Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics - Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2020

Studies on the speech and language development of hearing-impaired children often focus on (deviations in) the children’s speech production. However, it is unclear if listeners also perceive differences between the speech of normally hearing and hearing-impaired children. This contribution wants to fill this void by investigating the overall perceived speech quality of both groups. Three groups of listeners (speech and language pathologists, primary school teachers and inexperienced listeners) judged 126 utterances of seven normally hearing children, seven children with an acoustic hearing aid and seven children with a cochlear implant, in a comparative judgment task. All children were approximately seven years old and received, in the case of the hearing-impaired children, their assistive hearing device before the age of two.

The online tool D-PAC was used to administer the comparative judgement task. The listeners compared stimuli in pairs and decided which stimulus sounded best. This method ultimately leads to a ranking in which all stimuli are represented according to their overall perceived speech quality.

The main result is that the speech of normally hearing children was preferred by the listeners. This indicates that, even after several years of device use, the speech quality of hearing-impaired children is perceived as different from that of normally hearing children. Within the group of hearing-impaired children, cochlear implanted children were judged to exhibit higher speech quality than acoustically hearing aided children, especially after a longer device use. The speech quality of the latter group, on the other hand, remained practically stable. Listeners, irrespectively of their degree of experience with (hearing-impaired) children’s speech, completed the task similarly. In other words: the difference between the overall perceived speech quality of normally hearing and hearing-impaired children is salient for all listener groups and they all slightly preferred children with a cochlear implant over children with an acoustic hearing aid.

I evaluate three schools in linguistics (structuralism; generative linguistics; usage based linguistics) from the perspective of Karl Popper’s critical rationalism. Theories (providing proximate explanations) may be falsified at some point in time. In contrast, metatheories, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and the theory of Language as a Complex Adaptive System (LCAS) (providing ultimate explanations) are falsifiable in principle, but not likely to be falsified. I then argue that LCAS provides a fruitful framework for the explanation of individual differences in language acquisition and use. Unequal frequency distributions of linguistic elements constitute a necessary characteristic of language production, in line with LCAS. However, explaining individual differences implies explaining commonalities (Hulstijn, 2015, 2019). While attributes such as people’s level of education and profession are visible in knowledge of the standard language (declarative knowledge acquired in school), they may be invisible in the spoken vernacular (linguistic cognition shared by all native speakers).

Universities in the Netherlands are currently faced with finding a balance between the implementation of English-medium instruction and the protection and promotion of Dutch. In this article I analyse university language policy documents from a discursive and critical perspective. I explore the intertextual transformations involved in a multilevel process of policymaking; that is, as policy discourse shifts from the state legislation governing the language of instruction in higher education to the codes of conduct for language of the publicly funded universities. The institutions use various discursive strategies, including intertextuality and recontextualisation, to legitimate their reinterpretation of the basic legal principle ‘Dutch, unless’ as ‘English, unless’ (at master’s level, and increasingly at bachelor’s level too). Although the current law is set to be amended, it appears the proposed new law will simply require universities to do more paperwork while continuing on their current path.

We investigated whether the language of instruction (Dutch or English) influenced the study success of 614 Dutch and German first-year psychology students in the Netherlands. The Dutch students who were instructed in Dutch studied in their native language (L1), the other students in a second language (L2). In addition, only the Dutch students studied in their home country. Both these variables could potentially influence study success, operationalised as the number of European Credits (ECs) the students obtained, their grades, and drop-out rates. The L1 group outperformed the three L2 groups with respect to grades, but there were no significant differences in ECs and drop-out rates (although descriptively, the L1 group still performed best). In conclusion, this study shows an advantage of studying in the L1 when it comes to grades, and thereby contributes to the current debate in the Dutch media regarding the desirability of offering degrees taught in English.

The New Statistics is an approach to scholarly research which offers an alternative to the problematic overreliance on significance testing currently plaguing the research literature. This paper describes the problems associated with significance testing and introduces the key concepts of the data-analysis that best fits with the goals of the New Statistics: estimation of effect sizes and confidence intervals. These concepts will be applied in a reanalysis of the summary data from an article that was recently published in this journal. This makes it possible to compare the estimation approach advocated by the New Statistics to the standard significance tests and to discuss potential drawbacks of this approach as a means of gathering quantitative evidence in support of our substantive hypotheses.

With the average life expectancy in especially developed countries steadily increasing, healthy ageing is prioritised on the research agenda. Various studies have looked into bilingualism as a possible anti-ageing tool to delay the onset of symptoms of degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, with as perhaps the most promising recent line of work intervention studies that introduce bilingual experiences to seniors in the form of foreign language courses meant to induce a protective effect on cognitive decline. Unfortunately, the scant studies available have not found convincing results, most likely due to several pitfalls in their designs, one of the most important being that method of instruction is rarely specified or controlled for. In this paper, we identify methodological concerns that need to be addressed when conducting experimental work related to third-age language learning, resulting in a research agenda for third-age language learning studies.

West Frisian is a minoritized language spoken in the province of Fryslân, in the Netherlands. It has been said to be converging with Standard Dutch (see De Haan, 1997; Nerbonne, 2001), and it has been found to be largely intelligible for speakers of regional language varieties in the Netherlands, such as Low Saxon or Limburgish for example (see, for instance, De Vries, 2010).

In this research, we tested how much Frisian native speakers of Dutch can actually understand, as well as the degree of difficulty of each type of task. An online test was designed (N = 225) to measure the intelligibility of both written and spoken Frisian. The results seem to indicate that West Frisian is highly intelligible for Dutch native speakers, which we argue should be used to enrich the school curriculum and foster receptive skills in the minoritized language (see Fonseca, 2012; Belmar, 2019b), which could in turn boost its use.

The aim of the study is to analyze prelexical speech development in young children with a different socio-economic status (SES): children from low SES backgrounds (lowSES) are compared with mid-to-high SES (mhSES) children. Timing of the onset of babbling and the consonantal development in consonant-vowel (cv) syllables are investigated. Result show that lowSES children reach the babbling onset milestone significantly later than mhSES children. In addition, they use different consonant types in their cv-syllables: they use more glides, but fewer stops, nasals, fricatives, and liquids. These early differences between children of different backgrounds seem to be in line with the literature on SES differences later on in life.

This paper analyzes ethnic self-labeling among pupils of a secondary school in Venlo, the Netherlands. Pupils with migration backgrounds, born in the Netherlands, referred to themselves as ‘Moroccan’, ‘Turk’ or ‘foreigner’, and to others as ‘Dutch’. Ascription to these ethnic categories is often understood as an expression of national (un)belonging. Based on nine months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that ethnic labels functioned to manage everyday interpersonal social relations and did not necessarily express feelings of (un)belonging to the nation. Rather, pupils used ethnic labels to associate social personae with particular styles and behaviors and to construct local social hierarchies. The paper contributes to the investigation of ethnic labels as signs with locally contingent meanings, which nevertheless retain indexical links with wider discourses about social categories and belonging. It furthermore emphasizes the necessity of investigating the local meanings of ethnic categories.

Until recently, throughout the world, linguistic theory was virtually absent in secondary education, mostly limited to grammar teaching still based on 19th century linguistic theory. There is a growing call, however, for enriching grammar teaching with modern linguistic insights, integrating higher order critical thinking skills, like reasoning. This study tries to lay the groundwork for a model of linguistic reasoning in particular.

Based on a well-established model for historical reasoning (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2018), a linguistic model is developed in two steps. First, the components of the historical model are theoretically analysed and transposed to the linguistic domain, and second, the model is applied in qualitative analysis of linguistic experts’ reasoning.

It is found that the model fits linguistic reasoning fairy well: all central components can be observed, and are evenly distributed over different experts. It is concluded that the linguistic reasoning model can be used in the development of a new grammar pedagogy.

In this research note we argue that reading lessons for the subject of English in Dutch pre-university education require adjustments. Currently, these lessons do not prepare students well for university reading. Too often, lessons emphasize searching for information, the dominant skill to pass the school exit exam. Instead, students would benefit much more from instruction on reading to learn and critical reading, which are important university skills. Moreover, the expository texts for English classes generally concern school subjects instead of genuine English content such as linguistics. To address these problems, we are in the process of developing an academic reading course focussing on linguistic topics to enhance students’ academic readiness, while at the same time adding depth and content to the subject of English in Dutch pre-university education. An empirical study to evaluate the effectiveness of this course will follow.

This study examines the Dutch intelligibility of a group of monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish-Dutch preschool children in Flanders, as rated by native Dutch listeners and measured by a Dutch intelligibility test. The intelligibility of the bilingual children is compared to that of the monolingual Dutch children, in order to examine whether age and/or task effects are similar or different in the two groups. The results revealed that intelligibility was affected by age, but showed no significant interaction between age and group. However, we found a significant interaction between age and task: children’s intelligibility increased with age for a word production as well as a sentence production task, but much more so for the latter than for the former. We discuss the results in relation to the children’s developing phonological systems, the age of exposure to Dutch and the nature of the test.