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Effects of Literacy, Typology and Frequency on Children's Language

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Effects of Literacy, Typology and Frequency on Children's Language Effects of literacy, typology and frequency on children’s language segmentation and processing units Published by: LOT Trans 10 phone: +31 30 253 6111 3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected] The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl Cover illustration: Screenshot of pictures presenting ‘eat cake’, ‘bake’, ‘bake cake’, and ‘cake’ (background on cover adjusted to white), prepared by the author for the eye- tracking task. See Chapter 5. ISBN 978-94-6093-170-3 NUR 616 © Dorina Veldhuis, 2015. All rights reserved. Effects of literacy, typology and frequency on children’s language segmentation and processing units PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan Tilburg University op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. Ph. Eijlander, in het openbaar te verdedigen ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties aangewezen commissie in de aula van de Universiteit op woensdag 1 april 2015 om 14.15 uur door Theodora Maria Veldhuis, geboren op 28 april 1981 te Zwolle Promotor: prof. dr. Ad Backus Copromotores: dr. Jeanne Kurvers dr. Anne Vermeer Overige leden van de promotiecommissie: prof. dr. Ludo Verhoeven dr. Bruce Homer dr. Daniel Wiechmann dr. Petra Bos The research for this book was carried out as part of the research project ‘The Building Blocks of Language: The influence of literacy and typology’, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), awarded to Prof. dr. A.M. Backus (Project N˚ 360-70-380). For Thomas and Sophie Contents Preface 1 1 Introduction 5 1.1 Background to the current study 6 1.2 Overview of the current study 7 2 Units in language 11 2.1 Metalinguistic awareness and unit segmentation 13 2.1.1 Metalinguistic awareness and its development 13 2.1.2 Experimental studies on metalinguistic development 17 2.1.3 Conclusions from tasks focused on metalexical awareness 28 2.2 Cognitive Linguistics on unit processing 29 2.2.1 Units in processing 29 2.2.2 Cognitive Linguistics on children’s processing units 32 2.2.3 Literacy effects on online language processing 34 2.2.4 Conclusions from studies into unit processing in Cognitive Linguistics 35 2.3 Connection to the current study and summary of research questions 36 3 Offline versus online tasks: Not dichotomous but a continuum? 39 3.1 Differences between offline and online tasks 40 3.2 Offline and online tasks: A proposal for a continuum 42 3.2.1 Criteria for the placement of tasks on the continuum 43 3.2.2 Defining tasks as offline or online after answering the questions: A preliminary proposal 48 3.3 Final remarks 50 viii EFFECTS OF LITERACY, TYPOLOGY AND FREQUENCY ON CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE SEGMENTATION AND PROCESSING UNITS 4 Pilot studies 51 4.1 Testing Turkish-Dutch bilinguals 52 4.2 Tasks conducted in the pilot studies 54 4.2.1 The production task and the SPL-task: Two tasks especially focused on frequency effects 55 4.2.2 A picture-naming task focused on children’s knowledge of units in writing 57 4.3 Tasks focused on literacy, typology and frequency effects 59 4.3.1 Tasks focused on children’s language segmentation 59 4.3.2 A task focused on children’s online processing: The click task 60 4.3.3 Hypotheses for the sentence segmentation, last-part repetition and click tasks 60 4.3.4 Participants in the sentence segmentation, last-part repetition and click task 61 4.3.5 Materials and procedure 62 4.3.6 Analyses of the sentence segmentation, last-part repetition and click tasks 63 4.4 Results of the sentence segmentation, last-part repetition and click task 64 4.4.1 Effects of literacy and bilingualism 64 4.4.2 Multiword sequences as basic units of language and effects of typological background 66 4.5 Discussion and conclusion of the three tasks conducted among bilingual and monolingual children 69 4.5.1 Proposed improvements for the more offline tasks 69 4.5.2 Shortcomings of the click task 70 4.5.3 Encouragement for exploring literacy and bilingualism further 71 4.6 Implications of the pilot studies for the main study presented in this thesis 73 5 Methodology of the main study 75 5.1 Participants 75 5.2 Selection of high and low frequency targets 76 5.2.1 The selection of multiword target units 77 5.2.2 The selection of a frequency measure 78 5.2.3 The selection of targets on the basis of MI and EMI values 82 CONTENTS ix 5.3 Tasks 84 5.3.1 Dictation task 86 5.3.2 Sentence segmentation task 87 5.3.3 Last-part repetition task 90 5.3.4 Click task 92 5.3.5 Mixed-words task 96 5.3.6 Eye-tracking task 100 5.3.7 Other instruments used for the main study 106 5.4 Placement of tasks on the offline-online continuum 109 5.5 Final notes 110 6 An analysis of the dictation task 113 6.1 Participants and materials 114 6.2 General remarks about the dictations 114 6.3 Analysing the dictations 118 6.4 General results 119 6.5 Investigating the literacy effect 126 6.6 Children’s segmentations in the dictation task and their relation to frequency 128 6.7 Discussion and conclusions 130 7 A quantitative analysis of the tasks: Literacy, typology and frequency effects 133 7.1 Background information 134 7.2 Results from the tasks in Dutch 135 7.2.1 General results from the tasks conducted in Dutch 136 7.2.2 The impact of literacy in the Dutch tasks 144 7.2.3 The effect of entrenchment in the Dutch tasks 147 7.2.4 The impact of literacy, frequency, constructional type and task combined 150 7.2.5 Conclusions on the impact of literacy, frequency, constructional type and task in Dutch 151 7.3 Results from the Turkish tasks 152 7.3.1 General results from the Turkish tasks 152 7.3.2 The impact of literacy on each task in Turkish 155 7.3.3 Entrenchment effect Turkish data 155 7.3.4 The effects of literacy, frequency, constructional type and task combined in the Turkish data 160 7.3.5 Conclusions Turkish data 161 7.4 Results from the eye-tracking task 162 x EFFECTS OF LITERACY, TYPOLOGY AND FREQUENCY ON CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE SEGMENTATION AND PROCESSING UNITS 7.5 Comparing the Dutch and Turkish results in relation to the hypotheses 165 7.5.1 The impact of literacy and typological background (comparing Turkish and Dutch data) 165 7.6 Interim conclusion 167 8 Discussion and conclusions 169 8.1 Reflection on general conclusions 169 8.2 Task effects and the placement of tasks on the proposed continuum 180 8.3 Further remarks 182 References 185 Appendix 1 Schools that participated in the project 199 Appendix 2 Target items from the pilot: One word in Turkish, several words in Dutch 201 Appendix 3 Manual adjustment of fixations 203 Appendix 4 Selected items and MI/EMI values 205 Appendix 5 Sentences occurring in the sentence segmentation task, Dutch and Turkish 209 Appendix 6 Stories prepared for the last-part repetition task, in Dutch and Turkish 215 Appendix 7 Sentences occurring in the click task (Dutch only) 223 Appendix 8 Sentences occurring in the mixed words task (Dutch only) 225 Appendix 9 Eye-tracking materials 227 Appendix 10 Children’s multiword segments (per grade) in the dictation tasks 231 Appendix 11 Correlation scores on single word responses by background factors 237 Appendix 12 List of abbreviations 239 Nederlandse samenvatting 241 Tilburg Dissertations in Culture Studies 251 Preface After secondary school, I wanted to travel around the world, and then I wanted to study Japanese. This despite the fact that my father used to argue that he wanted his daughters to be the CEO of a bank one day (chances were very small that I would become one, after studying a language…) and without proper reason, apart from the fact that I found the Japanese written language extremely interesting. This interest in foreign languages and writing systems and the influence of knowing specific languages and being used to specific writing systems has, in addition to my wish to work as a kindergarten teacher one day, with 24 toddlers and a flute, probably been the reason why I have enjoyed doing research for my PhD and writing this thesis so much. Every thought about the influence of children’s typological background on their view on language and every idea on the impact of their knowledge of writing, enthused me to further investigate the role of literacy on the way we think. This current thesis is a result of all those thoughts and ideas, testing of children (without a flute though) and analyses of results from experimental tasks conducted with children. I would like to thank all the children who participated in the tasks – in pilot sessions and for the final study – first of all, as without them, this study would not have been completed. In addition, I would like to thank the teachers and managers at schools who supported me in testing the children and who allowed me to disturb classes, and who also believed in this study: I really enjoyed talking about your experiences with L2-children and literacy acquisition with you, Margriet, Astrid, Stanley, Helma, Janny, Willemien, Ivonne, Anne-Marie, Will, Souad, Manal, Nicole, Christa, and Maria. Your opinions and information from the work floor helped me greatly in shaping my ideas and thoughts! Shaping those ideas would not have been possible without the help of my colleagues and my supervisors either.
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