Browsing by Author "Salopuro, Salla"

Aim of the study. The aim of this thesis was to examine the self-repairs and their development in 4–5 years old children, who were learning finnish as their second language. It was also meant to find out, if the development of self-repairs was somehow different due to a linguistic small group intervention and along that, possibly enchanced language learning. Earlier research about the multilingual children's self-repair's development has been quite few, but the theme is interesting because of the known connections of self-repairs and the abilities of linguistic processing, for example (Zuniga & Simard, 2019). The previous studies have shown that the self-repairs of speech are usually targeted at such things that the child is lingually aquiring at that agepoint (Laakso, 2006). It is also known that higher levels of lingual knowledge are connected to more complex self-repairs (Dumont, 2010). Methods. There were 20 multilingual 4–5-year-old children, from the PAULA-project of the universities of Helsinki and Turku, who were chosen to the sample of this thesis. Half of them took part in a linguistic small group intervention during the one-year follow-up. This thesis' qualitative material included videotapes from the playsessions of child and research assistant. The videotapes were annotated using ELAN-software and every self-repair of the children was classified by the maker of self-repair initiation, the type of self-repair initiator and it's position and the self-repair's target. Statistics were made based on the classified self-repairs, and a quantitative analysis was carried out by observing statistical characteristics and using a repeated measures ANOVA. Results and conclusions. Results of the repeated measures ANOVA were not statistically significant, but some medium to strong effect sizes were noticed. At the level of the whole group (N = 20) there was a decrease in the number of self-repairs that begun without any clear initiator, which might denote that the abilities of using different initiators of self-repair are evolved in multilingual children at the age of four to five years. Also, the amounts of syntactic and morphological repairs were increased, which may in turn indicate that the syntactic and morphological parts of language become the core of linguistic development of multilingual children at that age. About the effects of the intervention was, for their part, noted that the usage of self-repair's initiator combinations and phonological repairs was increased in the intervention group. When assessing the reliability of the results, it should be rememberd that the statistical significance was not reached and that the sample was small.