Journal of interactional research in communication disorders, Jun 17, 2021
Background: The study investigates how clinicians achieve balance between the needs of the instit... more Background: The study investigates how clinicians achieve balance between the needs of the institution and the promotion of the child’s agency and volition. Method: Our data are taken from the opening segments of 16 sessions recorded by 8 speech clinicians during their meetings with 11 children with some form of speech and language disorder. We focus on four segments, and our analysis is based on the combined insights of three approaches to the analysis of talk: conversation analysis (CA), dialogic syntax (DS), and discourse pragmatics (DP). Results: The extended and integrated analyses of the segments illustrate different ways in which the clinicians and the children negotiate intersubjectivity in the speech-language therapy (SLT) session, focusing on the use of the verb for ‘to want’ in Hebrew. Discussion and conclusion: The study demonstrates that while clinicians may perceive their action of employing question constructions with the verb for ‘to want’ as addressing the interlocutor’s will, their interactional practices may in fact achieve the opposite.
Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, May 15, 2020
The globalization of English-based technology has caused the present-day Arab generation to rely ... more The globalization of English-based technology has caused the present-day Arab generation to rely on the use of the Latin script as the main writing system when communicating through the electronic medium in Spoken Arabic (SA). This has raised fears for the preservation of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the traditional orthography of Arabic. This study presents the attitudes of Arab adolescents in northern Israel towards the use of Arabizi (Latinized Arabic) in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), and towards MSA. The data were collected via a questionnaire completed by 8th grade students. The questions were divided into three different themes: (1) Demographic data, (2) The degree of control of communication with Arabizi in CMC, and (3) Subjects’ attitude towards Arabizi and MSA. The results show that although the students all use Arabizi and report that it is easier and more accessible to them, they consider MSA important and valuable, as it is related to their identity as Arabs.
Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, Nov 1, 2019
Expressive writing-Who is it good for? Individual differences in the improvement of mental health... more Expressive writing-Who is it good for? Individual differences in the improvement of mental health resulting from expressive writing,
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Sep 23, 2022
Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and writ... more Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and written discourse. Speakers’ ability to change and adjust language according to the communicative circumstances is a prominent factor that demonstrates their linguistic literacy and skill. Nonetheless, few studies have explored the characterization of discursively motivated variation in sign languages, and little is known about the topic. The purpose of the current study is to present features of variation in Israeli Sign Language as they appear in two discourse types—narrative versus expository texts. We present this aspect of linguistic literacy as it is expressed in two case studies of two adult signers in two domains: sign parameters and the use of signing space. The findings reveal a discourse type effect on the way that these aspects are expressed and highlight the importance of discourse and linguistic knowledge to educators of deaf students.
The present study joins recent endeavors within Construction Grammar to recognize constructions t... more The present study joins recent endeavors within Construction Grammar to recognize constructions that are beyond clauses and sentences and function as schematic frames for the organization of discourse. Specifically, it deals with two particular instances of what is termed adiscourse pattern, the conventionalized combination of genre and text-type: a personal experience narrative and an expository discussion of a personal opinion on an abstract topic. The paper discusses findings from various studies that characterize usage of lexical and clause-level constructions in the course of producing texts based on the two discourse patterns, and contrasts these findings with quantitative and qualitative analyses of clause combining in the same texts. The study relies on a corpus of 40 texts collected from Hebrew speaker-writers, who each produced a narrative and an expository text following a semi-structured elicitation controlling for the components offield,tenor, andmode. The distributional and functional findings of the study suggest that discourse patterns, like other constructions, occupy a cline of idiomacity/schematicity. In its conclusion, the study considers the tangential and intersecting points between Construction Grammar, on the one hand, and discourse analysis, on the other.
We present a corpus of transcribed spoken Hebrew that forms an integral part of a comprehensive d... more We present a corpus of transcribed spoken Hebrew that forms an integral part of a comprehensive data system that has been developed to suit the specific needs and interests of child language researchers: CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System). We introduce a dedicated transcription scheme for the spoken Hebrew data that is aware both of the phonology and of the standard orthography of the language. We also introduce a morphological analyzer that was specifically developed for this corpus.
The goal of the present study is to examine whether clause-combining rhetorical preferences that ... more The goal of the present study is to examine whether clause-combining rhetorical preferences that differentiate between Hebrew and English are maintained across grammars, specifically, in the context of text production in a non-native language. It examines the usage of various bi-clausal constructions marking different levels of event integration in texts written by advanced speakers of English, all native monolingual Hebrew speakers. The data analyzed consist of personal experience narratives that were collected from high-school and university-level students. These texts are compared to narratives that were collected from native speakers of both languages following the same design of study. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show differences and similarities between the three populations in terms of clause-combining strategies. They reveal that not only the constraints of the L1 but mainly those of the L2 guide non-native speakers in their choice of bi-clausal constructions, as devices expressing event integration. Results further show that event integration is reflected by constructions at different levels of the grammatical system, and that constraints on bi-clausal constructions at the more local, morpho-syntactic level are echoed by constraints at the level of discourse itself as a construction.
Trends in language acquisition research, Aug 15, 2016
The chapter relies on the notion of dependency marking as a framework for a reinterpretation of d... more The chapter relies on the notion of dependency marking as a framework for a reinterpretation of data on syntactic development in Hebrew from early childhood to adulthood. Following a short outline of how grammatical dependencies are realized in Hebrew, I explore the emergence of dependencies in both simple (single-clause) and complex (clause-combining) syntax. In each case, concern is with the transition from isolated, to non-dependent, to partially dependent, and eventually to fully dependent combinations as markers of functional dependency, in the sense of integration of how events are represented verbally both within and across clause boundaries.
HaCohen et al. (2018)identified three types of narratives that emerge in the context of integrati... more 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.
Learning multimorphemic words involves the simultaneous learning of two hierarchically organized ... more Learning multimorphemic words involves the simultaneous learning of two hierarchically organized categories. In such words, sub-lexical units usually encode superordinate categories, whereas whole words encode exemplars of these categories. Complex, non-linear word structure is common in Semitic languages and can be used to probe the learning of multiple form-meaning associations. The aim of this study was to investigate how well Hebrew-speaking adults learn the dual form-meaning relationships that reflect different categorical levels following a few exposures to novel Hebrew-like words. Twenty-four native Hebrew-speakers were exposed to novel words through an interactive video story. Following a few exposures to the words, the learning of the exemplars was tested in a three-alternative-forced-choice identification test. The learning of the sub-lexical morphemes and the categories they encode were tested in generalization tests. The results show that a few exposures to novel, morpho...
HaCohen et al. (2018)identified three types of narratives that emerge in the context of integrati... more 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-sensiti...
The paper re-appraises accepted classifications of linguistic elements into word-level constructi... more The paper re-appraises accepted classifications of linguistic elements into word-level constructions on the one hand and in terms of Parts-of-Speech systems on the other from the point of view of Construction Grammar (CxG). We focus on a particular adverbial construction in Hebrew, with the surface form PrepOC, where “Prep” is one of the four basic prepositions in the language and OC stands for fixed forms of a lexically restricted group of Nouns, Verbs, or Adjectives. We analyze these constructions as having an “intermediate” status, in terms of elements lying between those that express concrete conceptual content and those that activate an abstract grammatical schema. The special nature of these and other intermediate word-level constructions in Hebrew is demonstrated experimentally in sentential contexts, and their functional, structural, and distributional properties are analyzed in the discursive context of a large corpus of authentic texts, both oral and written. Evidence from...
Journal of interactional research in communication disorders, Jun 17, 2021
Background: The study investigates how clinicians achieve balance between the needs of the instit... more Background: The study investigates how clinicians achieve balance between the needs of the institution and the promotion of the child’s agency and volition. Method: Our data are taken from the opening segments of 16 sessions recorded by 8 speech clinicians during their meetings with 11 children with some form of speech and language disorder. We focus on four segments, and our analysis is based on the combined insights of three approaches to the analysis of talk: conversation analysis (CA), dialogic syntax (DS), and discourse pragmatics (DP). Results: The extended and integrated analyses of the segments illustrate different ways in which the clinicians and the children negotiate intersubjectivity in the speech-language therapy (SLT) session, focusing on the use of the verb for ‘to want’ in Hebrew. Discussion and conclusion: The study demonstrates that while clinicians may perceive their action of employing question constructions with the verb for ‘to want’ as addressing the interlocutor’s will, their interactional practices may in fact achieve the opposite.
Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, May 15, 2020
The globalization of English-based technology has caused the present-day Arab generation to rely ... more The globalization of English-based technology has caused the present-day Arab generation to rely on the use of the Latin script as the main writing system when communicating through the electronic medium in Spoken Arabic (SA). This has raised fears for the preservation of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the traditional orthography of Arabic. This study presents the attitudes of Arab adolescents in northern Israel towards the use of Arabizi (Latinized Arabic) in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), and towards MSA. The data were collected via a questionnaire completed by 8th grade students. The questions were divided into three different themes: (1) Demographic data, (2) The degree of control of communication with Arabizi in CMC, and (3) Subjects’ attitude towards Arabizi and MSA. The results show that although the students all use Arabizi and report that it is easier and more accessible to them, they consider MSA important and valuable, as it is related to their identity as Arabs.
Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, Nov 1, 2019
Expressive writing-Who is it good for? Individual differences in the improvement of mental health... more Expressive writing-Who is it good for? Individual differences in the improvement of mental health resulting from expressive writing,
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Sep 23, 2022
Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and writ... more Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and written discourse. Speakers’ ability to change and adjust language according to the communicative circumstances is a prominent factor that demonstrates their linguistic literacy and skill. Nonetheless, few studies have explored the characterization of discursively motivated variation in sign languages, and little is known about the topic. The purpose of the current study is to present features of variation in Israeli Sign Language as they appear in two discourse types—narrative versus expository texts. We present this aspect of linguistic literacy as it is expressed in two case studies of two adult signers in two domains: sign parameters and the use of signing space. The findings reveal a discourse type effect on the way that these aspects are expressed and highlight the importance of discourse and linguistic knowledge to educators of deaf students.
The present study joins recent endeavors within Construction Grammar to recognize constructions t... more The present study joins recent endeavors within Construction Grammar to recognize constructions that are beyond clauses and sentences and function as schematic frames for the organization of discourse. Specifically, it deals with two particular instances of what is termed adiscourse pattern, the conventionalized combination of genre and text-type: a personal experience narrative and an expository discussion of a personal opinion on an abstract topic. The paper discusses findings from various studies that characterize usage of lexical and clause-level constructions in the course of producing texts based on the two discourse patterns, and contrasts these findings with quantitative and qualitative analyses of clause combining in the same texts. The study relies on a corpus of 40 texts collected from Hebrew speaker-writers, who each produced a narrative and an expository text following a semi-structured elicitation controlling for the components offield,tenor, andmode. The distributional and functional findings of the study suggest that discourse patterns, like other constructions, occupy a cline of idiomacity/schematicity. In its conclusion, the study considers the tangential and intersecting points between Construction Grammar, on the one hand, and discourse analysis, on the other.
We present a corpus of transcribed spoken Hebrew that forms an integral part of a comprehensive d... more We present a corpus of transcribed spoken Hebrew that forms an integral part of a comprehensive data system that has been developed to suit the specific needs and interests of child language researchers: CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System). We introduce a dedicated transcription scheme for the spoken Hebrew data that is aware both of the phonology and of the standard orthography of the language. We also introduce a morphological analyzer that was specifically developed for this corpus.
The goal of the present study is to examine whether clause-combining rhetorical preferences that ... more The goal of the present study is to examine whether clause-combining rhetorical preferences that differentiate between Hebrew and English are maintained across grammars, specifically, in the context of text production in a non-native language. It examines the usage of various bi-clausal constructions marking different levels of event integration in texts written by advanced speakers of English, all native monolingual Hebrew speakers. The data analyzed consist of personal experience narratives that were collected from high-school and university-level students. These texts are compared to narratives that were collected from native speakers of both languages following the same design of study. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show differences and similarities between the three populations in terms of clause-combining strategies. They reveal that not only the constraints of the L1 but mainly those of the L2 guide non-native speakers in their choice of bi-clausal constructions, as devices expressing event integration. Results further show that event integration is reflected by constructions at different levels of the grammatical system, and that constraints on bi-clausal constructions at the more local, morpho-syntactic level are echoed by constraints at the level of discourse itself as a construction.
Trends in language acquisition research, Aug 15, 2016
The chapter relies on the notion of dependency marking as a framework for a reinterpretation of d... more The chapter relies on the notion of dependency marking as a framework for a reinterpretation of data on syntactic development in Hebrew from early childhood to adulthood. Following a short outline of how grammatical dependencies are realized in Hebrew, I explore the emergence of dependencies in both simple (single-clause) and complex (clause-combining) syntax. In each case, concern is with the transition from isolated, to non-dependent, to partially dependent, and eventually to fully dependent combinations as markers of functional dependency, in the sense of integration of how events are represented verbally both within and across clause boundaries.
HaCohen et al. (2018)identified three types of narratives that emerge in the context of integrati... more 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.
Learning multimorphemic words involves the simultaneous learning of two hierarchically organized ... more Learning multimorphemic words involves the simultaneous learning of two hierarchically organized categories. In such words, sub-lexical units usually encode superordinate categories, whereas whole words encode exemplars of these categories. Complex, non-linear word structure is common in Semitic languages and can be used to probe the learning of multiple form-meaning associations. The aim of this study was to investigate how well Hebrew-speaking adults learn the dual form-meaning relationships that reflect different categorical levels following a few exposures to novel Hebrew-like words. Twenty-four native Hebrew-speakers were exposed to novel words through an interactive video story. Following a few exposures to the words, the learning of the exemplars was tested in a three-alternative-forced-choice identification test. The learning of the sub-lexical morphemes and the categories they encode were tested in generalization tests. The results show that a few exposures to novel, morpho...
HaCohen et al. (2018)identified three types of narratives that emerge in the context of integrati... more 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-sensiti...
The paper re-appraises accepted classifications of linguistic elements into word-level constructi... more The paper re-appraises accepted classifications of linguistic elements into word-level constructions on the one hand and in terms of Parts-of-Speech systems on the other from the point of view of Construction Grammar (CxG). We focus on a particular adverbial construction in Hebrew, with the surface form PrepOC, where “Prep” is one of the four basic prepositions in the language and OC stands for fixed forms of a lexically restricted group of Nouns, Verbs, or Adjectives. We analyze these constructions as having an “intermediate” status, in terms of elements lying between those that express concrete conceptual content and those that activate an abstract grammatical schema. The special nature of these and other intermediate word-level constructions in Hebrew is demonstrated experimentally in sentential contexts, and their functional, structural, and distributional properties are analyzed in the discursive context of a large corpus of authentic texts, both oral and written. Evidence from...
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