| 1. |
- Bohnacker, Ute, 1969-, et al.
(author)
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Adapting MAIN to Arabic
- 2020
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In: ZAS Papers in Linguistics. - Berlin : University Library J. C. Senckenberg. - 1435-9588. ; 64, s. 1-10
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper provides some brief background information on the Arabic language and describes how MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives) was adapted to several varieties of Arabic.
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| 2. |
- Bohnacker, Ute, 1969-, et al.
(author)
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Arabic-Swedish-Speaking Children Living in Sweden : Vocabulary Skills in Relation to Age, SES and Language Exposure
- 2021
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In: Journal of Home Language Research. - : Stockholm University Press. - 2537-7043. ; 4:1, s. 1-18
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper investigates the receptive and expressive vocabulary skills of 100 Arabic-Swedish-speaking children ages 4;0–7;11 growing up in Sweden. We explore how vocabulary in this under-researched population is affected by age, socio-economic status (SES), age of onset, daily exposure and home language use in the family (parents, siblings, extended family and friends) and via mother tongue instruction. Comprehension and production of nouns and verbs were assessed with the Arabic and Swedish versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs; Haman et al., 2015). Background information was collected via a parental questionnaire. In our cross-sectional study, comprehension was better in the minority home language (Arabic) than in the majority language (Swedish) for the youngest (4-year-old children), but this difference levelled out at ages 5, 6 and 7. There was a clear and positive effect of age on receptive and expressive vocabulary scores in both languages. For neither language was there any effect of SES (parental education). Age of onset and daily exposure had a measurable effect on Swedish vocabulary scores, whilst for Arabic, daily exposure and input in the home played an important role: Children whose parents mostly spoke Arabic to them had significantly higher Arabic vocabulary scores than other children. The complex interplay of environmental and individual-level factors on vocabulary skills is also illustrated by four case studies. These results from a Swedish context complement vocabulary studies of other language combinations and reveal the importance of input for the development of vocabulary in bilingual children.
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| 4. |
- Bohnacker, Ute, 1969-
(author)
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Bilingual development of Turkish-speaking children in Sweden
- 2020
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In: Linguistic Minorities in Europe Online. - Berlin & New York : Mouton de Gruyter.
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The BiLI-TAS research project explores the Turkish and Swedish language development of 102 bilingual children aged 4-7, growing up in Sweden. Findings are reported for vocabulary, inflectional morphology and subordination, and are related to existing studies of Turkish-speaking children with other language combinations. Higher Turkish vocabulary scores at age 4-5 give way to steeper vocabulary growth in the majority language Swedish. Narratives indicate mastery of Turkish inflection, but lower accuracy in Swedish, with overextended nonfinite past participle suffixation to mark finite past tense. Swedish subordinate clauses are well mastered and increase with age. Despite identical elicitation tasks, relative clauses are less frequent in Turkish, suggesting language-specific discourse functions. Adverbial subordination in Turkish is early, frequent and varied. Novel blends of a subordinate and a coordinate construction with clause-initial cünkü occur, not previously described in the literature.
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| 5. |
- Bohnacker, Ute, 1969-, et al.
(author)
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Bilingual Turkish-Swedish children's understanding of MAIN picture sequences : Individual variation, age, language and task effects
- 2020
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In: Developing Narrative Comprehension. - Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company. - 9789027260345 ; , s. 99-148
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This study investigates story comprehension in 100 bilingual Turkish-Swedish children aged 4 to 7 years, growing up in Sweden with Turkish as their home language and Swedish as the societal language. Information about language development, exposure and other background factors was obtained via parental questionnaires. In both languages, children told two picture-based stories from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2012, 2019) and answered standardised comprehension questions that probe inferencing of goals and emotions of story characters. Overall comprehension scores and response accuracies to individual questions were calculated. Story comprehension was compared across ages, languages and tasks, and related to performance on Turkish and Swedish vocabulary tasks (Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks, CLT, Haman et al., 2015). A qualitative analysis explored characteristics of the MAIN picture sequences and the type of inference required to score correct on comprehension questions.Overall comprehension scores did not differ between Turkish and Swedish at group level. Comprehension scores increased significantly with age in both languages. This increase was steeper in the majority language Swedish. Younger children (age 4-5) often performed well in Turkish, whilst more older children (age 6-7) performed well in Swedish. In both languages, older children reached relatively high scores, but did not yet master all aspects of inferential story understanding as probed by MAIN. Regression models indicate that a large part of the variance in story comprehension can be explained by age and expressive vocabulary knowledge (CLT) in the respective language. Individual case studies of exceptionally poor story comprehenders vs high performers also suggest that story comprehension and vocabulary skills are linked, but moreover that MAIN comprehension is influenced by language input and use in and outside the home.An interesting task effect was found, indicating that the comprehension measure for the MAIN Cat and Dog picture sequences is easier than for Baby Birds/Baby Goats – even when they are administered in the very same mode. The task influenced children’s comprehension performance more than the language of testing did. Turkish and Swedish showed the same overall response patterns, with very high vs low performance on certain individual questions. We argue that due to subtle differences in the pictorial stimuli, parallel and seemingly identical comprehension questions require inferences with rather different levels of difficulty. Comprehension scores should therefore not be straightforwardly compared across MAIN tasks.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Bohnacker, Ute, 1969-, et al.
(author)
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Fundament, formellt subjekt och frekvens : Ordföljdsmönster i svenska, nederländska och hos vuxna inlärare av svenska
- 2014
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In: Språk och stil. - 1101-1165 .- 2002-4010. ; 24, s. 33-71
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper investigates distributional patterns concerning the prefield and expletive subjects in two closely related languages, Swedish and Dutch, and in nonnative learners of Swedish. Native (Swedish, n=17; Dutch, n=17) and nonnative speakers (adult Dutch-speaking learners of Swedish, n=17) completed an oral picture description task and an unedited informal writing task. The overall frequencies with which constituents (subject vs. adverbial vs. object) occurred in the prefield were similar for all three groups in the oral data, though expletive subjects were more frequent in Swedish. In the written data, Swedish showed a more pronounced subject-initial pattern than Dutch. Distributional differences between Swedish and Dutch were smaller than previously reported for Swedish vs. German (Bohnacker & Rosén 2008, Bohnacker 2010). Learners mostly produced syntactically well-formed utterances but overused elliptic V1 clauses with overt postverbal subject (unattested in native Swedish), which can be attributed to syntactic transfer from L1 Dutch. Learners underused certain other word orders, namely prefield doubling (place adverbial + resumptive så) and postverbal expletive subjects, which in the oral genre were extremely frequent in native Swedish. The extent to which L2 learners produced postverbal expletives was found to be related to individual patterns in L1 Dutch, and for Dutch to be affected by regional origin (Netherlands vs. Flanders) and transferred to L2 Swedish.
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| 10. |
- Bohnacker, Ute, 1969-, et al.
(author)
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Fundamentet i svenskan och tyskan - Syntax och informationsstruktur : Ett problemområde för språkinlärning och undervisning
- 2009
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In: Språk och stil. - 1101-1165 .- 2002-4010. ; 19, s. 142-171
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper investigates the influence of the first language (L1), here Swedish, on the acquisition of syntax and discourse pragmatics in a closely related second language (L2), here German, by looking at the information structure of Verb-Second clauses. Even though almost any type of element can occur in the so-called ‘prefield’, i.e. the clause-initial preverbal position of V2 declaratives, we document language-specific patterns for native-speaker corpora: The frequencies of prefield constituent types differ substantially between German and Swedish, and Swedish postpones new (‘rhematic’) information and instead fills the prefield with given (‘thematic’) elements and elements of no or low informational value (e.g. expletives) to a far greater extent than German. Using oral production data from Bohnacker (2005, 2006) and new written production data from Rosén (2006), we compare Swedish learners of German at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels to native controls, matched for age and genre. These learners master the syntactic properties of V2, but start their sentences in nonnative ways. They overapply the Swedish principle of “rheme later” in their L2 German, indicating L1 transfer at the interface of syntax and information-structure, especially for structures that are frequent in the L1 (e.g. subject-initial clauses, expletive-initial clauses, fronted thematic objects das ‘it/this’). Implications of these findings for language teaching are discussed.
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