Project proposal

Current status of research and research training within the subject area in the Nordic countries

Research: The proposed network will work on research projects concerning the relationship between phonological and lexical acquisition in mono- and bilingual children in the Nordic and the Baltic states represented by Scandinavia and Estonia.

Earlier research has shown that there is a relationship between early phonological and lexical skills, and between early lexical skills and language impairment or dyslexia. Late talkers have less advanced phonological systems than precocious talkers, and poor readers typically have less advanced phonological processing skills, and, as a consequence of their limited reading experience, a less advanced vocabulary (Stoel-Gammon 2010, Muter et al. 2004). Further research is needed concerning both receptive and productive skills, to advance our knowledge in basic mechanisms of acquisition as well as developing assessment tools.

Research in this field with reference to the languages in the Nordic and Baltic states has just started. Bleses et al. (2010) addressed the question whether more general phonetic/phonological factors could account for the slower learning rate of receptive vocabulary in Danish children as compared to, e.g., other Scandinavian children. As the Scandinavian languages are similar in all respects except phonology, comparison studies can reveal how phonology influences lexical acquisition in both children and adults. As for Norwegian, studies in the relationship between early phonological and lexical development in monolingual children are in progress, and The Tromsø Longitudinal study of Dyslexia investigates early precursors and signs of developmental dyslexia, among them phonological and lexical skills. For Estonian, there are several case studies of the phonological and lexical development in monolingual and bilingual Estonian children (e.g. Vihman & Vihman in press).

Research on the phonological and lexical development in children is facilitated by the use of MCDIs. MCDI I, II & III (Fenson et al. 2007) are parental report tools that measure, i.a., the vocabulary size of a child. The MCDIs have been adapted into nearly 50 different languages, among them Norwegian (I & II), Danish (I & II) Swedish (I & II) and Estonian (I). Work is in progress for adapting the MCDI I and II into North Sami, and MCDI III is under way for Danish and Swedish. For several of the adaptations, age-based norms are established, and for Danish and Norwegian, the norms are based on large-scale population studies. Validity tests and norms lack for Estonian MCDIs, as well as for the MCDIs that have not yet been developed. Since the language specific MCDIs are based on the same original, they form a good starting point for cross-linguistic research, both within language families: Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, and across language families: Indo-European and Uralic.

MCDIs are also useful as bases for assessment tools in order to uncover language impairment as well as in measuring the language skills in bilingual children. Today, the MCDI-based research in the Nordic and Baltic countries focus on monolingual children. Participants within the proposed network plan to do phonological studies combined with MCDI studies on children with intra-Scandinavian bilingualism and Scandinavian-minority language bilingualism. We also plan to develop assessment tools that can distinguish between bilingual children with and without language impairment.

Research training: There are some Ph.D. courses in first language acquisition held by the individual institutions (e.g. CASTL at the University of Tromsø, NATED in Norway, University of Southern Denmark, Stockholm University, and the University of Tallinn), but they are sporadic, not coordinated, and thus not available to the whole community of researchers on language acquisition.

An exposition of the prospects and need for Nordic cooperation within the subject area with particular reference to research training

There are general and specific reasons why collaboration within the Nordic and the Baltic countries within this field is meaningful.

Today, research on language acquisition in the Nordic and Baltic countries takes place within individual institutions, and not between them. 15 years ago, a similar Nordic project and network on language acquisition was financed by NOS-H ("Language Acquisition - a Scandinavian Perspective," 1994-1996), with several PhD courses and workshops. This gave a boost to inter-Nordic cooperation in this field and resulted in a large number of collaborative projects and publications. Now, a new generation of researchers are entering the scene, and time is ripe for more collaboration, for several reasons. First, collaboration in most cases increases the quality of research methods and results, as the number of issues that can be addressed increase with the number of collaborators. Second, our research needs tools that may be expensive to develop. By joining forces where it is possible, the developmental costs can be reduced. Third, within the area of language acquisition, there are a number of challenges that are common to many of the Nordic and Baltic countries. One example is the need for MCDI IIIs and screening tools for bilingual children. Instead of developing such tools independently in each of the participating countries, this work can be done as a collaborative effort within the network. And finally, since the number of Ph.D. students working within this area in each participating institution is low, research training arranged by the network will provide the students with a larger research network.

More specifically, the Scandinavian languages are similar in all respects except phonology, and comparison studies can reveal how phonology influences lexical acquisition in both children and adults. North Sami and Estonian are Uralic languages that can give yet other typological perspectives.

The proposed network will focus on the following areas: 

1. Research on the relationship between phonological and lexical development. The proposed network will work on the relationship between the phonological and lexical development in mono- and bilingual children within several Nordic language communities.
2. Developing MCDIs and establishing norms for more languages. The proposed network will provide an arena for knowledge exchange concerning the development of MCDIs and MCDI norms for North Sami, MCDI II and MCDI norms for Estonian, and MCDI III and MCDI III norms for all the represented languages, as well as validity tests where necessary, based on the already existing experience with MCDIs in the participating countries.
3. Developing MCDI based assessment tools for bilingual children. The proposed network will provide a framework for developing common assessment tools for bilingual children in the Nordic countries. As the Nordic and Baltic countries are becoming increasingly bilingual, there is a need for assessment tools for bilingual children, both for assessing their linguistic skills in each of their languages, and also for identifying bilingual children who are at risk for language impairment. Even though there are several assessment tools in use today, few of them are designed for use with bilingual children, and, to the extent that they have been used in bilingual contexts, they have been found inadequate (Skaar et al., 2008).
4. Making MCDI-data more accessible for cross-linguistic research. The proposed network will facilitate MCDI data transfer among researchers in the Nordic and Baltic countries through CLEX. CLEX is a web-based cross-linguistic database for lexical data from adaptations of the MCDI developed by the CDI advisory board and Center for Child Language at University of Southern Denmark (see www.cdi-clex.org.) To date, CLEX contains data from American English, Danish and Swedish, and data from other languages are wanted (Jørgensen et al. 2010).
5. Research training Coordinated research training in language acquisition in the Nordic and Baltic countries will provide better training for Ph.D. students with a more efficient use of common teaching resources as well as providing a larger research network for the Ph.D. students. The participating researchers represent the disciplines linguistics, psychology and special needs education, and will thus be able to provide multidisciplinary research training. Also, the represented linguists cover several linguistic theories, and the research group from UK (H) may provide additional international and theoretical perspectives.

We plan courses within two fields:

• Ph.D. course 1: Theories in child language research 
• Ph.D. course 2: Methodology in child language research

A detailed plan covering collaborative activities during the project period

• October 2011: Kick-off meeting. (All participants welcome, Ph.D. students cover travel costs themselves.) Presentations of the participants research activities related to the themes of the network. Plan collaborative projects.
• June 2012: Workshop 1 and Ph.D. course 1. (All participants welcome. Travel, accommodation and cost will be covered for 10 senior researchers + all Ph.D. students, as well as the guest lecturers in the Ph. D. course.) Workshop 1: Phonological and lexical development; Old and new MCDIs; CLEX. Ph.D. course 1: Theories in child language research.
• June 2013: Workshop 2 and Ph.D. course 2 (All participants welcome. Travel, accommodation and cost will be covered for 10 senior researchers + all Ph.D. students, as well as the guest lecturers in the Ph.D. course.) Workshop 2: Assessment tools for bilingual children; New MCDIs. Ph.D. course 2: Methodology in child language research.
• March 2014: Final seminar: Planning for future activities. (One participant from each research group A-H are welcome. Travel, accommodation and cost will be covered for these eight participants.) Papers; CLEX; Assessment tools; New MCDIs

In between meetings, the participants will have time to work on the collaborative projects that are established during the meetings. The participants who have decided to co-operate on a project may communicate via email in periods between meetings, and should aim at meeting at other conferences or meetings that are of common interest.

For all activities, additional financing from other sources will be considered in order to cover the expenses for more participants.

Objectives to be achieved during the operating period of the network

1. Present, discuss and collaborate on child language research with a multidisciplinary approach and with a broad range of linguistic theories.
2. Increase the body of knowledge on the relationships between phonological and lexical acquisition.
3. Information exchange for old and new MCDIs: Establish a network of researchers working with language specific MCDIs which will both facilitate collaborative research and support development of new language specific versions of the MCDIs (in particular North Sami and Estonian). An important aim of the project is to make it possible for the languages that are in the starting phase in developing a MCDI (North Sami (and partly Estonian)) to make use of the experiences from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.
4. Develop research infrastructure 4a. Further develop CLEX as a tool for research, assessment and intervention. 4b. Co-ordinate the electronic versions for Swedish, Danish and Norwegian MCDIs in one website for collecting data from bilingual children with two different Scandinavian languages as L1 and L2 as well as bilingual children with one of the Scandinavian languages and a non-Scandinavian language as L1 and L2.
5. Facilitate cross-linguistic research based on the language specific MCDIs: Plan collaborative research based on the MCDIs concerning 1) the relationship between phonological and lexical development in the Scandinavian languages; 2) grammatical and lexical development in bilingual children with two different Scandinavian languages as L1 and L2 as well as bilingual children with one of the Scandinavian languages and a non-Scandinavian language as L1 and L2.
6. Develop assessment tools for bilingual children in the participating countries. 
7. Arrange Ph.D. courses in child language acquisition. 
8. Establish a Nordic network for Ph.D. students in language acquisition.

Visions for continued cooperation beyond the grant period

First, collaborative research between network members will continue beyond the grant period as in co-writing of papers and arranging seminars.Second, the established collaborative projects will continue until all of the participating countries have developed MCDIs, have entered the results in CLEX and have developed MCDI based assessment tools for bilingual children. Moreover, the network will form an arena for information exchange concerning MCDI development and norms that can be of value to other Nordic countries later. Third, the established Nordic research courses in first language acquisition can be repeated.

References

Bleses, D., Basbøll, H., Lum, J., & Vach, W. (2010). Phonology and lexicon in a cross-linguistic perspective: the importance of phonetics - a commentary on Stoel-Gammons 'Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children'. Journal of Child Language, 38, 6168. 

Fenson, L., Marchman, V. A., Thal, D. J., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., & Bates, E. (2007). MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Users guide and technical manual. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

Jørgensen, R. N., Dale, P. S., Bleses, D. , Fenson, L. (2010). CLEX: A cross-linguistic lexical norms database. Journal of Child Language, 37: 419428. 

Muter, V., Hulme, C., Snowling, M., & Stevenson, J. (2004). "Phonemes, rimes, vocabulary, and grammatical skills as foundations of early reading development: evidence from a longitudinal study". Developmental Psychology, vol 40 (5), 665-681. 

Skaar, K., Viblemo, T. E., & Karlsen, E. J. (2008). Se han snakker. Evaluering av kartleggingsverktøyet Språk 4. Oxford Research

Stoel-Gammon, C. 2010. Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children. Journal of Child language, 38, 134. 

Vihman, M. M. & Vihman, V-A. (in press). From first words to segments: A case study in phonological development. In E. V. Clark & I. Arnon, eds., How children make linguistic generalizations: Experience and variation in learning a first language. Trends in Language Acquisition Research. Amsterdam: Benjamin.