multiple children can also generate measures of word commonality, concerned with the numbers of children producing individual words. To our knowledge, comparisons of word usage as determined by parental checklist and language sample data obtained in parallel from the same children have not been carried out. Also scarce in the empirical literature are item-level analyses of early bilingual lexicons that explore word usage across two emerging languages. The present study aimed to contribute toward bridging both gaps through the analysis of data generated by a bilingual Maltese-English...
This paper describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narrative... more This paper describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to Maltese. The language-learning context in Malta is introduced, followed by an overview of the main typological characteristics of Maltese. A detailed account of the adaptation process is then given. Theoretical and clinical applications of the Maltese adaptation of the MAIN are discussed and current research projects in which the Maltese adaptation is being employed are briefly described.
A delay in expressive language in children with Down Syndrome (DS) is common, and often a major c... more A delay in expressive language in children with Down Syndrome (DS) is common, and often a major challenge of the condition. This study aimed to investigate the early expressive vocabulary skills of Maltese children with DS, whose first languages were either Maltese or English, while taking into account chronological age. Language preference was further explored in the context of a bilingual environment. A multi-method design was implemented across seven participants whose language abilities ranged from the expression of single words in isolation to simple word combinations. The expressive vocabularies of four boys and three girls between 2;10 and 11;9 years were assessed through caregiver report, picture naming and language sampling. Performance of the children was analysed in relation to local findings on lexical production in typically-developing children. The study revealed that productive vocabularies of Maltese bilingual children with DS escalated with increasing age, notwithst...
Auditory processing disorder is described as a mixture of unrefined listening skills which, despi... more Auditory processing disorder is described as a mixture of unrefined listening skills which, despite normal hearing, causes poor speech perception. These difficulties have also been reported in children with a diagnosis of language impairment (LI), literacy difficulties (LD)1, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The purpose of this study is to describe and compare the listening performance of typically developing (TD) children with those diagnosed with LI, LD, and ADHD on an assessment battery of auditory processing (AP) and language processing (LP). One hundred and one TD children and 53 children with a clinical diagnosis were assessed using four subtests of AP presenting linguistic stimuli, three AP subtests with non-linguistic stimuli and an assessment of LP. Parents of all children were required to fill in a questionnaire related to their listening difficulties. Parental report for the TD group on average yielded the lowest score, indicating fewer difficulties wi...
Response_Data.csv: Participant responses ('correct' or 'incorrect') to sentences ... more Response_Data.csv: Participant responses ('correct' or 'incorrect') to sentences with quantifiers ('all', 'none', 'some', 'some...not', 'most') in 31 languages presented in the context of different visual displays. Item_Coding.csv: How sentences with quantifiers ('all', 'none', 'some', 'some...not', 'most') were coded.
There is a paucity of research addressing the lexical skills of Maltese school-aged children. For... more There is a paucity of research addressing the lexical skills of Maltese school-aged children. For the clinical population, the only available standardised assessment that addresses lexical skills, alongside morphosyntactic and narrative abilities, derives naturalistic measures from a story re-tell task (Grech, Franklin and Dodd, 2011). Although clinically useful, the procedure involved is laborious and time-consuming. Assessment tools for Maltese children that specifically address vocabulary size through a structured approach are not available. This paper reports on the comprehension and expression of nouns and verbs in 56 typicallydeveloping Maltese children aged between 5;0 and 5;6 years who were attending their first year of primary schooling. Depending on their bilingual status, each participant was assigned to one of three sub-cohorts, a Maltese-dominant sequential bilingual group (N = 20), an English-dominant sequential bilingual group (N = 15) and a simultaneous bilingual gro...
A longstanding puzzle in developmental linguistics is why children are more permissive than adult... more A longstanding puzzle in developmental linguistics is why children are more permissive than adults in assigning distributive interpretations to sentences with the universal quantifiers each, every, and all under certain experimental conditions. One well-known controversial issue in this area is children’s symmetrical judgments of universally quantified sentences. Symmetrical judgments are elicited when a child is asked to judge if a sentence including a universal quantifier describes a visual context depicting an incomplete distributive relation. The following three judgment types have been included in the set of symmetrical judgment types in the literature (examples from Kang, 2001).
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