Heike Tappe | University of KwaZulu-Natal (original) (raw)

Papers by Heike Tappe

Past research indicates that the acquisition and subsequent usage of tense/aspect markings by sec... more Past research indicates that the acquisition and subsequent usage of tense/aspect markings by second language (L2) speakers pose particular challenges. Such challenges may emanate, inter alia, from differences in the tense/aspect systems of a L2 speaker’s two languages. This article compares and contrasts the use of tense and aspect in isiZulu and English by isiZulu L1/ English L2 speakers. We conducted an empirical intra-individual study among first-year mechanical engineering students enrolled for a communication skills module at a university of technology. The participants produced two written reports on a hypothetical series of events which culminated in an imaginary laboratory accident. We investigate how similarities and differences between English and isiZulu manifest in the written reports of each student. The qualitative, intra-individual data analysis indicates that our participants carefully position the events on a linear timeline and that they encode the chronological s...

Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2020

This article explores attitudes of isiZulu home-language tertiary students regarding the use of c... more This article explores attitudes of isiZulu home-language tertiary students regarding the use of contemporary poetry in isiZulu to disseminate academic content in English. In South African education sector English remains, by default, the official medium of instruction despite constitutional directives stipulating that there be a parity of esteem between all eleven official languages of the country. The hegemony of English results in ambivalent attitudes among speakers of African languages towards the use of their own languages in education. In this article, we promote the value of isiZulu as a resource for academic learning – a means to reclaim indigenous languages and cultures. We assess students’ attitudes to explore whether contemporary poetry in isiZulu may serve as a tool to enhance access to academic content. The findings indicate positive yet diverse views on the use of contemporary poetry in isiZulu for the dissemination of academic content. The majority of the participants ...

Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 2014

The investigation of narrative skills in children is significant in many respects; amongst other ... more The investigation of narrative skills in children is significant in many respects; amongst other things, narratives can yield information about a child's use of decontextualised, literate language features (Curenton and Justice 2004) while simultaneously providing access to the child's level of competence concerning narrative-specific aspects. Narrative abilities have been linked to literacy development and academic achievement (Dickinson and Tabors 2001) and are often used to predict language progress (Botting, Faragher, Simkin, Knox and Conti-Ramsden 2001). Moreover, narrative skills constitute an area of verbal language development in which delays are difficult to compensate (Girolametto, Wiigs, Smyth, Weitzman and Pearce 2001, Manhardt and Rescorla 2002). However, in multilingual settings the assessment of narrative skills cannot be restricted to language proficiency measurements in each of a child's languages. Rather, this assessment needs to include "linguistic descriptions of ethno-linguistic discourse patterns (contrastive rhetoric)" (Barnitz 1986:95) in order to assess the roles which cultural knowledge and language-specific narrative text structure elements play in the development of narrative skills in multilingual children. This article discusses the necessity to identify such language-specific elements of story structures. Empirical findings are presented which illustrate that 10-to 12-year-old children from Malawi exhibit narrative practices while they retell visually and aurally presented stories. It appears that these narrative practices are influenced by African folktales. The children's retellings in both Chichewa and English cannot simply be measured by canonical narrative text structures commonly used in academic settings. The global significance of such a discussion is reflected by a growing concern that academic success may be compromised by a misalignment between the narrative practices in a child's primary language(s) and the narrative practices in a respective language of teaching and learning (e.g. Makoe and McKinney 2009, Souto-Manning 2013).

Psykhe, 13(1), 191-196, 2004

Shared cognitive representations have been shown in different conceptual domains. An experiment i... more Shared cognitive representations have been shown in different conceptual domains. An experiment is presented here that extends this line of research to the domain of events. Specifically, this experiment shows a cultural consensus in the participants' event taxonomies, and suggests a shared event taxonomy based on semantic relations. Showing such a shared event representation is an important first step for learning about the role of events in cognitive processes such as memory and thought.

In this paper we present a psycholinguistically motivated architecture and its prototypical imple... more In this paper we present a psycholinguistically motivated architecture and its prototypical implementation for an incremental conceptualizer, which monitors dynamic changes in the world and simultaneously generates warnings for (possibly) safety-critical developments. It does so by conceptualizing events and building up a hierarchical knowledge representation of the perceived states of affairs. If it detects a safety problem, it selects suitable elements from the representation for a warning, brings them into an appropriate order, and generates incremental preverbal messages (propositional structures) from them, which can be taken by a subsequent component to encode them linguistically. 1

Literator, 2016

TABLE 1: Distinctions between different types of inferences. Authors Identifying distinctions bet... more TABLE 1: Distinctions between different types of inferences. Authors Identifying distinctions between types of inferences McKoon and Ratcliff 1992 Automatic Strategic Graesser et al. 1994 On-line Off-line Graesser et al. 1994 Text-connecting Knowledge-based Graesser et al. 1994 Local Global Barnes et al. 1996; Calvo 2004 Coherence Elaborative Cain and Oakhill 1998 Text-connecting Gap-filling Bowyer-Crane and Snowling 2005 Coherence Elaborative/knowledge-based Cromley and Azevedo 2007 Anaphoric text-to-text Background-to-text

Lssa Saala Saalt Joint Annual Conference 2013, Jun 28, 2013

ABSTRACT Multilingual and bilingual societies are a growing reality the world over; in fact, curr... more ABSTRACT Multilingual and bilingual societies are a growing reality the world over; in fact, current research indicates that speakers of two or more languages out-number monolingual speakers (Grosjean, 2010). Hence there is a growing interest in linguistic processes and representations in multi- and bilingual speakers . The multilingual mind poses a number of challenges to linguistic research. It may even be the ‘test-bed’ for our assumptions about language production and language comprehension models and ultimately our assumptions about the language faculty (Francis, 2011). The current chapter presents a synopsis of one set of such challenges by bringing together crucial observations on code mixing (in particular intra-sentential code mixing between Zulu and English) from fields as diverse as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition research, syntax, morphology, and the neurosciences. My objectives are threefold: My first objective is to conduct a ‘stock-taking’ exercise that juxtaposes selected findings and ideas from vastly different fields of linguistic research. My second objective is to provide examples from Zulu/English code-mixes that might be informative with respect to morphological processes and representations in a multilingual speaker. Finally, my third objective is to provide a ‘shopping list’ of research items that might be missing or be too low on supply in our research ‘cupboard’.

Abstract While describing sketch maps speakers choose between at least two conceptual layers of r... more Abstract While describing sketch maps speakers choose between at least two conceptual layers of representation: the layer representing graphical entities and the layer representing real world entities. In this paper we discuss the mechanisms and principles that underlie these ...

Eine wichtige Motivation der Sprachentwicklungsforschung besteht darin, daß sich aus der Beschäft... more Eine wichtige Motivation der Sprachentwicklungsforschung besteht darin, daß sich aus der Beschäftigung mit der Entwicklung einer kognitiven Fähigkeit Erkenntnisse über diese Fähigkeit entwickeln lassen, die auf anderem Wege nicht zugänglich sind: "Approaches which do not take ...

Mediating between Concepts and Grammar, 2003