FRAGL 43: Sprachliche Fähigkeiten Freiburger Jugendlicher: Eine Projektbeschreibung
Adriana Hanulikova / Daniel Müller-Feldmeth
Abstract
This paper provides a detailed description of a project funded by an Assistant Professor grant from the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts in Baden-Württemberg. The aim of the project was to investigate individual differences in the comprehension and production of spoken language in youth population from diverse socioeconomic and language backgrounds. The main objective was to investigate the speech comprehension and production interface and to determine the relative contribution of participants’ background as well as of language, auditory and cognitive skills to speech comprehension and production performance across various linguistic levels and tasks under noisy and thus more demanding listening conditions. We expected large individual variation across different tasks and participants that would allow for an analysis and a better understanding of the relative weight of diverse factors affecting language performance and language skills at different linguistic levels. To this end, a pilot and a main study were conducted. The main study comprised of 131 adolescents from three school types in Freiburg who completed a battery of tests assessing passive and active vocabulary knowledge, comprehension of utterances produced in accented and noise contexts, memory and inhibitory skills as well as a scene description task. In addition, a detailed questionnaire assessing the social and language background of the adolescents was included. This contribution provides a detailed description of each of these tests as well as the process of data collection. Finally, some preliminary descriptive results and an overview of ongoing studies and future research are presented.
Keywords: adolescents’ language skills, individual variation, language production, speech comprehension