Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 79, Issue 1, 2008

It is assumed that the overall combination of the positioning of speech articulators such as the tongue, jaws and lips differs per language, which is commonly referred to as articulatory settings. Previous studies involving analytic listening, as well as acoustic analyses and those based on modern scanning techniques that can visualize the vocal tract claim to have found evidence for the existence of articulatory settings; yet, thus far none of these seems to have found unambiguous measurable evidence for language specific settings. The present study attempts to acoustically measure differences between the settings of English and Dutch under optimal conditions, based on within-speaker comparisons of comparable vowels in similar phonetic contexts. Formant frequencies of eight different Dutch-English vowel pairs that appear in interlingual homophones produced by five advanced Dutch learners of English were measured for this purpose. Statistical analyses of the acoustic data seem to point to overall distinct patterns in the positions of Dutch and English vowels, which can be related to the language-specific settings of the two languages examined. Most of all, the outcomes of the analyses seem to highlight the dynamic nature of articulation, which can explain the difficulty previous studies have encountered.

Phonemes are perceived categorically and this perception is language-specific for adult listeners. Infants initially are "universal" listeners, capable of discriminating both native and non-native speech contrasts. This ability disappears in the first year of life. Maye et al. (Cognition (2002)) propose that statistical learning is responsible for this change to language-specific perception. They were the first to show that infants of 6 and 8 months old use statistical distribution of phonetic variation in learning to discriminate speech sounds. A replication of this experiment studied 10-11-month-old Dutch infants. They were exposed to either a bimodal or a unimodal frequency distribution of an 8-step speech sound continuum based on the Hindi voiced and voiceless retroflex plosives (/da/ en /ta/). The results show that only infants in the bimodal condition could discriminate the contrast, representing the speech sounds in two categories rather than one.

In this study, I have tested the assumption that in child language acquisition dimensional adjectives are prototype-free by looking at the acquisition of these words by children. The results of longitudinal data from English and Dutch show that the predictions of the non-prototypicality hypothesis are disconfirmed. Children initially apply dimensional adjectives only to a restricted set of entities, most prominent of which are prototypical instantiations of the entity (e.g., 'tower' for tall). After having stored a critical mass of adjective-object pairings, children are able to make generalisations and extract spatial schemas. The findings provide support to Prefab Theory and Categorical Learning Theory, and disconfirm the predictions of Semantic Feature Theory.

This study investigates the phenomenon of weakening or regularization in Dutch verb morphology synchronically: how often do forms such as kiesde 'choosed' or graafde 'digged' occur, how acceptable are they, and what factors influence the production of weakified rather than strong forms? Based on production and acceptability tasks in a sample of 240 Dutch and Flemish informants, the observations of weakification will be outlined in detail, with particular reference to geographical variation and to various aspects of the 'past tense debate' (Pinker, 1998).

Linguists have distinguished between various types of causal relations. For instance, Pander Maat & Sanders (2000; 2001) distinguish between different kinds of causal relations: objective and subjective causal relations. A connective provides explicit processing instructions on how the first segment should be related to the next segment. An eye tracking experiment on the online and offline effects of the subjective connective dus and the objective connective daardoor, shows that there are online differences between these connectives. Objective relations with daardoor cause a speeding up effect of the sentence after the connective in comparison to objective relations without daardoor. There were no differences in reading speed found between subjective relations with and without dus.The online differences between dus and daardoor can be partly explained in terms of their differences in subjectivity. However, there are clues that subjectivity can not explain everything and that the specificity of the connective also might have played a role.

This study focuses on the use of electronic dictionaries by students with dyslexia. As opposed to what is known about paper dictionaries, the electronic dictionary used in this study was frequently consulted during the reading of a digital text in a foreign language. Students with dyslexia were also able to utilize this resource. They searched for high-frequency words significantly more than non-dyslexic students with the same vocabulary. Because the electronic dictionary was easy to manage, some students used it as a reading machine. Students with dyslexia and non-dyslexic students spent the same amount of time reading a digital text. The range of the reading vocabulary of the students, in contrast to the dyslexia factor, appeared to influence the reading tempo and word retention. To stress upon vocabulary growth appears to be an important goal in the intervention of reading problems.

In Brussels, the officially Dutch-French bilingual but predominantly francophone capital of Belgium, a monolingual Dutch-medium and French-medium school system operate in parallel and independently from each other. Lately, an increasing number of francophone parents have sent their children to the Dutch-medium schools in, expecting that this will provide them with the 'immersion experience' felt necessary to become bilingual in French and Dutch. There has been much debate about the effects on the pupils of the complex multilingual environment in the Dutch-medium schools which has thus been created. This article reports on an analysis of Dutch writing proficiency of both French and Dutch-speaking pupils in these Dutch-medium schools. Quantitative measures of linguistic complexity, accuracy and productivity were used to assess the Dutch academic written production of 60 pupils from two age levels. Significant differences between the Dutch and the French pupils were mainly found with respect to accuracy.