Kleanthes K. Grohmann

University of Cyprus · Department of English Studies

This volume is based on the conference ‘Heritage Languages and Variation (HELV)’, which was held at the University of Cyprus in September 2022. It brings together interdisciplinary research from the fields of heritage language study and language variation with a critical eye towards examining issues of bi- and multilingualism, heritage language acq...

This volume is based on the conference ‘Heritage Languages and Variation (HELV)’, which was held at the University of Cyprus in September 2022. It brings together interdisciplinary research from the fields of heritage language study and language variation with a critical eye towards examining issues of bi- and multilingualism, heritage language acq...

In today’s global society, an increasing number of people speak a few widely spoken languages enjoying high standardisation and official recognition. Meanwhile, minority and local languages are gaining interest from specialists and society. This volume explores the rich topic of bi(dia)lectal repertoires, focusing on their grammatical as well as at...

This volume collects research on language, cognition, and communication in multilingualism. Apart from theoretical concerns including grammatical description, language-specific analyses, and modeling of multilingualism, different fields of study and research interests center around three core themes: The Early Years (aspects of language acquisition...

The ability of persons with non-fluent aphasia (PWAs) to produce sentential negation has been investigated in several languages, but only in small samples. Accounts of (morpho)syntactic impairment in PWAs have emphasized various factors, such as whether the negative marker blocks or interferes with verb movement, the position of the Negation Phrase...

Research on language in Cyprus is relatively recent. The first wave emphasized the sociolinguistic situation of the local language variety/dialect, which was supplemented by studies concerning attitudes towards Cypriot Greek vs. Standard Modern Greek. This was followed up by more systematic investigations into the grammar of Cypriot Greek: Other th...

This paper presents the results of the first study within a perceptual dialectology framework in the Greek-speaking community in Cyprus. Thirty participants from three age groups of equal size took part in a sociolinguistic interview. As part of the language module component of the interview, they discussed their beliefs about regional variation in...

Biolinguistics essentially stems from Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and is very much a child of its times, especially through the influence of Eric Lenneberg on Chomsky’s thinking.

This study investigates the acquisition of grammatical gender in Heritage Greek as acquired by children (6–8 years of age) and adolescents (15–18 years) growing up in Adelaide, South Australia. The determiner elicitation task from Varlokosta (2005) was employed to assess the role of morphological and semantic cues when it comes to gender assignment...

Coordination of international aphasia research would minimise duplication of effort, support synergistic international activities across languages and multidisciplinary perspectives, and promote high-quality conduct and reporting of aphasia research, thereby increasing the relevance, transparency, and implementation of findings. The Collaboration o...

Variation involving a switch between pre- and post-verbal placement of pronominal object clitics in a single syntactic environment within a language is unexpected. The rationale why this would not be expected is clear: Languages pattern as either proclitic or enclitic with respect to object clitic placement, possibly allowing one or the other optio...

It may be the case that linguists “would rather share each other’s toothbrush than each other’s terminology”—but so what? There are many situations that might prompt the sharing of toothbrushes…

In this paper, reconstruction for Binding Principles A and C will be (re)considered in 'wh'-slifting, a construction which appears to associate a 'wh'-interrogative clause with a yes/no-interrogative clause, whose predicate typically selects propositions rather than questions. While the current view is that both binding principles bleed in 'wh'-sli...

Is Merge really in the brain or is it kept in the mind? Kleanthes Grohmann takes aim at Juan Uriagereka’s review of Language in Our Brain, by Angela Friederici.

The aim of this work is to identify and analyze a set of challenges that are likely to be encountered when one embarks on fieldwork in linguistic communities that feature small, young, and/or non-standard languages with a goal to elicit big sets of rich data. For each challenge, we (i) explain its nature and implications, (ii) offer one or more exa...

The language abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are highly variable. More insight is needed into the mechanisms that underlie co-morbid language impairments (LI) in children with ASD (henceforth, ASD–LI) across complex lexical and/or grammatical phenomena, particularly for languages beyond English. The present study tested th...

Previous work on linguistic abilities of individuals with Down syndrome (DS) suggests severe impairment of complex syntactic structures in a number of languages. Given difficulties reported with comprehension and production of relative clauses and object clitics in typically developing Greek Cypriot bilectal children (acquiring Cypriot Greek and St...

The aim of this study is to profile the cognitive–linguistic performance of a male child (P.I.) with 22q11 deletion syndrome (22q11DS). Specifically, receptive and expressive language performance and nonverbal IQ (NVIQ) are described at two different time points—when P.I. was 6 and 10 years of age, respectively. Using case-based methodology, P.I.’s...

The clinical significance of sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) for assessing children's language ability is well-recognized. SRT has been identified as a good clinical marker for children with (specific) language impairment as it shows high diagnostic accuracy levels. Furthermore, qualitative analysis of repetition samples can provide information to...

The present study examines whether bilectal Greek Cypriot educators are able to identify dialectal (Cypriot Greek) elements superimposed on the standard language (Standard Modern Greek) in a written variety-judgment task. By doing so, (meta)linguistic skills of bilectal teachers from Cyprus were put to the test and later compared to the results of...

Grammatical markers are not uniformly impaired across speakers of different languages, even when speakers share a diagnosis and the marker in question is grammaticalized in a similar way in these languages. The aim of this work is to demarcate, from a cross-linguistic perspective, the linguistic phenotype of three genetically heterogeneous developm...

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...

This paper examines the development of object clitic placement by children acquiring Cypriot Greek. Greek-speaking Cyprus is sociolinguistically characterized by diglossia between two varieties of Greek, the local Cypriot Greek and the official Standard Modern Greek. Arguably as a result of this situation, clitics may be placed post- (enclisis) or...

Research in speakers of closely related varieties has shown that bilectalism and non-standardization affect speakers’ perception of the variants that exist in their native languages in a way that is absent from the performance of their monolingual peers. One possible explanation for this difference is that non-standardization blurs the boundaries o...

At the core of case lies an abstract, phonetically null Case. The authors discuss how Jean-Roger Vergnaud’s proposal regarding abstract Case enhanced the explanatory power of Universal Grammar.

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism have an impact on the processing mechanisms that are active during the acquisition process in a way that results in language variation. Within bilingual populations, the notion of “language proximity” is also of key importance for deriving variation. Certain sociolinguistic factors can invest the process of la...

Significance Although much research has been devoted to the acquisition of number words, relatively little is known about the acquisition of other expressions of quantity. We propose that the order of acquisition of quantifiers is related to features inherent to the meaning of each term. Four specific dimensions of the meaning and use of quantifier...

Background: Clinicians globally recognize as exceptionally challenging the development of effective intervention practices for bi- or multilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI). Therapy in both or all of an impaired child's languages is rarely possible. An alternative is to develop treatment protocols that facilitate the transfe...

Very little is known about diagnosing specific language impairment (SLI) in children who are exposed daily to a dialect (community language) and a standard variety (school instruction). The research reported here examines the specificity and sensitivity of language tests used so far to evaluate language performance in the context of diglossia (Cypr...

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 di...

A multitude of factors characterizes bi- and multilingual compared to monolingual language acquisition. Two of the most prominent viewpoints have recently been put in perspective and enriched by a third (Tsimpli, 2014): age of onset of children's exposure to their native languages, the role of the input they receive, and the timing in monolingual f...

The aims of this study are to compare quantitative and qualitative differences for noun/verb retrieval across language-impaired groups, examine naming errors with reference to psycholinguistic models of word processing, and shed light on the nature of the naming deficit as well as determine relevant group commonalities and differences. This include...

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”),...

This study investigates the production and placement of direct object clitic pronouns in children with specific language impairment (SLI). A total of 38 bilectal children were divided into four groups: two groups of children with SLI and two groups of age-matched typically developing children; 5-year-olds in the younger and 7-year-olds in the older...

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) has been widely used to study children’s word production in both monolingual and bilingual contexts, in typical and atypical populations, and for the study of different aspects of language development, such as the use of mutual exclusivity. In this study, an adaptation of the CDI in Cypr...

This cross-sectional study investigates the acquisition of the interpretation of syntactic and semantic aspects of wh -questions by Cypriot Greek-speaking children aged 4 to 9 years. Two experimental tools were employed, a question–picture-matching task examining the comprehension of D-linked and non-D-linked questions for subject and object, and a...

This paper discusses the morphosyntactic properties of clitics that occur in [VP CLACC/GEN V] and [VP CLGEN CLACC V] idioms in two varieties of Modern Greek. Previous work on this type of idioms captures idiomaticity by proposing inactiveness of Agree and distinguishes between levels of idiosyncrasy by claiming that in Standard Modern Greek, these...

This paper addresses verbal performance and overuse of “not fully lexical verbs” by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and peers with typical language development (TLD). Experimental data come from picture-naming and retell narratives. Fourteen school-aged children with SLI (mean age = 6 years, 9 months) participated alongside 50 lang...

Investigating children’s language skills in their native variety is of paramount importance. Clinical practices cannot be based on findings from languages or varieties which have different properties. This paper, after demonstrating the importance of investigating Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Cyprus, assesses the feasibility of existing la...

This work investigates first language (L1) influence on the second language (L2) acquisition of aspect, comparing participants with homogeneous L1 background (Russian) in Mainland Greece (L2 Standard Modern Greek) and Cyprus (L2 Cypriot Greek), where verb complementation takes a finite form instead of an infinitival as is possible in Russian. Focus...

Previous evidence shows that nouns are easier for many language users to retrieve than verbs, but scant research has been conducted with children in bilectal environments (where both standard and non-standard forms of a language are spoken). This study investigates object and action naming in children who are native speakers of a non-standard varie...

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This article explores the nuances in the type of diglossic society in Cyprus towards a characterization of the precise stage of diglossic progression that accurately describes the current sociolinguistic state of Greek-speaking Cyprus. The question concerns the identification of that status as diglossic, as standardwith-dialects (social dialectia),...

We report on object and action picture-naming accuracy in two groups of bilectal speakers in Cyprus, children with typical language development (TLD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Object names were overall better retrieved than action names by both groups. Given that comprehension for action names was relatively intact for a...

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in Cypriot Greek (CG) - in particular, young children’s comprehension and production of subject relatives (SRs) and object relatives (ORs). A total of thirty-three monolingual children aged between 5 and 9 years acquiring CG as their native language (variety) participated in this study. Tw...

This paper investigates different facets of the second language acquisition of Modern Greek by native speakers of Russian and Georgian, both adults and children, in the domain of aspectual marking in embedded clauses. The study investigates experimentally the interaction of lexical and grammatical aspect in those embedded sentential environments wh...

a b s t r a c t We report and compare results from the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) in three languages in a multilingual individual with a fluent primary progressive aphasia (PPA): Greek, English, and Czech. Our participant, SG, is a 60-year-old male who shows focal atrophy of the left temporal and parietal lobes typical of PPA. He is highly educat...

This issue marks the completion of the 5th volume of Biolinguistics. In these five years, we have managed to produce a traditional journal-like publication — free of charge for readers and contributors alike, and open to all. The "traditional journal-like publication" is a journal that comes in volumes, one per year, with each volume further divide...

The Greek and the English versions of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) were used to assess the linguistic abilities of a premorbidly highly proficient late bilingual female after a haemorrhagic cerebrovascular accident involving the left temporo-parietal lobe. The BAT was administered in the two languages on separate occasions by the first author,...