Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 60, Issue 1, 1998

Research on primary school children shows that the differences between L1-Dutch children on the one hand, and L2-Dutch children on the other, tend to become greater, which is a process in which the children's proficiency in Dutch plays a major role. In this paper it is shown that word knowledge is the main source of this Matthew-effect. The level of difficulty of ten different school texts is investigated with respect to the relative number of unknown words (lemmas) in these texts for DFL and DSL-speakers, who have an absolute receptive vocabulary size in Dutch of 7.000 and 4.000 words respectively. On the basis of a word frequency list in primary education, covering percentages (lemmas and types) are calculated for both groups, for ten texts on various school subjects (five on reading, five on science). The mean (lemma) coverage of the reading text was 89% for DFL-, and 84% for DSL-children; for the science texts these percentages were 85% for DFL-, and 78% for DSL-speakers. Comparing these outcomes with what is known about understanding texts and learning words from texts, it is shown that for the DFL-children, only two science texts were quite difficult. For the DSL-children, however, all the science texts, and two of the five reading texts were too difficult. They could only marginally understand what the text was about, and learning new words from the text was almost impossible, due to the high percentage of unknown words.

This article desribes the implementation of a screening test of text comprehension in five secondary schools. The test results yield diagnostic information about the individual's reading style, which may be either compensating for a lack of word knowledge, or a 'bottom-up' reading style without bringing about meaning on the textual level. The typology of readers is carried out with the aim of improving the different reading problems by follow-up reading and language programs tailored to the specific individual needs. The schools apply different models of remediation, dependent on the different logistic possibilities and on the numbers of weak readers. It appears that 'remedial teaching' and the 'integrated model' conditions yield the best results.

Adolescent speakers of Dutch who have a language disorder cannot as yet be identified by generally acknowledged tests. However, in the future this will become necessary to apply for special education or financial support in the regular educational system. Based on a survey of the literature concerning normal and disordered language development in children up age 10, this article presents a pilot study in which the language skills of 10 specific language-impaired students are compared with those of 10 normally developing peers. Tasks are used both within academic and communicative contexts. Between the groups significant differences appear on two aspects only: the number of grammatical errors made while telling a story, and the length of the sentences used in writing a story. These two aspects therefore appear to be useful in the process of identifying language-disordered adolescents.

Since in 1993 the Dutch government set detailed goals for educational programmes on secondary schools for 14-year-olds, writing EFL materials has become an increasingly complex task for textbook writers.Not only are they supposed to deal with these new objectives, but they are also expected to cater for all pupils within that age-group and ensure that (teacher)independent learning can be achieved.Writing course books for all pupils implies writing for pupils with language learning difficulties as well. In a newly developed English course a distinction was made between dyslexic pupils, who experience purely phonological problems, on the one hand and poor language learners, who in addition are characterized by a poor general understanding on the other.In this article the editor of 'Worldwide', the new Dutch EFL course, reports on how the various elements mentioned above have been incorporated into the material.

Blind children acquire their mother tongue in a relatively 'decontextualized' way, as compared to their sighted peers. Many word meanings which sighted children learn in a predominantly visual experiential context, have to be verbally explained and defined to blind children. In consequence, blind children may be deficient in the more experientially based aspects of word meaning, but may be aheadof their,sighted peers in their acquisition of the more verbally based meaning relations between words.Our findings indicate that blind children do not seem to be 'ahead' of sighted children in the knowledge about verbally based relations but rather in the accessibility of the relations which they have in their lexicon.

In this study, a Dutch version of the metaphor task (Heesbeen e.a., 1990) is' standardized and normed within a group of adults with acquired brain damage, as well as within a comparable healthy control group. The aim is to construct a test for measuring problems in word comprehension and for eventually evaluating the recovery from these problems in patients with mild aphasie or non-aphasic language problems.It appears that, according to Mokken's scale analysis the Metaphor task consists of a homogeneous set of items (Hi—.35). This homogeneity can be maximized to Hi—.45 within an optimal subset of 19 items. Moreover, the original task can be subdivided in two subsets, each consisting of 19 comparable items, without loss of homogeneity.Both the original task and the two comparable subdivisions appears to be able to reflect problems in word comprehension as well as aspects of their recovery. Therefore, in this study percentile norms for the three subject groups mentioned were computed.

In this article I present the results of a comparison between six Dutch agrammatic aphasics and six Wernicke's aphasies on a sentence comprehension test and a sentence ordering test. One aim was to establish whether the Wernicke's aphasies suffer from a syntactic disorder, and whether this disorder resembles the syntactic disorder of agrammatics. A second aim was to see whether the problems observed in production are similar to the problems observed in comprehension and vice versa. The results show that Wernicke's aphasies suffer from a syntactic impairment, although the impairment differs from that in agrammatics. Specifically, agrammatics seem impaired in their ability to construct adequate syntactic representations, whereas Wernicke's aphasies seem to have an impairment in the syntactic information of the verbs. Finally, in agrammatism, it seems that only argument movement is problematic in both production and comprehension, while for the Wernicke's aphasies there is also a problem with verb movement in comprehension.

The semantic system has a central position in the language processing system as the intermediate between language production and language comprehension. The system itself may be separated into distinctive components: visual and lexical semantics. Their is much discussion about the interference between the visual and lexical semantic system and about the quality of the processing routes. Some authors propose a unitary amodal system, other authors plead for modality-specific semantic systems. The stage of perceptual categorization is considered both as optional and as obligatory. The objective of this study is: to investigate visual and lexical semantic processing in aphasic patients (n=74) (control groups: right- hemispheric patients (n=10) and normals (n=96)) (i), to examine the relation between semantic deficits and aphasia type and severity (ii) and to explore the relation between presemantic and semantic visual processing. Instruments to measure presemantic and semantic processing: Object Decision (Riddoch & Humphreys, 1987) and the verbal and visual Semantic Association Test (Visch-Brink e.a.., 1993). Results: aphasie patients as a group were significantly impaired both in Object Decision and visual and verbal semantic processing. Some patients appeared to have a selective deficit in visual or verbal semantic processing (1). No correlation was found between the performance on the visual or verbal Semantic Association Test and the aphasia type or severity (ii). In some patients a dissociation was found between presemantic and semantic visual processing (iii). Conclusions: Visual and lexical semantic processing in aphasia may selectively disturbed, which pleads rather for a multiple than for a unitary semantic processing system. Aphasia type and the severity of aphasia do not function as indicators for the presence of a visual and/or lexical semantic disorder. For the interpretation of the meaning of a picture, the stage of perceptual categorization can be bypassed.

In order to provide authors of text books with empirical data on the acquisition in Dutch of written morphology in nouns, verbs and adjectives, several empirical studies were undertaken. In this article, the second study is reported on the performance of the morpheme -en in a special case of adjectives in Dutch: material adjectives such as 'gouden' (gold). The study tried to determine factors which affect the performance in reading and writing. Factors involved were two interference factors (plural in adjacent nouns; normal adjectives), cognitive task (comprehension versus writing) and two syntactic factors (grammatical function and position in the sentence of the constituent. Subjects (n=80, grades 6 and 7, from four schools) individually completed a comprehension and a production task in which factors were systematically varied. No effects of cognitive task were observed. Therefore only results for the production task were reported in detail. It turned out that material adjectives were more difficult than normal adjectives, and that within the category of material adjectives two subcategories should be distinguished, the easier one in which the morpheme is preceded by a stressed syllable as in 'gouden', and the more difficult one in which this is not the case, as in 'zilveren'. Of the two syntactic factors, only the grammatical function seems to affect the performance: adjectives in constituents with subject function were more difficult than adjectives with other grammatical functions; interactions between group and category of adjectives were found. Of the two interference factors, both factors seemed to affect performance.

The two-year Opstap-Opnieuw programme is a programme to stimulate children aged 4-6 years in their cognitive, social and linguistic development. The 'Arabic' version of the programme, which is directed at Moroccan children, consists of texts written in Modern Standard Arabic and tapes containing recordings in Moroccan Arabic and Berber. The article investigates whether the words used in the first year of the programme link up with the proficiency of Moroccan children in their mother tongue and whether the language choice based on which the programme is developed is a suitable one. The outcomes of the analyses show that the lexical level of the programme is relatively high for the target children but not too high. Furthermore it shows that the multilingual language choice of the programme seems acceptable although the original choice in favour of the Moroccan Arabic dialect is to be preferred.