Search Results (7)

Despite the growing number of bilinguals worldwide, research on how bilingualism influences grammatical development in children with learning disabilities remains limited. This may be due to challenges in assessing language in these children, given the heterogeneity of their disabilities, lack of appropriate tools, and variability in language background and exposure common in bilingual populations. This pilot study investigates grammatical abilities in bilingual versus monolingual children with Down syndrome using the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task, specifically designed for bilingual populations. Sentence repetition tasks are widely used for assessing grammar in neurotypical children and children with language impairments and are part of many omnibus language assessments. Ten children with Down syndrome aged 5–8 were recruited: five bilingual, speakers of British English and various home languages, and five monolingual, age- and language-matched. Both groups produced a high proportion of ungrammatical repetitions, with more omissions of verbs than nouns, function words than content words, and significant difficulties producing complex structures such as relative clauses, wh-questions, and passives. However, qualitative analyses showed that bilingual children speaking morphologically rich home languages (e.g., Polish, Greek) appeared to have fewer difficulties with some function words (e.g., prepositions) and were able to produce complex structures like passives and wh-questions, unlike their monolingual peers. Although the small sample limits generalisability, two insights emerge: First, sentence repetition may be of limited use in assessing expressive grammar in children with Down syndrome due to frequent ungrammatical responses. Second, while both groups showed similar challenges, bilingualism—especially with richly inflected home languages—may support specific grammatical skills. These findings support existing evidence that bilingualism does not hinder grammatical development in children with Down syndrome and suggest that parents should not avoid dual-language input. Further research is needed to determine whether bilingualism confers specific benefits in grammatical morpheme use and complex syntactic constructions. Full article

As in many other countries, baseline data concerning the linguistic development of bilingual children in Sweden are lacking, and suitable methods for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals are lacking as well. This study presents reference data from 108 typically developing (TD) Turkish/Swedish-speaking children aged 4;0–8;1, for a range of language tasks developed specifically for the assessment of bilinguals (LITMUS test battery, COST Action IS0804). We report on different types of nonword repetition (NWR) tasks (language-specific and language-independent), receptive and expressive vocabulary (Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks, CLTs), and narrative macrostructure comprehension and production (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, MAIN) in Turkish, the children’s home language, and in Swedish, the language of schooling and society. Performance was investigated in relation to age, language exposure, type of task, and (for NWR and narratives) vocabulary size. There was a positive development with age for all tasks, but effects of language exposure and vocabulary size differed between tasks. Six bilingual Turkish/Swedish children with DLD were individually compared to the TD children. TD/DLD performance overlapped substantially, particularly for NWR, and more so for the production than the comprehension tasks. Surprisingly, the discriminatory potential was poor for both language-specific and language-independent NWR. DLD case studies underscored the importance of interpreting language scores in relation to exposure history, and the need for an increased emphasis on functional language skills as reported by parents and teachers when assessing and diagnosing DLD in bilinguals. Full article

Refugee children tend to show low emotional well-being and weak executive functions that may have consequences on language and therefore complicate a potential diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in this population. We assessed the performance of 140 children living in Switzerland aged 5 to 8 (20 monolinguals, 86 non-refugee bilinguals, 34 refugee bilinguals) on LITMUS language tasks (nonword repetition, sentence repetition, parental questionnaire), standardized language tasks, memory and executive function tasks. Parents also filled in the Child Behavior Checklist providing a measure of their child’s emotional well-being. Results indicate that refugee children are more emotionally vulnerable and show weaker performance in memory and executive functions tasks compared to non-refugee children, in line with the existing literature. Moreover, when compared to non-refugee bilingual children with similar length of exposure to French, refugee children are disadvantaged on all language tasks. Whereas emotional well-being does not predict language performance, memory and executive functions show up as predictors of both LITMUS and standardized language tasks, although in an unsystematic way. It is concluded that refugee children are at risk across the board and that a better understanding of the complex interplay between well-being, executive functions, memory and language is needed in order to build more appropriate diagnostic tools for these children. Full article

This study evaluates whether the short version of the German LITMUS quasi-universal nonword repetition task (LITMUS-QU-NWR) can be used as an index test for monolingual and early second language learners (eL2) of German aged 8 to 10 years. The NWR taps into quasi-universal phonological knowledge via the so-called language-independent part and into language-specific phonological knowledge via the language-dependent part. Thirty-six monolingual and thirty-three eL2 learners of German, typically developing (TD) and diagnosed as language-impaired (DLD), participated in the study. The effects of the language group (Mo vs. eL2) and the clinical status (TD vs. DLD) on repetition accuracy are investigated by a logistic mixed-model analysis. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) and likelihood ratios are calculated to determine the diagnostic accuracy of the two parts. The group comparisons showed significant effects of the clinical status but not of the language group. The ROC analyses and the likelihood ratios reveal better diagnostic values for the language-dependent compared to the language-independent part and almost similar diagnostic values for the monolingual and the eL2 group. The results indicate that the LITMUS-QU-NWR helps to disentangle DLD and DLD in monolingual children and eL2 learners aged 8 to 10 years. Full article

Due to the overall widespread accessibility of electronic materials available on the internet, the availability and usage of computers in education have resulted in a growth in the incidence of plagiarism among students. A growing number of individuals at colleges around the globe appear to be presenting plagiarised papers to their professors for credit, while no specific details are collected of how much was plagiarised previously or how much is plagiarised currently. Supervisors, who are overburdened with huge responsibility, desire a simple way—similar to a litmus test—to rapidly reform plagiarized papers so that they may focus their work on the remaining students. Plagiarism-checking software programs are useful for detecting plagiarism in examinations, projects, publications, and academic research. A number of the latest research findings dedicated to evaluating and comparing plagiarism-checking methods have demonstrated that these have restrictions in identifying the complicated structures of plagiarism, such as extensive paraphrasing as well as the utilization of technical manipulations, such as substituting original text with similar text from foreign alphanumeric characters. Selecting the best reliable and efficient plagiarism-detection method is a challenging task with so many options available nowadays. This paper evaluates the different academic plagiarism-detection methods using the fuzzy MCDM (multi-criteria decision-making) method and provides recommendations for the development of efficient plagiarism-detection systems. A hierarchy of evaluation is discussed, as well as an examination of the most promising plagiarism-detection methods that have the opportunity to resolve the constraints of current state-of-the-art tools. As a result, the study serves as a “blueprint” for constructing the next generation of plagiarism-checking tools. Full article

Today, simulator technology has been widely used as an important part of quadrotor development such as validation and testing. A good quadrotor simulator can simulate the quadrotor system as closely as possible to the real one. Therefore, in case of multi-quadrotor simulator, the simulator should not only can simulate a multi-quadrotor system, but also every quadrotor should be able to leverage their own resources. To solve this issues, in this paper, we present a hypervisor-based multi-quadrotor simulator. We used RT-Xen as hypervisor, a real-time Xen hypervisor. To ensure every quadrotor runs in real-time manner, we implemented quadrotor simulator in Litmus-RT which is a real-time extension of Linux. In this paper, we conducted some testing and performance evaluation for particular cases on our multi-quadrotor simulator: step-input responses, computation time, and response times. Based on the performance evaluation, our hypervisor-based multi-quadrotor simulator environment is proven to meet the real-time requirements. The results show that three important tasks in quadrotor system: Stability Controllability Augmented System (SCAS), Equation of Motion (EOM), and waypoint following task, are finished before their deadlines; in fact, 20 ms, 10 ms, and 40 ms before the deadlines for SCAS, EOM, and waypoint following, respectively. Full article

Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures. Full article