Hanne Gram Simonsen

The acquisition of past tense morphology in Icelandic and Norwegian children: an experimental study

Icelandic and Norwegian past tense morphology contain strong patterns of inflection and two weak patterns of inflection. We report the results of an elicitation task that tests Icelandic and Norwegian childrens knowledge of the past tense forms of a representative sample of verbs. This cross-sectional study of four-, six- and eight-year-old Icelandic (n = 92) and Norwegian (n = 96) children systematically manipulates verb characteristics such as type frequency, token frequency and phonological coherence--factors that are generally considered to have an important impact on the acquisition of inflectional morphology in other languages. Our findings confirm that these factors play an important role in the acquisition of Icelandic and Norwegian. In addition, the results indicate that the predominant source of errors in children shifts during the later stages of development from one weak verb class to the other. We conclude that these findings are consistent with the view that exemplar-based learning, whereby patterns of categorization and generalization are driven by similarity to known forms, appropriately characterizes the acquisition of inflectional systems by Icelandic and Norwegian children.

Productive vocabulary size predicts event-related potential correlates of fast mapping in 20-month-olds

Although it is well documented that children undergo a productive vocabulary spurt late in the second year, it is unclear whether this development is accompanied by equally significant advances in receptive word processing. In the present study, we tested an electrophysiological procedure for assessing receptive word learning in young children, and the impact of productive vocabulary size for performance in this task. We found that 20-month-olds with high productive vocabularies displayed an N400 incongruity effect to violations of trained associations between novel words and pictures, whereas 20-month-olds with low productive vocabularies did not. However, both high and low producers showed an N400 effect for common real words paired with an incongruous object. These findings indicate that there may be substantial differences in receptive fast mapping efficiency between typically developing children who have reached a productive vocabulary spurt and typically developing children who have not yet reached this productive spurt.

Brain dynamics of word familiarization in 20-month-olds: effects of productive vocabulary size.

The present study investigated the brain mechanisms involved during young childrens receptive familiarization with new words, and whether the dynamics of these mechanisms are related to the childs productive vocabulary size. To this end, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 20-month-old children in a pseudoword repetition task. Results revealed distinct patterns of repetition effects for children with large and small productive vocabularies. High producers showed evidence of recognizing the novel words already after three presentations, while the low producers needed five presentations to display a recognition effect. The familiarization process was manifested in the modulations of two components, the N200-400 and a later fronto-central component, which appeared to increase in amplitude until a certain level of encoding was reached and then decrease with further repetition. These findings suggest a relation between the onset of the productive vocabulary spurt and the rate of receptive word familiarization.

Brain responses to lexical-semantic priming in children at risk for dyslexia.

Deviances in early event-related potential (ERP) components reflecting auditory and phonological processing are well-documented in children at familial risk for dyslexia. However, little is known about brain responses which index processing in other linguistic domains such as lexicon, semantics and syntax in this group. The present study investigated effects of lexical-semantic priming in 20- and 24-month-olds at-risk for dyslexia and typically developing controls in two ERP experiments. In both experiments an early component assumed to reflect facilitated lexical processing for primed words was enhanced in the at-risk group compared to the control group. Moreover, an N400-like response which was prominent in the control group was attenuated or absent in at-risk children. Results suggest that deficiencies in young children at-risk for dyslexia are not restricted to perceptual and lower-level phonological abilities, but also affect higher order linguistic skills such as lexical and semantic processing.

The Norwegian Communicative Development Inventories: reliability, main developmental trends and gender differences

This article presents results from a large population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories, comprising 6574 children between 8 and 36 months. Data were collected via the Internet. In accordance with similar studies from other languages, it was found that vocabulary comprehension preceded vocabulary production, and that both use of gestures, comprehension and production of vocabulary, and grammatical complexity increased with age. Moreover, boys lagged behind girls in vocabulary production and comprehension, in grammatical complexity, and in certain types of imitation – this gender difference seems to come out more clearly in this study’s data than in data from other languages.

Semi-spontaneous oral text production: Measurements in clinical practice

Functionally relevant assessment of the language production of speakers with aphasia should include assessment of connected speech production. Despite the ecological validity of everyday conversations, more controlled and monological types of texts may be easier to obtain and analyse in clinical practice. This article discusses some simple measurements for the analysis of semi-spontaneous oral text production by speakers with aphasia. Specifically, the measurements are related to the production of verbs and nouns, and the realization of different sentence types. The proposed measurements should be clinically relevant, easily applicable, and linguistically meaningful. The measurements have been applied to oral descriptions of the ‘Cookie Theft’ picture by eight monolingual Norwegian speakers, four with an anomic type of aphasia and four without any type of language impairment. Despite individual differences in both the clinical and the non-clinical group, most of the measurements seem to distinguish between speakers with and without aphasia.

Norwegian retroflex stops in a cross linguistic perspective

Abstract In this paper, Norwegian retroflex stops are investigated through the combined use of electropalatography (EPG) and electromagnetic articulography (EMA), with extensive and detailed data from four informants. Cross linguistic investigations have shown considerable articulatory variation in retroflex consonants regarding both place of articulation and tongue configuration, making it difficult to establish common articulatory characteristics for these consonants. Through our detailed articulatory investigation, we were able to identify one characteristic only that was always present in retroflex stops in Norwegian, namely an apical articulation. Other characteristics often found in retroflexes, like a posterior place of articulation, a bending up (retroflexion) of the tongue tip, a flat tongue middle, and a forward movement of the tongue tip after the release of the stop (‘flapping out’), were found only in some contexts or in some individuals. Overall, the extensive articulatory variation in retroflexes often found in languages with relatively small inventories of coronal consonants was confirmed in our data.

Sonority and cross‐linguistic acquisition of initial s‐clusters

This paper examines the findings and implications of the cross‐linguistic acquisition of #sC clusters in relation to sonority patterns. Data from individual studies on English, Dutch, Norwegian, and Hebrew are compared for accuracy of production as well as the reductions with respect to potential differences across subtypes of #sC groups. In all four languages, a great deal of variability occurred both within and across children, but a number of general patterns were noted. While all four languages showed similar behaviour in reduction patterns, clear differences between the three Germanic languages–English, Dutch, and Norwegian–and Hebrew were found in the accuracy rate of #sC clusters that have a larger sonority distance between C1 and C2, in a binary split of /s/+[+cont.] versus /s/+[−cont.], and in #sC clusters versus non‐/s/‐clusters. Patterns in cluster reductions were, in general, supportive of the factorial typology of Pater and Barlow, while pointing at some difficulties for the predictions of the headedness approach advanced by Goad and Rose, and Jongstra. This cross‐linguistic description of patterns of s‐clusters increases our knowledge of typical phonological development and helps selecting targets in clinical context.

The acquisition of #sC clusters in Norwegian

This study investigates the acquisition of two-element word-initial consonant clusters in 27 Norwegian children aged 21–36 months. We have focussed on clusters starting with a sibilant (S-clusters), comparing them with clusters without a sibilant (non-S-clusters). Overall, non-S-clusters were mastered more successfully than S-clusters – mainly related to the fact that the younger children (>30 months) performed much better on the non-S-clusters than on the S-clusters – this difference had disappeared in the older age group. Concerning S-clusters, sonority does not seem to play an important role for acquisition neither in terms of the sonority sequencing principle nor sonority distance. Homorganicity may be a factor for a subset of the S-clusters: /sn/ clusters are mastered clearly better than /sm/ clusters. However, frequency may also play a role here. Finally, deletion patterns differ between S-clusters and non-S-clusters: in S-clusters, deletion of the sibilant (C1) is the predominant pattern, while in non-S-clusters, C2 is the one deleted.

Imageability of Norwegian nouns, verbs and adjectives in a cross-linguistic perspective.

In this article, we present a study of imageability ratings for a set of 1599 Norwegian words (896 nouns, 483 verbs and 220 adjectives) from a web-based survey. To a large extent, the results are in accordance with previous studies of other languages: high imageability scores in general, higher imageability scores for nouns than for verbs, and an inverse relation between frequency and imageability. A more surprising finding is the low imageability of low-frequency verbs. Also, imageability ratings increase systematically and significantly with informant age, reminding us that conceptual learning continues and changes throughout life. This has consequences for our expectations of different linguistic skills in a life span perspective. These findings have an obvious clinical relevance both for choice of items in test construction, for evaluation of performance in clinical groups and for development of therapy material.