Activities

On 5 December (2024), Henrik and Lari from Project 2 visited Project 1 as part of the "Local Guest Researcher Scheme".  This activity was made part of the TEAM research program to foster cross-fertilization and share insights and research skills across projects. 

In the session, we described the main features of our respective projects. Ida, Emily and Kristina elaborated on their planned test battery, and we discussed criteria for the selection of words for the word definition task to be used in the upcoming study. Project 1 also explained the status of their ongoing scoping review on children's word definition skills. We did five initial full-text reviews together and discussed criteria for inclusion and exclusion. It was a useful experience. Explaining to others what you do deepens your own understanding. We will all meet again soon for a second session.

At the NKL2024 Conference (Nationell Konferens i Logopedi/National Conference in Speech-Language Pathology) Project 1 presented a poster with the title Children’s ability to define words: An ongoing scoping review. The poster presented the aim and method for an ongoing scoping review with the objective to map which factors have been studied as associated with WD skills, as well as to summarize the methodological characteristics of the WD tasks used in the included studies.

The protocol is available at:  

Grenner,  Emily; Rosqvist, Ida; Hansson, Kristina (2024). Internal and external factors explaining variability in children’s word definition skills: A scoping review protocol.pdf. figshare. Online resource. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.27692643

At the NKL2024 Conference we also gave an oral with the title Assessment of children’s word definitions: Possibilities and challenges in clinic and research. We talked about how word definitions can be used to assess several aspects of language and communications skills, and the use of WDs in a school context. Furthermore, we talked about challenges when assessing and analyzing children’s WDs and the aim of the TEAM research project Word definition skills: explaining variability. The complex interaction between factors within and around the child. (Ev. länk till projektsidan? 1. Word definition skills: explaining variability | Transdisciplinary Approaches to<br/>Learning, Acquisition, Multilingualism)

On 1 October, TEAM members gathered for the first Journal Club of the autumn term. Ida Rosqvist, Kristina Hansson and Emily Grenner from Project 1 led a stimulating discussion on Hadley and Dickinson's (2020) paper exploring vocabulary depth. The conversation was both lively and engaging, covering a broad range of topics, including vocabulary assessment across different fields and key considerations for designing tools to measure children's word definition skills.

On September 19, Henriette Arndt gave a guest lecture at the Tilburg Experience Sampling Center which provides training and support in conducting Experience Sampling Method (ESM) studies, primarily to local researchers in psychology and medicine. The talk showcased past and future projects in which Arndt and colleagues leverage the ESM to investigate everyday language use (see Project 4; the LANG-TRACK-APP), thereby illustrating the method’s potential applications and benefits in a novel research area – the study of learning, acquisition, and multilingualism.

Project 1, Kristina Hansson, Emelie Grenner and Ida Rosqvist, gave several conference presentations in September. These are their reports.

At the International Developmental Language Disorder Research Conference we gave an oral presentation: Word definition skills in Swedish children with a history of SLP contact. An exploratory study. Using data from a previous project involving children in school year 1 and 2 we compared a subgroup of the participants (35 out of 205) who, according to parent report, had seen a speech-language pathologist (SLP) with those who had not had any SLP contact. This subgroup performed significantly below the rest of the participants. Given that the reasons for SLP contact often were other than DLD (e.g. stuttering or speech sound disorders) the fact that this group tended to score lower indicates that word definition skills in Swedish children with DLD deserve further investigation.

At the Educational Linguistics (EdLing) conference, we presented a poster: Word definition skills – underlying processes and background factors. Presentation of a new research project. We presented the purpose of the project, i.e. to investigate how executive function, referential communication, lexical and grammatical skills, and background factors contribute to word definition skills in children representing a variation of language skills, language background and exposure, and socio-economic conditions. We also presented our planned design, with a focus on factors to take into consideration when selecting targets for the word definition task.

At EdLing we also gave an oral presentation: Word definition skills in the early school years. We presented two previous studies investigating WD skills in monolingual and bi/multilingual school children and the effect of a teacher Continuous Professional Development program on students' WD skills. The results were discussed in relation to our upcoming research project investigating the interaction between linguistic, cognitive, and social variables shaping variability in WD skills. Project 1 in TEAM focuses on questions that were identified for future research in the presented study.

On 5 April, Project 2 organised an informal seminar on compounding, with the purpose to further the understanding of compound structures, compounding processes in the English, Finnish, Italian, and Swedish languages, and identify challenges for cross-linguistic comparisons. Presentations by project members and invited guests on different topics were followed by a discussion that aimed to identify salient points and challanges.