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Nonword Repetition Test for Detecting Developmental Language Disorder in Russian-English Bilingual Children
Lebedeva, Tatiana ; Cilibrasi, Luca (advisor) ; Luef, Eva Maria (referee)
The present thesis is concerned with designing and evaluating a novel language-specific nonword repetition task (NWR) capable of identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in English-Russian bilingual children. The proposed NWR task manipulates three variables, item length, morphological complexity, and phonological complexity that reflect respective language processing mechanisms, namely, phonological working memory strain, phonological processing, and the knowledge of grammatical rules and long-term memory. The main question of the study was whether the proposed task could show adequate performance results for a typically developing bilingual child when matched with standardized language ability tests (TROG2, YARC, CNRep). To evaluate the efficacy of the task, a case study with one participant was conducted. The participant was a bilingual child (7;5) with simultaneous acquisition of English and Russian in an English-dominant environment. The findings showed that the proposed task passed the evaluation procedure and yielded expected patterns when matched against standardized tests both in terms of the patterns of difficulty and language dominance. As a result, the proposed NWR task demonstrated the potential for distinguishing DLD from typical development in bilingual children speaking...
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Linguistic Estrangement in Selected Science Fiction
Lebedeva, Tatiana ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee)
This work is a discussion of the connections between language in science fiction, the formalist concept of estrangement, and gender studies. The thesis suggests that the language of science fiction features linguistic estrangement that manifests itself in the form of a device and an effect which is produced as a result of certain modification of language used in a science fiction narrative. As the device of linguistic estrangement can be aimed at highlighting various processes, this thesis focuses on a narrow category of the representation of the sexes in the English language and the transformation of gender-biased language and the unequal representation of sexes via the aforementioned device. The introduction to this work gives an overview of the current debate on the topic in order to introduce the reader to the relevance of the discussion. The first chapter explores the definition of science fiction through the theory of cognitive estrangement by Darko Suvin and explains the choice of this medium for the study of language and gender. Then, it gives a definition of the device of literary estrangement as well as explains the nature and the usage of linguistic estrangement in science fiction. The second and the third chapters exemplify this phenomenon in selected works, Woman on the Edge of Time by...
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