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Previous events

2023

Computational Assessment of Speech, Language, and Communication Functioning in Individuals with Dementia

Associate professor Charalambos Themistocleous at the  Department of Special Needs Education, UiO will give a talk about computational assessment of speech, language, and communication functioning in individuals with dementia.

Time and place: Apr. 20, 2023 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 421/Zoom

About Charalambos Themistocleous

Charalambos Themistocleous is an Associate Professor of Speech, Language, and Communication at the Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Gothenburg, and Princeton University. His research aims to determine the relationship between the brain and language and provide automated and personalized assessment, diagnosis, and prognosis for patients with speech and language impairment.

He has published several articles in top-tier journals such as the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Brain Sciences, the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Also, he has developed computational and machine learning tools to enable the large-scale analysis and quantification of the speech and language in typical and atypical speakers (e.g., Themis and a python library for automated acoustic analysis). He has presented his research at various conferences around the world. You can find more information about him on his website https://charalambosthemistocleous.com. 

About the talk

Dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative condition that affects cognition, such as memory, attention, reasoning, and language. It is estimated that about fifty million people worldwide have dementia, and this number is expected to rise as the population ages.

Thus, it is urgent provide reliable and valid assessments of dementia that can help with early detection, diagnosis, and treatment planning. In this talk, we argue that Computational Language Assessment (CLA) is an improvement over traditional manual neurological assessments, which have been the standard of speech and language assessment since the 1950s, as i. it can provide quantified and reliable measures of the speech, language, and communication functioning in elderly individuals and individuals at substantial risk for dementia. ii. it can facilitate the diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy efficacy in at-risk and language-impaired populations; and iii. it can provide ecological measures of discourse and communication. CLA models can significantly advance our ability to optimize the prevention and treatment of elderly individuals with language and communication disorders, allowing them to age gracefully with social engagement.

About the event

The presentation will be given in English.

This is an open event. If you wish to stay up to date about upcoming events, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list here. For more information, please contact the organizers Anne Marte Haug Olstad, Helene Killmer or Ingvild Elisabeth Winsnes. 

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Ingvild Winsnes

Primary progressive aphasia and conversation – an intervention study

Time and place: Feb. 23, 2023 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 536

About Ingvild

Ingvild Winsnes is a first year PhD candidate at the Department of Linguistic and Scandinavian studies (ILN). Ingvild is a speech and language therapist (SLT) and before joining ILN she worked as a clinical SLT and research assistant with people with stroke induced aphasia and people with primary progressive aphasia.

About the talk

The term primary progressive aphasia (PPA) refers to different types of dementia were language and/or speech is the first and most prominent symptom. There is no cure for PPA, but there are encouraging findings from research on speech and language therapy for people with PPA. The goal of speech and language therapy for PPA is to maximize effective communication for as long as possible.

For my PhD I will conduct an intervention study.  I will use a broad range of outcome measures, from formal testing to observational data. By using such a broad range of measures, I hope to gain insight into not only language skills, but also language use.

In this talk I will present my PhD project. I will emphasise and discuss the research design and methodological issues. Hopefully I will also get some feedback and advice from the audience to take with me.

About the event

The presentation will be given in English.

This is an open event. If you wish to stay up to date about upcoming events, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list here. For more information, please contact the organizers Anne Marte Haug Olstad, Helene Killmer or Ingvild Elisabeth Winsnes. 

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Michela Iacorossi

Trajectories of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of Norwegian as a third language

Time and place: Jan. 26, 2023 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH: Møterom 536

About Michela

Michela Iacorossi is a doctoral fellow at the department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies (ILN). She joined the department in August 2020 as a research assistant and admin at MultiLing.

In August 2022, she obtained a doctoral fellowship within the NFR-funded project CLIMA – Cross-linguistic influence in multilingual acquisition, led by Anne Dahl (NTNU), Kjersti Listhaug (NTNU) and Guro Busterud (UiO, main supervisor). She holds a BA in European languages from La Sapienza – University of Rome and anguro MA in Applied Linguistics from UiO / UCLouvain.

About the talk

Previous research has shown that learning an L2 and an L3 are intrinsically different processes. During the last decade, several theoretical models have been proposed, but there is still little consensus on how previously acquired languages affect the acquisition of grammar of a third language (L3).

In this talk, I will first introduce the CLIMA project and its main research questions focusing on CLIMA’s Work Package 1, which investigates cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and development in the acquisition of Norwegian as a third language.

Currently we are designing a longitudinal study that aims to track the acquisition of verb placement in declarative main clauses over time using a variety of experimental methods. We will compare the developmental trajectories of two groups of adult learners, one with a V2 (German) and one with a non-V2 (French) L1.

A series of theoretical and methodological issues will be discussed, such as how to disentangle learning from facilitative cross-linguistic influence and how to use different methods in order to reflect different types of language competence.

About the event

The presentation will be given in English.

This is an open event. If you wish to stay up to date about upcoming events, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list here. For more information, please contact the organizers Anne Marte Haug Olstad, Helene Killmer or Ingvild Elisabeth Winsnes.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition

2022

Qingyuan Liu Gardner & Valantis Fyndanis

Cross-linguistic investigation of grammatical aspect production in individuals with stroke-induced aphasia.

Time and place: Dec. 1, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, online & HWH: Møterom 536

About Qingyuan Gardner and Valantis Fyndanis

Qingyuan Gardner is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Multilingualism Across the Life Span (MultiLing). Joining in October 2021, she has been working on the Norwegian Research Council funded project ‘Machine Learning Aphasia’ with project leader Valantis Fyndanis, where they examine morphosyntactic production in individuals with stroke-induced aphasia. Qingyuan holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Edinburgh.

Valantis Fyndanis is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Psycholinguistics/Neurolinguistics in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at the Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus, and a Researcher at the MultiLing Center at the University of Oslo, Norway. Prior to his current appointments, he held a tenure-track Associate Professor position at Long Island University, U.S.A., a postdoctoral position at MultiLing, a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Potsdam, Germany, as well as research and teaching positions in Greece and Italy. His areas of expertise are adult language disorders and bi-/multilingualism. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator of the FRIPRO project "Machine Learning Aphasia".

They will give the talk in English.

About the talk

Research has shown that individuals with agrammatic aphasia (IwAAs) have difficulty producing and comprehending morphosyntactic/morphosemantic categories such as time reference/tense (e.g., Bastiaanse, Bamyaci, Hsu, Lee, Duman, & Thompson, 2011; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997) and grammatical aspect (e.g., Fyndanis, Arcara, Christidou, & Caplan, 2018; Koukoulioti & Bastiaanse, 2020).

However, while the time reference/tense deficit in agrammatic aphasia has been documented in many languages, it is still unknown whether IwAAs are impaired in grammatical aspect cross-linguistically. Grammatical aspect has been consistently found impaired in Greek-speaking aphasia (e.g., Fyndanis, Varlokosta, & Tsapkini, 2012; Fyndanis et al., 2018; Varlokosta et al., 2006; Nanousi et al., 2006), but it has not been explored systematically in other languages, including English.

This talk will first give a broad overview of existing literature on aspect production in IwAAs, particularly in Greek- and English-speaking individuals: What we know so far, and what issues require further investigation. Then, we will present work examining production of English aspect currently underway, focusing on the experimental design of a production task tapping into English aspect. We will also present pilot data and preliminary predictions, and discuss challenges and current solutions.

This is an open event. A zoom link will be send via the forum's mailing list. If you wish to join, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Helene Killmer or Sarah Cameron for more information.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Titia Benders
Two attempts to understand the structure of acoustic variability in Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) (and the implications for language development).

Time and place: Nov. 25, 2022 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM, MultiLing Meeting room (421)

About Titia Benders

Titia Benders is Assistant Professor in Linguistics (with a focus on phonetics) at the University of Amsterdam. She completed a PhD at this same University, held a post-doctoral position at Radboud University Nijmegen, lectured in Psychology at Newcastle University (Australia), and spent 7 years as (Senior) Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University (Australia), where she was deputy-director of the Child Language Lab.

Benders investigates developing phonological representations at the interface between perception, production, and input. Her main interest is the acquisition of segmental and prosodic representations by by children between 6 months and 6 years of age, who acquire one or more languages, without or with hearing loss or developmental language disorder. A second line of research concerns the linguistic and emotional properties of infant-directed speech by parents (i.e., both mothers and fathers). Benders' research routinely includes techniques from phonetics, developmental psychology, and recent statistical insights.

About the event

Infant-Directed Speech (henceforth: IDS), the conglomerate of voice and articulation characteristics most speakers adopt when speaking to babies, is easily recognised from its raised and lively pitch. One of the many other IDS features is that vowels are realised with less consistent or more variable formant frequencies across tokens. Another feature is that pitch is more variable.

While the consequences of variability for language learning have been discussed, its causes have so far remained largely unexplored. To start addressing this issue, I will share two attempts to characterise the structure of variability in IDS.

To this end, I will:

1) assess the association between pitch and vowel variability in Mandarin (Tang, Benders, Xu-Rattanasone, Yuen, and Demuth, under review) and Dutch (Benders, 2016).

2) characterise pitch variability in (Dutch) IDS (Benders, StGeorge, & Fletcher, 2021).

3) engage in speculation with the audience about the impact of structured variability on infants’ language learning

I look forward to discussing the promise and shortcomings of this line of research, and potential next steps towards better understanding the causes of vowel variability in Infant-Directed Speech.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Liquan Liu

Tone perception by pitch accent language learning infants – is there a perceptual “advantage”?

Time and place: Nov. 3, 2022 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM, online

About Dr Liquan Liu

Dr Liquan Liu is a Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University. His research at MARCS Babylab targets the multi-dimensional effects of multilingualism, multi-racialism and multi-culturalism on early childhood development and the relationship between internal (initial biases, learning mechanisms, developmental disorders and delays) and external (quantity and quality of exposure, learning environment) factors.

Liquan will give the talk in English.

About the talk

In Oslo I studied two strings of research, one on cross-culture emotion perception and language-affect interface, the other on tone perception. In this talk I present results of the latter, namely, tone perception by pitch accent language learning infants.

Tone languages use pitch variations to differentiate meaning. Albeit initial sensitivity to tones, infants’ tone perception has initially been argued to be related to the tone use of their native language, a “use-it-or-lose-it” pattern. However, recent findings challenge this claim, with mixed results observed between various tone perception trajectories and learners from across language backgrounds. Many have attributed these mixed findings to the acoustic properties of contrasts and listeners’ specific language experience.

Our prior work shows that listeners’ overall language experience such as multilingualism also modulates perception. Pitch accent languages provide a unique angle exploring the theoretical aspect of the issue, especially how language experience may play a role.

In the current study, 64 monolingual and bilingual Norwegian-learning infants aged 5 and 10 months participated in a familiarization-dishabituation task where their perception of two tone contrasts differing in salience was examined.

Bilinguals additional acquire a non-tone or pitch-accent language apart from Norwegian. At 5 months, monolingual but not bilingual infants perceived the salient tone contrast, where sensitivity to non-native tone contrast remains low for all infants. At 10 months, while monolingual infants lose sensitivity to either tone contrast, bilingual infants exhibited discrimination.

Results indicate that 1) salience is one of the key factors modulating listeners’ tone perception, 2) infants’ pitch accent experience does not necessarily facilitate perception of non-native tone contrasts, and 3) bilingual experience appears to enhance speech perception.

This is an open event. A zoom link will be send via the forum's mailing list. If you wish to join, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Helene Killmer or Sarah Cameron for more information.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Clara Martin

Language comprehension in accented speech.

Time and place: Sep. 20, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, MultiLing meeting room HWH 421

About Clara D. Martin

Clara D. Martin is an Ikerbasque research professor at the BCBL (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastián, Spain), leader of the research group “Speech and Bilingualism”.

The main objective of Dr. Martin’s research group is to explore language perception and production, in native and foreign languages, with a special focus on language interactions in the bilingual mind. Her research group also focuses on language learning, exploring how we learn to perceive and produce novel sounds and words, and how those processes can be optimized.

About the talk

I will present a series of experiments aiming to define how language comprehension is modulated when a native listener is facing a non-native speaker. In the project, we explored this question regarding different fundamental aspects of sentence comprehension, mainly syntactic and semantic processing.

Regarding syntactic processing, we showed that the way the brain reacts to grammatical errors depends on the linguistic status of the speaker, as well as on the frequency of errors in real life. Regarding the semantic level, we showed that processing of dialectal synonyms and semantic violations differ when listening to native and non-native speakers, and we also revealed that anticipatory processes are affected by the speaker’s accent.

In its whole, this project provides important advances on our knowledge on sentence comprehension in bilingualism. The results we obtained are relevant at the pragmatic level, providing a better understanding on how native listeners manage to comprehend foreign speakers, and at the theoretical level, showing how sentence comprehension is recalibrated on-line depending on external cues such as the speaker’s accent.

This is an open event. If you would like to receive information about upcoming events, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Helene Killmer or Sarah Cameron for more information.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Anne Marte Haug Olstad

Gamified second language acquisition: testing the effects of a digital children's game for language learning.

Time and place: Aug. 25, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, MultiLing meeting room HWH 421

About Anne Marte Haug Olstad

Anne Marte is a first year PhD fellow at MultiLing, working within the Nordic collaboration project TEFLON. She holds an MA in Language Studies with Teacher Education from NTNU in Trondheim from 2019. Her research interests include psycholinguistics and second language learning, as well as a growing interest in language technology.

About the talk

The TEFLON project is concerned with all steps from developing the contents of a digital language learning game for children, to evaluating the actual learning effects from playing the game.

Anne Marte’s PhD project is also involved in most of these steps, and she is now in the early stages of planning how to test the game’s efficacy for learning. She will in this talk present the learning effects the TEFLON project seeks to investigate, and hopefully use some of the discussion after to seek tips and advice on how best to answer these questions.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Curtis Sharma

Associations between bilingualism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related behaviour in a community sample of primary school children.

Time and place: May 31, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 536

About Curtis Sharma

Curtis divides his time being Research Data Coordinator at University of Cambridge and a Researcher in multilingualism and neurodiversity, particularly, the interaction of multilingualism and levels of attention in children. Curtis holds a PhD in Psycholinguistics and an MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (University of Cambridge). He is currently a researcher with the “Better attention, better communication? How ADHD multilingualism influence children’s pragmatic development”, funded by the Research Council of Norway.

The talk will be given in English.

About the talk

It has been found that bilinguals and children from minority backgrounds lag behind monolinguals or those in the majority culture, with respect to prevalence, assessment, and treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This suggests that bilingualism might be yet another factor giving rise to variability in ADHD.

Using regression methods, we analysed parent reports for 394 primary school-age children on background and language experience, ADHD-related behaviour, and structural language skill in English to explore whether bilingualism is associated with levels of ADHD-related behaviour.

Bilingualism as a category was associated with slightly lower levels of ADHD-related behaviour. Bilingualism as a continuous measure showed a trend of being associated with lower levels, but this did not quite reach significance. Structural language skill in English was the main predictor of levels of ADHD-related behaviour; higher skill predicting lower levels.

This is an open event. If you would like to receive information about upcoming events, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Helene Killmer or Sarah Cameron for more information.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Mary Elizabeth Neff

Exploring the literal bias in children’s metaphor comprehension development.

Time and place: May 19, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 536

About Mary Elizabeth Neff
Mary Beth is a first year PhD fellow at the department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas (IFIKK). She is working under the supervision of Ingrid Lossius Falkum (as part of the DEVCOM project) and her PhD is on the literal bias in children’s figurative language development. Mary Beth holds a MAS from the University of Basel and has recently rejoined academia after working as a Senior Science Advisor for the NZ Department of Conservation.

The talk will be given in English.

About the talk

If you were to stub your toe and say ‘Ah - my toe is on fire!’ children would likely take that to mean that your toe is literally on fire. This observed literalism in tasks on children’s metaphor comprehension has often been attributed to children’s inability to forgo literal meaning until later in development. However, this contradicts findings showing children’s general pragmatic competencies, where even by 2 years, children demonstrate the ability to infer intended meaning above and beyond what is explicitly said.

In this talk, I will be discussing proposed research exploring why—despite their general pragmatic competence—children appear to have difficulties forgoing the literal meaning of novel metaphorical statements.

This is an open event. If you would like to receive information about upcoming events, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Helene Killmer, Ane Theimann or Sarah Cameron for more information.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Monica Norvik and Hanne Gram Simonsen

Letting the CAT-N out: Adaption of the aphasia test CAT to Norwegian.

Time and place: Apr. 21, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 421

Monica and Hanne will be holding their talk in Norwegian. For more info, please visit the Norwegian version of this page.

This is an open event. If you would like to receive information about upcoming events, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Helene Killmer, Ane Theimann or Sarah Cameron for more information.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Sarah Cameron

Acquisition and processing of L2 grammar: An ERP study.

Time and place: Mar. 31, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 536

About Sarah Cameron

Sarah got her MA in linguistics at UiO in 2019, and is currently a PhD fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian studies. She is also affiliated with MultiLing. Her academic interests are most things language and brain-related, particularly acquisition, processing, and organization of languages in the brain.

The talk will be given in English.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Christiane Lingås Haukedal and Ingeborg Sophie Ribu

Words for Well-being.

Time and place: Feb. 28, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:10 PM, Online

Christiane and Ingeborg will be holding their talk in Norwegian. For more info, please visit the Norwegian version of this page.

Please note that this month's clinical forum will take place on a Monday.

About Christiane Lingås Haukedal and Ingeborg Sophie Ribu

Christiane Lingås Haukedal and Ingeborg Sophie Ribu are both associate professors in special needs education at OsloMet. Christiane holds a PhD from ISP, where she wrote her dissertation on the connection between language abilities and quality of life in children and young people with hearing impairment. Ingeborg wrote her dissertation on language impairment in people with dementia. They will be at the clinical forum to present and receive feedback on their new research project on language assessment and life quality in teenagers and young adults with developmental language impairment. 

This is an open event. A zoom link will be sent via the forum's mailing list. If you wish to join, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Helene Killmer, Ane Theimann or Sarah Cameron for more information.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition


Franziska Köder

Does multilingualism affect attention levels and the likelihood of an ADHD diagnosis? Evidence from a Norwegian Cohort study.

Time and place: Jan. 27, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, online

About Franziska Köder

Franziska Köder is a researcher and lab manager of MultiLing's Socio-Cognitive Laboratory. She holds a PhD in Experimental Psycholinguistics (University of Groningen) and a MA in German Linguistics, and Philosophy (University of Heidelberg).

Her interests lie in children’s pragmatic and semantic development, with a special focus on multilingualism and atypical development. She is currently the manager of the project "Better attention, better communication? How ADHD and multilingualism influence children’s pragmatic development", funded by The Research Council of Norway.

Franziska will give the talk in English.

About the talk

Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) frequently have impairments in executive attention. Multilingual children, by contrast, might have cognitive advantages related to attentional control (although this is highly contested). The goal of the study is to investigate the relationship between multilingualism, attention levels and ADHD diagnosis in a general population sample. We address among others the following questions: Do differences in multilingual experience explain variability in attention levels? Is the probability of getting an ADHD diagnosis the same for monolingual and multilingual children? How are parent ratings of attention related to an official ADHD diagnosis for monolingual and multilingual children?

The study will be based on data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), a prospective population-based study with over 100,000 participants from different parts of Norway. In this talk, I will discuss the design of the study, what variables and age groups to include, and how to best analyse the data set. Since this is work in progress, all feedback is highly welcome.

This is an open event. A zoom link will be sent via the forum's mailing list. If you wish to join, you can register the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Helene Killmer or Ane Theimann for more information.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition

2021

Audun Rosslund

Babytalk in Tromsø.

About Audun Rosslund

Audun is a PhD fellow at MultiLing, University of Oslo. He has a background in psychology and as a preschool teacher. His research interest spans the early years of cognitive development, especially language acquisition and the role of environmental input in shaping language outcomes.

Audun will give the talk in English.

About the talk

When interacting with infants and young children, adults fine-tune their speech signal by slowing down, heightening their pitch, expanding their pitch range and exaggerating their vowels. This speech register, known as infant-directed speech (IDS), functions as an ‘acoustic hook’ and is suggested to aid infants in the task of language acquisition. Yet, there seems to be cultural differences, and so far there is limited data on IDS to Norwegian children.

In this talk, I will present preliminary results from a study on IDS with data from parents and their 18-month-old toddlers in Tromsø, Norway. The study sought to examine the acoustic properties of storybook-read IDS, and will assess whether these properties, or the (articulatory) effort that parents make in IDS as compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), are related to toddlers' expressive vocabulary size.


Helena Taubner

Identity and narrative agency when living with aphasia in a digitalised society.

Time and place: Oct. 28, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, online

About Helena Taubner

Helena is a postdoctoral researcher at Halmstad University, Sweden. With a background in computational linguistics and disability research, she has specialized in aphasia, identity and narrative agency.

Helena will give her talk in English.

About the talk

Aphasia is an acquired language disability, caused by stroke or brain injury. Since aphasia involves difficulties producing and/or understanding language, written as well as spoken, it entails a reduced ability and opportunity to author one’s own narrative. In the face of this reduced narrative agency, people who acquire aphasia need to renegotiate their identity. To do so they mirror their stories of self in social structures, including the contemporary communication landscape in which digital tools play an important part, but also norms and attitudes – strongly influenced by the media – towards people with language disabilities.

In her PhD thesis, published in 2019, Helena included 21 individuals with post-stroke aphasia. They experienced a higher degree of narrative agency when communicating online in social media than in other practices. The key to this enhanced narrative agency was the multimodality offered by the digital tools.


Ane Theimann

Linguistic and non-linguistic prediction.

Time and place: Sep. 30, 2021 2:15 AM–3:15 AM, P.A. Munchs hus: Seminarrom 360

About Ane Theimann

Ane is a PhD fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian studies at the University of Oslo (UiO), she is also affiliated with MultiLing. Ane has an MA in linguistics from UiO. She has previously worked on a variety of different projects as a research assistant, involving data collection with child and adult populations.

Ane will give the talk in English.

About the talk

In this talk Ane will present her PhD project about linguistic prediction. She will focus on a one of the sub-projects about linguistic and non-linguistic prediction. Linguistic prediction concerns pre-activation of linguistic input before it has been uttered, for example upon hearing “He is eating a…” we anticipate something edible.

Non-linguistic prediction involves pre-activation of a movement before somebody has performed the movement. For instance, we anticipate that you will bring a cup to your mouth already when you are reaching for the cup.

In this presentation Ane will talk about how she is planning to investigate possible correlations between linguistic and non-linguistic prediction, and whether there is a correlation between language abilities and linguistic prediction.


Michelle White

A North-South perspective on socialisation practices and SES in bilingual language learning.

Time and place: Aug. 26, 2021 2:15 AM–3:14 AM, online

Abount Michelle White

Michelle has an MSc from the European Masters in Clinical Linguistics (University of Groningen) and a PhD from Stellenbosch University. Since obtaining her PhD she has worked as a postdoc for the University of Cape Town, forming part of a team adapting child language assessments into six South African languages. Michelle will be starting as a postdoc at MultiLing later this year.

Michelle will give the talk in English.

About the talk

In this presentation, she will discuss her proposed postdoctoral research project, which will commence at MultiLing later this year.

Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds often have lower language skills and perform more poorly than their peers on language tasks, Researchers assume that SES affects the quantity and quality of input that a child receives, but input is also affected by socialisation practices and bilingualism. Most studies researching the impact of these factors on language outcomes emerge from the global North, but will we get similar findings among bilingual children in the global South?


Suzanne Beeke

The VOICE study: Developing and evaluating evidence-based communication skills training to enhance acute healthcare encounters between staff and people with dementia.

Time: May 27, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM

About Dr Suzanne Beeke

Dr Suzanne Beeke is an associate professor in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London, and a qualified speech and language therapist. Her research focuses on communication disability in adults with post-stroke aphasia, traumatic brain injury, and dementia, particularly the impact of these conditions on everyday conversations in the home and on healthcare interactions.

She led the team that developed Better Conversations with Aphasia (@BCAphasia), a free e-learning resource and communication training programme for SLTs to use with people with aphasia and family members (https://extend.ucl.ac.uk/). She was part of the Nottingham-based NIHR HR&DS funded VOICE Study, which developed communication training for healthcare professionals interacting with people with dementia on acute hospital wards (@voice_study).

Suzanne Beeke's talk will be in English.

About the talk

Twenty five percent of hospital beds are occupied by a person living with dementia (PLWD). Difficulties with communication are common and can make delivering care difficult. Health care professionals (HCPs) report lack of communication skills training (CST) in this area.

We videotaped 41 encounters between 27 HCPs and 26 PLWD, and used conversation analysis to understand where problems arose, and how skilled practitioners overcame them. Particular problems were found during HCP requests (patients often refused) and the 'closing' phase at the end of an encounter. Agreement was more likely where requests were direct, made with high entitlement, and lowered contingencies.

Closings were more successful if the HCP announced the end of a task, made a specific arrangement, and matched body language to speech. We used these insights to design a 2-day CST course using multiple teaching methods including simulated patients. Forty five staff attended from two hospitals. Evaluation included measuring knowledge and confidence before, immediately after and 1 month later.

Communication was measured using blind-rated videos of before and after simulations. Knowledge and confidence both increased. Some behaviours, especially around closings, were more frequent after training. The course was highly-rated by participants, including simulation, real-life videos, and interdisciplinary learning.


Mia Cecilie Heller

Second-language learning in the early elementary years.

Time: Apr. 29, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM

Mia Cecilie Heller is a senior advisor at Statped, section for speech and language impairments. She has a PhD in educational psychology (from University of Oslo, Department of Education) and has previously worked as a lecturer (Department of Special Needs Education, UiO) and as a school psychologist (School Psychologist Service in Oslo). Her research interests concern language development in second-language learners, developmental language disorders and interventions that can promote children’s language learning in school.

Mia Cecilie Heller's talk will be in Norwegian.

Organizer

Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition
This is an open event. A zoom link will be send via the forum's mailing list. If you wish to join, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list klinisk-ling@iln.uio.no here. You may also contact the organizers Elisabet García González, Helene Killmer or Ane Theimann for more information.


Natalia Kartushina

Word learning in multi-dialect environment: Insights from Norwegian 2.5-year toddlers.

Time: Mar. 25, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM

About Natalia Kartushina

Natalia Kartushina is an Associate Professor in Psycholinguistics, who joined MultiLing in December 2020. She holds a PhD in Experimental Psycholinguistics (University of Geneva) and had previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at BCBL (Spain) and BabyLing (Institute for Psychology, UiO). Her research interests cover first and second-language phonological/lexical acquisition and the role of environment in shaping language learning.

About the talk

In this talk, I will present data from two experiments that assess the role of dialectal variability on word learning in 2.5-year-old Norwegian toddlers.

In experiment 1, two-and-a-half-year-old Norwegian toddlers were exposed, in their kindergarten, twice per day for one week, to a child-friendly audiovisual tablet-based e-book containing four novel pseudowords. Half of toddlers heard the story in three Norwegian accents, whereas the other half - in one Norwegian accent. The results revealed no differences between conditions, suggesting that multi-accent variability did not hinder toddlers’ word learning.

In the second experiment, we examined the role of previous experience with multi-accent speech on word learning. Here, two-and-a-half-year-old Norwegian toddlers from mono-dialect and bi-dialect households were exposed, in their homes, for one week, to the e-book featuring three Norwegian accents and assessed on their word learning after each second exposure session. The results that I will present will shed light on our understanding on the role of dialect exposure on word learning in multi-accent input.

This is an open event. A zoom link will be send via the forum's mailing list. If you wish to join, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Elisabet García González, Helene Killmer or Ane Theimann for more information.


Kristen Schroeder

Harnessing heterogeneity when studying language abilities in Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC).

Time and place: Feb. 25, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, online

About Kristen Schroeder

Kristen Schroeder is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas (IFFIK), joining the University of Oslo in December 2020. Under the supervision of Ingrid Lossius Falkum, she is developing the Norwegian Research Council project entitled, ‘Creativity and Convention in Pragmatic Development’, which assesses pragmatic language development among children with and without Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). Kristen holds an MA and PhD in Cognitive Science and Language from the University of Barcelona.

The presentation will be given in English.

About the talk
In this talk I will be exploring the topic of heterogeneity in language development and language outcomes among individuals with autism spectrum conditions. Although variability of language ability is widely attested in this population, much of the research on language in ASC has been focused on a relatively restricted subset of the spectrum. I will discuss both methodological issues related to assessing diverse profiles of autism as well as benefits that may be drawn. I argue that variability may be an assent in better understanding underlying cognitive processes.

Specifically in this talk I will explore the topic of comprehension and expression of referential expressions in autism spectrum conditions, drawing on previous work developed in my doctoral thesis and finally touch on new ideas on development of non-literal language understanding across individuals with ASC.

A zoom link will be send via the forum's mailing list. If you wish to join, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Elisabet García González, Helene Killmer or Ane Theimann for more information.


Ellisiv Ørnes Vestre

Speech errors in alcohol intoxicated Norwegian speakers.

Time and place: Jan. 26, 2021 4:15 PM–5:15 PM, online

About Ellisiv Ørnes Vestre

Ellisiv has a BA and MA in linguistics from the University of Oslo, and finished her MA thesis in the fall semester of 2020. Since then she has been working at Biblioteksentralen as a marketing consultant, mostly focusing on our communication with Norwegian publishers.

About the talk

In this talk she will present the topic of her thesis. Her thesis falls into the field of psycholinguistics, but she also has an interest in sociolinguistics, specifically language attitudes and Norwegian language politics. In this talk she examines the nature of speech errors made by speakers who are under the influence of alcohol. She will also touch upon the topic of clinical linguistics by comparing speech errors under the effects of alcohol with speech errors made by speakers with aphasia.

The zoom link will be sent via email 30 minutes before the event. If you wish to join, you can register to the clinical forum mailing list. You may also contact the organizers Elisabet García González, Helene Killmer or Ane Theimann for more information.

2020

Junyi Yang - Chinese parents in Norway on home literacy: a questionnaire study

Junyi Yang is a Doctoral research fellow at the Department of Education, and a member of the research group Text Comprehension: Development, Instruction and Multiple Texts (TextDIM). She has a background as a language teacher for young learners, and an MA in Early Language Education from University of Eastern Finland. She also works as a volunteer in teaching Chinese at Kinesisk Skole i Norge.

Time and place: Feb. 27, 2020 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, HWH 536

According to Statistics Norway (2019), there are more than 12000 Chinese people in Norway, and over 12% of them are under 12 years old. My PhD project aims to explore how these young Chinese-Norwegian dual language learners develop their language and literacy.

This talk is generated from the first part of my PhD project. Aiming to gain knowledge of the targeted population, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted. Information such as demographics, language-related resources, practices and attitudes at home was collected.  The data collection was from November to December 2019, with over a hundred Chinese parents responded. In the talk, I will present the descriptive data and some preliminary findings.


Maria Garraffa - Bilingualism and minority languages: integrating context of use with linguistic variables.

Maria Garraffa is Assistant Professor at Heriot- Watt University (Edinburgh) where she teaches and does research on Language Acquisition and impairment. In collaboration with leading scholars, some of her key achievements include the development of the first UK psychological test to assess reading in adults with language disorders and a model to investigate vulnerable aspects of language in children with language impairment and adults suffering from stroke.

Developed in parallel with a core interest for language impairment, her research on multilingualism addresses the effects of early second language learning in immigrants and people speaking heritage languages. She is the director of the Language Across the Life Span lab, based in Edinburgh and Malaysia.

She was Research fellow at University of Siena, Milano Bicocca, Newcastle University and Edinburgh University.

Time: Jan. 16, 2020 2:15 PM

Bilingualism and minority languages: integrating context of use with linguistic variables.

The language experience of children and adults growing up with minority languages is subject to considerable variation, both in terms of input quantity and quality. Speakers acquiring a minority language are exposed to less variety of input, growing up in a smaller linguistic community and with fewer occasions to use the language in everyday life. Despite this poverty of input, most speakers are successfully learning the language and exhibit similar language acquisition in the dominant language as monolinguals.

In this talk I will discuss recent data coming from an investigation of language and cognitive skills in Sardinian/Italian children and adults and Gaelic/English young adults, presenting evidence from speakers with different language experiences. It will be discussed in detail how syntactic structures could guide the investigation of cognitive functions, as in the case of an exclusive oral-language acquisition, and the effect of syntactic structures on verbal working memory and on syntactic processing.


2019

Communication and cognitive impairment among elderly hospital patients

On Thursday 12.12, Tahreem Ghazal Siddiqui will present two studies about elderly hospital patients. Siddiqui is a PhD student in the research group for Health services research unit, Ahus and Institute of Clinical Medicine, UiO. In her PhD project, she investigates cognitive effects of  medication and doctor-patient communication among older patients.

Time and place: Dec. 12, 2019 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, MultiLings møterom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Siddiqui has a BSc in psychology from Roehampton University and an MSc in Clinical Mental Health Sciences from University College London, UK. She is interested in research related to neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, health psychology and clinical communication. She is working on a mixed method project examining the cognitive effect of central nervous system depressant medication and doctor-patient communication on treatment plan among older patients.

Siddiqui will give two presentations of 45 minutes, with a break in between. Both presentations will be given in English, and they are open for everyone.


Clinical forum: Technology-enhanced language learning in children and adults

Sari Ylinen is a researcher at the department of Education at the University of Helsinki. She will present some of her ongoing work at the clinical forum on November 14th 

Time and place: Nov. 14, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, MultiLing meeting room (421)

Foreign- and second-language (L2) learning have become increasingly important. To develop new techniques for language learning, a better understanding of neurocognitive mechanisms of L2 learning is needed. In this presentation, I will focus on possibilities of technology in language learning and review some studies on speech and language training that have utilized digital and speech technology. I will also tell about a digital language learning game that we have designed and present experimental results on its effects on L2 learning in children with typical or atypical language skills.


Clinical forum: Statistical learning and disordered language acquisition

Frank Wijnen, professor in Language processing and language pathology at Utrecht University, will visit Oslo this fall, and give a presentation at the Forum for Clinical Linguistics and Language Acquisition on October 24th, titled "What Statistical Learning Studies Have to Say about (Disordered) Language Acquisition".  

The event will take place in English and is open to everyone.

Time and place: Oct. 24, 2019 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing meeting room 421


Clinical forum: The role of individual differences in Executive Function in bilingual children

On October 10th, Elisabet García González will present her PhD project at the Forum for Clinical Linguistics and Language Acquisition. Her talk is titled “The role of individual differences in Executive Function in bilingual children: can we predict balanced bilingualism?".  

The event will take place in English and is open to everyone.

Time and place: Oct. 10, 2019 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

Abstract

Does bilingualism benefit cognition? This is the burning question that has led research on early bilingualism in children in recent decades. Yet, the  “cognitive advantage” claim is increasingly being challenged as we pay more attention to a fuller, more multifaceted representation of the bilingual speaker. Furthermore, the omnipresence of cross-sectional studies in the field make it impossible to fully understand the relationship between Executive Function (EF) and bilingualism, which may not be unidirectional.

With this issues in mind, the goal of this PhD project is to study how EF affects the acquisition of two languages and their development in a short longitudinal study. Ultimately, I would like to answer the question: can EF predict the maintenance of bilingualism in the lifespan? By looking at individual differences in a number of cognitive components and monitoring their development over time, I aim to contribute to the understanding of this complex relationship that is so relevant for linguistic researchers, educators and bilingual speakers themselves.​


Clinical forum: Salience in word learning under ambiguous conditions

Gabrielle Weidemann, associate professor in psychology at Western Sydney University, will come to the Forum for Clinical Linguistics and Language Acquisition September 5th to give a lecture titled «The influence of word and object salience on word learning under ambiguous conditions».

The event will take place in English and is open to everyone.

Time and place: Sep. 5, 2019 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

Abstract

In learning new words an association must be formed between a word and its referent, however in many circumstances there are many words and many possible referents, and associations are formed across time and contexts. This process has been modelled experimentally using cross-situational word learning paradigms where participants are presented with multiple words and multiple referents across multiple trials.

However there is some debate about the underlying mechanisms, whether it is a form of statistical associative learning or a memory-based inference mechanism or some hybrid of the two. In a series of experiments using a cross-situational word learning paradigm, we manipulated the salience of words, and object referents in isolation and in combination in order to examine the mechanisms of association formation.

We found that within experiments manipulations of word salience increased learning for both salient and non-salient words, whereas with experiment manipulations of object salience in isolation and in combination with word salience manipulations learning was impaired. Modelling suggests that manipulations of word salience increased learning through increasing word discriminability and that object salience captured attention but did not facilitate association formation, indicative of the operation of an a more inferential process.


Kate Kuzmina: Predictors of object naming in aphasia

At the Forum for clinical linguistics and language acquisition June 6, MultiLing postdoc Kate Kuzmina will present her research on cognitive control and language ability effects of psycholinguistic variables on object naming among persons with aphasia.

Time: June 6, 2019 2:15 PM–3:45 PM

This research will be presented as a poster at the Nordic aphasia conference 2019 in Turku, Finland later in June. Below is an abstract of the presentation, which will be given in English, and is open to everyone.

Predictors of object naming in aphasia: Do cognitive control and language ability mediate effects of  psycholinguistic variables?

Previous studies have shown that several psycholinguistic variables affect picture naming in persons with aphasia (PWA). For example, earlier acquired words stay better preserved compared to later learned ones (for review see Brysbaert & Ellis, 2016). Also, it has been argued that naming objects with lower name agreement requires inhibition of alternative names (Alario et al., 2004), and therefore puts demands on cognitive control.

Bose and Schafer (2017) showed that although both PWA and healthy controls performed better at naming words with high naming agreement, the difference between the naming conditions was significantly greater for PWA. This could be due to reduced ability to inhibit irrelevant information in PWA.

To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies investigating whether cognitive control mediates effects of psycholinguistic variables on the accuracy of object naming in aphasia. The present study aims to shed light on this problem. 31 right handed, native Russian speakers with preserved visual and hearing abilities diagnosed with  mild to moderate post-stroke aphasia aged from 44 to 70 yr (M = 60.7, SD = 7.0), 32% female were recruited from the Center for Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation in Moscow.

All participants were tested with a picture naming task including 247 colorized object pictures (Rossion & Pourtois, 2004) where they were instructed to name pictures appearing in the center of a screen as fast and as accurately as possible. Accuracy of responses was coded based on the normative data for Russian speakers (Tsaparina, Bonin, & Meot, 2011). Cognitive control was measured with the nonverbal Flanker task and two tasks from the Rus-BCoS, namely Auditory Attention and Rule Finding tasks. Language performance was measured with a general language assessment battery. At the talk, I will present preliminary results from the analysis.


Julien Mayor: A short version of MacArthur-Bates CDI of high accuracy

Julien Mayor is associate professor at Department of Psychology, UiO. He will visit us to present a new short version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, soon to be available for researchers.

Time and place: Mar. 21, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PAM 489

The lecture will be given in English ,and is open to everyone. Below is a short abstract of his talk.

A short version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories of high accuracy

MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs; Fenson et al., 2007) are one of the most widely-used evaluation tool of early language development. CDIs are filled in by parents or caregivers of young children by indicating which of a pre-specified list of words and/or sentences their child understands and/or produces. Despite its success, its administration is time-consuming and can be of limited use in clinical settings, multilingual environment or when parents possess low literacy skills.

I will present a new method in which an estimation of the full-CDI score is obtained by combining parental responses on a limited set of words randomly sampled from the full CDIs with vocabulary information extracted from the WordBank database (Frank et al., 2017), sampled from age-, gender- and language-matched participants. Real-data simulations using CDI-WS for American English, German and Norwegian as examples revealed high accuracy and reliability of the instrument even for tests having just 25 words, effectively cutting administration time to a couple of minutes.

Empirical validation with new participants confirmed the robustness of the test (Mayor & Mani, 2018). Beta versions of an app (available for iOS and Android) and of a web-interface implementing the instrument are currently being tested and will be made available for researchers over the coming months.


Liquan Liu: Language-Affect Interface in Parent-Infant Communication

Our new Marie S. Curie postdoctoral fellow Liquan Liu will talk at the Forum for Clinical Linguistics and Language Acquisition about his new research project at MultiLing.

Time and place: Feb. 14, 2019 2:15 PM–3:30 PM, PAM 489

The lecture is open to everyone and will be given in English. The abstract can be found below.

Language-Affect Interface in Parent-Infant Communication
Although affect, our experience with emotions, plays a key role in communication, its developmental trajectory in the beginning of life remains unclear. How do infants develop affect recognition that corresponds to their native environment? How do they perceive affect from non-native cultures? How does language interact with affect perception, and how does infants’ (multi-) linguistic and cultural experience play a role?

To further our understanding toward these questions, I propose a project bridging psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches. I will experimentally examine infants’ affectual development and its interaction with language in the first year after birth, and specifically, adopting a preferential looking paradigm where infants will watch videos of happy/angry expressions from various cultures along with languages that match or mismatch with the correspondent culture.


2018

Clinical Forum: Brain and Language Symposium

The Research group in clinical linguistics and language acquisition are pleased to invite you to a half-day symposium on language and the brain. Speakers: Annika Hultén (Aalto University) , Kasper Boye (University of Copenhagen) & Thomas Bak (University of Edinburgh).

Time and place: Nov. 22, 2018 1:00 PM–5:15 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Annika Hultén is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering at Aalto University, in Helsinki, Finland. Kasper Boye is an associate professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. Thomas Bak is a reader at School of The School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The lectures will be given in English, and the event is open to everyone.


Atypical interaction: What does it mean to be pragmatically impaired?

Johanna Rendle-Short, associate professor at the Australian National University, will give a guest lecture on pragmatic impairment in children diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or High Functioning Autism.

Time and place: Aug. 22, 2018 12:15 PM–1:30 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Dr. Johanna Rendle-Short researches within the areas of spoken interaction and discourse, and is particularly interested in how children with Asperger’s Syndrome or High Functioning Autism communicate with those around them. Below is an abstract for the guest lecture, which will be given in English. The event is open to everyone.

Atypical interaction: What does it mean to be pragmatically impaired? 
One of the features of autism spectrum disorder is ‘persistent deficits in social interaction’ (Diagnostic Statistical Manual V). But the question arises as to what exactly is meant by such deficits when analysing everyday conversations between the affected person and their conversational partner.

This paper will focus on the basic unit of interaction, the adjacency pair, comprising a first pair part (FPP) and a second pair part (SPP). A FPP/SPP could be question/answer, instruction/response, order/response, suggestion/response, compliment/response. The paper will show how children diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome are more likely to provide an appropriate turn-at-talk when in a structured, predictable interactional environment. For example, they find it easier to provide a SPP response when asked a FPP question due the structural constraints of the adjacency pair.

In contrast, it is interactionally more difficult to initiate their own FPP as they have to work out where, when and how to ask the question (FPP) given that the FPP needs to be in a sequentially appropriate environment. The paper will highlight what pragmatic impairment can mean for those engaged in everyday talk and how conversational partners can scaffold the interaction in order to ensure that the progressivity of the interaction is maintained.


Melanie Kirmess: Latest research from Sunnaas intensive aphasia groups

May 24 Melanie Kirmess will visit Forum for clinical linguistics and language acquisition to present research on SunCIST, a program for language treatment for persons with aphasia, tested at Sunnaas rehabilitation hospotal.

Time and place: May 24, 2018 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, P. A. Munchs hus room 489

Melanie Kirmess is associate professor at the Department of Special Needs Education, UiO. She is a speech and language therapist, and has carried out multiple research projects on aphasia rehabilitation. At the forum meeting on May 24 she will present ongoing research on constraint induced språkterapi (CIST), a treatment program focusing on intensive treatment of oral language. Below is a short summary for the guest lecture, which will be given in English. The event is open to everyone.

Latest research from Sunnaas intensive aphasia groups
I will present ongoing research from the intensive aphasia groups at Sunnaas rehabilitation hospital. The aphasia groups use a modified treatment approach within the constraint induced specter, lasting for 3 weeks per group in a clinical in-patient setting (SunCIST).

Many participants apply for several attendances in those groups. Therefore, we are currently exploring data to evaluate the effect of a second participation. The presentation will provide a short introduction of the SunCIST program, existing outcome results for first time participation and preliminary results for comparison of the first and second time participation and its possible implications.


Valantis Fyndanis & Sarah Cameron: Does bi-/multilingualism make academics ‘smarter’?

On April 26th, Valantis Fyndanis, postdoc at MultiLing, and Sarah Cameron, MA student at ILN, will give a talk on cognitive advantages of bilingualism at the Forum for clinical linguistics and language acquisition.

Time and place: Apr. 26, 2018 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Mutliling Meeting room (4th floor)

The event is open for everyone. Below is an abstract for the talk, which will be given in English.

Does bi-/multilingualism make academics even ‘smarter’? Evidence from Norway
While it is well established that healthy older speakers exhibit age-related cognitive decline, a growing body of research suggests that both simultaneous bi-/multilingualism and successive bi-/multilingualism are associated with cognitive benefits, enhancing aspects of executive functioning in healthy older speakers and even delaying the onset of dementia (for a recent review, see Bialystok, 2017).

It has recently been argued (e.g., Bialystok et al, 2014) that a bilingualism-driven cognitive benefit is more likely to be detected in nonverbal cognitive tasks than in verbal tasks. Interestingly, a bilingual advantage has been found not only in people who speak two or more languages, but also in infants who are only exposed to two languages (e.g., Pons et al., 2015).

This suggests that not only speaking, but also listening to two or more languages may confer a cognitive advantage. However, the bilingual advantage has been called into question because of potential confounding factors involved in several studies, such as immigration status, socioeconomic status, and educational level. Moreover, it has been suggested that bi-/multilingualism should be treated as a continuous and not as a categorical variable, as is usually the case.

This study investigates whether different degrees of bi-/multilingualism in different modalities (speaking, writing, listening, reading) have a differential effect on the cognitive abilities of healthy older individuals who are of the same immigration status and of similar socioeconomic status and educational level. The study also explores if a bilingual advantage only emerges in nonverbal cognitive tasks.

Eighty three healthy older native speakers of Norwegian differing in the degree of bi-/multilingualism were tested with tasks tapping verbal and nonverbal inhibition and switching, as well as nonverbal fluid intelligence. All participants were university professors and had learned a foreign language after the age of 5. None of them were immigrants. We are looking forward to presenting the results at the Clinical Forum and discussing them with you!

References

Bialystok, E. (2017). The bilingual adaptation: How minds accommodate experience. Psychological Bulletin, 143, 233–262.

Bialystok, E., Poarch, G., Luo, L., & Craik, F. I. (2014). Effects of bilingualism and aging on executive function and working memory. Psychology and Aging, 29, 696–705

Pons, F., Bosch, L., & Lewkowicz, D. J. (2015). Bilingualism modulates infants’ selective attention to the mouth of a talking face. Psychological Science, 26, 490–498.


The role of acoustic variability in language acquisition

On Thursday April 12th, Natalia Kartushina, postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology, will come to the Forum for clinical linguistics and language acquisition to give a talk on how acoustic variability may both aid and slow down phonological development in an L1 or L2. 

Time and place: Apr. 12, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, room 536

The talk is open to everyone, and will be given in English. Below is a short abstract.

From foreign to native accents: The role of variability in language acquisition
Research on the role of speaker variability in first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition has been growing exponentially during the last ten years. Generally, the results converge to the idea that speaker-variability, arising from differences in the production of speech sounds between speakers, boosts the establishment of L1 and L2 phonological categories in infants and adults, respectively.

Yet, a recent study suggests that (acoustic) variability arising from the productions of a single speaker might override the benefits of multiple-speaker variability. In my research, I examine the role of speaker variability in L1 and L2 phonological acquisition by controlling for the amount of acoustic variability it yields. The first part of my talk will focus on L2/foreign phonological learning.

Here, I will present how speaker-variability (single vs multiple) might affect learning to produce foreign speech sounds during training, and how individual-specific (acoustic) variability in speech production can modulate the success of L2 learning. The second part of my talk will focus on the role of acoustic variability in infants’ L1 phonological acquisition.


2017

Two new post docs on the MultiLing Aphasia Project

Leena Maria Heikkola and Kate Kuzmina

Kate Kuzmina and Leena Maria Heikkola joined the research group before the summer to work on MultiLing's new project on studies in multilingual aphasia.

Time and place: Oct. 26, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, HW536

Leena Maria Heikkola came to Oslo and MultiLing from Åbo/Turku in Finland where she did her PhD in neurolinguistics. In her current project she will investigate what we can learn about language processing in people with aphasia by using EEG/ERP. During her talk at the Clinical Forum she will tell us about what previous studies reveal about language processing in the different languages of mulitlingual people with aphasia, and she will give a short review of studies using EEG/ERP with people with aphasia.

Kate Kuzmina did her PhD on cognitive deficits and their role in language impairments in aphasia in Hong Kong. Here she will study whether and how aphasic language deficits impact the ability to anticipate upcoming linguistic information in a bilingual brain. She will talk to us about previous findings on predictive auditory language precessing in aphasia and bilingual speakers focusing on eye-tracking methodology, and introduce us to the research questions asked in the MultiLing Aphasia project and ways to answer them. 

Both talks will be given in English.


Growing up to be flexible with words and sounds

Julien Mayor is associate professor at Department of Psychology, UiO. He will visit us to talk about children's early language development.

Time and place: Sep. 28, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

The lecture will be given in English ,and is open to everyone. Below is a short abstract of his talk.

Growing up to be flexible with words and sounds

Textbooks suggest that young children learn just one word for each object. This strategy, referred to as Mutual Exclusivity, is deemed to help them learn words efficiently. I will present data with infants and children suggesting that they are more flexible with word learning than typically considered, and that early word learning is built upon a network of word-object associations.

I will provide further evidence for a spontaneous activation of dense networks of associations between words and objects in bilingual adults. Finally, I will introduce a model of the formation of the perceptual vowel space in monolingual and simultaneous bilinguals, which shows how vowel perception in native speakers of a language can be altered depending on whether they are exposed to another language or not.


Argument structure and children with specific language impairment

Jan de Jong from the University of Bergen and the University of Amsterdam will present his research on children with specific language impairment (SLI). 

Time and place: May 18, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Rom 536, Henrik Wergelands hus

The topic of the presentation is problems with verbs' argument structure among children with specific language impairment (SLI). The talk will be given in English, and is open to everyone. An abstract is given below. 

Argument structure and SLI

An important part of my thesis on symptoms of SLI in Dutch (de Jong, 1999, see also de Jong & Fletcher, 2014) concerned the argument structure of lexical verbs. Children with SLI have well-known problems with grammatical morphology, but, it was found, also with verb argument structure.  In my lecture I will illustrate the nature of these problems, also using data from my earlier research (in collaboration with researchers from the University of Reading, UK). Research into argument structure, meanwhile, is still limited. I will review the current evidence and ask why there isn’t more.

The problems, however, have consequences elsewhere. Since the verb and its arguments are important ingredients of the sentence, problems with argument structure lead to incomplete (or less complex) sentences and a lack of versatility in the construction of sentences – causing a kind of ‘collateral damage’ (Rice, 1991). Recent research by Ebbels (2005; 2007) shows that it works both ways: training argument structure supports the communicative skills of children with SLI.


2016

Assessment of multilingual children in South Africa

Frenette Southwood and Helena Oosthuizen from Stellenbosch University in South Africa will join us on the last Clinical Forum of the year to tell us about assessment of multilingual children in South Africa. 

Time and place: Dec. 1, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, HW536

Legislatively, South Africa is the most multilingual country in the world. It has 11 official languages, but many other languages – notably heritage and immigrant languages – are also widely spoken. Although English is the country’s lingua franca and the dominant language in the domains of trade and industry, science and technology, politics, and education, many South Africans have limited proficiency in English, despite most of them (in theory, at least) having been educated for at least eight of their school years through medium of English only.

By contrast, the vast majority of South African speech-language therapists are either monolingual speakers of English or are Afrikaans-English bilinguals, and have good proficiency in English but limited or no proficiency in the widely spoken indigenous African languages. In general, speech-language therapists’ practices remain a poor reflection of the multilingual and multicultural realities of the South African population. Furthermore, the African languages spoken in South Africa are under-researched: Child language developmental norms, grammatical descriptions, and assessment and intervention materials are either absent or highly limited for these languages.

The situation described above poses severe challenges for practising speech-language therapists and other child language professionals. This talk provides the context in which child language assessment and intervention in South Africa take place and briefly describes the attempts made to meet these challenges.


Clinical forum November 17th

Ingrid Lossius Falkum and Franziska Köder from CSMN will visit us on Thursday November 17th to talk about their ongoing poject about children's understanding of metonomy.

Time and place: Nov. 17, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, HW536

Köder and Falkum investigated children’s processing of metonyms such as “The nose is grumpy” to refer to a grumpy person with a big nose. Norwegian children between 3 and 9 years of age and a control group of adults participated in a novel metonymy task that combines picture selection with eye-tracking.

The gaze data show that even three-year-old children have a basic understanding of metonyms. However, it takes children several years longer until they have reached a more adult-like comprehension of metonymy, as evident from their picture-selection results and justifications. They will discuss these findings in the light of children’s general cognitive and linguistic development.


Clinical forum with Francisco Pons

Francisco Pons from the Department of Psychology (PSI) will come to the Clinical forum on October 20th to talk about his latest data on how children comprehend emotion. He will also introduce the TEst of Emootion Comprehension (TEC)

Time and place: Oct. 20, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, HW536

Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) assesses nine domains of emotional understanding, namely the recognition of emotions, based on facial expressions; the comprehension of external emotional causes; impact of desire on emotions; emotions based on beliefs; memory influence on emotions; possibility of emotional regulation; possibility of hiding an emotional state; having mixed emotions; contribution of morality to emotional experiences (Rocha, Roazzi, Da Silva, Pons, 2015). 


Two new PhD projects in clinical linguistics

Helene Killmer and Ingeborg Ribu will present their PhD projects in clinical linguistics on Thursday September 22nd.

Time and place: Sep. 22, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, HW536

Helene Killmer started working in the Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition in August, where she will conduct research on conversation in speakers with aphasia. 

She has a Master degree in Speech- and Language Pathology from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), and has worked as a research assistant, teacher and speech and language therapist at different research facilities in Germany, The Netherlands and Switzerland.

At the Clinical Forum she will introduce us to her project: "The role of repetition in conversation of speakers with aphasia".

Ingeborg Ribu got her Master degree at ILN, and has since worked as a research assistant in the Research group for clinical linguistics and language acquisition. After a year away working for and with psychologists, she returned to ILN this spring to start on her PhD project "Linguistic abilities in ageing and dementia". 

The project focuses on production and comprehension of single words and sentences in patients with Alzheimer's disease.  

The event is open for all, and both presentations will be given in English. 


Practice for the ICPLA-conference

The conference International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) 2016 is held in Halifax, Canada, 15.-18. of June. We have been accepted with four oral presentations and will present two of them at this meeting: 

1) N-LARSP: Adaption of the LARSP profile chart to Norwegian

2) Cross-linguistic adaptations of The Comprehensive Aphasia Test: challenges and solutions

Time and place: May 26, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, HW536


2015

Testing the Tense Underspecification Hypothesis: Evidence from Greek, Italian, and German

Valantis Fynandi

Time and place: Nov. 26, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Room 536, Henrik Wergelands hus.

It is well established that speakers with agrammatic aphasia have selective (morpho)syntactic deficits. A number of hypotheses have been put forward to account for the observed patterns of performance, such as the Tense Underspecification Hypothesis (TUH) (Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004, 2005), the Interpretable Features’ Impairment Hypothesis (Fyndanis, Varlokosta, & Tsapkini, 2012), and the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH) (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997).

However, not all of these hypotheses have been adequately tested. For instance, while the TPH has been extensively tested – with several studies providing counterevidence –, the TUH has never been tested by authors other than the ones who formulated this hypothesis (see Clahsen & Ali, 2009). This study aims at taking a first step towards filling this gap taking a cross-linguistic approach.

We will focus on languages with rich inflectional morphology that encode all three categories/features that are critical for testing the TUH, namely subject-verb agreement, tense/time reference, and mood: Greek, Italian, and German. It is worth noting that these languages differ in the way they encode mood.

We will present data from 10 Greek-speaking, 10 Italian-speaking, and 6 German-speaking agrammatic individuals who were tested with a constrained task that tapped agreement, tense/time reference, and mood in production. I will be happy to discuss the results with you!


Language anxiety across generations, across disciplines: Implications for the relation between bilingual speech, anxiety and physiology

Yeșim Sevinç

Time and place: May 28, 2015 2:15 PM–4 PM, Room 536, Henrik Wergelands hus.

The feeling of tension and apprehension has mostly been associated with foreign language or second language contexts. Research on language anxiety has increased rapidly but has mostly focused on foreign language learners in high school or a university (Dewaele et al. 2008). In this talk, I go beyond the classroom setting and discuss language anxiety that occurs within the realm of immigrants’ daily life.

In particular, I address the differences across three generations of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands with respect to their language anxiety levels while speaking the majority language (Dutch) and heritage language (Turkish) in different situations (within the family, with friends, with native speakers and around native speakers).

By combining questionnaire, interview and physiological data, I attempt to provide a means to explore the potential links between bilinguals’ linguistic background (language history, language proficiency, language choices), language anxiety and autonomic arousal (skin conductance level (SCL) and skin conductance response (SCR) amplitude).

Dewaele, J-M., Petrides, K. V., & Furnham, A. (2008). Effects of trait emotional intelligence and sociobiographical variables on communicative anxiety and foreign language anxiety among adult multilinguals: A review and empirical investigation. Language learning, 58 (4), 911-960.


The representation of (morpho-)syntax in bilingual minds

Gözde Mercan

Time and place: May 28, 2015 2:15 PM–4 PM, Room 536, Henrik Wergelands hus.

This study investigates the general question of whether the grammars of the two languages spoken by bilinguals are distinct or shared in the minds of these speakers. To address this question, a well-established psycholinguistic phenomenon called “structural priming” is employed cross-linguistically. Structural priming (Bock, 1986; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008) is the facilitation in the processing of a grammatical form due to repetition.

If the processing of a structure (for instance: a passive form) in one language, primes the use of the same structure in the other language of the bilingual, this would provide evidence for the shared representation view. In this talk, the structural priming method will be introduced along with a discussion of how it can constitute a rich source of information for studies on the mental representation of language. Specifically, the design of a cross-linguistic priming experiment in Turkish-Norwegian and English-Norwegian bilinguals will be presented.

References:

Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355-387.

Pickering, M. J. & Ferreira, V. S. (2008). Structural Priming: A Critical Review. Psychological Bulletin, 134 (3), 427-459.


Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages - Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

Magdalena Łuniewska

Time and place: Apr 23, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Room 536, Henrik Wergelands hus.

Łuniewska will present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 158 nouns and 141 verbs (299 early words) in 25 languages from 5 language families. She will compare the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs and show striking consistency in the order of ratings.

Then the data will be presented (1) to analyse how the demographic characteristics of participants influence AoA estimations; (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of target question; (3) to compare ratings obtained in our study to previous ones; and (4) to assess reliability of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories.

2014

Bilingual and cross-linguistic aphasia

January 14.

Roelien Bastiaanse (University of Groningen)


Input effects in early child bilingualism: Gender agreement in Russian and Norwegian

February 6.

Yulia Rodina (MultiLing, UiO)


Issues in bilingual aging

May 15.

Professor Loraine Obler fra The City University of New York, USA. 


Norwegian Words: A lexical database for researchers and clinicians

June 4. 

Marianne Lind, Hanne Gram Simonsen, Pernille Hansen and Elisabeth Holm. 

2013

Deconstructing rhythm

September 19.

Elinor Payne, Oxford University

2012


Integrating phonetic and phonological factors in the acquisition of speech timing

May 31.

Elinor Payne, Oxford University


An image is worth a thousand sounds? Semantic and phonological interactions in language processing

October 11.

Ingeborg Sophie Ribu (ILN)


Norwegian children's first words

November 22.

Nina Gram Garmann (HiOA), Hanne Gram Simonsen, Kristian E. Kristoffersen & Pernille Hansen (ILN)

2011

2010

June 22.
Seminar: Pre-conference workshop on phonological acquisition (Videnskapsakademiet)

2009

September 17.
Melanie Kirmess (ISP, UiO): Constraint induced language therapy

February 26.
Natalia Zharkova (Edinburgh): Coarticulation differences between children and adults.

February 5.
Inger Moen og Hanne Gram Simonsen (ILN, UiO): The combined use of EPG, EMA and ultrasound in the description of retroflex stops in Norwegian

2008

September 9.
Seminar: Aphasia and oral text production

2007

November 29.
Seminar on verb morphology

November 8.
Parth Bhatt, Department of French, University of Toronto: A new analysis of agrammatism and paragrammatism

2006

October 12.
Seminar: Language in aphasia and dementia (Vitenskapsakademiet, Oslo)

2005

November 9.
Seminar: Linguistic assessment and treatment of aphasia and other language disorders (Bredtvet kompetansesenter)

Published Apr. 13, 2012 12:06 PM - Last modified Mar. 18, 2024 2:21 PM