Browsing by Subject "Syntactic development"
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Item Morphosyntactic priming in bilingual children(2011-05) Fitzpatrick, Kerry Elisabeth; Bedore, Lisa M.; Peña, Elizabeth D.Limited information exists regarding the acquisition of syntax and morphology in young Spanish-English bilingual language learners. A method to measure short-term language learning is through structural priming; an auditory model of the target structure is presented, which influences a subject’s subsequent production. The purpose of this thesis was to develop and pilot priming tasks in both English and Spanish to analyze the language production of typically developing bilingual elementary school students. The morphosyntactic structures targeted in the structural priming task included the third person singular and past tense in English, as well as direct object clitics and imperfect tense in Spanish. The study included three participants, aged 4;7, 6;7, and 10;11. Results revealed that bilingual elementary students with varied language exposure are influenced and learn from morphosyntactic priming.Item Syntactic performance of bilingual children ages 7 ; 0-9 ; 0(2007-05) Lenden, Jessica Marie, 1983-; Bedore, Lisa M.To date, very little is known about the syntactic development of school-age bilingual Spanish-English speaking children. There are currently no standardized tests that have been designed to assess bilingual (English/Spanish) language development in children ages 7-9 years. The Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña, Gutierrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, in development) was designed to identify language impairment in bilingual children ages 4-6 years. For the first study, an upward extension of this assessment was created to assess the syntactic skills of 7-9 year old bilingual children. This upward extension includes items retained from the syntactic portion of the BESA, as well as newly created test items that were chosen based on children's test performance and current literature on clinical markers for bilingual children with language impairment. The second study looks at the syntactic skills of 2 typically developing bilingual (English/Spanish) children ages 7;0 and 9;4 using the upward extension of the BESA. The participants were unable to complete the Spanish tasks. However, their English performance indicated that these children performed at or near ceiling for nearly all test items. Most of the test items appeared to be relatively easy for these typically developing children. Based on the children's performance, some test items will need to be evaluated further before being included in the final test battery.