Liliana Tolchinsky
Biographic Data
| ID | 1186744 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Liliana Tolchinsky |
| GIVEN NAMES | Liliana |
| FAMILY NAME | Tolchinsky |
| SIGNATURE | TOLCHINSKY L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universitat de Barcelona |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7893-6587 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Catalan speakers’/writers’ awareness of adjective compositionality
The term compositionality refers to the extent to which the meaning of an expression can be derived from its constituent parts plus the way they are combined. This study investigates bilingual Catalan-Spanish speakers’/writers’ judgments of adjective compositionality and which word properties best explained informants’ decomposability judgments. Two complementary phases were conducted using 729 written adjectives drawn from the GRERLI-CAT1 corpus…
Multilingual use assessment questionnaire
The linguistic profile of multilingual individuals can vary significantly due to diversity in linguistic experience. This poses challenges for language researchers, educators, and clinical practitioners. We developed a Multilingual Use Assessment Questionnaire (MUAQ) to capture the heterogeneous nature of multilinguals profiles integrating three dimensions: self-assessment of language(s) competence, language(s) use for mental operations, and lang…
Internal and external appraisals of analytical writing. A proposal for assessing development and potential improvement
This paper introduces Developing analytical writing (DAW), a model of text analysis aimed at capturing how social expectancies of analytical writing become part of students’ linguistic literacy. DAW proposes a multilayer analysis of text features on repeated text production prompted by the same and different topics, control for pedagogical input, and researcher- and reader-based evaluations of text quality. We revise DAW previous implementations …
The influence of students' linguistic condition, school level, and pedagogical input on analytical essay features
Introduction Analytical essays are a fundamental discourse practice within educational settings. These essays are topic-oriented texts that aim to inform readers about a specific matter while persuading them of the writer's perspective. This study investigates how students' linguistic condition (monolingual vs. bilingual) affects their ability to meet the social and discursive expectations of analytical essays. This is examined both over a broad …
Macro- and micro-developmental changes in analytical writing of bilinguals from elementary to higher education
Analytical writing serves to learn and communicate learning. Our goal was to determine the impact of students’ bilingual profile, defined by self-evaluated bilingual competence, use of language(s) for mental operations and language(s) use across different contexts, on their developing analytical writing abilities. Catalan/Spanish bilinguals – in 6th and 10th grade and university students – produced three texts on the same topic along a set of cla…
Linguistic patterns of spelling of isolated words to dictation and text-composing in Catalan across elementary school ( Patrones lingüísticos de la ortografía en el dictado de palabras aisladas y en l…
Spelling is a language problem-space, not only a school subject. Successful spelling demands going beyond letter to sound mapping and gaining access to a full representation of the orthographic structure of words. We traced bilingual Catalan/Spanish speakers’ spelling performance in Catalan across elementary school in two tasks: isolated words to dictation and text-composing. Our first goal was to tap the effect of grade level and task on the qua…
A multidimensional perspective on written language development ( Una perspectiva multidimensional del desarrollo del lenguaje escrito )
The development of writing is pivotal in the educational and communicative growth from childhood to adulthood. This special issue harnesses studies that examine the development of text writing in different discourse genres and languages, showcasing a set of text-embedded features that function as the blueprint for children’s evolving writing ability. These studies focus on both word-level and text-level features; a range of discourse genres; diff…
The rhetorical structure of analytical writing
Analytical writing is an academic genre that combines features of expository and argumentative discourse. Although the ability to write analytically is crucial to succeed at school and beyond, the pathway to master this type of writing mode has rarely been explored. We analyzed the writings of 226 native-speakers of Iberian Spanish from elementary school, high school and university levels, each of whom wrote two texts in Spanish. Three types of r…
The university
The articles in this monograph explore different aspects of how universities work in light of their fundamental missions and the challenges that this institution is facing in the post-pandemic era. Members of different universities in Spain with extensive experience in teaching, research, transfer, management and participation on governing teams respond with their reflections, document studies and fieldwork in Culture and Education’s invitation t…
The contribution of teaching practices and pupils’ initial knowledge to literacy learning
The learning of written language results from a shared contribution of the literacy knowledge pupils bring and the pedagogical instruction they receive. The aims of the present study were (1) to assess children’s emerging literacy knowledge, in terms of both notational and textual aspects, at the beginning of the third year of preschool education; (2) to obtain a detailed picture of teaching practices in initial instruction of written language in…
Use of adjectives in Catalan
Adjectives, like nouns and verbs, are one of the three major classes of lexical words. But, unlike nouns and verbs, they emerge late in acquisition. In Catalan, as in many other languages, their use is closely linked to the literate lexicon learned at school-age. Thus, the use of adjectives can be a good indicator of later language development. The goal of this study is twofold: to characterize the use of adjectives from age 9 to adulthood and to…
Growth of text-embedded lexicon in Catalan
Lexical development is a key facet of later language development. To characterize the linguistic knowledge of school age children, performance in the written modality must also be considered. This study tracks the growth of written text-embedded lexicon in Catalan-speaking children and adolescents. Participants ( N = 2161), aged from 5 to 16 years produced six different texts: a film explanation, a film recommendation, a joke telling and definiti…
Production and judgment of linguistic devices for attaining a detached stance in Spanish and Catalan
Corpus CesCa
This paper outlines the compilation of a corpus of Catalan written production. The CesCa corpus presents a picture of the Catalan written language throughout compulsory schooling. It contains two kinds of data: Vocabularies of five semantic fields comprising 242,404 lexical forms and Textual data of four different discourse genres consisting of 207,028 tokens. Both vocabularies and the textual data have been morphologically analyzed and lemmatize…
Conocimientos iniciales y logros de los alumnos en el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura
El aprendizaje de la lengua escrita, como cualquier otro aprendizaje, es un resultado conjunto del aprendiz y del entorno. En un primer estudio nos propusimos detectar los conocimientos que los niños demuestran en distintos ámbitos relacionados con el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura al inicio del último curso de Educación Infantil y al finalizar primero de Educación Primaria y establecer el peso relativo del nivel inicial de conocimiento…
Pedagogical practices in the teaching of early literacy in Spain
Children’s success in learning to read in the first grade is crucial for their ultimate success in schooling. This study aimed at identifying self‐declared practices in preschool and first grade in Spain and contrasting these practices with the official recommendations for the initial teaching of reading and writing. A characterisation of the ways of teaching and of the broader institutional context which can support or hinder teachers’ work is f…
The growth of the written lexicon in Catalan
The lexicon, a complex storage device of units of language use, is a central component of linguistic knowledge closely tied to grammar and has a strong influence on demanding cognitive tasks and academic achievement. This study aims at tracking the growth of the Catalan written lexicon of children and adolescents throughout compulsory schooling, a time when the lexicon is assumed to experience an exponential growth. 2,436 participants from 5 to 1…
Developing a depersonalized stance through linguistic means in typologically different languages
Attaining rhetorical competence requires the capacity to use linguistic form to communicate discourse stance as well as discourse content. Languages provide their speakers with a range of options to express content in ways that reveal orientation, generality of reference, and attitude to the propositional content of their message to create a more involved or detached discourse stance. This paper focuses on the linguistic means used by children (9…
The effect of literacy, text type, and modality on the use of grammatical means for agency alternation in Spanish
Investigating literacy development and language acquisition. Reply to commentaries on ‘Developing linguistic literacy
The model under discussion was elaborated in response to our need to construct a general, explicit and integrative framework for the seemingly different strands of research that we and our associates have carried out in the last decade or so. The findings of these studies made it increasingly clear to us that it is impossible to account for the dramatic changes in language knowledge and language use in children and adolescents within the boundari…
Text openings and closings in writing and speech
The differentiation of text segments to fulfil specific discourse functions (e.g. to introduce a topic, or to state the time and place of a story), along with the definition of clear textual boundaries that set the text apart from the situational context, are two aspects of the configuration of a text as an autonomous semantic unit. This paper analyzes the opening and closing elements of narrative and expository texts to determine whether they fu…
Developing linguistic literacy
This is a position paper modelling the domain of linguistic literacy and its development through the life span. It aims to provide a framework for the analysis of language development in the school years, integrating sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic notions of variation, language awareness, and literacy in a comprehensive model. The paper focuses on those aspects of literacy competence that are expressed in language as well as aspects of ling…
Writing in four- to six-year-olds
When asked to write an utterance, nursery children and kindergartners often produce strings of unrelated characters. We analysed whether these invented writings reflect similarities and differences in the phonetic and semantic aspects of the utterance. One hundred and twenty Israeli children were asked to write pairs of nouns that share a syllable (e.g. pe ‘mouth’ and perach ‘flower’) and series of sentences that share either mainly nouns or main…
Developing linguistic literacy
This is a position paper modelling the domain of linguistic literacy and its development through the life span. It aims to provide a framework for the analysis of language development in the school years, integrating sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic notions of variation, language awareness, and literacy in a comprehensive model. The paper focuses on those aspects of literacy competence that are expressed in language as well as aspects of ling…
The effect of literacy, text type, and modality on the use of grammatical means for agency alternation in Spanish
Conocimientos iniciales y logros de los alumnos en el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura
El aprendizaje de la lengua escrita, como cualquier otro aprendizaje, es un resultado conjunto del aprendiz y del entorno. En un primer estudio nos propusimos detectar los conocimientos que los niños demuestran en distintos ámbitos relacionados con el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura al inicio del último curso de Educación Infantil y al finalizar primero de Educación Primaria y establecer el peso relativo del nivel inicial de conocimiento…
Production and judgment of linguistic devices for attaining a detached stance in Spanish and Catalan
Pedagogical practices in the teaching of early literacy in Spain
Children’s success in learning to read in the first grade is crucial for their ultimate success in schooling. This study aimed at identifying self‐declared practices in preschool and first grade in Spain and contrasting these practices with the official recommendations for the initial teaching of reading and writing. A characterisation of the ways of teaching and of the broader institutional context which can support or hinder teachers’ work is f…
Writing in four- to six-year-olds
When asked to write an utterance, nursery children and kindergartners often produce strings of unrelated characters. We analysed whether these invented writings reflect similarities and differences in the phonetic and semantic aspects of the utterance. One hundred and twenty Israeli children were asked to write pairs of nouns that share a syllable (e.g. pe ‘mouth’ and perach ‘flower’) and series of sentences that share either mainly nouns or main…
Investigating literacy development and language acquisition. Reply to commentaries on ‘Developing linguistic literacy
The model under discussion was elaborated in response to our need to construct a general, explicit and integrative framework for the seemingly different strands of research that we and our associates have carried out in the last decade or so. The findings of these studies made it increasingly clear to us that it is impossible to account for the dramatic changes in language knowledge and language use in children and adolescents within the boundari…
Text openings and closings in writing and speech
The differentiation of text segments to fulfil specific discourse functions (e.g. to introduce a topic, or to state the time and place of a story), along with the definition of clear textual boundaries that set the text apart from the situational context, are two aspects of the configuration of a text as an autonomous semantic unit. This paper analyzes the opening and closing elements of narrative and expository texts to determine whether they fu…
Developing linguistic literacy
This is a position paper modelling the domain of linguistic literacy and its development through the life span. It aims to provide a framework for the analysis of language development in the school years, integrating sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic notions of variation, language awareness, and literacy in a comprehensive model. The paper focuses on those aspects of literacy competence that are expressed in language as well as aspects of ling…
The effect of literacy, text type, and modality on the use of grammatical means for agency alternation in Spanish
Developing a depersonalized stance through linguistic means in typologically different languages
Attaining rhetorical competence requires the capacity to use linguistic form to communicate discourse stance as well as discourse content. Languages provide their speakers with a range of options to express content in ways that reveal orientation, generality of reference, and attitude to the propositional content of their message to create a more involved or detached discourse stance. This paper focuses on the linguistic means used by children (9…
The growth of the written lexicon in Catalan
The lexicon, a complex storage device of units of language use, is a central component of linguistic knowledge closely tied to grammar and has a strong influence on demanding cognitive tasks and academic achievement. This study aims at tracking the growth of the Catalan written lexicon of children and adolescents throughout compulsory schooling, a time when the lexicon is assumed to experience an exponential growth. 2,436 participants from 5 to 1…
Corpus CesCa
This paper outlines the compilation of a corpus of Catalan written production. The CesCa corpus presents a picture of the Catalan written language throughout compulsory schooling. It contains two kinds of data: Vocabularies of five semantic fields comprising 242,404 lexical forms and Textual data of four different discourse genres consisting of 207,028 tokens. Both vocabularies and the textual data have been morphologically analyzed and lemmatize…
Conocimientos iniciales y logros de los alumnos en el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura
El aprendizaje de la lengua escrita, como cualquier otro aprendizaje, es un resultado conjunto del aprendiz y del entorno. En un primer estudio nos propusimos detectar los conocimientos que los niños demuestran en distintos ámbitos relacionados con el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura al inicio del último curso de Educación Infantil y al finalizar primero de Educación Primaria y establecer el peso relativo del nivel inicial de conocimiento…
Pedagogical practices in the teaching of early literacy in Spain
Children’s success in learning to read in the first grade is crucial for their ultimate success in schooling. This study aimed at identifying self‐declared practices in preschool and first grade in Spain and contrasting these practices with the official recommendations for the initial teaching of reading and writing. A characterisation of the ways of teaching and of the broader institutional context which can support or hinder teachers’ work is f…
Growth of text-embedded lexicon in Catalan
Lexical development is a key facet of later language development. To characterize the linguistic knowledge of school age children, performance in the written modality must also be considered. This study tracks the growth of written text-embedded lexicon in Catalan-speaking children and adolescents. Participants ( N = 2161), aged from 5 to 16 years produced six different texts: a film explanation, a film recommendation, a joke telling and definiti…
Production and judgment of linguistic devices for attaining a detached stance in Spanish and Catalan
Use of adjectives in Catalan
Adjectives, like nouns and verbs, are one of the three major classes of lexical words. But, unlike nouns and verbs, they emerge late in acquisition. In Catalan, as in many other languages, their use is closely linked to the literate lexicon learned at school-age. Thus, the use of adjectives can be a good indicator of later language development. The goal of this study is twofold: to characterize the use of adjectives from age 9 to adulthood and to…
The contribution of teaching practices and pupils’ initial knowledge to literacy learning
The learning of written language results from a shared contribution of the literacy knowledge pupils bring and the pedagogical instruction they receive. The aims of the present study were (1) to assess children’s emerging literacy knowledge, in terms of both notational and textual aspects, at the beginning of the third year of preschool education; (2) to obtain a detailed picture of teaching practices in initial instruction of written language in…
Linguistic patterns of spelling of isolated words to dictation and text-composing in Catalan across elementary school ( Patrones lingüísticos de la ortografía en el dictado de palabras aisladas y en l…
Spelling is a language problem-space, not only a school subject. Successful spelling demands going beyond letter to sound mapping and gaining access to a full representation of the orthographic structure of words. We traced bilingual Catalan/Spanish speakers’ spelling performance in Catalan across elementary school in two tasks: isolated words to dictation and text-composing. Our first goal was to tap the effect of grade level and task on the qua…
A multidimensional perspective on written language development ( Una perspectiva multidimensional del desarrollo del lenguaje escrito )
The development of writing is pivotal in the educational and communicative growth from childhood to adulthood. This special issue harnesses studies that examine the development of text writing in different discourse genres and languages, showcasing a set of text-embedded features that function as the blueprint for children’s evolving writing ability. These studies focus on both word-level and text-level features; a range of discourse genres; diff…
The rhetorical structure of analytical writing
Analytical writing is an academic genre that combines features of expository and argumentative discourse. Although the ability to write analytically is crucial to succeed at school and beyond, the pathway to master this type of writing mode has rarely been explored. We analyzed the writings of 226 native-speakers of Iberian Spanish from elementary school, high school and university levels, each of whom wrote two texts in Spanish. Three types of r…
The university
The articles in this monograph explore different aspects of how universities work in light of their fundamental missions and the challenges that this institution is facing in the post-pandemic era. Members of different universities in Spain with extensive experience in teaching, research, transfer, management and participation on governing teams respond with their reflections, document studies and fieldwork in Culture and Education’s invitation t…
Macro- and micro-developmental changes in analytical writing of bilinguals from elementary to higher education
Analytical writing serves to learn and communicate learning. Our goal was to determine the impact of students’ bilingual profile, defined by self-evaluated bilingual competence, use of language(s) for mental operations and language(s) use across different contexts, on their developing analytical writing abilities. Catalan/Spanish bilinguals – in 6th and 10th grade and university students – produced three texts on the same topic along a set of cla…
Multilingual use assessment questionnaire
The linguistic profile of multilingual individuals can vary significantly due to diversity in linguistic experience. This poses challenges for language researchers, educators, and clinical practitioners. We developed a Multilingual Use Assessment Questionnaire (MUAQ) to capture the heterogeneous nature of multilinguals profiles integrating three dimensions: self-assessment of language(s) competence, language(s) use for mental operations, and lang…
Internal and external appraisals of analytical writing. A proposal for assessing development and potential improvement
This paper introduces Developing analytical writing (DAW), a model of text analysis aimed at capturing how social expectancies of analytical writing become part of students’ linguistic literacy. DAW proposes a multilayer analysis of text features on repeated text production prompted by the same and different topics, control for pedagogical input, and researcher- and reader-based evaluations of text quality. We revise DAW previous implementations …
The influence of students' linguistic condition, school level, and pedagogical input on analytical essay features
Introduction Analytical essays are a fundamental discourse practice within educational settings. These essays are topic-oriented texts that aim to inform readers about a specific matter while persuading them of the writer's perspective. This study investigates how students' linguistic condition (monolingual vs. bilingual) affects their ability to meet the social and discursive expectations of analytical essays. This is examined both over a broad …
Catalan speakers’/writers’ awareness of adjective compositionality
The term compositionality refers to the extent to which the meaning of an expression can be derived from its constituent parts plus the way they are combined. This study investigates bilingual Catalan-Spanish speakers’/writers’ judgments of adjective compositionality and which word properties best explained informants’ decomposability judgments. Two complementary phases were conducted using 729 written adjectives drawn from the GRERLI-CAT1 corpus…
Psychology (17 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Writing and Handwriting Education (11 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Literacy (7 works) · Literacy and Educational Practices (7 works) · Pedagogy (7 works) · Sociology (7 works)