Papers by Maria Mastropavlou
Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics, Sep 14, 2007
The aim of this study is threefold: firstly, to describe the acquisition patterns of Greek past t... more The aim of this study is threefold: firstly, to describe the acquisition patterns of Greek past tense by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI); secondly, to investigate the relationship between the phonological salience of past tense in Greek and its acquisition by language impaired learners; thirdly, to establish an account on the nature of the impairment by comparing the acquisition patterns exhibited by SLI children with those presented by language unaffected ones. The performance of 10 SLI children in elicited past tense production is compared to that of chronological age matched (CA) and language development matched (LD) controls. Based on the claim that perceptual saliency aids acquisition (or learning), it is predicted that SLI children will perform better in the production of past forms of higher salience than less salient forms. The results confirm this prediction, providing support for the claim that perceptual salience does account for better performances in tense marking in Greek SLI.
Journal of Greek Linguistics, 2010
Journal of Greek Linguistics, 2009
Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics, Mar 30, 2005
International journal of monitoring and surveillance technologies research, 2015
Journal of Communication Disorders, May 1, 2010
The aim of this study is threefold: Firstly, to describe the acquisition patterns of Greek past t... more The aim of this study is threefold: Firstly, to describe the acquisition patterns of Greek past tense by children with specific language impairment (SLI); secondly, to investigate the relationship between the phonological salience of past tense in Greek and its acquisition by children of typical and atypical language development; thirdly, to establish an account on the nature of specific language impairment by comparing the acquisition patterns exhibited by children with SLI to those presented by typically developing children. The performance of 10 children with SLI in elicited past tense production is compared to that of chronological age matched (CA) and language matched (LM) controls. Based on the claim that morphophonological salience aids acquisition (or learning), it is predicted that children with SLI will perform better in the production of past forms of higher salience than less salient forms. The results confirm this prediction, providing support for the claim that salience differences do account for better performances in tense marking in Greek SLI. By reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) describe the problems children with SLI face in Greek tense marking, (2) explain the reasons why SLI performances differ from one language to the next based on the Interpretability Hypothesis, (3) discuss whether children with SLI differ qualitatively from TD controls in past tense marking and explain how.
In this paper we report on the findings from a Greek and German production task which investigate... more In this paper we report on the findings from a Greek and German production task which investigated the expression of constructions involving manner-of-motion verbs with Greek and German adults as well as typically developing and SLI children at the age of 5-6 years. The results showed that the typically developing children, when describing motion events, differed from the adults in the integration of grammatical information into motion predicates. The SLI children on the other hand displayed problems with the use of grammatical aspect (Greek) and case marking (German) as well as with ambiguous constructions (Greek).
The current study investigates past formation in Standard Greek (SG) and Cypriot Greek (CYG) meas... more The current study investigates past formation in Standard Greek (SG) and Cypriot Greek (CYG) measuring the associated morphophonological salience and its effects on SLI grammars. Elicited production of real and pseudo verbs was carried out with SLI and TD groups from each variety. Results show that phonological salience of past formation affects SLI but not TD performance. Between varieties, the GR/SLI group performs better than CYG/SLI group with real verbs. We attribute this finding to the difference in the status of the augment in each variety.
9th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion, 2020
The aim of the current paper is to present and discuss the development, structure, content, and u... more The aim of the current paper is to present and discuss the development, structure, content, and use of a flexible, scalable and cost-effective cloud-based software system used in the iRead project.The iRead Project (Infrastructure and Integrated Tools for Personalized Learning of Reading Skills) aimed to offer personalized learning services to novice readers and students with reading difficulties or dyslexia by developing an integrated supportive tool for tablets, the iRead software, which includes a set of educational applications, like mini-games, an e-reader and a text classifier. iRead is built and operates around a comprehensive knowledge base, which includes a structured and detailed model of linguistic content that is essential to reading development, the domain model. iRead Domain models are essential for the operation of all iRead apps and were designed to provide personalized learning support to students with dyslexia by enabling each app to select linguistic content based on the particular learning needs of each student. The sophisticated and thorough structure and linguistic content of the iRead domain models, along with the ability of iRead to adapt to students’ needs, constitute unique features that render iRead innovative.
In recent research in language development, several attempts have been made to compare performanc... more In recent research in language development, several attempts have been made to compare performance data from different populations (L1 or L2 learners, SLI, agrammatics) in order to provide an analysis that would account for the patterns
Selected Papers from the 18 th ISTAL , 2009
In this paper we report on the findings from a Greek and German production task which investigate... more In this paper we report on the findings from a Greek and German production task which investigated the expression of constructions involving manner-of-motion verbs with Greek and German adults as well as typically developing and SLI children at the age of 5-6 years. The results showed that the typically developing children, when describing motion events, differed from the adults in the integration of grammatical information into motion predicates. The SLI children on the other hand displayed problems with the use of grammatical aspect (Greek) and case marking (German) as well as with ambiguous constructions (Greek).
DSAI 2020: 9th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion., 2020
The aim of the current paper is to present and discuss the development, structure, content, and u... more The aim of the current paper is to present and discuss the development, structure, content, and use of a flexible, scalable and cost-effective cloud-based software system used in the iRead project.The iRead Project (Infrastructure and Integrated Tools for Personalized Learning of Reading Skills) aimed to offer personalized learning services to novice readers and students with reading difficulties or dyslexia by developing an integrated supportive tool for tablets, the iRead software, which includes a set of educational applications, like mini-games, an e-reader and a text classifier. iRead is built and operates around a comprehensive knowledge base, which includes a structured and detailed model of linguistic content that is essential to reading development, the domain model. iRead Domain models are essential for the operation of all iRead apps and were designed to provide personalized learning support to students with dyslexia by enabling each app to select linguistic content based...
Applied Psycholinguistics
Studies on the processing of non-active (NACT) voice have indicated that passive sentences are mo... more Studies on the processing of non-active (NACT) voice have indicated that passive sentences are more difficult to comprehend and require more time to process. Children with Reading Difficulties (RDs) face problems with sentence comprehension, which are often attributed to phonological processing, working memory, syntactic awareness limitations, or a maturation delay. Using an online self-paced reading task, we investigated the effect of voice morphology and argument structure on sentence processing in 3 groups of participants; 30 children RDs, 28 Age-Matched (AM) controls without RDs, and 28 young Beginning Readers (BRs). Our results suggest that although the RDs and BR groups present similar reading times, their reading patterns differ qualitatively. Beginning Readers experienced greater processing delays when processing NACT structures, suggesting that they have not yet fully grasped the properties of the various NACT verbs. However, the RDs group presents effects not found in the ...
Journal of Education and Practice, 2017
The aim of this paper is to increase knowledge and understanding on how the implementation of lan... more The aim of this paper is to increase knowledge and understanding on how the implementation of language content through specialized software, such as the “Integrated Intelligent Learning Environment for Reading and Writing-iLearnRW”, can enhance learning during intervention procedures to enhance reading skills for children with dyslexia.The iLearnRW software is a newly designed tool that makes use of innovative technology and provides individualized intervention through games that incorporate learning activities, addressing those language areas that are most challenging for children with dyslexia in a highly entertaining and motivating way. Individualized intervention is provided through an underlying user profile, which incorporates these language features and is constantly updated as the child uses the software playing games, presenting language material selected based on his difficulties and recording his progress. A group of 78 students (52 male, 26 female) diagnosed with dyslexi...
The aim of this presentation is to investigate the status of Agreement features and in particular... more The aim of this presentation is to investigate the status of Agreement features and in particular [Gender] in the grammar of Greek children with Specific Language Impairment. Feature assignment is investigated with respect to Chomsky's notion of LF-interpretability. It has been argued that AGR features (phi- features) on definite articles and adjectives are interpretable only in PF but not in LF, whereas phi-features of Nouns are LF-interpretable. If features that are non-interpretable at LF are mostly affected by SLI, then there should be a distinction between the assignment of [Gender] on Articles and Nouns, as [Gender] is considered an inherent property of the noun stem, whereas in adjectives it is a property of the inflectional affix. There should also be a distinction between [Gender] assignment as opposed to [Number] and [Case] assignment, features that are considered to be of a different status.
Uploads
Papers by Maria Mastropavlou