Maria Mastropavlou

Morphophonological salience as a compensatory means for deficits in the acquisition of past tense in SLI.

UNLABELLED The aim of this study is threefold: Firstly, to describe the acquisition patterns of Greek past tense by children with specific language impairment (SLI); secondly, to investigate the relationship between the phonological salience of past tense in Greek and its acquisition by children of typical and atypical language development; thirdly, to establish an account on the nature of specific language impairment by comparing the acquisition patterns exhibited by children with SLI to those presented by typically developing children. The performance of 10 children with SLI in elicited past tense production is compared to that of chronological age matched (CA) and language matched (LM) controls. Based on the claim that morphophonological salience aids acquisition (or learning), it is predicted that children with SLI will perform better in the production of past forms of higher salience than less salient forms. The results confirm this prediction, providing support for the claim that salience differences do account for better performances in tense marking in Greek SLI. LEARNING OUTCOMES By reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) describe the problems children with SLI face in Greek tense marking, (2) explain the reasons why SLI performances differ from one language to the next based on the Interpretability Hypothesis, (3) discuss whether children with SLI differ qualitatively from TD controls in past tense marking and explain how.

Text classification for children with dyslexia employing user modelling techniques

The problem of text-readability has received great attention in the literature. However, the classification of a text as readable is based solely in its linguistic complexity and does not take into account the skills of the intended reader. In this paper, we make a first attempt to study user-specific text readability. We focus on readers with dyslexia and documents written in English and Greek. Central to our approach is the notion of the users profile which carries information regarding the linguistic difficulties a user with dyslexia may experience. Based on the users profile, we develop heuristics for evaluating texts readability for the specific user. The developed heuristics are incorporated in the text classification services of the iLearnRW1 project, aiming to facilitate the selection of appropriate/suitable reading resources for children with dyslexia.

Morphophonology and compensation in specific language impairment: Evidence from Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek

ABSTRACT The current study investigates the role of the morphophonological realisation of grammatical features as a compensatory mechanism for morphosyntactic deficits in specific language impairment (SLI). The phenomenon examined is past tense formation in Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and Cypriot Greek (CG) as it manifests a distinction in morphophonological salience realisation in the two linguistic varieties via differential use of a stress shift and stressed syllabic augment [é] required for past tense rule formation. Participants were pre-schoolers with typical language development (TD) and children with SLI. Subjects produced real verb (RV) and pseudo-verb stimuli (PV) in sentence completion tasks. Results indicated that morphophonological properties of past tense formation affected SLI but not TD performance. We attribute the results to the difference in the status of the augment in each variety and the effects it has on its realisation at the phonetic interface. Furthermore, verb contractibility appeared to pose particular difficulties in the performance of all groups.

Profile-Based Text Classification for Children with Dyslexia

Although extensive research has been conducted in the field of text-readability and user modelling, scholars and researchers have taken into consideration only linguistic complexity in order to classify a text as readable or not. In this paper, the authors move one step forward by considering one more factor, namely intended readers skills, and by trying to study text readability from a user-specific perspective. Central to our approach is the notion of the users profile which carries information regarding the linguistic difficulties a user with dyslexia may experience. Based on the users profile, they develop heuristics for evaluating texts readability for the specific user. The developed heuristics are incorporated in the text classification services of the iLearnRW project, aiming to facilitate the selection of appropriate/suitable reading resources, written in English or Greek, for children with dyslexia1.

Reply to Stephany & Christofidou 2010

First of all, I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Greek Linguistics for giving me this opportunity, by way of a reply to Stephany & Christofi dou 2010 (this issue) (henceforth, S&C), to provide some clarifi cations con cerning my initial review of their work (S&C 2008; see JGL 9 (2009), 215-230), with the aim also of off ering a better characterization of my initial arguments. To begin with, although I do not fully agree, I completely welcome S&C’s argumentation on a usage-based approach to morphological structure and development. I adhere to my initially stated points for consideration and I would only like to point out that S&C might be doing generative models an injustice by stating that they “assume complex forms to be constructed by adding affi xes to stems” ( p. 118 ). It is quite frequently claimed in generative morphology that words are also stored (and therefore accessed and retrieved) as wholes in the lexicon, while word formation rules are used during morphological processing (input analysis) and in generating new words (acknowledging thus the productive nature of morphology) (Selkirk 1982 ). Although S&C deny that usage-based models do not recognise processes of morphological decomposition or analysis (as I commented in my initial review), they go on to argue for schemas that account for morphological structure “without however decomposing complex forms into their elements” ( p. 118 ). I do not address the issue of morphological decomposition further at this point, as I think I have provided suffi cient detail on my views in the original review. Regarding the description and analysis of the data provided by the authors in the monograph, I would like to clarify that I was not disappointed by the fact that no well-defi ned stages of acquisition are described but rather by the fact that no general patterns of acquisition are identifi ed in the language data examined. By general patterns I am defi nitely not referring to stages but to similar phenomena or types of linguistic behaviour that could be found across the diff erent language samples examined and could very well progress