Papers by Ineta Dabasinskiene
The ten contributions to this volume present original research on grammar and discourse in modern... more The ten contributions to this volume present original research on grammar and discourse in modern Lithuanian and Latvian. They reflect the diversity of approaches in linguistic research on Baltic languages that has developed in recent years, after a period where these languages were studied almost exclusively from the perspective of historical-comparative linguistics. Current research perspectives include, among others, perspectives from discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language acquisition research, corpus linguistics, contrastive studies, and linguistic typology. The studies in this volume explore new ways of describing the system and use of Latvian or Lithuanian from a synchronic, non-normative point of view. They focus on grammatical categories and constructions (modality, evidentiality, case, existential clauses), grammatical characteristics of lexical classes (reflexive verbs, numerals), the characteristics of certain forms of discourse (academic discourse, food discourse...
Behavior Research Methods, 2015
We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141... more We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from 5 language families (
"Dvikalbių vaikų rišliojo pasakojimo analizės metodika (DVRPAM) skirta įvertinti vienakalbių... more "Dvikalbių vaikų rišliojo pasakojimo analizės metodika (DVRPAM) skirta įvertinti vienakalbių ar dvikalbių 3–9 metų vaikų rišliojo pasakojimo suvokimo ir kūrimo gebėjimus. Naudojant šią metodiką (pasitelkiant atpasakojimo, pasakojimo kūrimo pagal pateiktą schemą ar savarankiškai metodus), galima tikrinti rišliojo pasakojimo viena ar keliomis kalbomis kokybę. DVRPAM sudaryta iš keturių tapačios struktūros pasakojimų, kurių kiekvienas pavaizduotas šešių siužetinių paveikslėlių eile. Visi pasakojimai sutampa (ar yra labai panašūs) struktūrinėmis ir kalbinėmis ypatybėmis, pritaikyti įvairioms kultūroms ir kalboms. Metodinė priemonė šiuo metu pritaikyta penkiolikai skirtingų kalbų ir įvairiems jų deriniams bei išbandyta testuojant daugiau kaip 500 vienakalbių ir dvikalbių 4–9 metų vaikų. Nors DVRPAM normatyviniai kriterijai dar nėra griežtai apibrėžti, standartizuota metodikos procedūra gali būti taikoma tiek rišliosios kalbos moksliniams tyrimams, tiek logopediniam kalbos įvertinimui, tiek kalbos raidos sutrikimų diagnostikai."
Problem under investigation. The growing number of migrants’ children in Europe poses an immense ... more Problem under investigation. The growing number of migrants’ children in Europe poses an immense challenge for educators due to the fact that these children are early sequential bilinguals who use one language at home and another language at school. Research on home languages especially so-called “small languages” is very scanty, particularly with respect to their interference with the child’s school language. Studies of language acquisition in monolingual children have demonstrated the significance of narrative development for the acquisition of literacy skills and communicative competence. However, little is known about the narrative skills of Lithuanian as L1 and L2 for typically developing children who are in the process of becoming bilinguals. Methods. This study examines the narrative performance in Lithuanian (according the MAIN – Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives tools) of 87 five- and six-year-old preschool children. The children were divided into 4 groups: 1) 25 TD bilingual children with Lithuanian (L1) and English (L2); 2) 25 TD bilingual children with Russian (L1) and Lithuanian (L2); and 3) 25 TD monolingual Lithuanian children. The narratives were recorded, transcribed and coded using CHILDES tools for micro- and macrostructural indications (including general productivity, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, cohesion and coherence). The analysis is mainly focused on microstructure, i.e. lexicon and grammar. Results The results of the analysis show that general productivity and story complexity were similar in all groups. However, TD bilingual children scored below TD monolinguals, and children with SLI demonstrated the lowest results. TD monolinguals had the highest lexical skills in comparison to the bilingual peers or SLI; syntactic complexity was low for all groups. Conclusion. The bilinguals with Lithuanian as L1 and TD monolinguals demonstrated similar scores, whereas the bilinguals with Lithuanian as L2 were closer to the SLI group.
Child Development Research, 2012
How much morphological variation can children tolerate when identifying familiar words? This is a... more How much morphological variation can children tolerate when identifying familiar words? This is an important question in the context of the acquisition of richly inflected languages where identical word forms occur far less frequently than in English. To address this question, we compared children’s (N=96, mean age 4;1, range 2;11–5;1) and adults’ (N=96, mean age 21 years) tolerance of word-onset modifications (e.g., forstug: wugandwastug) and pseudoaffixes (e.g.,kostugandstugko) in a label-extension task. Word-form modifications were repeated within each experiment to establish productive inflectional patterns. In two experiments, children and adults exhibited similar strategies: they were more tolerant of prefixes (wastug) than substitutions of initial consonants (wug), and more tolerant of suffixes (stugko) than prefixes (kostug). The findings point to word-learning strategies as being flexible and adaptive to morphological patterns in languages.
Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu aastaraamat. Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics, 2009
The paper discusses the development of spoken Lithuanian corpora. In the analytical part longitud... more The paper discusses the development of spoken Lithuanian corpora. In the analytical part longitudinal child language data as well as adult conversations are discussed in view of the issues that occurred during the period of data collection, transcription and coding. The data are transcribed and coded according to the requirements of CHILDES. The second part of the paper presents a corpus based analysis and provides preliminary results. The data of adult-directed speech, child-directed speech and child speech are analysed to reveal the frequency distribution of parts of speech. Spoken language is compared to written language in order to observe the tendencies of usage. The main differences and similarities within the spoken language registers are discussed as well.
Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu aastaraamat. Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics, 2009
Although teaching Lithuanian as a foreign language is not a new subject, there has not been much ... more Although teaching Lithuanian as a foreign language is not a new subject, there has not been much research in this eld. The paper presents a study based on an analysis of grammatical errors which was carried out at Vytautas Magnus University. The data was selected randomly by analysing written assignments of beginner to advanced level students. The analysis has shown that the most frequent error is incorrect usage of case, affecting either form or meaning or both. This paper discusses the errors of overgeneralisation in case marking, dif culties in acquiring prepositional constructions and in ectional paradigms. The paper tries to interpret students' errors and suggests possible explanations, such as the impact of the students' mother tongue, or of English as the language of instruction on their Lithuanian, or the strategy of generalisation.
Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 2007
Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu aastaraamat Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics, 2007
The aim of the present article is to examine the relationship between the process of language acq... more The aim of the present article is to examine the relationship between the process of language acquisition and gender. It analyzes a longitudinal corpus of one girl, Rūta, covering the period from 1;7 to 2;6. The corpus consists of 35 hours of recordings. The recorded speech is transcribed according to the requirements of CHILDES (MacWhinney, Snow 1990). A special attention in the article is paid to testing the hypothesis which was supported by empirical evidence from other languages to the effect that the unmarked member, i.e. nouns of masculine gender, is acquired earlier than the marked member of the opposition (i.e. feminine nouns).
Studies About Languages, 2011
Journal of Baltic Studies, 2012
Journal of Baltic Studies, 2012
Journal of child …, Jun 1, 2009
This study examines Lithuanian children's acquisition of gender agreement using an elicited ... more This study examines Lithuanian children's acquisition of gender agreement using an elicited production task. Lithuanian is a richly inflected Baltic language, with two genders and seven cases. Younger (N=24, mean 3;1, 2;53;8) and older (N=24, mean 6;3, 5;66;9 ...
This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical asses... more This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0–6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small
between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than
verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.
The ten contributions to this volume present original research on grammar and discourse in modern... more The ten contributions to this volume present original research on grammar and discourse in modern Lithuanian and Latvian. They reflect the diversity of approaches in linguistic research on Baltic languages that has developed in recent years, after a period where these languages were studied almost exclusively from the perspective of historical-comparative linguistics. Current research perspectives include, among others, perspectives from discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language acquisition research, corpus linguistics, contrastive studies, and linguistic typology. The studies in this volume explore new ways of describing the system and use of Latvian or Lithuanian from a synchronic, non-normative point of view. They focus on grammatical categories and constructions (modality, evidentiality, case, existential clauses), grammatical characteristics of lexical classes (reflexive verbs, numerals), the characteristics of certain forms of discourse (academic discourse, food discourse...
Language Acquisition, 2015
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Papers by Ineta Dabasinskiene
between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than
verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.
between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than
verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.