Level Of Linguistic Development Research Articles

The use of complex structures with a word class change in Inuktitut child-directed speech.

Caregivers typically use a simplified mode of the language – child-directed speech (CDS) – when addressing young children. In this study, we investigate the use of complex morphological structures with a word class change within a single word in Inuktitut CDS. Inuktitut is a polysynthetic agglutinative language of the Inuit–Yupik–Unangan language family spoken in arctic Quebec, which allows more than 10 morphemes per word and in which the meaning of an entire sentence can be expressed in one word. Clearly, such a complex morphological system presents special challenges for young children, which raises the question of whether caregivers shape their CDS in ways that facilitate acquisition. Using the data from mothers addressing eight Inuktitut-speaking children aged 0;11 to 3;6, we investigated whether the frequency and complexity of polysynthetic structures in CDS are dependent on the stage of the children’s linguistic development. The results demonstrate that the number and morphological complexity of the structures with a word class change increased as the children developed linguistically. The variety of nominalizers and verbalizers – the key components of such structures – also increased through the stages and were used in variation sets, which help children acquire morphological items by providing examples of use of the same morpheme in morphologically contrasting environments. These results show the presence of morphological simplification in Inuktitut CDS and demonstrate that such simplification is fine-tuned, i.e., that mothers are sensitive to their children’s level of linguistic development.

Reading level in the cognitive development of the students of the upper basic


 Reading is considered a cognitive activity that stimulates thought in order to make a pertinent judgment, it has also become a great challenge for students. Reading is one of the primary educational processes in education, it allows knowing the level of linguistic development and reading comprehension. The objective of the research is to investigate the reading level and its association with the cognitive development of the students, of higher basic education of the Fiscal Educational Unit "Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola, during the 2021-2022 school period. A questionnaire was applied that allowed to know the low reading level of the students. A mixed qualitative-quantitative methodology was applied. The results have shown that there are several factors that affect the low reading level, from demotivation to the lack of strategies such as extracting ideas and summarizing what has been read. However, there are tools to enhance critical thinking and analytical skills, in which the guide and strategies used by the teacher must be based on the student's level of prior knowledge to achieve a valuable level of reading comprehension.

Russian language maintenance among multilingual teachers in Israeli educational settings

The present paper focuses on language maintenance among multilingual teachers and presents a research project with Russian-Hebrew speakers on their ideas of language-related normality in educational settings. The main objective is to investigate the role of migration-related multilingual teachers within the multilingual turn. The project approached the topic from three perspectives: the macro level of educational policies, the meso level of educational institutions, and the micro level of linguistic development. Data were collected through biographical interviews with 17 teachers and interpreted within the theoretical framework of language beliefs using the concepts of linguistic market, language awareness and language education policy as well as pedagogical competence. The results show the close interconnectedness of language beliefs on all the three levels. They also show that beliefs can experience a reconstruction. In order to challenge the monolingual idea of normality among teachers, an interwoven intervention on all the three levels is necessary: there is a need for education policy measures (macro level) that would anchor training on dealing with multilingualism (meso level) in regular teacher training and, in doing so, would draw on the existing migration-related multilingual practices of prospective teachers (micro level). This interaction between top-down (professionalization in dealing with multilingualism anchored in educational policy) and bottom-up (migration-related multilingual practices among prospective teachers) measures can enable a shift toward multilingualism as an idea of normality in educational contexts. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the formation, development and reconstruction of language-related idea of normality among teachers and discusses its methodological and theoretical implications.

The effect of instruction on conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics

This study investigates the effects of instruction (input plus focused metapragmatic noticing) on the oral production of conventional expressions, particularly those conventional expressions which perform specific pragmatic functions in English. Using a pre-test–instruction–post-test design we tested 36 university-level students in six intact intensive English classes in order to determine whether guided metapragmatic noticing activities help learners increase oral production of targeted conventional expressions and whether such gains (if they are realized) can be generalized to other conventional expressions. Students were divided into two groups of three classes each; the two groups received instruction on a different set of expressions. Results showed that both instructional groups showed significant gains on one set of conventional expressions but not another, suggesting that learning conventional expressions is sensitive to instruction but also constrained by the transparency of the expression and the learners’ level of linguistic development.

A cost-effectiveness evaluation of a home visit program for adolescent mothers

A home visit intervention program for adolescents throughout their pregnancy and during the early stages of motherhood was evaluated. The participants (N = 90) were part of a larger group of adolescents treated in two health centers in a poor neighborhood in Santiago, Chile. The program was carried out by volunteer community health monitors and evaluated through an experimental, randomized, controlled clinical trial. Cost-effectiveness was examined in comparison with standard health care. Results show higher scores for the intervention group on the mothers' mental health and nutritional state, as well as on the children's levels of linguistic development.

La teoría de los códigos. Desigualdades lingüísticas en educación

Linguistic inequalities in education do not only represent a hitherto unresolved problem but may even be exacerbated by social change (synonymous with technological and multicultural societies). In this article we have re-examined Basil Bernstein's code theory from a culturalist perspective and tried to clarify some of most controversial features and to present a new analytical model that relates the cultural capital of families to the level of linguistic development in adolescents. We observed that the level of studies reached by parents has a notable bearing upon the development of communicative competence, and particularly upon the development of written language skills, in adolescents studying the first course of Compulsory Secondary Education.

Evidence for a reciprocal model of language development

A reciprocal model of language development is proposed analogous to Bowlby's model for the development of attachment, a control system model. The hypothesis for the research reported is that a reciprocal behavioral system operates between the language-developing infant-child and the competent language user in a socializing-teaching-nurturing role vis-a-vis the language-developing child. Findings are from a longitudinal study of four infant-mother dyads, videotaped in the home from the time the infants were 3 months until they were 2 years old. The mother's linguistic behavior following vocalizing and verbalizing by her infant is analyzed for evidence that it is language-teaching behavior appropriate to the infant's level of linguistic development and, in the terms of the control system model, elicited by the infant's linguistic behavior.

Performative and Presuppositional Skills in Language-Disordered and Normal Children

The presuppositional and performative abilities of language-disordered and normal children were compared, controlling for the children's ability to use the lexical items required in the experimental tasks. Subjects were 36 children, 18 normal and 18 language-disordered, functioning at a single-word level of linguistic development. Results revealed that both the language-disordered and the normal children showed a tendency to encode changing rather than unchanging situational elements. The two groups of children also demonstrated similar levels of imperative and declarative performance intent. For both groups, performative and presuppositional behaviors were usually in the form of word productions. Discrepancies between the findings of this and other investigations are discussed with respect to the size of the children's lexicons, their expressive command of the lexicon, chronological age, and representational skills.

Inappropriate word extensions in the speech of young language-disordered children.

The purpose of this study was to determine the frequency of inappropriate word extensions in the spontaneous speech of young language-disordered children, and how these extensions should be characterized. Inappropriate word extensions were identified and tested, first in a production task and then in a comprehension task for nine language-disordered children (age 2:8 to 3:4). Results indicated that the percentage of inappropriate word extensions seen in the speech of these children was comparable to that seen in normal children at the same level of linguistic development. As with normal children, these inappropriate word extensions reflected varying levels of lexical knowledge. The findings of this study are discussed in terms of their clinical applicability for lexical training with language-disordered children.

Semantic relations used by normal and language-impaired children at stage I.

Two-word utterances of four language-impaired children at Brown's Stage I level of linguistic development were compared with two-word utterances of four young normal children at the same linguistic level to determine any differences between the two groups in the use of a set of 10 basic semantic relations. Type-token ratios for each semantic relation were used to compare use of semantic relations between groups. A significant difference was obtained for only one relation, with the language-impaired group demonstrating greater diversity in the use of the introducer + entity relation than the normal group. The findings indicated that at Stage I level of linguistic development, the language-impaired children demonstrated a linguistic system no different than the system of normal Stage I children. The findings are discussed relative to possible cognitive and linguistic strategies involved in language acquisition. It is suggested that some language-impaired children rather than being deficient in their ability to understand and code the basic semantic relations demonstrate a deficit in the higher, more complex aspects of the linguistic coding system.

Formant concentration positions in the speech of children at two levels of linguistic development.

This investigation was concerned with acoustic measurements of the first two formants in four sustained vowels—/i/, /æ/, /a/, and /u/—produced by children at two different levels of linguistic development. The object of the investigation was to determine whether children of the same chronological age but at a different level of language development would exhibit significant differences of formant frequencies. Acoustic measurements of formants 1 and 2 of the four sustained vowels /i/,/æ/,/a/, and /u/ showed no statistically significant differences when produced by two groups of children at two levels of linguistic development. In each group, differences among formant measurements, for the four vowels, were significantly different.