The war in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, has led to a significant civilian involvement in Israel, particularly among immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who began to provide humanitarian assistance, including interpreting. Highlighting the interrelation between translation and migration, I argue that the war strongly affects…

Relative clauses (RCs) are complex syntactic structures because they consist of multiple clauses and involve syntactic movement. RCs are known as a reliable clinical marker of syntactic impairment across many different languages and populations. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle with the comprehension and production of RCs,…

Limited research to date has addressed the language socialisation of transnational children during global movement with their parents. The aim of this study was to explore the complexity of language socialisation for a transnational child experiencing a multilingual environment both at home and in preschool. This transnational English- and…

This dissertation examines the relative effects of phonetic salience and phonological prominence on speech sound processing. Three test cases, respectively, investigate the processing of consonants versus vowels by speakers of German, Hebrew, and Amharic; the processing of aspirated versus unaspirated stops by speaker of Spanish and Thai; and the…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

A case study of a Russian-Hebrew bilingual woman with transcortical sensory aphasia showed that overall, aphasic symptoms were similar in the two languages, with Hebrew somewhat more impaired. The woman revealed a difference in her ability to perceive phonemes in the context of Hebrew words that depended on whether they were presented in a Russian…

Developmental changes in the interaction between word order and structural cues were investigated. Hebrew-speaking children between 4 and 10 years old interpreted noun-verb-noun utterances. Both word order and structural cues affected interpretation by all subjects, though the role of structural cues increased with age. (Author/DB)

The relationship between language, thought, and concept formation has been a central issue in many studies and theoretical discussions in various domains--philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. The relation between language and concept development can be framed as two opposing questions: (1) Does the child learn concepts first and…

Papers presented at the symposium on the relationship between language and culture include, in addition to an opening adress: "Sociosemiotics Across Cultures" (Wolfgang Kuhlwein); "Translation Across Languages or Across Cultures?" (Albrecht Neubert); "Grammatical Categories Across Cultures" (Olga Tomic); "On…