Acceso usuarios
Maria Kaltsa
, Alexandra Prentza, Froso Argyri, Dionysios Tafiadis, Ianthi Tsimpli
The aim of the study is to present the standardization of the Gender Assessment tool designed for typically developing Greek-speaking children. The Gender Assessment tool exploits lexical and grammatical gender and taps on two syntactic operations, namely gender assignment and gender agreement in real and novel nouns. We administered it to an extensive pool of 8 to 12 year-old speakers, specifically 110 monolingual Greek-speaking children and 308 bilingual children of different language pairs, namely Albanian/Greek, English/Greek and German/Greek. We conducted a Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis to evaluate the test’s discriminatory ability, the Youden analysis for the computation of the cut-off scores and a Cronbach's alpha coefficient and a split-half reliability coefficient measure to examine the internal consistency of the test. The analysis showed that the GAAGL tool is a valid measure of grammatical development in typically developing bilingual children irrespective of the typological differences of grammatical gender in the other language. Consequently, validated grammar-specific tasks can assist researchers in the profiling of bilingual children more effectively and potentially address their individualized needs.
