Projects

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  • IFV Study (ZAS)

    The IFV study is a follow-up study based on the BIVEM study and was carried out at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (Leibniz-ZAS) in Berlin, Germany under the direction of Natalia Gagarina, coordination of Nathalie Topaj and active participation of other colleagues, most notably Sophia Czapka. It was conducted from 2016 to 2021 and supported by the Senate of Berlin. The study dealt with the acquisition and development of reading and writing skills, narrative skills and general language development in German among primary school children as well as with long-term predictors of literacy and narrative skills based on the data from the BIVEM study.

    340 children participated in the study, including 62 Russian-German and Turkish-German bilingual children from the BIVEM study, bilingual children with many other home languages, and German monolingual children. All participants were tested in grades 1–3 (6 to 10–year-olds) at the end of each school year. MAIN was a part of the test battery.

    MAIN was conducted in Russian, Turkish, and German in different elicitation modes. At the end of the 1st grade MAIN was conducted in telling (without comprehension questions) and in additionally designed dictated mode; at the end of the 2nd grade MAIN was conducted in the written mode, specifically designed for the study; at the end of the 3rd grade MAIN was conducted in the written and oral (telling without comprehension questions) modes. A subset of data was published in open access at Zenodo.

    More information about the study can be found here.