Abstract. Recent work on object shift (OS) suggests that this is not as uniform an operation as traditionally assumed. In this paper, we examine OS in the spontaneous speech of adults in large Danish, Norwegian and Swedish child language corpora in order to explore variation with respect to OS across these three languages. We also evaluate our results against three recent strands of accounts of OS, namely a prosodic/phonological account, an account in terms of cognitive status, and an account in terms of information structure. The results show that there is both withinlanguage and across-language variation in the application of OS, and that the three accounts can explain some of our data. However, all accounts are faced with challenges, especially when explaining exceptional cases.
Writing has been identified as a challenge for students with reading difficulties. This study contributes to previous research by exploring argumentative writing in L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) in a group of students with reading difficulties in upper secondary school. Participants were 19 students with typical reading, 19 students with poor decoding, and 9 students with poor comprehension. A majority of students attended vocational programmes. Written text quality was assessed by using an adapted version of Jacobs et al.’s (1981) analytic scoring scheme including content, organisation, cohesion, vocabulary, language use, spelling, and punctuation. Students with reading difficulties (regardless of reader subgroup) were found to perform poorly in all categories in both L1 and L2, with spelling being particularly challenging in L1, and cohesion, language use, spelling, and punctuation in L2. Significant differences were found between students with poor comprehension and students with typical reading in cohesion, language use and spelling in L2. Few other significant differences were identified possibly due to an overall poor writing outcome also for students with typical reading. This general poor outcome in writing is discussed in relation to previous studies on writing among students with reading difficulties and writing in vocational programmes.
This paper examines rule-based learning and item-based learning in relation to a Swedish child's acquisition of verb second in main clauses. While rule-based accounts assert that young children have access to syntactic structure and acquire a rule of generalized verb second, item-based accounts claim that young children are reproducing frequent word combinations in the input. The paper provides new and important data from one Swedish child, concluding that the acquisition of verb second is the result of rule-based learning.
This study investigated patterns of written language and the relation of oral language, phonological processing, verbal working memory and reading to written language in early writers with weak reading and/or spelling in grade 2 (n = 39). In grade 3, the students participated in an assessment of oral and written language. A resolved group with age-typical oral language, phonological processing and reading (n = 11) performed better than their unresolved peers (n = 28) on almost all written language measures. Spelling, text length, grammatical accuracy and vocabulary diversity were the most challenging aspects for the unresolved group. Oral language correlated significantly with the composite written language score, text length and vocabulary diversity, while phonological processing was related to grammatical accuracy and working memory to the composite written language score and spelling. Word reading and reading comprehension were not related to any written language measures. Regression analyses confirmed that oral language contributed significantly to the variation in the composite written language score, text length and vocabulary diversity. The results emphasize the importance of oral language for written language in early writers with (a history of) weak reading and/or spelling.
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