Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research XI 2015
Lectures and Hands-on Tutorials on Methodological Aspects of
Language Acquisition Research
General Information
Keynote speaker: Harald Clahsen
Invited speakers:
Judy Clegg, Pelagia Derizioti, Paul Leseman
Pim Mak, Chloë Marshall, Judith Rispens
Jason Rothman, Ludovica Serratrice
Tutorials
Articulography
CHILDES
Hayo Terband
Jacqueline van Kampen
Eye Tracking:
Reading
Computational
Methods
Christina Bergmann and
Raquel Garrido Alhama
Eye Tracking: Visual LENA & Analysis of
World Paradigm Spontaneous Speech
Iris Mulders
Pim Mak
Petra van Alphen
Multilevel Analysis
PRAAT
Preferential
Listening/Looking
Huub van den Bergh
Willemijn Heeren
Annemarie Kerkhoff and
Maartje de Klerk
ERP
Ethics
Caroline Junge
Maartje de Klerk
Lexical databases
LimeSurvey
Emmanuel Keuleers
Martijn van der Klis
SPSS
Statistics with R
Roeland van Hout
Hugo Quené
CONTENTS
LOCATION
3
BY PUBLIC TRANSPORT / AIR
3
BY CAR
3
ACCOMMODATION
3
MAP
4
SUGGESTED LUNCHPLACES
5
PROGRAMME
6
ABSTRACTS
7
Talks
7
Tutorials
14
Poster abstracts
19
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LOCATION
EMLAR X will be mainly held at Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, 3512 HM Utrecht (Netherlands). The
registration desk will be in the small cantina next to room 0.06, where the plenary lectures are given.
The lectures and most of the tutorials (unless otherwise specified) will take place in this building,
although the Poster Session will take place in Trans 10, room 0.07.
NOTE: The Eye-Tracking: Reading and Preferential Looking/Listening tutorials are the only ones which
are not held in Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, but at a different location: Janskerkhof 13, which is at a
walking distance from the main location. For directions see the map.
E-mail and internet can be used in room 1.08 at Kromme Nieuwegracht 80.
The login and password are available at the registration desk.
BY PUBLIC TRANSPORT / AIR
The main Dutch airport at Amsterdam (Schiphol) is connected to Utrecht by a direct train, as are
most other Dutch cities. For train schedules and prices, see the website of NS, the Dutch railways.
Utrecht Centraal is the name of the railway station you will want to use. While waiting for your
luggage you can buy a train ticket at the yellow/blue self-service ticket machine.
Walking from Utrecht Centra(a)l Station takes 15-25 minutes. For directions, see the map below.
There is also a good bus network. The nearest stop is Domplein, served only by bus line 2
(Museumkwartier Ringlijn) and also close is Janskerkhof, served by lines 11 (Uithof/UMC WKZ), 3
(Homeruslaan), 4 (Burg. F. Andreaelaan), and 8 (Overvecht Zuid). To plan a trip by public transport
within the Netherlands, use the 9292ov site.
BY CAR (NOT RECOMMENDED)
You are most likely to find (expensive) parking spots at Janskerkhof, Lepelenburg, Kruisstraat or
Springweg (indicated on signs from main roads). Traffic in Utrecht is restricted and can take a lot of
time, as in most old city centers.
ACCOMMODATION
For a list of suggestions for accommodation please check the website (NB: Prices may have changed;
we do not officially endorse these establishments in any way.)
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MAP
The map shows the railway Station Utrecht Centra(a)l . The poster session and drinks will be at Trans
10, room 0.07. Kromme Nieuwegracht 80 is where all lectures, as well as most tutorials will be held.
The Eye:-Tracking: Reading and Preferential Looking/Listening tutorials will be held at Janskerkhof
13. When walking through Utrecht, the Dom tower (112 meters) is a nice reference point; see the
picture below. It is marked as a dark blue circle.
(A) Utrecht Centraal, (B) Trans 10, (C) Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, (D) Janskerkhof 13, circle: Dom
church tower
The pictures below are the Dom church and the entrance of Trans 10.
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The pictures above are the entrance of Kromme Nieuwegracht 80 and Janskerkhof 13, respectively.
SUGGESTED LUNCHPLACES
Name
Bakkerswinkel
Bigoli
Brasserie Domplein
Broers
Café de Vingerhoed
Café Orloff
Hofman
Lokaal de Reunie
Schrans
Winkel van Sinkel
Address
Wittevrouwenstraat 2
Schoutenstraat 12
Domplein 20
Janskerkhof 9
Donkere Gaard 11
Donkere Gaard 8
Janskerkhof 17a
‘t Wed 3a
Trans 10
Oudegracht 158
Phone
030 2667999
030 2368848
030 2322895
030 2343406
030 2319659
030 2321679
030 2302470
030 2310100
(Chipknip only!)
030 2303030
Apart from this list there are many more places in the vicinity of the workshop venue.
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Progrmam:
Wednesday, April 15th
9.30 – 10.15
Registration
10.15 – 10.30
Welcome (director UiL OTS Prof. dr. Frank Wijnen)
10.30 – 11.15
Jason Rothman University of Reading and UiT – the Arctic University of Norway
Empirical and theoretical issues in third (or more) language acquisition
11.15 – 11.45
Coffee break
11.45 – 12.30
Ludovica Serratrice The University of Manchester
Analogical reasoning, cognitive flexibility and syntactic priming
12.30 – 13.15
Pim Mak Utrecht University
What speech corpora cannot tell us. Insights from eye tracking in research on
bilingualism and specific language impairment.
13.15 – 14.30
Lunch break
14.30 – 16.30
Tutorial Session I
16.30 – 18.00
Poster session and drinks
Trans 10, room 0.07
Thursday, April 16th
9.00 – 9.45
Paul Leseman Utrecht University
Longitudinal modeling of language development in bilingual contexts:
competition and transfer
9.45 – 10.30
Judy Clegg University of Sheffield
Language trajectories in large population cohorts: reflections on using the
ALSPAC Cohort
10.30 – 11.00
Coffee break
11.00 – 13.00
Tutorial session II
13.00 – 14.30
Lunch break
14.30 – 16.30
Tutorial Session III
16:45 – 17:45
Keynote lecture:
Harald Clahsen Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
Grammatical constraints in language learners’ spoken language comprehension
17.45 – 18.30
Free time
18.30
Workshop dinner
Friday, April 17th
9.30 – 10.15
Chloë Marshall UCL – Institute of Education, University College London
Verbal fluency tasks as a window onto the organization and access of the lexicon
10.15 – 11.00
Judith Rispens University of Amsterdam
(Sub)lexical processing in children with developmental language disorders
11.00 – 11.30
Coffee break
11.30 – 12.15
Pelagia Derizioti Max Planck Institute
Neurogenomics of speech and language disorders: The road ahead
12.15 – 12.30
Poster prize and closing
All lectures are in Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, room 0.06
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ABSTRACTS
Talks
Harald Clahsen
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
Grammatical constraints in language learners’ spoken language comprehension
The human language processor is capable of rapidly integrating grammatical information with
Information from other sources during reading or listening. Yet, little is known of how (child and
adult) language learners make use of grammatical cues along with other information sources
during language comprehension. For the present talk, I will address this general question by
investigating one specific phenomenon, the so-called plurals-in-compounds effect, the avoidance
of plurals inside compounds in English and other languages (e.g. *rats eater vs. rat eater), which
is subject to both structural and non-structural constraints. I will present new evidence from both
compound-internal modifiers in English and German (e.g., rote Paprika(s)fresser ‘red pepper(s)
eater’). Results will be reported from graded linguistic judgements and from visual world eyemovement experiments focusing on the role of grammatical constraints in both child and adult
language learners’ spoken language comprehension. Our results indicate clear differences
between child and adult learners in this domain. Whilst children seem to rely more upon structural
properties of language (in the present case, morphological cues) during comprehension, adult
learners showed earlier sensitivity to non-structural constraints.
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Jason Rothman
University of Reading and UiT – the Arctic University of Norway
Empirical and Theoretical Issues in Third (or More) Language Acquisition
In this talk, I will present the recent trends in the growing literature regarding formal linguistic
approaches to adult multilingual acquisition. I will explain the formalized models of the L3/Ln
initial stages, which seek to model the role of previous linguistic experience (transfer) as well as
methodological issues that one needs to consider to properly test between them (e.g. selection of
groups and how to counterbalance them, levels of exposure to the L3 at time of testing, issues of
proficiency in the L2, differences regarding type of bilingual (simultaneous vs. successive), etc.. I
will also discuss the implications of these initial stages models for development, inclusive of
discussing methodological restrictions that obtain when testing L3/Ln developmental sequencing
and ultimate attainment. I will review much of my own empirical work to expand on the above
issues as well as show you recent methodological developments, such as incorporating
EEG/ERP into our research program.
Ludovica Serratrice
The University of Manchester
Analogical reasoning, cognitive flexibility and syntactic priming
The mapping between events and linguistic constructions is rarely one-to-one. For example, the
same transitive event could be described in English with an active construction (‘The dog chased
the cat’), a subject cleft construction (‘It was the dog that chased the cat’) or a passive (‘The cat
was chased by the dog’), amongst others. The specific choice of syntactic construction will
depend on a range of different factors, including the perspective that the speaker chooses to take
on the event, and the level of accessibility of that syntactic construction in previous discourse.
An integral part of language development is the mastering of syntactic choice, i.e. the ability to
choose different linguistic constructions (e.g. an active or a passive) to describe the same event
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as a function of perspective taking. Research on children’s language development has exploited
the structural priming paradigm to assess the extent to which children’s syntactic choices are
affected by what they hear in the input and has generally shown that, although children can be
successfully primed to use constructions of interest (e.g. passives, double object datives), there is
considerable individual variation that is not yet well understood. As structural priming has been
interpreted as evidence for implicit learning, a better understanding of the determinants of priming
will give us a better insight into mechanisms of language learning in general.
In this presentation I will report the results of a syntactic priming study with 47 monolingual
English-speaking 5-year-olds. Passive and active constructions were primed in a within-subjects
experimental design; measures of short-term memory, verbal working memory, language
comprehension, sentence repetition, cognitive flexibility and analogical reasoning were included
as predictors of the likelihood of priming. Individual differences will be discussed in the context of
the relative contribution of these predictors. Methodological issues concerning the use of the
syntactic priming methodology in the developmental literature will also be addressed.
Pim Mak
Utrecht University
What speech corpora cannot tell us. Insights from eye tracking in research on bilingualism
and specific language impairment
Speech corpora can tell us much about the linguistic development of children. For example, the
errors that children make provide an insight in their linguistic abilities. However, if children make
certain mistakes, this may be due to lack of knowledge, but also to other factors, such as
processing limitations. Processing research, for example using eye tracking, can provide further
evidence for the source of the errors children make. In this talk, I compare language production
and processing of typically developing monolingual Russian children with (1) monolingual
Russian children with specific language impairment (SLI) and with (2) bilingual Russian-Dutch
children. The latter two groups make similar errors in speech production. However, eye tracking
experiments, using the Visual World Paradigm, show that in processing these two groups have
different profiles: The bilingual children perform as well as monolingual children with typical
language development in processing, thereby showing an understanding of constructions in
which they make many errors in in production. This was not the case for children with SLI. This
suggests that the production errors have different causes in the two populations.
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Paul Leseman
Utrecht University
Longitudinal modeling of language development in bilingual contexts: competition and
transfer
The presentation is based on a number of longitudinal studies into bilingual development of
preschoolers in immigrant communities in the Netherlands, focusing on the interplay of exposure
to languages in the home environment and children’s language processing mechanisms. The
bilingual children are from Moroccan-Berber-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch immigrant communities.
Native Dutch monolinguals serve as a comparison group. The presentation will highlight (and
explain) statistical models to track development of language skills (e.g., vocabulary, narrative
skills) in both L1 and L2, changes in L1 and L2 language exposure, and the interrelations
between development and exposure. Furthermore, issues of measuring exposure will be
addressed. The usefulness of a longitudinal approach with change/growth modeling for teasing
apart positive and negative mechanisms in situations of complex bilingualism will be discussed,
referring in particular to competition between languages for exposure time and transfer of
knowledge and skills across languages.
Judy Clegg
University of Sheffield
Language trajectories in large population cohorts: reflections on using the ALSPAC
Cohort
Judy Clegg, PhD, Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield,
UK.
Longitudinal studies of children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) are
important in understanding their developmental trajectories and the provision needed to maximize
their psycho-social outcomes. However, such studies are considerably small in size and clinically
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focused (Clegg et al., 2005; Clegg et al., 2012). Therefore, research is now analyzing speech,
language and communication trajectories in general population cohorts. This presentation will
explore the methodologies involved in these data sets, the advantages this approach offers as
well as the inherent challenges involved.
The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) will be presented to illustrate
recently published research regarding the 1) links between early language development and
social, emotional and behaviour al functioning and 2) the role of pragmatics in the relationship
between social disadvantage and adolescent behaviuor. Finally, future research with large data
sets will be considered including the mechanics of accessing these data sets.
Delegates will learn about 1) the structure and content of general population cohorts; 2) the
methodologies used to answer questions of these cohorts; 3) the advantages and disadvantages
of these data sets and 4) the procedure for accessing this data.
Chloë Marshall
UCL – Institute of Education, University College London
Verbal fluency tasks as a window onto the organization and access of the lexicon
Verbal fluency tasks are widely used experimentally and in language and cognitive assessments.
Participants are given a limited amount of time, most usually one minute, to name as many items
as they can that belong to particular categories, for example “animals”, “foods”, “words beginning
with the letter A”, etc. Fluency tasks yield a wealth of data, beyond merely the number of items
produced, and these data shed light on how the participant’s lexicon is organised and accessed.
The tasks can be carried out with children and adults, and my colleagues and I are the first to
adapt them to signed languages.
In this talk I will present data from a study of deaf children who use British Sign Language (BSL),
some of whom are identified as having specific language impairment (SLI) in their signing
(Marshall et al, 2013). The overall number of BSL responses produced by the group of children
with SLI on a semantic fluency task did not differ from their typically developing deaf signing
peers, but they were slower in getting started on the task and some made sign-finding errors. We
conclude that vocabulary is not severely impaired in deaf children with SLI, and that lexical
organisation is not different to that of typical signers, but that access to signs is more effortful,
possibly reflecting a phonological impairment.
References:
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Marshall, C. R., Rowley, K., Mason, K., Herman, R., & Morgan, G. (2013). Lexical organisation in
deaf children who use British Sign Language: Evidence from a semantic fluency task. Journal of
Child Language, 40, 193-220.
Marshall, C. R., Rowley, K. & Atkinson, J. (2014). Modality-dependent and -independent factors
in the organization of the signed language lexicon: Insights from semantic and phonological
fluency tasks in BSL. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 43, 587-610.
Judith Rispens
University of Amsterdam
(Sub)lexical processing in children with developmental language disorders
Children who are diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI) and / or developmental
dyslexia (DD) experience impairments in their oral language and / or their literacy development.
There is overlap in the linguistic profiles of children with SLI and DD. In this talk similarities and
differences between SLI and DD will be discussed. The focus will be on investigating the effects
of neighborhood density on lexical word recognition and of phonotactic probability on non-word
repetition.
Pelagia Derizioti
Max Planck Institute
Neurogenomics of speech and language disorders: The road ahead
Traditional screening approaches such as linkage analysis and genome-wide association studies
have been extremely fruitful in identifying genetic factors associated with speech and language
disorders. Linkage mapping of a large three-generational pedigree identified FOXP2as the first
gene to be clearly implicated in a monogenic form of developmental verbal dyspraxia. Individuals
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carrying FOXP2 sequence variants have difficulties in mastering the coordinated orofacial
movements required for speech. Although etiological mutations of FOXP2are rare, the gene
provides a valuable molecular window into neurogenetic mechanisms contributing to human
spoken language. FOXP2 encodes a transcription factor with roles in brain development.
Recently, next generation DNA sequencing in cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and
intellectual disability (ID) revealed pathogenic mutations in FOXP1 and TBR1, two brain
transcription factors known to interact with FOXP2. These findings highlight molecular links
between FOXP2-related speech/language disorder and other neurodevelopmental disorders that
are also characterized by language deficits. Undoubtedly, next generation sequencing holds great
promise for uncovering the key genomic changes that affect our speech and language abilities,
not only in relevant disorders, but also in the general population. However, in order to understand
the biological impact of identified genetic variants it will be essential to assess their functional
significance. The success of such efforts will depend on synergies between diverse research
methodologies, including bioinformatics and experimental analyses using model systems, as well
as integration of human genome sequences and functional gene network datasets.
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Tutorials
Articulography
CHILDES
Computational
Methods
ERP
Ethics
Hayo Terband
Jacqueline van Kampen
Christina Bergmann and
Caroline Junge
Maartje de Klerk
Raquel Garrido Alhama
Eye Tracking:
Reading
Eye Tracking:
Visual World
Paradigm
LENA & Analysis
of Spontaneous Lexical databases
Speech
Emmanuel Keuleers
LimeSurvey
Martijn van der Klis
Iris Mulders
Pim Mak
Petra van Alphen
Multilevel Analysis
PRAAT
Preferential
Listening/Looking
SPSS
Statistics with R
Huub van den Bergh
Willemijn Heeren
Annemarie Kerkhoff and
Roeland van Hout
Hugo Quené
Maartje de Klerk
Abstracts
Articulography: Hayo Terband (UU)
This workshop will introduce you to 3D Electromagnetic Articulography or EMA as it is currently
used in spoken language research. EMA is a kinematic tracking technique to measure articulatory
movements. A set of transmitter coils produces a magnetic field that generates currents in tiny
sensors placed on the surface of the articulators. As the sensors move through the field, they are
tracked by computer. In the first hour we will demonstrate the procedure from set up to
measurement together with the accompanying software and discuss the ins and outs of the
experimental setup. In the second hour, participants will get hands-on experience with data
analysis and we will give some theoretical background on the different measures and some
examples of how they can be used to study speech and language development.
CHILDES: Jacqueline van Kampen (UU)
This workshop will introduce you into CHILDES, a system for sharing and studying child language
databases. We will discuss its history and success, and then demonstrate the transcription tools
and conventions (including how to work with video). Finally, we will focus on the tools for the
analysis of CHILDES data.
Computational Methods: Christina Bergmann (Radboud University) and Raquel Garrido
Alhama (UvA)
Finding recurring patterns in speech is a fundamental ability for children acquiring their first
language. This ability relies on statistical learning. Insights in the workings of this mechanism in
children, however, are hard to obtain, because we only have indirect evidence of internal
processes.
Computational models allow us to study learning in greater detail than child studies. Additionally,
simulations do not suffer the time constraints present in child studies. In this workshop we will
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investigate the ability to find patterns using data from actual child experiments. We will replicate
findings from child studies using a recent model of statistical learning.
Participants will get hands-on experience with the use of the programming language Python, a
high level scripting language ideally suitable for both beginners and advanced scientific
computing. At the end of the workshop, participants will have built a working model and thus
gained insight into the possibilities and limitations of computational modeling in child language
research.
Lexical databases: Emmanuel Keuleers (Ghent)
Lexical databases such as CELEX, Lexique, SUBTLEX, childlex, Wordnet, the MRC
psycholinguistic database, CoCa, …), are structured collections of information about words in a
language. In contrast to corpora, lexical databases contain compiled information about each
word, such as its frequency, phonology, morphology, grammatical function, semantics, etc. For
researchers in psycholinguistics, lexical databases are indispensable for setting up and analysing
experiments and for building computational models. The aim of this first session is to develop an
understanding of the information that is available in lexical databases, how that information can
be used in psycholinguistic research, and what the most common problems are when using them.
I will start by tracing the historical context in which lexical databases were developed and discuss
current advances. Then, we will explore different lexical databases and give an overview of the
tools that can be used to extract and manipulate information from them. There will be an
emphasis on correctly interpreting information from lexical databases, with a focus on
understanding frequency measures. At the end of this session, participants should be confident
about obtaining and interpreting data from lexical databases.
Eye Tracking: Reading: Iris Mulders (UU)
This workshop will introduce you to the eye-tracking methodology as it is currently used in
reading research. In the first part, we will discuss the basics of the methodology, Dos and Don’ts
concerning stimulus design and analysis, and well-known eye-tracking measures in reading, like
first fixation, regression path, total reading time etc: how do we compute these measures, and
how are they interpreted? In the second part of the workshop, we will look at some data to lend
more concreteness to these issues.
Eye Tracking: Visual World Paradigm: Pim Mak (UU)
This workshop will introduce you to the Visual World Paradigm as it is currently used in
psycholinguistic research. In a typical VWP experiment participants listen to sentences or a short
discourse while looking at a scene (often a cartoon-like picture) on a computer screen while their
eye fixations are monitored. The method has been shown to be sensitive to various language
processes, ranging from auditory word recognition to grammatical ambiguity resolution (and
beyond).
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It has the important advantage that it provides clues about what happens prior to a critical word or
sentence region. Another advantage is that this technique can provide a relatively direct insight
into the interpretations listeners assign to the language perceived, which in reading-based
methods can only be assessed indirectly. Furthermore, many interesting questions about
language comprehension can only be answered by “situating” language within a real-world
context. Finally, the visual world paradigm can be relatively easily applied with individuals of all
ages and competences. However, as in reading research, it is not always easy to link the eyemovements patterns of your participants to higher cognitive functions such as language. In the
light of this more general debate, we will discuss issues concerning experimental design, data
collection and statistical analysis, which will be illustrated with data from recent experiments in
our lab. These experiments cover a range of topics, including verb semantics, the processing of
noun gender, the processing of causal relations and discourse coherence.
ERP: Caroline Junge (UU)
In this tutorial we will talk about EEG: what is it, where does it comes from, and how do you get to
an ERP. The scalp-recorded EEG, a real-time reflection of neuronal activity, is one of the tools
we can use to study the machinery behind language processing and language acquisition. In this
tutorial, we’ll look at what we can do with this research tool, as well as what the constraints are.
LENA (Language Environment Analysis) and the Analysis of Spontaneous Speech: Petra van Alphen
(Kentalis)
In this tutorial I will give an overview of the Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA) and
its application in early screening, research and treatment of language delays and disorders. I will
then focus on its use in research in the light of our current project (colllaboration of Kentalis and
NSDSK) in which we use LENA to collect data of 30 preschoolers (2;6-3;6) with specific language
impairment and 30 normally-developing children (in progress). The data of this project will be
used to explain how LENA software works, what it generates and what can be done with the
information it provides. Furthermore, the possibilities and limitations of LENA will be discussed.
Multilevel Analysis: Huub van den Bergh (UU)
Many datasets a kind of natural hierarchy exists. For instance, repeated measurements are in
fact measurements within subjects, or, to give another example, students are nested within
classes which themselves are nested within schools. This nesting of observations have been an
enormous problem for data analysis; in the first example both the variance within subjects
(between measurements) and between subjects have to be estimated simultaneously. In the
second example the differences within classes (between students) and between classes (within
schools) as well as the variance between schools have to be estimated. Failing to do so always
results in an underestimation of the total variance, and therefore the null hypothesis will be
rejected too easily.
Today the magic words are ‘multilevel analysis’. Multilevel analysis can be carried out in SPSS. In
this hands-on tutorial the principles of multilevel analysis will be dealt with and participants should
be able to carry out (simple) multilevel analysis afterwards. However, the tutorial is only open to
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participants who have some knowledge of statistical testing (i.e. they should know concepts like
variance, null hypothesis and testing statistics (t, F, χ2).
Preferential Listening/Looking: Annemarie Kerkhoff & Maartje de Klerk (UU)
In this tutorial, we’ll first provide a background on the methodology of preferential listening and
looking by discussing the designs as well as different studies that have used these methods.
After the introduction, we’ll run actual experiments in the Babylab to show you what equipment
and which skills are needed to run thse experiments. We’ll also show you clips of babylab
experiments from our research project to demonstrate the ins and outs of subject/data inclusion
and exclusion and the reliability of coding the experiments. Both the first part, theoretical in
nature, and the second part, the hands on approach, should lead to understanding of Babylab
experiments.
PRAAT: Willemijn Heeren (UU)
In this tutorial you will learn the basics about how to use the program Praat (Boersma & Weenink,
2014) for speech analysis and speech manipulation. Part of the tutorial will consist of hands-on
practice with the software.
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2014). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer
program]. Retrievable from http://www.praat.org/
SPSS: Roeland van Hout (Radboud University)
Using SPSS to produce a few statistics is different from handling complex data in a larger
research project. The data set can become too large to put all data in one file. Sometimes it is
necessary to import and export data from and to other sources. In other cases, a distinction
needs to be made between the levels of analysis. In this session four aspects of SPSS data
handling and analysis will be dealt with:
1. Why keeping syntax? The window system in SPSS has many advantages. Using ‘oldfashioned’ syntax seems to have the advantage that more procedures and more options are
available. However, an essential difference is that by using syntax you can save en redo the
(complex) operations required to get the statistical analyses done.
2. Why using different files? In a larger research project you may collect so many data that they
need to be split into different files. How should you do that and how can you use the function
merge? Another option is to apply the exchange (import/export) facilities, for instance with
EXCEL.
3. How to switch between speakers and occurrences? In dealing with a corpus, the basic level of
handling data is represented by the occurrences of the linguistic phenomenon to be analyzed.
Nevertheless, it is often necessary to calculate scores on the level of the speakers or participants.
This level switch can be handled by using the function of aggregate.
4. How to change the structure of the data matrix? For frequency analysis, it is good to know what
the weight function may do, for reliability analysis you need sometimes to transpose your matrix
structure, and it may happen that you need to repeat an analysis for different groups. How useful
are options like weight, transpose, and split?
This list can be expanded by implementing questions of the participants, including questions
about specific statistical procedures and techniques.
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Statistics with R: Hugo Quené (UU)
This workshop will introduce the R programming environment for statistical analysis. Contrary to
SPSS which is procedure-oriented (commands are verbs, e.g. “compute”), R is object-oriented
(objects are nouns, e.g. “factor”). In this workshop, we will try to ease the learning curve of using R
for your data analysis. Experience with statistical software is NOT required! We will use data
simulation as well as real data sets, to explore topics like t-tests, χ2 tests, and regression. We will also
show how R produces publication-quality figures.
Lime Survey: Martijn van de Klis (UU)
LimeSurvey is a free and open-source on-line survey application. LimeSurvey allows users to
quickly create intuitive, powerful, online question-and-answer surveys that can work for tens to
thousands of participants without much effort. For researchers, big pluses are that LimeSurvey is
easy to use, is modifiable to a great extent and can be installed on university servers (thus
keeping the data in-house).
In the first part of this tutorial we will cover some aspects of survey creation with LimeSurvey.
We’ll cover question types like scales (Likert, Thurnstone), audio/image presentation and arrays.
We’ll talk about what LimeSurvey can and can’t do with regard to randomization. We’ll go over
different access modes for participants, and will also cover issues with opening up your survey to
a broad public.
In the second part you are able to implement a survey yourself on the Utrecht University
LimeSurvey server. We’ll provide some example survey ideas, but you’re free to try and
implement your own.
Ethics: Maartje de Klerk (UU)
This tutorial is about the ethical aspects of doing research with human subjects, ranging from
subject recruitment to data analysis and storage. My aim is to familiarise you with the laws and
codes of conducts that currently apply in the Netherlands, but also present you with some ethical
dilemmas. We will discuss the grey areas, which are open to subjective interpretation. The setting
is informal and participants of this tutorial are asked to actively join the discussion.
18
Poster Session Abstracts
The acquisition of control in European Portuguese: A study on comprehension
Celina Agostinho
It is generally assumed that children have early knowledge of control in complement
clauses (complements of promise are the exception), although very young children may have
non-obligatory control readings of obligatorily controlled subjects (MacDaniel & Cairns,
1990b; McDaniel et al., 1991). As an explanation, it has been suggested that the syntactic
representation of complement clauses is non target-like in child grammar (McDaniel et al.,
1991), or alternatively that developmental effects follow from lexical acquisition (Sherman &
Lust 1993).
A comprehension task based on McDaniel and Cairns (1990a, b) was applied to 64
children (aged 3-5) and 20 adults. It comprises four test conditions: (i) subject control,
transitive and ditransitive verbs, (ii) object control, direct and indirect objects, (iii) sentential
subjects, and (iv) cases of pragmatically determined interpretation (pedir para ‘ask’).
Children identify obligatory and non-obligatory control contexts, choosing an
sentence-external antecedent only in sentential subjects. Subject control is also unproblematic
except for the case of prometer ‘promise’, which could result from intervention effects
(Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi 2009; Orfitelli 2012 for similar effects on A-movement) if
control is movement (Hornstein, 1999). However, these effects may also result from a
misanalysis of the argument structure of verbs with two arguments (a DP and a clausal
argument). Recently, Santos, Gonçalves & Hyams (2013) showed that children aged 3-5
misanalyse object control verbs as taking a single internal argument. This analysis predicts
better comprehension results with object control verbs presenting more cases of misanalysis.
Our data shows that this prediction is confirmed.
(i) a. O esquilo consegue trazer uma maçã.
The squirrel manage-3PS bring-INF an apple.
The squirrel manages to bring an apple.
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b. O galo promete ao coelho cozinhar o jantar.
The rooster promise-3PS to+the rabbit cook-INF the dinner
The rooster promises the rabbit to cook dinner.
(ii) a. O ouriço proíbe o esquilo de tomar banho no lago.
The hedgehog forbid-3PS the squirrel of take-INF bath in+the lake
The hedgehog forbids the squirrel to bathe in the lake.
b. O cisne diz ao pato para arranjar comida.
The swan tell-3PS to+the duck to get-INF food
The swan tells the duck to get food.
(iii) Sair da lagoa chateia o elefante.
Leave-INF from+the lagoon bother-3PS the elephant
To leave the lagoon bothers the elephant.
(iv) O touro pede ao burro para tocar à campainha.
The bull ask-3PS to+the donkey to ring-INF to+the bell
The bull asks the donkey to ring the bell.
Friedmann, N., A. Belletti & L. Rizzi. (2009) Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in
the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua 119. 67-88.
Hornstein, N. (1999) Movement and control. Linguistic Inquiry 30: 69-96.
McDaniel, D. & H. S. Cairns (1990a) The child as informant: Eliciting linguistic intuitions
from young children. In Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 19 (5), 331-344.
---. (1990b) The processing and acquisition of control structures by young children. In Lyn
Frazier & Jill de Villiers (Eds.) Language Processing and Language Acquisition
Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 10, 313-325.
McDaniel, D., H. S. Cairns & J. R. Hsu (1991) Control principles in the grammar of young
children. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics. 1.121-38.
Orfitelli, R. (2012) Argument Intervention in the Acquisition of A-Movement. PhD
Dissertation, UCLA.
Santos, A.L., A. Gonçalves & N. Hyams (2013) Aspects of the acquisition of control and
ECM-type verbs in European Portuguese. Talk given at Generative Approaches to
Language Acquisition. University of Oldenburg.
Sherman, J.C. & B. Lust (1993) Children are in control. Cognition 46, 1-51.
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Double delay in bilingual specific language impairment?
Counter-evidence from Italian-German bilingual children with SLI
Anna-Lena Scherger, Bergische Universität Wuppertal/Germany
Successive as well as simultaneous bilinguals may lag behind monolinguals in selective
grammatical domains within language acquisition (Müller & Hulk 2001; Paradis et al. 2007).
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show a delay in language acquisition as
well. These children show a late start of language acquisition and a protracted delay in their
language development as a whole (Leonard 2014). Research on bilingual SLI discusses a
conceivable double delay in bilingual children with SLI (Orgassa & Weerman 2008; Paradis
2010; Leonard 2010). The present study provides counter-evidence against such a double
delay in German-Italian SLI (ages 4 and 7). Longitudinal studies of bilingual children with
SLI (n=3) are compared to cross-sectional data of monolingual typically developing (TD)
children (n=18), monolingual children with SLI (n=10) and bilingual TD children (n=14).
Data is analysed in terms of target-like case marking (accusative and dative) in German.
Bilingual children with SLI show no cumulative effect of bilingualism and SLI, i.e. effects of
bilingualism and SLI are not additive and do not result in a double delay compared to
monolingual SLI and bilingual TD children.
Leonard, L. (2014): Children with specific language impairment. 2nd edition. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Leonard, L. (2010): Language combinations, subtypes, and severity in the study of bilingual
children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 31(2), 310-315.
Müller, N. & Hulk, A. (2001): Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition:
Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4(1),
1-21.
Orgassa, A. & Weerman, F. (2008): Dutch gender in specific language impairment and
second language acquisition. Second Language Research 24, 333-364.
Paradis, J. (2010): The interface between bilingual development and specific language
impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 31(2), 227-252.
Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E. & Crago, M. (2007): French-English bilingual children´s acquisition
of the past tense. In: Caunt-Nulton, H., Kulatilake, S. & Woo, I. (Eds.): BUCLD 31
proceedings. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 497–507.
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The acquisition of mood by monolingual speakers of European Portuguese
Alice de Jesus
Although the literature on acquisition of verbal mood is scarce, some previous studies
suggest that the subjunctive is acquired late, becoming stable only around the age of 10
(Blake, 1983). This takes place long after relevant syntax, morphology (Gili Gaya, 1972) and
basic cognitive capacities associated with ToM (Papafragou, 1998) are available. This paper
presents the first set of data on the acquisition of the subjunctive / indicative mood contrast in
European Portuguese (EP) complement clauses and its main goal is to determine which
semantic values guide children in the distribution of mood. Concerning the adult grammar, in
EP (as most Romance languages), the indicative is selected when a veridical epistemic
attitude is expressed towards the embedded proposition, while the subjunctive is selected
when both nonepistemic or nonveridical epistemic attitudes are expressed (Marques, 2009).
An elicited production task was applied to 80 children (aged from 4 to 9) and to a
control group of 20 adults, consisting of a sentence completion task of different types of
matrix predicates: epistemic (veridical and nonveridical) and nonepistemic (veridical and
nonveridical).
The results show that, from the age of 4, children already use the subjunctive on a
variety of contexts. However, the youngest children only seem to be sensitive to epistemicity,
producing subjunctive in complements of nonepistemic verbs and indicative with epistemic
verbs. As they develop, they become more sensitive to the combination of epistemicity and
veridicality, also using the subjunctive in epistemic nonveridical contexts. It is then proposed
that epistemicity precedes veridicality.
Blake, R. 1983. "Mood Selection among Spanish Speaking Children, Ages 4 to 12.", The
Bilingual Review, 10: 21-32.
Gili Gaya, S. 1972. Estudios de lenguaje infantil. Barcelona: Bibliograf.
Marques, R. 2009. “On the selection of mood in complement clauses”, in L. Hogeweg, H. de
Hoop and A. Malchukov (eds.), Cross-linguistic Semantics of Tense, Aspect, and
Modality, John Benjamins, 179-204.
Papafragou, A. 1998. “The acquisition of modality: Implications for theories of semantic
representation”, Mind and Language, 13: 370-99.
22
Reading comprehension in beginning first and second language readers
Liza van den Bosch, Radboud University, Behavioural Science Institute
A considerable number of children in primary education are confronted with the challenging
task of learning to read in their second language. Already early in the process of formal
reading instruction, in particular these children are found to have reading comprehension
difficulties despite accurate word decoding skills. This research project seeks to investigate
the early reading comprehension development of second language readers compared to first
language readers. In a two-fold longitudinal study the precursors and development of word-totext integration are investigated throughout the second and third grade of primary school.
Furthermore, eye-tracking is used to gain insight into children’s on-line word-to-text
integration processes to explain reading comprehension. Prior to the start of the longitudinal
study, a pilot study has been conducted. In this experimental study, 20 Turkish-Dutch L2
learners and 20 Dutch L1 learners (third grade) performed an anaphoric reference task and a
causal relation task while their eye movements were recorded by means of eye tracking
technology. Furthermore, their syntactic knowledge, decoding skills, and vocabulary
knowledge were measured using standardized tests. Besides validating the use of eye tracking
to investigate the reading process in young, beginning readers, the aim of this study was to
gain more insight in the role of syntactic knowledge in text processing and reading
comprehension of children from different linguistic backgrounds.
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Neurobiological correlates of written text comprehension in young adults
Galperina E.I., Kornev A.N., Nagornova Zh.V. Shemyakina N.V.
Saint-Petersburg State Pediatric medical University
The study deals with neurophysiological basis for written text comprehension. The main aim
of the paper is to discuss EEG/ERP preliminary results obtained within complex investigation
that consisted of a) psychological and reading skills assessment, and b) EEG/ERP/fMRI
examination of written text comprehension.
First, 102 subjects (typically-developed young adults, Russian native speakers) were assessed
by the reading comprehension test; then, 15 percentile of the highest (HS) and lowest score
(LS) participants (N=10) were included in neurophysiological stage of the study. In
categorical decision tasks they were presented phrases with metaphoric/literal meaning and
random letter sequences.
The EEG spectral power analysis revealed sensitivity of theta (4-7.5Hz) and alpha2 (10-13Hz)
frequency bands for differences between reading metaphoric and literal phrases. Reading of
metaphoric phrases revealed higher values of the EEG power in theta band in occipital
regions with a focus in the right hemisphere and in the central-frontal regions, with some
accent to the left. Reading of metaphoric phrases was also characterized by higher alpha2
spectral power in the right parietal cortex, in comparison with reading of the literal phrases.
The ERP study highlighted differences between reading metaphoric and literal phrases only in
the HS group: significant differences (p < 0.05) were observed in the parietal cortex. This
corresponds with the results of previous studies that support involvement of associative areas
in the processing of figurative phrases. In the LS group neurophysiological correlates had no
significant difference. This could be related to the text processing specificity in LS
participants.
Supported by RFBR grant №15-06-08349a.
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L2 Acquisition of Portugues Articles by Serbo-Croatian Native Speakers
Radovan Miletić
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
The aim of this PhD project is to analyse the acquisition of L2 articles in European
Portuguese by Serbo-Croatian (SC) native speakers (whose L1 lacks articles) focussing on
their production.
We want to test two hypothesis: Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) (Ionin, Ko & Wexler, 2004)
and Syntactic Misanalysis Model (SMM) (Trenkić, 2007). For L2 learners whose L1 lack
articles, FH assumes full Universal Grammar access and predicts ‘fluctuation’ between
specificity or definiteness patterns until the appropriate value is set. On the other hand, SMM
predicts higher article omission rates in Art+Adj+N vs. Art+N sequences through misanalysis
of articles as adjectives. Hence, learners assign articles some lexical meaning related to
referent identifiability, which leads to omission due to overload of attentional resources (as it
is more costly to process elements of meaning). Besides simple DPs, we will also focus on
less explored complex DPs involving the [±DP ofGEN ±DP] construction in singular
contexts.
The projects addresses the following research questions: do SC learners rely on one
pattern (specificity or definiteness) or do they ‘fluctuate’ between the two? Does the presence
of an adjective affect article production leading to higher omission rates? Does the logical
interpretation of [+DP ofGEN +DP] singular first-mention contexts require less time to
process than the pragmatic interpretation of [-DP ofGEN +DP] singular contexts? Are SC
learners driven by the uniqueness presupposition or by the quantificational reading in [±DP
ofGEN -DP] singular contexts?
Participants will complete two on-line tasks: a fill-in-the-blank task testing four
[±definite, ±specific] conditions, with simple and complex DPs in singular contexts; and a
task testing Art+(Adj)+N+(Adj) conditions using a lexical visual stimulus. These experiments
will be conducted using DMDX (Forster & Forster, 2003).
Forster, Kenneth I. & Jonathan C. Forester. (2003). DMDX. A Windows display program
with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 35
(1), 116-124.
Ionin, Tania; Heejeong Ko & Ken Wexler. (2004). Article semantics in L2 acquisition: The
role of specificity. Language Acquisition 12, 3–70.
Trenkić, Danijela. (2007). Variability in L2 article production: Beyond the representational
deficit vs. processing constraints debate. Second Language Research 23, 289–327.
25
The effect of explicit training on the prosodic production of L2 sarcasm by Dutch
learners of English
Laura Smorenburg*, Joe Rodd*, Aoju Chen
* presenting
Our previous research suggests that Dutch learners of (British) English are not able to express
sarcasm prosodically in their L2. The present study investigates whether explicit training on
the prosodic markers of sarcasm in English can improve learners’ realisation of sarcasm.
Sarcastic speech was elicited in short simulated telephone conversations between Dutch
advanced learners of English and a native British English-speaking ‘friend’ in two sessions,
fourteen days apart. Between the two sessions, participants were trained by means of (1) a
presentation (2) directed independent and (3) evaluation of participants’ production and
individual feedback in small groups. L1 British English- speaking raters subsequently
evaluated the degree of sarcastic sounding in the participants’ responses on a five-point scale.
It was found that significantly higher sarcasm ratings were given to L2 learners’ production
obtained after the training than that obtained before the training; explicit training on prosody
has a positive effect on learners’ production.
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The Processing of Morphosyntactic Cues in wh-Questions: An Eye-Tracking Study
Atty Schouwenaars (University of Oldenburg), Esther Ruigendijk (University of Oldenburg) &
Petra Hendriks (University of Groningen)
atty.schouwenaars@uni-oldenburg.de
Object questions, in which the object precedes the subject, are difficult to comprehend for
children due to a strong subject-first bias (among others; [1]). The ability to identify who is
doing what to whom in sentences with a non-canonical word order by the use of case-marking
does not develop until the age of 7 ([2]). Children seem to be even less sensitive to the verb
agreement cue ([3] for Dutch, [4] for Italian).
The aim of this study is to find out (1) when and to what extent German children make use
of these cues in their interpretation of object questions, and (2) whether different cues lead to
different processing (also for adults), in terms of different eye-gaze patterns.
We tested 7-10 year old German children (n=33), and an adult reference group. A picture
selection task with eye-tracking was carried out to test the comprehension subject, object and
passive wh-questions disambiguated by case and/or agreement.
Offline data confirm that children (as well as adults) respond less correctly on object
questions, than on subject and passive questions. Offline data do not indicate differences
between the different types of cues, but online data do: The eye-gaze patterns show that for
both adults and children, object questions disambiguated later in the sentence by agreement
and case cues (on the second NP) lead to incorrect first interpretations. Our eye-tracking study
shows that German children are sensitive to both case marking and verb agreement and do
revise their incorrect first interpretations of object questions.
[1] Friedmann & Novogrodsky (2011). Lingua; [2] Dittmar et al. (2008). Child Development;
[3] Metz et al. (2010). New developments in the acquisition of Dutch; [4] De Vincenzi et al.
(1999). Proc. of the Eur. Conf. on Cogn. Sci.
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Prosodic Focus Marking in Child L2
Zenghui Liu, Utrecht University
This study investigates prosodic marking of focus in Child L2 speakers of Mandarin, by
adopting a semi-spontaneous experimental approach. The child L2 speakers are sequential
bilinguals who speak Bai as their native language at home and learned Mandarin at school,
and all of them were recruited from a Bai-speaking community in southwest of China. A
previous study has shown that Bai is a language marks focus prosodically. However, native
speakers of Bai only use duration rather than pitch as the only prosodic cue to signal focus,
which is different from Mandarin. Out investigation aims to reveal whether child L2 speakers
of Mandarin will mark focus prosodically, and whether they differentiate different focus
types. Further, the present study shows specific prosodic cues are used by child L2 speakers
of Mandarin, and a developmental path of prosodic focus marking for Child L2 speakers.
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