e-Σεμινάρια Τομέα Γλωσσολογίας ΕΚΠΑ - Σπύρος Αρμοστής (Πανεπιστήμιο Κύπρου)

Τετάρτη 16/03/2022, 18:30, διαδικτυακά

Ο Τομέας Γλωσσολογίας σας προσκαλεί στην ομιλία του Σπύρου Αρμοστή (Πανεπιστήμιο Κύπρου) με τίτλο "Developing a phonetics and phonology test for Cypriot-Greek–speaking toddlers: a computerised application".

Η ομιλία θα πραγματοποιηθεί την Τετάρτη 16 Μαρτίου 2022 στις 18.30, στον παρακάτω σύνδεσμο:

https://uoa.webex.com/uoa/j.php?MTID=m47822882c1a66128bc3597dbfa8e72d6

Password: UsfP6mmaw38

Η ομιλία πραγματοποιείται στα πλαίσια των e-σεμιναρίων που διοργανώνονται από τον Τομέα Γλωσσολογίας με τη συνδρομή του Εργαστηρίου Φωνητικής και Υπολογιστικής Γλωσσολογίας. Το πρόγραμμα όλων των ομιλιών (Μάρτιος – Μάιος 2022) βρίσκεται στον σύνδεσμο http://www.phil.uoa.gr/tomeis/tomeas-glwssologias/seminaria.html

Περίληψη

In the process of providing Speech and Language Therapy services for paediatric populations, the accurate assessment of phonetic and phonological skills is of paramount importance in order for targeted intervention to be successfully provided. In Cyprus, although Standard Modern Greek (SMG) is one of the official languages of the country, the language variety which Grecophone children acquire as first language is Cypriot Greek (CyGr), a non-standard variety of Modern Greek whose phonetics and phonology differ greatly from SMG. However, to date, no protocol for assessing the phonetics and phonology of CyGr exists, something that leads clinicians in Cyprus to —at best— develop and use their own individual testing procedures, or even resort to protocols used in Greece (as the only standard Grecophone protocols available), which, however, were developed for assessing SMG-speaking children, and are thus largely unsuitable for assessing children that speak a different variety of Modern Greek. Furthermore, this lack of assessment standardisation entails the utter dearth of normative data, i.e. benchmarks for typical phonetic and phonological skills at different ages. This situation is exacerbated by different degrees of detail and/or accuracy in the phonetic transcription and phonological analysis among clinicians due to limited training on the phonetics and phonology of CyGr, something that leads to variability among existing practices. These issues attest the dire need for research that will lead to effective evidence-based practices uniformly applied in Cyprus.

In this talk, an attempt to address this long-awaited need is presented, which involved the creation of a complete phonetics and phonology screening tool for CyGr with the potential of becoming a standardised protocol in the future. Moreover, situated within the contemporary research trend of computerisation of clinical assessment of children’s linguistic profiles, this endeavour also involved the development of a computerised algorithm that facilitates the analysis of the results of the proposed CyGr phonetics-phonology test. Apart from automating the computation of measures of phonetic and phonological skills via independent and relational analyses, the development of this algorithm aims to compensate for the observed lack of training among clinicians in accurate phonetic transcription and phonological analysis of CyGr data, as such an algorithm tailored to the structural characteristics of CyGr can be trained to recognise common transcription errors and provide suggestions for correction. An application of the CyGr phonetics-phonology test for the collection of normative data from 20 CyGr-speaking children with a typical course of language development will be presented along with the various analyses automatically conducted by the algorithm. Finally, extension of the use of the algorithm to Language Sample Analysis will also be discussed.

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