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This study examines language ideologies and communicative practices in the multilingual Vaupes region of northwestern Amazonia. Following a comparative overview of the Vaupes as a 'small-scale' language ecology, it discusses claims from existing ethnographic work on the region in light of data from a corpus of video-recordings of sociolinguistic interviews and spontaneous everyday conversations. It shows how a practice-based and interdisciplinary approach combining language documentation methodology and ethnographic, structural linguistic, and interactional perspectives can contribute to understanding of macro and micro aspects of multilingualism, thus contributing to future work on the Vaupes, typologies of small-scale multilingual ecologies, and language contact research.
The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is used to test higher-level executive functions or switching, depending on the measures chosen in a study and its goal. Many measures can be extracted from the WCST, but how to assign them to specific cognitive skills remains unclear. Thus, the current study first aimed at identifying which measures test the same cognitive abilities. Second, we compared the performance of mono- and multilingual children in the identified abilities because there is some evidence that bilingualism can improve executive functions. We tested 66 monolingual and 56 multilingual (i.e., bi- and trilingual) primary school children (M-age = 109 months) in an online version of the classic WCST. A principal component analysis revealed four factors: problem-solving, monitoring, efficient errors, and perseverations. Because the assignment of measures to factors is only partially coherent across the literature, we identified this as one of the sources of task impurity. In the second part, we calculated regression analyses to test for group differences while controlling for intelligence as a predictor for executive functions and for confounding variables such as age, German lexicon size, and socioeconomic status. Intelligence predicted problem solving and perseverations. In the monitoring component (measured by the reaction times preceding a rule switch), multilinguals outperformed monolinguals, thereby supporting the view that bi- or multilingualism can improve processing speed related to monitoring.
Ein diagnostisches Ziel der „Profilanalyse nach Grießhaber“ ist die Testung der grammatischen Fähigkeit zur Verbstellung im Deutschen. Zur erstmaligen Evaluation der Testgüte wurden 403 ein- und mehrsprachige Grundschulkinder randomisiert drei verschiedenen Testmaterialien zugewiesen: Testmaterial, das die Zielkompetenz spezifisch stimulierte, führte zu den besten Testergebnissen. Dies spricht für eine geringe Durchführungsobjektivität. Zudem wurden Deckeneffekte für Grundschulkinder nachgewiesen, weshalb die Profilanalyse nur wenig zwischen den Grammatikfähigkeiten der Kinder differenzieren kann. Auch die Retest-Reliabilität und Auswertungsobjektivität sind noch zu gering. Zusammenfassend wird die Testgüte hinsichtlich aller betrachteten Testgütekriterien als verbesserungswürdig bewertet. Daraus werden die Empfehlungen abgeleitet, die Profilanalyse stärker zu standardisieren und um sensitivere diagnostische Kriterien für das Grundschulalter zu ergänzen. Weitere Ziele der Profilanalyse, z. B. die Verbesserung diagnostischer Kompetenzen von Lehrkräften, sind in Folgeprojekten zu evaluieren.