Receptive and expressive vocabulary development in children learning English as an additional language: Converging evidence from multiple datasets.

Children learning English as an additional language (EAL) are a diverse and growing group of pupils in England's schools. Relative to their monolingual (ML) peers, these children tend to show lower receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge in English, although interpretation of findings is limited by small and heterogeneous samples. In an effort to increase representativeness and power, the present study combined published and unpublished datasets from six cross-sectional and four longitudinal studies investigating the vocabulary development of 434 EAL learners and 342 ML peers (age range: 4;9-11;5) in 42 primary schools. Multilevel modelling confirmed previous findings of significantly lower English vocabulary scores of EAL learners and some degree of convergence in receptive but not expressive knowledge by the end of primary school. Evidence for narrowing of the gap in receptive knowledge was found only in datasets spanning a longer developmental period, hinting at the protracted nature of this convergence.

Changing Polish university students' attitudes toward cluttering.

PURPOSE: This quasi-experimental design study in Poland explored the extent to which attitudes toward cluttering of university students could be changed or improved after a series of activities dedicated to attaining deeper recognition of problems associated with fluency disorders. METHOD: University students were assigned to either an Experimental or a Control group, with 39 in each (total = 78). They all completed the Polish version of the Public Opinion Survey of Human Attributes-Cluttering (POSHA-Cl) on two occasions up to eight weeks apart. Participants in the Experimental group attended the following intervention activities: watching and discussing an educational video on cluttering, participating in a workshop on the nature of cluttering, and watching and discussing a documentary on the life experiences of people struggling with fluency disorders. The Experimental group also filled out an open-ended questionnaire at the end of the study. RESULTS: Pre-intervention comparisons indicated that participants assigned to either of the Experimental or Control groups differed significantly on 2 of the 15 summary ratings (13 %) of their pre-POSHA-Cl attitudes toward cluttering. For the Experimental group, the intervention resulted in significant positive changes in cluttering attitudes on 8 of the 15 summary ratings (53 %). In contrast, pre- and post- POSHA-Cl scores for the Control group were essentially unchanged (0 of 15 ratings). CONCLUSIONS: This quasi-experimental study demonstrated that it is possible to positively modify the cluttering attitudes of university students. This has implications for the length, content, and experiential components of interventions designed to improve public attitudes toward fluency disorders.

Inversion effects on mental arithmetic in English- and Polish-speaking adults.

In some languages the order of tens and units in number words is inverted compared with the symbolic digital notation (e.g., German 23 → "dreiundzwanzig," literally: "three-and-twenty"). In other languages only teen-numbers are inverted (e.g., English 17 → "seventeen"; Polish 17 → "siedemnascie" literally "seventeen"). Previous studies have focused on between group comparisons of inverted and non-inverted languages and showed that number word inversion impairs performance on basic numerical tasks and arithmetic. In two independent experiments, we investigated whether number word inversion affects addition performance within otherwise non-inverted languages (Exp. 1: English, Exp. 2: Polish). In particular, we focused on the influence of inverted (I; English: teen-numbers ⩾ 13, Polish: numbers 11-19) and non-inverted (N) summands with sums between 13 and 39. Accordingly, three categories of addition problems were created: N + N, N + I, and I + I with problem size matched across categories. Across both language groups, we observed that problems with results in the 20 and 30 number range were responded to faster when only non-inverted summands were part of the problems as opposed to problems with one or two inverted summands. In line with this, the cost of a carry procedure was the largest for two inverted summands. The results support the notion that both language-specific and language-invariant aspects contribute to addition problem-solving. In particular though, regarding language-specific aspects, the results indicate that inverted number word formation of teens influences place-value processing of Arabic digits even in otherwise non-inverted languages.

Public attitudes toward stuttering in Europe: Within-country and between-country comparisons.

INTRODUCTION: Epidemiological research methods have been shown to be useful in determining factors that might predict commonly reported negative public attitudes toward stuttering. Previous research has suggested that stuttering attitudes of respondents from North America and Europe (i.e., "The West"), though characterized by stereotypes and potential stigma, are more positive than those from several other regions of the world. This inference assumes that public attitudes within various regions characterized by "The West" are similar. PURPOSE: This study aimed to determine the extent to which public stuttering attitudes are similar or different both within regions of three different European countries and between or among five different European countries or similar geographic areas. It also aimed to compare these European attitudes to attitudes from 135 samples around the world using a standard measure. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Using convenience sampling, 1111 adult respondents from eight different investigations completed the Public Opinion Survey of Human Attributes-Stuttering (POSHA-S) in the dominant language of each country or area. In Study I, the authors compared attitudes within three different regions of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Italy, and Norway. In Study II, the authors compared attitudes between combined samples from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Italy, and Norway (with additional respondents from Sweden), and two other samples, one from Germany and the other from Ireland and England. RESULTS: Attitudes of adults from the three samples within Bosnia & Herzegovina, Italy, and Norway were remarkably similar. By contrast, attitudes between the five different countries or area were quite dramatically different. Demographic variables on the POSHA-S did not predict the rank order of these between-country/area differences. Compared to the POSHA-S worldwide database, European attitudes ranged from less positive than average (i.e., Italians) to more positive than average (i.e., Norwegians and Swedes). CONCLUSION: Factors related to national identity appear to play a significant role in differences in public attitudes in Europe and should be explored in future research.