1502 阅读 2020-10-05 09:16:02 上传
以下文章来源于 临床语言学
香港理工大学
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Ranked 45 in the world in Linguistics, QS World University Rankings by Subject 2020
Department: Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies
Project Topic funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council:
Revisiting Non-word Repetition as a diagnostic tool in Cantonese-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder
Project Info
Nonword Repetition (NWR) tasks are used cross-linguistically to discriminate between children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; more recently “Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)”, Bishop et al., 2016) and their typically-developing peers. NWR has been described as a clinical marker of SLI/DLD, and is one of the most sensitive measures in identifying bilingual children with SLI/DLD (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). NWR has been shown to not discriminate between Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD (Stokes, Wong, Fletcher & Leonard, 2006), making Cantonese an interesting exception cross-linguistically. However, little published research has revisited this line of investigation in child Cantonese.
Our project re-examines the diagnostic accuracy of non-word repetition (NWR) in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in child Cantonese. The project addresses these important issues: first, are there ways to improve the diagnostic strength of NWR in identifying DLD in Cantonese? Second, what abilities underlie the ability of Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD to repeat non-words?
Our project adapts the quasi-universal NWR task from the European COST Action IS0804 “Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Pattern and the Road to Assessment” into Cantonese to assess Hong Kong children with and without DLD. This task has been shown to be better at disentangling language impairment and language disadvantage due to less language experience than more language-specific measures in some languages. We will compare it with two other NWR tasks with more and less Cantonese word-like stimuli respectively, to evaluate their differentiation of Cantonese children with and without DLD. A number of predictor variables are included to evaluate the underlying abilities assessed by our NWR tasks, to shed light on the nature and source of difficulty of NWR tasks for Cantonese children with DLD. The findings allow us to better understand the nature of difficulties in NWR in children with and without DLD. The project also has important societal impact as it will lay necessary groundwork for further research on using NWR measures to improve the identification of DLD in Cantonese-speaking bilingual children, an important area largely lacking assessment tools.
Expected Application Date
Postdoc: open until the position is filled
PhD student: around Sep 2020
Research Assistant: open until the position is filled
Expected Start Date
4 January 2021
Stipend & Benefits
Postdoc: Amount of Monthly Salary HK$22,880 (or higher subject to academic standing, for 2 years)
PhD student: Amount of Monthly Stipend HK$18,100 (for 3 years)
Research assistant: Amount of Monthly Salary HK$15,000 (for 1 to 2 years)
Postdoc: Conference Allowance HK$20,000
PhD student: Conference and Research Related Travel Allowance max. of HK$25,000 for the entire study period
PhD student: Associated money HK$20,000 per normal study year (3 years in total)
Strong intellectual support: co-supervised by Dr. Angel Chan (PolyU), Prof. Shula Chiat (City University of London), Dr. Rachel Kan (PolyU), Dr. Kamila Polišenská (University of Manchester)
Promising prospects in publishing in a number of high impact journals (e.g. former PhD student able to publish in "Journal of Child Language", "Applied Psycholinguistics", “Cognition” and having 2 more publications in the pipeline)
Opportunity to test children in a number of linguistic/cognitive experimental tasks
Expectations
Preferably a good PhD/master/BA degree in Linguistics/Psycholinguistics/Speech Therapy with relevant training in Cantonese phonology and language development and disorders
Preferably a native or near-native speaker of Cantonese
Preferably knowledge and proficiency in statistics
Preferably some experience in testing young children
Good academic English writing skills
Promising publication records (for postdoc)
Willing to transcribe and code massive experimental data (especially for PhD student and RA)
Contact
Interested candidates please email Dr. Angel Chan at angel.ws.chan@polyu.edu.hk with their CV, English proficiency test scores, academic transcripts, academic English writing sample(s), publication samples (if any) as soon as possible.
Subject line of the email:
PDF/PhD/RA opportunity in research project on non-word repetition abilities in Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD
Shortlisted candidates will be contacted further.
