Sven Strömqvist

Cascaded processing in written compound word production.

In this study we investigated the intricate interplay between central linguistic processing and peripheral motor processes during typewriting. Participants had to typewrite two-constituent (noun-noun) Finnish compounds in response to picture presentation while their typing behavior was registered. As dependent measures we used writing onset time to assess what processes were completed before writing and inter-key intervals to assess what processes were going on during writing. It was found that writing onset time was determined by whole word frequency rather than constituent frequencies, indicating that compound words are retrieved as whole orthographic units before writing is initiated. In addition, we found that the length of the first syllable also affects writing onset time, indicating that the first syllable is fully prepared before writing commences. The inter-key interval results showed that linguistic planning is not fully ready before writing, but cascades into the motor execution phase. More specifically, inter-key intervals were largest at syllable and morpheme boundaries, supporting the view that additional linguistic planning takes place at these boundaries. Bigram and trigram frequency also affected inter-key intervals with shorter intervals corresponding to higher frequencies. This can be explained by stronger memory traces for frequently co-occurring letter sequences in the motor memory for typewriting. These frequency effects were even larger in the second than in the first constituent, indicating that low-level motor memory starts to become more important during the course of writing compound words. We discuss our results in the light of current models of morphological processing and written word production.

On the development of narrative structure in child L1 and adult L2 acquisition

The present study investigates the development of grammatical aspects of narrative structure in child L1 and adult L2 acquisition in a comparative perspective. The narratives were elicited through a picture story task. In the theoretical part of the study, this task is analyzed in semantic and psycholinguistic terms. In the empirical part of the study, it is demonstrated that narratives relating to an early phase of adult L2 acquisition show strong global cohesion, whereas narratives by child L1 learners tend to have very weak cohesion up to around 5 years of age. In a second developmental phase, however, the situation is observed to be the reverse: whereas child L1 learners become very much concerned with narrative structure and accomplish very strong cohesion, adult L2 learners tend to experience a dip in performance. The observed developmental asymmetry is interpreted as indicative of a difference in cognitive resources and sociocommunicative skills between the two types of learners.

Discourse level writing i dyslexics – methods, results and implications for diagnosis

In this paper, we investigate some aspects of the written language production process in dyslexic writers. A group of adult dyslexic writers are compared with a control group and a group of congenitally deaf writers. We present analyses of the actions of both constructing and editing linguistic units during on-line writing. The results suggest that in order to understand the organization of how linguistic units are constructed in writing, we need to take both cognitive and socio-communicative factors into account. We must also recognize that on-line recordings could contribute important data in the diagnosis of writing difficulties. We propose that the temporal distribution, pause frequencies and nested editings on the word level are good candidates for such a diagnostic purpose.

A Grid of Language Resource Repositories

The DAM-LR (Distributed Access Management for Language Resources) project aims at virtually integrating various European language resource archives that allow users to navigate and operate in a single unified domain of language resources. This type of integration introduces Grid technology to the humanities disciplines and forms a federation of archives. It is the basis for establishing a research infrastructure for language resources which will finally enable eHumanities. Currently, the complete architecture is designed based on a few well-known components and some components have already been tested. Based on the technological insights gathered and due to discussions within the international DELAMAN (Digital Endangered Languages and Music Archives Network) network the ethical and organizational basis for such a federation is defined.

Disclosing the Secrets of Braille Reading—Computer-Aided Registration and Interactive Analysis

The pilot project reported here utilized the first technology ever developed for the computerized on-line registration and analysis of finger movements during Braille reading. Five congenitally blind subjects performed tactile reading of pedagogically carefully selected texts. Two specialists in visual impairments analyzed the computer-registered reading activities using specially designed interaction software. The subjects themselves were interviewed and contributed to discussions about their own individual reading styles. The analyses of this first handful of subjects reveal a number of important strategies and preferences with regard to on-line tactile reading. Further, the results challenge several assumptions and practices in Braille teaching. This pilot project lays the foundation for more comprehensive large-scale studies—both cross-sectional and longitudinal ones—studies long wanted in the domain of tactile reading.

Perceiving and Producing the Frog Story

Consider the screen-shot in Figure 1. It is derived from a recording of a computerbased narrative task, using the word-less picture story Frog where are you? (Mayer, 1969) as elicitation instrument (see also Berman & Slobin 1994). The screen-shot was taken 2 minutes and 58 seconds into the recording. At that point, the subject, a 23-year old Swedish university student, had just finished writing in relation to the first picture (out of twenty-four) of the story. How can we get a handle on the processes behind the product in figure 1? How did the flow of writing interact with the distribution of visual attention? These are the main questions addressed in the present paper. Starting from some preliminaries in reading and writing research, we take the step to presenting a methodology and an analysis example from a new research project1 where computer logging of writing activity is combined with eyetracking to derive a profile of the interaction between picture viewing and writing during the production of a picture-elicited narrative.

Linguistic feedback, input and analysis in early language development

Abstract The present study explores the development of feedback morphemes (e.g., yes, no, mm etc) and feedback-giving through other-repetition in the early language development of two monolingual Swedish children. The two children differ with respect to rate as well as preferred means of linguistic feedback giving. In both children, however, there is a period of increase in partial other-repetitions starting roughly at the same time as the early spurt in inflectional morphemes. It is hypothesized that the shift to more feedback giving through other-repetition represents one aspect of a developmental change towards a greater analytic (input analysis) ability on the part of the children. The hypothesis gained further support when tested against two additional longitudinal Swedish case studies. The choice of feedback strategies, then, is not only important to the management of discourse; it also interacts with the childs processing strategies and different phases of his early language development.

The Inter-Nordic Study of Language Acquisition

The typological variation between the Nordic languages offers a “natural laboratory” for the cross-linguistic study of first language acquisition. Based on an on-going inter-Nordic project, the present article discusses research designs for the exploration of this laboratory together with pilot analyses of acquisition data across Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. On the basis of evidence from longitudinal case studies, from narrative tasks, and from morphological and phonetic experiments, the project aims at producing an integrated picture of the development of grammatical morphology and its interaction with (a) the semantic domains of spatial and temporal relations and (b) the prosodic domains of tonal word accents and duration. In the present article the focus is on spatial relations and prosody. Comparisons of developmental data between languages that show considerable typological differences (Finnish vs Icelandic vs the Mainland Scandinavian languages) allow us to establish broad cross-linguistic commonalities in acquisition structure. It is shown that, across all five languages, very similar relational concepts are encoded by the first grammatical morphemes emerging in the field of spatial relations. The impact of linguistic details on acquisition structure can be explored with greater precision through comparisons between languages that show minimal typological differences (the internal differences between the Mainland Scandinavian languages: Danish vs Norwegian vs Swedish). Here, the early development of the Verb + particle construction in two Danish and two Swedish children is analysed. Language-specific effects on acquisition structure of syntactical and prosodic traits are demonstrated. Further, language-specific effects on the development of verb argument structure in spatial descriptions are discussed.

On the acquisition of verb argument structure

Abstract The present study explores two domains in Scandinavian child language development where the encoding of arguments to verbs shows a variable distribution. The first domain is grammatical subjects in an early phase of development when the 90% criterion is not yet attained. The second domain is spatial arguments (landmarks and location). It is argued that the encoding of subjects as well as of spatial arguments represents multiple constraint-satisfaction processes (encompassing both grammatical constraints and pragmatic constraints) and that the mastery of these constraints is a long-term achievement rather than something that happens suddenly in the course of acquisition. Many previous studies have focused on missing arguments, especially missing subjects, and asked what mechanisms make possible argument ellipsis. In contrast, our focus is on arguments that are actually present and on why children bother to encode arguments to begin with. In particular, we argue that input factors and pragmatic factors form an important part of the explanation for the structure of the earliest phases of the acquisition of verb arguments, irrespective of whether the arguments are traditionally considered obligatory or optional from the point of view of the target grammar.

Educating the Humanities for e-Science

The first part of the present paper discusses why the Humanities is lagging behind in terms of making use of e-science and what might be done to remedy that situation. The diversity of ontologies in the Humanities, hampering consensus over metadata, is one problem. Another problem is the lack of education in e-science tailored to the needs of researchers in the Humanities and the lack of efforts to try to integrate elements of e-science with the standard repertoire of research and education in the Humanities. Drawing on experiences from the project European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) and from the on-going project Distributed Access Management of Language Resources (DAM-LR), the Centre for Languages and literature at Lund University is trying to implement new elements of e-science at the local Faculty of Humanities. The second part of the paper briefly describes the process as well as some of its added values.