Hanne Gram Simonsen

Hanne Gram Simonsen
University of Oslo · Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies; MultiLing Center of Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan

PhD

About

87
Publications
20,429
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1,258
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Introduction
My main fields of research are language acquisition (in particular the acquisition of phonology, morphology, and lexicon in a cross-linguistic and multilingual perspective) clinical linguistics (in particular language disorders in children and in adults with aphasia or dementia), and instrumental phonetics (with EPG (electropalatography), EMA (electromagnetic articulography), and ultrasound). I also work with development and adaptation of language assessment tools.
Additional affiliations
January 1990 - present
University of Oslo
Position
  • Professor (Full)
Education
February 1968 - August 1968
University of Geneva
Field of study
  • French
August 1965 - December 1990
University of Oslo
Field of study
  • English, French, Pedagogy, Major in Linguistics

Publications

Publications (87)
Article
This publication provides an overview of research on a large range of topics relating to language processing and language use from a life-span perspective. It is unique in covering and combining psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches, discussing questions such as: Is it beneficial to speak more than one language when growing old? How are l...
Article
In this article, we present a study of imageability ratings for a set of 1599 Norwegian words (896 nouns, 483 verbs and 220 adjectives) from a web-based survey. To a large extent, the results are in accordance with previous studies of other languages: high imageability scores in general, higher imageability scores for nouns than for verbs, and an i...
Article
This article presents results from a large population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories, comprising 6574 children between 8 and 36 months. Data were collected via the Internet. In accordance with similar studies from other languages,...
Article
In this article, we explore the naming skills of a bilingual English-Norwegian speaker diagnosed with Primary Progressive Aphasia, in each of his languages across three different speech contexts: confrontation naming, semi-spontaneous narrative (picture description), and conversation, and at two points in time: 12 and 30 months post diagnosis, resp...
Article
Full-text available
Young children simplify word initial consonant clusters by omitting or substituting one (or both) of the elements. Vocalic insertion, coalescence and metathesis are said to be used more seldom (McLeod, van Doorn & Reed, 2001). Data from Norwegian children, however, have shown vocalic insertion to be more frequently used (Simonsen, 1990; Simonsen, G...
Article
Full-text available
Aims and objectives This study investigates how multilingual speakers with dementia mobilise their multilingual and interactional resources when searching for words in a naming test setting, and how their word-search behaviour relates to lexical retrieval processes characteristic of multilinguals, as well as to aspects of cognitive decline. Method...
Preprint
Full-text available
Studies with monolingual speakers show that people predict upcoming linguistic elements during sentence processing. Linguistic prediction behavior has been found to be less consistent in studies with bilingual individuals performing in their non-native language and in neurotypical older monolingual adults. The present study utilized an eye-tracking...
Article
5p deletion syndrome is a rare genetic condition associated with severe speech and language problems. In general, research on speech and language skills is scarce, but there is more knowledge on phonetic and phonological skills than on lexical and grammatical skills. And till now no studies have addressed the relationship between grammar and vocabu...
Article
Background Standardised aphasia assessment tools may not always be available in a variety of languages, posing challenges for speech and language therapists to adequately assess and diagnose aphasia in speakers of those languages. In 2013, Working Group 2 (WG2) Aphasia Assessment & Outcomes, part of the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists network, w...
Chapter
Persons with dementia (PWD) experience language impairments, mainly related to lexical retrieval. Linguistic assessment of multilingual PWD is particularly challenging due to a lack of appropriate tools. Narrative production may provide a broader understanding of the language impairments in dementia. Thus, we investigate narrative production in L1...
Poster
Full-text available
Little is known about the impact of bi-/multilingualism on L1 morphosyntactic/morphosemantic production. Given the coactivation of lexical representations encoding specific morphosyntactic/morphosemantic features (e.g., past reference) in bi-/multilinguals, one could presume that amount of use and proficiency level in their L2/foreign languages mig...
Article
Background: To be able to conduct comparative research on aphasia assessment and rehabilitation across languages, there is a need for comparable assessment tools. Croatian and Norwegian are among the first languages for which the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT) versions have been published within the Working Group 2 of the Collaboration of Aphasia...
Chapter
This chapter demonstrates how problem-based peer group mentoring in groups can facilitate change and learning in an organisation. This is exemplified by a 5-year project at a humanities faculty at a large, research-based university, where the supervisors of master’s students discussed their supervision-related problems in groups following a strictl...
Article
Full-text available
Cognates, words that are similar in form and meaning across two languages, form compelling test cases for bilingual access and representation. Overwhelmingly, cognate pairs are subjectively selected in a categorical either- or manner, often with criteria and modality unspecified. Yet the few studies that take a more nuanced approach, selecting cogn...
Article
Full-text available
ABSTRACT Background: Ivanova and Hallowell 2013 emphasise the importance of reporting on test development and psychometric properties of tests in international journals. Such documentation may serve as references for other test developers and enable researchers and clinicians to assess reliability and validity issues in tests made for a language u...
Article
Full-text available
To date, the evidence regarding the effect of bilingualism/multilingualism on short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) capacity is inconclusive. This study investigates whether multilingualism has a positive effect on the verbal STM and WM capacity of neuro-typical middle-aged and older individuals. Eighty-two L1-Norwegian sequential bilingu...
Poster
Full-text available
Eye tracking can be used to measure language processing in real-time and without a need for an overt response. This is particularly advantageous for studies with participants with aphasia (PWA) – a language impairment resulting from brain lesion – who have language production deficits. Previous eye tracking studies show that neurologically healthy...
Article
Full-text available
Social sciences researchers emphasize that new technologies can overcome the limitations of small and homogenous samples. In research on early language development, which often uses parental reports, taking the testing online might be particularly compelling. Due to logistical limitations, previous studies on bilingual children have explored the la...
Chapter
Full-text available
In this chapter, we discuss insights gathered from developing comparable language versions of child language assessment tools in different geographic, linguistic and sociocultural contexts. We use two tools as case studies: the LITMUS Crosslinguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT), which has been developed for more than 25 languages and assesses the comprehen...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we investigate a prosodic-phonetic feature in child-directed speech within a dynamic, complex, interactive theoretical framework. We focus on vocalic intrusions, commonly occurring in Norwegian word initial consonant clusters. We analysed child-directed speech from nine Norwegian-speaking mothers to their children, aged 2;6, 4, and 6...
Book
The aim of the present volume is to provide an authoritative overview of research on multilingualism and ageing. Multilingualism exists in all countries, partly for historical reasons, but currently also because large numbers of people are moving into different countries due to wars, conflicts, and more general trends of globalisation. Furthermore,...
Chapter
This publication provides an overview of research on a large range of topics relating to language processing and language use from a life-span perspective. It is unique in covering and combining psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches, discussing questions such as: Is it beneficial to speak more than one language when growing old? How are l...
Article
Full-text available
This preliminary study tested cross-linguistic structural priming of passives in two groups of adult bilinguals speaking Norwegian-English and Norwegian-Turkish to understand the nature of syntactic mental representations in bilingual minds. Passives in spoken Norwegian are structurally similar to those in English, whereas passives in Turkish are d...
Article
Full-text available
According to the Norwegian Framework Plan for Kindergartens (Ministry of Education 2017: 24), the staff shall ‘monitor the children’s communication and language and identify and support children who demonstrate various types of communication problems, who are not linguistically active, or who show signs of delayed language development’. As a first...
Article
Full-text available
The study investigates code-switching by multilingual persons with dementia in two different speech contexts, picture naming tests and spontaneous conversation. It combines a psycholinguistic perspective on cognitive and linguistic skills with a qualitative conversation analytic approach to understanding the functions and appropriateness of code-sw...
Article
In this article, we report the results of a large-scale population study based on the Latvian adaptation of Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) – a parental report tool aimed at mapping the lexical and grammatical development of children under the age of three. Two CDI forms are discussed: CDI I: ‘Words and Gestures’ (8–16 months), and CDI...
Article
Full-text available
The mental lexicon is dynamic and changes throughout the lifespan, but how does it begin? Previous research has established that children's first words depend on their communicative needs, but also on their phonetic repertoire and phonological preferences. In this paper, we focus on the phonological characteristics of children's first words, primar...
Article
Purpose As a contribution to the endeavour of developing appropriate tools for bilingual language assessment, this paper investigates the concurrence between two new tools from the recent COST Action IS0804 (Bi-SLI), and the differences between children across two different migrant communities. Approach Two new tools from the battery Language Impa...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Verb retrieval is challenging for monolingual and multilingual speakers with aphasia. Previous research on bilingual aphasia shows equivocal results of cross-linguistic transfer and inhibition. Aims: This study explores the impact of verb-production treatment in the treated and untreated languages of two bilingual speakers with aphasia....
Article
Full-text available
Imageability is a psycholinguistic variable that indicates how well a word gives rise to a mental image or sensory experience. Imageability ratings are used extensively in psycholinguistic, neuropsychological, and aphasiological studies. However, little formal knowledge exists about whether and how these ratings are associated between and within la...
Article
This paper is the Editorial to the Special Issue: ‘Testing Vocabulary in Bilingual Children across Languages’ of Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics.
Article
Whole word phonological patterns (templates) in utterances produced by children with 5p deletion syndrome are analysed, addressing four questions: (1) Are children with 5p deletion syndrome able to generalise over words? (2) How does the template score of children with 5p deletion syndrome relate to those of typically developing children and of the...
Article
Full-text available
Comparative research on aphasia and aphasia rehabilitation is challenged by the lack of comparable assessment tools across different languages. In English, a large array of tools is available, while in most other languages, the selection is more limited. Importantly, assessment tools are often simple translations and do not take into consideration...
Article
Full-text available
This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledg...
Article
The novel assessment tool Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT) aims for comparable cross-linguistic assessment of multilingual children’s lexical skills by basing each language version on two language-specific variables: age of acquisition (AoA) and complexity index (CI), a novel measure related to phonology, morphology, exposure and etymolo...
Chapter
Full-text available
This study 1 investigates the acquisition of the V:C vs VC: contrast in (Urban Eastern) Norwegian for sonorants and voiceless plosives. We find that by 2;6 years children already differentiate between these structures in their own productions, and do so most reliably through proportion of vowel duration in the rhyme (V/VC), with values close to the...
Poster
Full-text available
The establishment of this research network is funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST). For more information please visit www.aphasiatrials.org
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Stem-, Spraak-, en Taalpathologie
Conference Paper
This paper examines how young children negotiate complex mappings between phonological structure and durational cues in their early productions, and explores how competition between multiple uses of temporal properties may influence the acquisition pathway. Findings suggest children switch priorities as they develop, possibly as a result of masteri...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper examines how young children negotiate complex mappings between phonological structure and durational cues in their early productions, and explores how competition between multiple uses of temporal properties may influence the acquisition pathway. Findings suggest children switch priorities as they develop, possibly as a result of masteri...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Semantic feature analysis (SFA) is a treatment approach aimed at enhancing lexical retrieval by improving access to the semantic network in speakers with aphasia. Although there are promising results on trained items, previous studies exploring the impact of SFA on verb production in monolingual speakers have shown mixed results for gen...
Article
Abstract All words have properties linked to form, meaning and usage patterns which influence how easily they are accessed from the mental lexicon in language production, perception and comprehension. Examples of such properties are imageability, phonological and morphological complexity, word class, argument structure, frequency of use and age of...
Article
Abstract This article focuses on consonant productions by a group of children with cri du chat syndrome (CdCS) and examines how various aspects of these productions contribute to these children's overall intelligibility. Eight children and adolescents with CdCS participated in the study, and the following four questions were addressed: (1) What are...
Article
This is a reply to the comments by Sverre Stausland Johnsen, Janne Bondi Johannessen, and Bert Vaux to our article from 2008 entitled “Norwegian retroflex stops in a cross linguistic perspective” (Simonsen, Moen, & Cowen, 2008). We focus on methods, and discuss advantages and problems in the use of EPG and EMA in investigations of articulation and...
Article
This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0 ; 8 and 3 ; 0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data via...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, the Norwegian retroflex fricative /ʂ/ is investigated through the combined use of electropalatography (EPG) and electromagnetic articulography (EMA) based on four informants. Cross linguistic investigations of retroflex consonants have shown that there are three characteristics often present in their articulation: an apical articulat...
Article
Functionally relevant assessment of the language production of speakers with aphasia should include assessment of connected speech production. Despite the ecological validity of everyday conversations, more controlled and monological types of texts may be easier to obtain and analyse in clinical practice. This article discusses some simple measurem...
Article
The Electronic database of Norwegian speech sounds under development at the University of Oslo is intended to be a resource for phonetic research and practice. Beside its theoretical contribution as a research tool and as a basis for cross-linguistic comparison, one of the primary goals is for the database to be a tool that can assist in the treatm...
Article
The present study uses electropalatography (EPG) and electromagnetic articulography (EMA) in the description of the articulation of the two East Norwegian fricatives /∫/ and /ç/ in the speech of seven normal adult speakers. The motivation for studying these two phonemes is twofold: there is a merger between the places of articulation of these two f...
Article
Full-text available
A number of relatively non-invasive recording and transduction techniques for the analysis and description of continuous speech are now available to the speech scientist and speech pathologist. Two of these techniques are electropalatograpy (EPG) and electromagnetic articulography (EMA). The use of EPG allows us to record and display details of the...
Article
The present study investigated the brain mechanisms involved during young children's receptive familiarization with new words, and whether the dynamics of these mechanisms are related to the child's productive vocabulary size. To this end, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 20-month-old children in a pseudoword repetition task. Result...
Article
This paper examines the findings and implications of the cross-linguistic acquisition of #sC clusters in relation to sonority patterns. Data from individual studies on English, Dutch, Norwegian, and Hebrew are compared for accuracy of production as well as the reductions with respect to potential differences across subtypes of #sC groups. In all fo...
Article
In this paper, Norwegian retroflex stops are investigated through the combined use of electropalatography (EPG) and electromagnetic articulography (EMA), with extensive and detailed data from four informants. Cross linguistic investigations have shown considerable articulatory variation in retroflex consonants regarding both place of articulation a...
Article
Full-text available
Although it is well documented that children undergo a productive vocabulary spurt late in the second year, it is unclear whether this development is accompanied by equally significant advances in receptive word processing. In the present study, we tested an electrophysiological procedure for assessing receptive word learning in young children, and...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
How do speakers with fluent aphasia adapt strategically to difficulties caused by anomia in their speech production? And how does their linguistic behaviour inform our knowledge of the general structure and processing of the mental lexicon? In the present study, we analyse aspects of the language production of two native Norwegians with fluent apha...
Article
The article reports on a comparative study of the abilities of aphasic speakers and normal control subjects to comprehend and produce verbs and sentences. The analysis is based on test results obtained as part of the standardization procedure for a test battery originally developed for Dutch and since translated and adapted for English and Norwegia...
Article
Deviances in early event-related potential (ERP) components reflecting auditory and phonological processing are well-documented in children at familial risk for dyslexia. However, little is known about brain responses which index processing in other linguistic domains such as lexicon, semantics and syntax in this group. The present study investigat...
Article
While the N400 component in adults is sensitive to both semantic incongruity and semantic relatedness between stimulus items, the N400 in toddlers has only been shown as an incongruity effect so far. The present event-related potential (ERP) study aimed to investigate whether the N400 in toddlers also indexes semantic relatedness between single wor...
Article
Specifically language impaired (SLI) children are known to have particular problems with morphology. Their morphological competence varies, however, in accordance with the morphological structure of the language they are learning. This article examines the past tense inflection of verbs in Norwegian, a Germanic language with a verbal morphology sim...
Article
Full-text available
En test utviklet for å undersøke tilegnelse av preteritumsformer hos barn er gitt til en gruppe afasirammede, det vil si voksne med språkvansker etter fokal hjerneskade. Testen består av bilder av 60 verb representative for de tre store verbklassene i bokmål. De afasirammedes responser sammenlignes med resultatene fra normalspråklige voksne og Alzh...
Article
In ERP studies of adults, semantic incongruities elicit a late negative response called the N400. Recently it was demonstrated that the amplitude of the N400 is sensitive to the organization of semantic categories in memory. The present study sought to investigate whether a similar incongruity response can be identified in children in their second...
Article
This study investigates the acquisition of two-element word-initial consonant clusters in 27 Norwegian children aged 21–36 months. We have focussed on clusters starting with a sibilant (S-clusters), comparing them with clusters without a sibilant (non-S-clusters). Overall, non-S-clusters were mastered more successfully than S-clusters – mainly rela...
Article
The present study uses electropalatography (EPG) and electromagnetic articulography (EMA) in the description of the articulation of the two East Norwegian fricatives [symbols: see text] in the speech of seven normal adult speakers. The motivation for studying these two phonemes is twofold: there is a merger between the places of articulation of the...
Article
Full-text available
Artikkelen presenterer en norsk kasusstudie av hvordan en afasirammet mann mestrer fortidsbøyning av verb i fri samtale og i en kontrollert testsituasjon. Resultatet av studien viser en markant forskjell mellom de to situasjonene. I fri samtale bruker den afasirammede svært få verb og svært få fortidsbøyde former. Til tross for dette greier han ved...
Article
Full-text available
Icelandic and Norwegian past tense morphology contain strong patterns of inflection and two weak patterns of inflection. We report the results of an elicitation task that tests Icelandic and Norwegian children's knowledge of the past tense forms of a representative sample of verbs. This cross-sectional study of four-, six- and eight-year-old Icelan...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Hanne Gram Simonsen. Phonological Fillers: Data from Norwegian. IN: Almgren, M.; Barrena, A.; Ezeizabarrena, M.J.; Idiazabal, I.; MacWhinney, B. (eds.): Research on Child Language Acquisition. From: Almgren, M.; Barrena, A.; Ezeizabarrena, M.J.; Idiazabal, I.; MacWhinney, B. (eds.): Research on Child Language Acquisition.
Article
Introduction How do children acquire the past tense of verbs? By rote or by rule? Maybe both? What kind of rules? Is there developmental change over time? These are questions one would like to answer for all languages, including the Scandinavian ones, which we are focussing on. We want to see how acquisition takes place for both weak (regular) and...
Article
The typological variation between the Nordic languages offers a “natural laboratory” for the cross-linguistic study of first language acquisition. Based on an on-going inter-Nordic project, the present article discusses research designs for the exploration of this laboratory together with pilot analyses of acquisition data across Danish, Finnish, I...
Article
Full-text available
This investigation is a pilot study aiming to identify suitable tools for assessing the linguistic competence of AD patients, compared to aphasics and normal elderly controls. A picture test eliciting past tense forms of Norwegian verbs, originally developed for testing children's development of past tense inflection, has previously also been used...

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