Biomedical subjects

Dorit Ravid

Publications and source records attributed to Dorit Ravid.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2007

Morphological analogies in Hebrew-speaking university students with dyslexia compared with typically developing gradeschoolers.

Little attention has been devoted to date to the study of morphological knowledge in individuals with developmental dyslexia. The current study compares the ability of Hebrew-speaking adult dyslexic students and gradeschool children to analyze written words into their morphological components, using a linguistic analogy task. Two sets of monolingual Hebrew-speaking participants--152 typically developing gradeschool children and 38 undergraduate students diagnosed with reading disabilities--were administered the Morphological Analogies Task. Results indicate an early ability of normally developing children to perform morphological analogies, while the adult dyslexic group performed on par with 3rd and 4th grade. Error analysis revealed that the overwhelming majority of the erroneous responses in all grades involved morphological strategies rather than the associative semantic strategy. However, the adult dyslexic students had many more associative responses than the graderschoolers. This testifies to the reduced written morphological abilities of adult dyslexic students.

Achievement↗

PubMed2006

Early noun plurals in German: regularity, productivity or default?

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0. Analyses of correct responses showed that the highest scores were obtained with -e plurals, followed by the plural markers -e + U, -er + U, -s and -(e)n. The lowest score was observed for pure Umlaut (U) plurals. Analyses suggested an impact of productivity on the number of correct scores: fully productive and productive plural patterns obtained higher correct scores than weakly productive and non-productive ones. The results of the study support our productivity scale and are compatible both with single-route models and with a race-model variant of the dual-route view.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Typological effects on spelling development: a crosslinguistic study of Hebrew and Dutch.

This study investigates the role of phonological and morphological information in children's developing orthographies in two languages with different linguistic typologies: Hebrew, a Semitic language with a highly synthetic morphology, and Dutch, a Germanic language with a sparse morphology. 192 Israeli and 192 Belgian monolingual schoolchildren in grades 1-6 (aged 6;0-12;0) were administered respective dictation tasks in which homophonous segments were the targets. In each language, these phonologically distinct segments are neutralized phonetically but are nevertheless represented orthographically. In both languages the target segments in the test words differed along two dimensions: (1) their morphological function as part of a stem or root versus as part of an affix; and (2) their morphophonological recoverability. The spelling tests in both languages consisted of four conditions which differed in the number and type of cues for retrieving the correct spelling of homophonous graphemes. The cues were of two types: morphological cues, which offer spellers clues to the correct spelling through consistent orthography/morphology mapping regularities; and morphophonological cues, which offer spellers clues to the correct spelling through the manipulation of orthography/morphophonology conversion procedures. A central finding of this study is the differential treatment of morphological cues by Dutch and Hebrew spelling learners. When faced with neutralized segments with and without morphological function, Hebrew-speaking children find morphology an enormously helpful tool. Dutch-speaking children, in contrast, do not find morphology a good cue provider. The impact of typology on the interface between spoken and written language is invoked as an explanation of the main findings.

Belgium↗

PubMed2006

Semantic development in textual contexts during the school years: noun scale analyses.

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre. Eighty Hebrew-speaking children (9;0 to 10;0), adolescents (12;0 to 13;0 and 16;0 to 17;0), and a group of adult university graduate students participated in the study. Each produced four different texts: a spoken and written narrative and a spoken and written expository, yielding a total of 320 texts. All lexical noun tokens in each of the 320 texts were analysed to determine their score on the Noun Scale. Results indicate that nominal density, which underlies much of the syntactic architecture of texts, increases dramatically in adolescence, towards adulthood. The paper analyses the developmental patterns of each of the ten Noun Scale categories, showing that the nominal lexicon of schoolaged children is already very different from that of young children in having only a small amount of genuinely concrete nouns, and these too only in narrative texts. The quantitative analysis shows that nouns grow more categorical and abstract with age and schooling, especially in adolescence. Written expository texts are the preferred habitat of abstract, categorical nouns from early on. The systematic qualitative analysis of noun tokens in their textual context demonstrates how the nominal lexicon undergoes fundamental changes that are affected by linguistic, cognitive and social development, in interaction with text genre and modality.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Hyponatremia and preeclampsia.

A 33-year-old healthy woman, gravida 1 with twins pregnancy was admitted with mild preeclampsia and unusual hyponatremia which resolved promptly postpartum. This is the seventh reported case of hyponatremia complicating preeclampsia, four of the patients carried twins and four had nephrotic syndrome.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Representing written vowels in university students with dyslexia compared with normal Hebrew readers.

The study investigates dyslexic and normal Hebrew readers' perception of words containing a vowel letter in different orthographic and morphological contexts. In the first experiment, 72 undergraduate education students (half diagnosed with reading disabilities and half normal readers) were asked to judge pointed words with different morphological structures with and without the grapheme W. Half of the words had consistent (obligatory) W and half had inconsistent (optional) W. In the second experiment, the same procedure was repeated using the same words without pointing marks. Response latencies and accuracy were measured. In both experiments, dyslexic readers did less well than normal readers, they had lower scores on accurate lexical decisions, and they took more time over these decisions. They also exhibited some deviant patterns indicating that they cannot make use of orthographic and morphological cues which are available to normal readers, especially in the pointed experiment. Processing pointed words placed a heavier cognitive burden on the dyslexic readers. These findings are in line with other studies of adult dyslexic reader/writers, and support a reading / spelling processing model, which claims that internal orthographic representations of words are increasingly strengthened with each exposure during reading, but not all graphemes are strengthened equally. The general implication is that the ambiguities that exist in the relationships between orthography, phonology and morphology underlie spelling knowledge and are particularly difficult for dyslexic readers.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Morphosyntactic constructs in the development of spoken and written Hebrew text production.

This study examined the distribution of two Hebrew nominal structures-N-N compounds and denominal adjectives-in spoken and written texts of two genres produced by 90 native-speaking participants in three age groups: eleven/twelve-year-olds (6th graders), sixteen/seventeen-year-olds (11th graders), and adults. The two constructions are later linguistic acquisitions, part of the profound lexical and syntactic changes that occur in language development during the school years. They are investigated in the context of learning how modality (speech vs. writing) and genre (biographical vs. expository texts) affect the production of continuous discourse. Participants were asked to speak and write about two topics, one biographical, describing the life of a public figure or of a friend; and another, expository, discussing one of ten topics such as the cinema, cats, or higher academic studies. N-N compounding was found to be the main device of complex subcategorization in Hebrew discourse, unrelated to genre. Denominal adjectives are a secondary subcategorizing device emerging only during the late teen years, a linguistic resource untapped until very late, more restricted to specific text types than N-N compounding, and characteristic of expository writing. Written texts were found to be denser than spoken texts lexically and syntactically as measured by number of novel N-N compounds and denominal adjectives per clause, and in older age groups this difference was found to be more pronounced. The paper contributes to our understanding of how the syntax/lexicon interface changes with age, modality and genre in the context of later language acquisition.

Child↗

PubMed2002

Developing linguistic literacy: a comprehensive model.

This is a position paper modelling the domain of linguistic literacy and its development through the life span. It aims to provide a framework for the analysis of language development in the school years, integrating sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic notions of variation, language awareness, and literacy in a comprehensive model. The paper focuses on those aspects of literacy competence that are expressed in language as well as aspects of linguistic knowledge that are affected by literacy competence, tracing the route that children take in appropriating linguistic literacy as part of their cognitive abilities and examining the effect of literacy on language across development. Our view of linguistic literacy consists of one defining feature: control over linguistic variation from both a user-dependent ('lectal') and a context-dependent (modality, genre, and register) perspective; of one concomitant process: metalanguage and its role in language development; and of one condition: familiarity with writing and written language from two aspects: written language as discourse style--the recognition that the kind of language used for writing is essentially different from the one used for speech; and written language as a notational system--the perception and growing command of the representational system that is used in the written modality. Linguistic literacy is viewed as a constituent of language knowledge characterized by the availability of multiple linguistic resources and by the ability to consciously access one's own linguistic knowledge and to view language from various perspectives.

Awareness↗