Despina Papadopoulou

Within a socio-cultural framework of language teaching and a mixed methods design, the present study explores the emotional impact of collaborative writing activities on (non-) migrant students in formal education as well as their perceptions towards collaboration. The study examined whether emotions and perceptions about collaboration are differentially affected by educational level (primary vs. junior high school), educational setting (reception vs. mainstream class) as well as students’ background (migrant, non-migrant). The data were obtained by means of questionnaires and were analyzed both quantitatively by means of linear mixed-effects models and qualitatively by means of thematic analysis. The results revealed that students overall exhibited more positive than negative emotions. Even more, primary school students in the mainstream class exhibited weaker negative emotions compared to students in the reception class, and marginally stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions compared to junior high school students in the mainstream class. Primary school students in the mainstream class were the only group who did not exhibit negative emotions towards collaboration. Furthermore, junior high school students exhibited more negative emotions and reported more collaboration difficulties compared to primary school students, which could be associated with different conceptualization of group work among different ages as well as with different social group dynamics between the mainstream class of primary school and the mainstream class of junior high school along with different orientation of the school curricula.

In this study we explore similarity effects in the processing and comprehension of subject (SRCs) and object relative clauses (ORCs) in Greek as a first (L1) and second (L2) language. Increased disruption in the processing of ORCs in the L1 due to featural similarity in the nominal domain (e.g., number match) is accounted for by approaches such as the featural Relativized Minimality, and similarity-based interference models. Similarity effects are much less researched in the L2 and the findings are thus far inconclusive. We report online and offline data obtained by means of a self-paced reading task with native and non-native speakers of Greek. Our findings reveal processing and comprehension costs for ORCs as well as similarity effects modulated by the RC type during L1 and L2 online sentence processing. The non-native speakers show some indication of increased interference due to ORCs at the end of the sentences, and also lower accuracy than the native speakers. However, their accuracy is positively affected by proficiency scores. Our findings show that number match affects the processing of RCs alike in both groups, implying that native and non-native speakers of Greek overall employ similar parsing routines.

Pedagogical translanguaging (PTL) refers to the use of educational techniques that incorporate learners’ entire linguistic repertoire. Recent studies indicate that PTL is efficient in the teaching of morphological awareness to bilingual children. The question remains whether it can be successfully applied in the highly specific context of adult forced migrants’ classrooms. This study describes a new protocol developed within the framework of PTL to teach derivational morphology to L2 French and Greek adults. We used questionnaires to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the feasibility of the protocol, teachers’ and learners’ attitudes, and learners’ emotions in the PTL lesson. A total of 141 migrant learners (79 forced migrants) and 13 teachers were involved in 23 2 h lessons. Teachers and learners gave high overall evaluations of the feasibility of the PTL protocol and of their pleasure from teaching and learning using PTL tools. Learners’ ease of learning and learning benefits were positively influenced by their perception of the proximity between their L1 and L2. Learners reported higher positive emotions and lower negative emotions during the PTL lesson, while forced migrants showed more hope and shame overall than voluntary migrants, as well as gained more benefits from PTL due to enjoyment. These findings suggest that the use of pedagogical translanguaging in migrants’ classrooms is feasible and develops positive attitudes and emotions, which are more pronounced in forced migrants.

Pedagogical translanguaging (PTL) refers to the use of educational techniques which incorporate learners’ entire linguistic repertoire. Recent studies indicate that PTL is efficient in the teaching of morphological awareness to bilingual children. The question remains whether it can successfully be applied in the highly specific context of adult forced migrants' classrooms. This study describes a new protocol developed within the framework of PTL to teach derivational morphology to L2 French and Greek adults. We used questionnaires to assess quantitatively and qualitatively the feasibility of the protocol, teachers' and learners' attitudes, and learners' emotions in the PTL lesson. A total of 141 migrant learners (79 forced migrants) and 13 teachers were involved in 23 2-hour lessons. Teachers and learners gave overall high evaluations of the feasibility of the PTL protocol and of their pleasure to teach and learn using PTL tools. Learners’ ease to learn and learning benefits were positively influenced by their perception of the proximity between their L1 and L2. Learners reported higher positive emotions and lower negative emotions during the PTL lesson, while forced migrants showed globally higher hope and shame than voluntary migrants, as well as higher benefits from PTL on enjoyment. These findings suggest that the use of pedagogical translanguaging in migrants’ classrooms is feasible and develops positive attitudes and emotions, which are more pronounced in forced migrants.

The article introduces triangulation to converge evidence from corpus and experimental data, by means of two case studies in second language (L2) learners of Greek. The first case study investigates the acquisition of gender agreement, while the second probes the development of relative clauses. In both studies, findings from the corpus are tested against online experimentation using eye‐tracking and self‐paced reading tasks, a combination that is scarce in research implementing triangulation. The findings suggest that methodological convergence yields both congruous and incongruous evidence. However, both types of evidence contribute to a nuanced understanding of the linguistic phenomena under study, as well as the different perspectives from which they are approached. The article concludes that such an approach to triangulation can significantly contribute to enhancing the reliability and validity of the findings, provided that methodological convergence has been achieved at the design level of the study.

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of sentential context on lexical ambiguity resolution in Greek adults and typically developing children. Context and word frequency are factors that can affect lexical processing, however, the role of them has not been thoroughly examined in Greek. To this aim, we assessed sentence context effects in homonym meaning activation in monolingual speakers of Greek, children and adults, using a cross-modal priming paradigm. Additionally, all participants conducted a verbal working memory task and an inhibition task so as to examine whether the use of sentential context for lexical ambiguity resolution relates to age and/or cognitive processing capacity. The data analysis showed (a) major processing differences between adults and children due to ambiguity and sentential context, (b) children’s processing times affected by cognitive skills while adults’ processing unaffected, and (c) visual word recognition intact for all participants.

Working memory (WΜ) components are investigated as correlates of complex sentence comprehension (cSC) in children, under the consideration of WM as a cognitive system of limited capacity. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between WM components and cSC in children of typical language development (TLD) as well as in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), by systematically reviewing relevant studies. First, different tasks that are used to assess three distinct WM components are presented and task purity considerations on each of them are taken into account. Second, syntactically complex sentence types that are considered to constrain the already limited resources of WM are presented. Then, the systematic methods of the PRISMA-P protocol are followed. Based on them, six databases were thoroughly searched. After an initial screening stage and a final evaluation stage, twenty-eight studies were found to meet the inclusion criteria. Narrative synthesis was performed on the included studies. In TLD children, results on the role of verbal short-term memory (vST) and verbal working memory (vWM) in cSC are inconclusive, either supporting or questioning the capacity-limit approach. In DLD children, verbal working memory (vWM) has an important effect on cSC, rather than verbal short-term memory (vSTM). This suggests that a processing-execution component is important in DLD children’s cSC. For both children groups, a component serving as an interface between vSTM/vWM and long-term memory (vSTM/vWM-LTM) seems to play an important role; however, it is greatly understudied. Based on the results, future research directions and educational implications are suggested.

Background: Most descriptions of the clinical and cognitive features of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) highlight deficits mainly in memory ability, while the in‐depth understanding of the language deficits of people with AD remains limited with most data reported as heterogeneous (see Eyigoz et al., 2020; Kavé & Dassa, 2018). The overarching goal of DemLENS project (https://demlens.enl.auth.gr/) is to investigate the key linguistic characteristics of native speakers with cognitive impairment and the decline of language skills.Method: The study integrates the clinical evaluation, the neuropsychological assessment and thorough linguistic profiling via language production data from 168 native speakers of Greek. Specifically, we examine the lexical, syntactic and content complexity of spoken language elicited through sentence repetition, single picture description, picture sequence narratives and personal narratives. We tested young healthy adults (yHC = 35), cognitively intact elder healthy adults (eHC = 31), speakers with Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD = 32), speakers with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI = 33) and speakers with mild to moderate AD (AD = 38).Result: The data analysis focuses on the annotated data at the microstructure level – e.g. POS, syntactic complexity, internal state terms – and at the macrostructure level – e.g. information content units, narration length and narration density and revealed that depending on the cognitive severity stage, language subsystems deteriorate at different stages in the progression of AD. Lexical access difficulties, reduced informational content (e.g. narration density: F _(4,164) = 6.514, p<.001; yHC,eHC>SCI,MCI>AD) and syntactic complexity of speakers’ production appear to drive linguistic decline. Note also that sentence repetition was shown to have high discriminatory value in the development of AD (e.g. accuracy index: F _(4,164) = 92.632, p<.001; yHC>eHC,SCI>MCI>AD (Figure 1).Conclusion: Language performance exposes subtle early signs of progression to AD that can shed light on the early detection of cognitive decline, thus facilitating the clinical process. Consequently, a language‐based AD assessment is ecologically valid and one of the least intrusive ways to assess symptoms of AD. References Eyigoz, E., Mathur, S., Santamaria, M., Cecchi, G., & Naylor, M. (2020). Linguistic markers predict onset of Alzheimer’s disease. EClinicalMedicine, 28, 100583.Kavé, G., & Dassa, A. (2018). Severity of Alzheimer’s disease and language features in picture descriptions. Aphasiology, 32(1), 27‐40.

By means of an annotated corpus of 13,085 words, this paper investigates discourse-level anaphora in L1 Greek, exploring the anaphoric preferences of referring expressions in subject position and the effect of several factors on antecedent prominence. Longer referential forms are supposed to signal low accessibility, whereas shorter ones tend to be linked to more salient discourse elements. Moreover, antecedent saliency appears to be influenced by syntactic position, sentential/discourse topichood, recency and rhetoric relations between utterances (Right Frontier Constraint). The results of the study indicate that, although the use of null pronominals is the default option in Greek, the ‘second-in-command’ anaphoric expression is the full DP and not the overt pronoun. Furthermore, null pronouns significantly prefer to refer to salient antecedents.