Suchergebnisse

Abstract

HaCohen et al. (2018) identified three types of narratives that emerge
in the context of integrating a difficult event into one's life story. We use their identification while focusing on the quality
of emotional involvement evidenced in texts, and combining it with an abstract-content text analysis. This allows us to quantify
emotional engagement in Expressive Writing (EW) texts. We analyze personal-experience narratives produced in EW, and examine
whether good EW outcome cases (in terms of well-being improvement) would be characterized with different types of narratives than
poor outcome cases. Results show that texts produced by good outcome cases presented more emotional involvement than poor cases.
Furthermore, good cases presented with a more complex and well-integrated narrative of their story than poor cases. It is
suggested that good outcome participants' writings are more emotionally involved, integrated and personal. Our findings emphasize
the importance of context-sensitive and function-oriented accounts of EW texts.

The focus of the present study was the trajectory of the acquisition of noun pluralization in Hebrew as a window into the development of inflectional morphology among early sequential Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals. Our participants were six early sequential bilingual children between 36 and 42 months of age at the beginning of the study, who acquired Russian (L1) at home and at preschool within a 'first language first approach' and whose age at the onset of their acquisition of Hebrew (L2) was about 3 years. We investigated both qualitative and quantitative features of noun pluralization in Hebrew (L2) acquisition in order to determine (1) whether early sequential bilingual children are delayed or accelerated in this domain; (2) whether they show similar or different patterns of errors in comparison to the L1 children; and (3) at what age sequential bilingual children acquire regular versus irregular noun plural forms
compared with the L1 children.

We relied on a multi-faceted longitudinal analysis of noun pluralization, examining both correct and incorrect production- in structured elicitations as well as in (semi-) spontaneous interactions. Comparing our data to those collected for Hebrew L1 speakers, the results for monolinguals and early sequential bilinguals show a striking similarity with respect to the development of pluralization. These findings suggest that the accelerated rate of ESBs' L2 pluralization mechanism provides evidence of the linguistic maturation hypothesis.