There has been a lot of variability in how Ukrainian refugee children received education and language support in the Netherlands. Some children were immediately immersed in Dutch-only classrooms where they initially received support in English. Other children started off at language schools, with varying amounts of support in their home language (Ukrainian or Russian). There are also in-between cases where children studied in Dutch mainstream schools, but still received support in their first language. This research aims to study the consequences of these language support trajectories for children’s proficiency in Dutch and English, well-being, school performance and motivation to learn Dutch. 

• Anna Rijkers-Baranova
• Nataliia Rekonvald
• dr. Hanna Tryfonova

Bilingual pupils often perform better in English and other foreign languages compared to their monolingual peers. This holds for typically-developing children and pupils with developmental language disorder (DLD). But the underlying causes of the bilingual advantages are possibly different for children with and without DLD. In this project, we aim to discover why bilingualism offers benefits in foreign language learning. To this end, learners’ progress in English is studied in relation to the development of their cognitive skills, motivation and proficiency in the school language (Dutch) and the home language (Turkish or Polish). 

• prof. dr. Rick de Graaff
• Jasmijn Stolvoort
• dr. Sümeyye Koskulu

• Prof. dr. Johanne Paradis (University of Alberta)

This project is investigating the mechanisms of English as a foreign language (EFL) learning by children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Three research questions are addressed:

Research question 1: Does starting age of EFL instruction predict ultimate EFL performance at the end of secondary school?

Research question 2: Is cross-language transfer affected by DLD?

Research question 3: Do children with DLD benefit from explicit cross-linguistic EFL teaching approaches?

This research is conducted in collaboration with Joyce Meuwissen (Royal Dutch Kentalis) and Elena Elgart-Dubinkina (Kuzbas Centre for Psychological, Medical and Social Child Support; Kemerovo State University).

AIM OF THE PROJECT

Bilingual children grow up with two languages. Therefore, they cannot hear and speak each of their languages as often as monolingual children do. As a result, bilinguals tend to develop their languages slower and are often referred to speech language therapists for screening and intervention. Due to the lack of reliable assessment tools for bilinguals, these children are often misdiagnosed for language impairment, which leads to unnecessary treatments and emotional problems. Alternatively, bilingual children can be under-diagnosed, because speech language therapists may think that their language delay is due to bilingualism, rather than language impairment. In this case, children do not receive speech therapy that they really need.

Hence, insights and tools for differentiating between typically developing bilinguals and children with language impairment are urgently needed. This is exactly what our project set out to achieve. In this study, we compared language production and comprehension by bilinguals with typical language development and monolinguals with and without language impairment. Our main goal was to find a way (e.g. tool, method, analysis) to distinguish between typically developing bilingual children (who may just be a bit slower due to dual language exposure) from bilingual children suffering from a language disorder.

MAIN FINDINGS

Our main and most important finding is that there is a way to distinguish between typically developing bilinguals and children with language impairment. The two groups look very similar in language production, but have clearly different profiles in language processing.

When we compare the narratives produced by bilingual children (in their weaker language) to narratives produced by monolinguals with language impairment, we see a lot of similarities. For example, both groups often use the wrong conjunctions to connect clauses (e.g. ‘and’ instead of ‘but’). These errors are numerous until age six, but are also present in the speech of children as old as eight years of age. Sometimes bilingual children make even more errors than children with language impairment; this is particularly evident in the domain of pronominal gender. Hence, based on errors in speech production it is difficult (of not impossible) to say whether a bilingual child suffers from a language disorder or not. This finding is consonant with the observation that bilingual children are often misdiagnosed or under-diagnosed for language impairment.

However, two distinct profiles emerged when we looked at online comprehension measures (by means of eye-tracking). Our results reveal that children with language impairment have difficulty understanding discourse connectives and are not able to predict discourse continuation based on connective semantics. As against this, bilingual children perform as well as typically-developing monolinguals: their gaze patterns clearly show that they know subtle semantic differences between complex discourse connectives and use this information to predict how discourse will unfold. The same pattern emerged in the domain of pronominal gender. Bilingual children under age 6 make a lot of errors in pronoun use, for example saying ‘he’ instead of ‘she’. However, bilinguals of this age do show sensitivity to gender cues in receptive tasks and look at the picture congruent with the gender of the pronoun, just like typically developing monolingual children of their age.

Evidence from our eye-tracking studies suggests that the seemingly similar profiles of bilinguals and children with language impairment (in speech production) probably have different underlying causes. Children with language impairment make errors in their speech because they have difficulty learning the semantics and the grammar of discourse connectors. In contrast, typically developing bilinguals make errors under the influence of their dominant language, but they do know the correct word meanings and grammar rules. In other words, bilingual children sometimes have difficulty inhibiting their dominant language when they are speaking. The capacity to inhibit the dominant response improves with age, as a function of cognitive maturation.

Another crucial finding from this project is that bilingualism does not necessarily lead to problems and language delays. When we look at the dominant language of our bilingual participants – German in Germany and Dutch in the Netherlands – we do not see many differences from monolingual German- and Dutch-speaking children (even though there is some evidence of crosslinguistic influence in the bilingual mind). However, this only holds for children growing up with two languages from birth; children acquiring German or Dutch as their second language do feature some delay and/or deviations in their linguistic development. Furthermore, bilingual children have difficulty with their non-dominant language, that is the language that is not spoken or maintained in the country of residence. Since harmonious bilingual development is essential for a child’s well-being, it is very important to support the acquisition of minority languages, for example, by creating more bilingual schools and kindergartens.

An important implication of this research is that speech language therapists should be aware of the fact that language production of typically developing bilinguals often looks very similar to that of individuals with language impairment and that (online) comprehension measures provide a much better tool for differentiating between the two groups than language production measures (such as narratives).

This project was supported by the EU grant (Marie Curie IRSES) and was carried out in cooperation with Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (Berlin) and Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (Saint-Petersburg).

• prof. dr. Ted Sanders
• prof. dr. Sergey Avrutin
• dr. Pim Mak

Linguistics witnesses a growing interest in gradable adjectives in general and relative adjectives (e.g. big, good, warm) in particular. Recent studies show that scales evoked by relative adjectives have a language-specific, functionally relevant structure. For instance, relative adjectives in Dutch evoke open scales and are therefore incompatible with maximizers (e.g. #helemaal láng ‘completely long’). In contrast, Russian relative adjectives evoke half-closed scales and may therefore be combined with sovsem ‘com-pletely/entirely’. 

This project focused on three aspects in the development of relative scales in Dutch and Russian child language: external structure (open vs. closed scales), internal structure (e.g. large-medium-small) and scale adjustment in argumentative contexts. Each of these structural aspects was investigated in terms of cognitive reference points (Tribushinina 2008a), i.e. salient parts of the scale anchoring the interpretation of relative adjectives.

RESULTS

1. External scalar structure: Universal or language-specific mechanisms of acquisition?

Early acquisition of scalar adjectives can be either universal or language-specific. The results of a corpus study, a production experiment and a comprehension experiment provide converging evidence that scalar structures are acquired by exposure to the target language rather than by mapping universal pre-linguistic concepts onto words. Production and comprehension of scalar adjectives by Dutch- and Russian-speaking children is clearly determined by the typological properties of their language rather than by some universal ontological scales (Tribushinina & Gillis, 2012, Linguistics; Tribushinina, 2017, Linguistics).

At the same time, my collaboration with researchers in several different countries has revealed that there are also universal tendencies/mechanisms in adjective acquisition. For example, the composition of early adjective lexicons is very similar across languages (Tribushinina et al., 2014, Language, Interaction and Acquisition). Furthermore, irrespective of the language being acquired children use adjective learning strategies based on comparison and contrast (big-small, good-bad) (Tribushinina et al., 2013, First Language). 

2. Internal scalar structure: Relative or absolute reference points?

The results of an eye-tracking experiment demonstrate that toddlers use absolute reference points (e.g. elephants are best exemplars of bigness) rather than relative standards of comparison (elephants are bigger than mice). This finding confirms my initial hypothesis that early in development absolute reference points (such as knowledge of best exemplars) are more available to children than relative reference points. The results of this study are reported in Tribushinina & Mak (2015, Journal of Child Language).

3. Scale structure in argumentative contexts: argumentative or descriptive interpretations?

A series of comprehension experiments reported in Tribushinina (2012, Journal of Pragmatics) and Tribushinina (2014, Folia Linguistica) demonstrated that children as young as age 2 are able to understand the argumentative loading of evaluative adjectives (such as tasty and ugly). In contrast, argumentative uses of relative adjectives modified by degree adverbs (such as a bit big, too warm) take much longer to acquire: even 5-year-olds have difficulty understanding the argumentative loading of such combinations, as evidenced by high error rates and long reaction times.

• prof. dr. Sergey Avrutin

This project dealt with the acquisition of relative adjectives, such as ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘good’ and ‘warm’ by Dutch-speaking children. The focus was on the following three research questions:
1. When do Dutch-speaking children start using the category-specific norm in the interpretation of relative adjectives?
2. Is the ability to use the norm influenced by the ontological status and prototypicality of the described objects?
3. How is the knowledge of the linguistically relevant scale structure acquired?

Research questions 1 and 2 were investigated by means of two comprehension experiments based on a Scalar Judgment Task. In Experiment 1, I investigated whether adult interpretations of groot ‘big’ and klein ‘small’ are contingent on the ontological status and prototypicality of the described objects (Tribushinina, 2011). The results showed that scalar judgments of adults clearly depend on the object category under judgment. Adults are reluctant to call prototypically big entities such as elephants and planes groot and prototypically small entities such as mice and gnomes klein. The results also demonstrated that the adult subjects integrated two different reference points – one from the world knowledge and one from the perceptual context – when assigning size terms to objects.

Experiment 2 targeted children’s developing ability to interpret relative terms by dynamically combining two sources of information (world knowledge and perceptual cues). The selection of target objects was made on the basis of a longitudinal corpus study of spatial adjectives in Dutch child language. In total, 150 Dutch-speaking children between ages 2 and 7 (25 per age group) participated in the experiment. The results show that 2- and 3-year-old children use two distinct reference points at the extremes of the scale for interpreting groot and klein. Four-year-olds, like adults, use a common reference point in the mid-zone of a series so that half of the scale is dubbed groot and half klein. From age 5 onwards, children are capable of integrating a conceptual and a perceptual reference point. However, the judgments of 5-year-old subjects were not contingent on the ontological and/or prototypical status of the described entities. This capacity appears to emerge only around age 7 (Tribushinina, 2013).

Research question 3 was investigated by means of a corpus study (Tribushinina and Gillis, 2012). The main finding is that although even 2-year-old children display some sensitivity to scalar structures, the development in this domain is more protracted than has been hitherto assumed. More precisely, even at age 6 children make errors by combining adjectives with degree adverbs of incompatible scalar types (e.g. helemaal ziek ‘completely ill’, een beetje piepklein ‘a bit small’). The patterns found in child speech were compared to those attested in adult language (Tribushinina 2011; Tribushinina and Janssen 2011).

This project has been carried out at the University of Antwerp, Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Research Centre.

• Prof. dr Steven Gillis