Joel Walters
Biographic Data
| ID | 3780684 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joel Walters |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joel |
| FAMILY NAME | Walters |
| SIGNATURE | WALTERS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bar-Ilan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3585-401X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Culture-specific heritage language vocabulary and collective identity among three generations of Mountain Jews
Culture-specific vocabulary denotes objects that bear cultural weight and are not readily translatable or understood in other languages. The present study explores cultural items in an endangered language, Juhuri (Judeo-Tat), the traditional language of Mountain Jews (MJ) who immigrated to Israel and the United States. A set of ten items, five cultural and five neutral, served as stimuli for a picture recognition task inserted in a questionnaire …
Immigrant student identities and classroom engagement
The Impact of Ethnic Identity on Language Attitudes
Heritage language maintenance and shift of three languages across three generations of Mountain Jews in Israel
Mountain Jewish immigrants to Israel from the Eastern Caucasus used two heritage languages, Juhuri (Judeo-Tat) and Russian. Juhuri was their home and Russian the societal languages prior to migration. In Israel, Juhuri and Russian are Heritage Languages and Hebrew is the societal language. The present study reports on frequency of use and codeswitching behaviour across three generations of Mountain Jewish speakers in order to account for patterns…
Perceptions of identity, language abilities and language preferences among Russian-Hebrew and English-Hebrew bilingual children and their parents
Israel’s population includes over a million Russian-speaking immigrants and more than 300,000 native English speakers. These groups differ in social integration and in the status of their heritage languages in Israel. We compared children’s and parents’ perceptions of children’s identities, language abilities, and language preferences among Russian-Hebrew and English-Hebrew bilinguals via sociolinguistic questionnaires. Forty-six Russian-Hebrew (…
The effect of language attitudes on proficiency in two heritage languages of Mountain Jews in Israel and the US
Mountain Jews (MJs), native of the eastern Caucasus, mass immigrated in the 1990s to Israel and the US. MJs brought with them two heritage languages (HLs): Russian, the language of wider communication in the former Soviet Union, and Juhuri, their traditional home language. The present study explores the effects of HL attitudes on proficiency among 146 Israeli and 138 American MJs differing in age (M = 35.42) and in education level. A questionnair…
The impact of language dominance on Russian-Hebrew bilingual children’s narrative production
The study explores the effect of language dominance on microstructure, macrostructure, and Internal State Terms (ISTs) in narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children and examines within-language and cross-language associations between narrative elements in two dominance groups. Narratives were collected from 38 Russian-Hebrew bilingual children aged 5;5–6;7 using the LITMUS-MAIN retelling procedures. The children were divided into L1-dominant…
Reference to characters in narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual and Russian and Hebrew monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and typical language development
This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51 children using a storytelling procedure ( MAIN – Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives).…
Language Control and Intra-Sentential Codeswitching among Bilingual Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
The present study investigated bilingual language control among preschool children in a sentence repetition task containing unilingual stimuli and codeswitched stimuli within prepositional phrases (PPs). Cross-language errors, that is, codeswitches that were not part of the stimulus sentences, were taken as evidence of difficulties in language control. Specifically, we investigated cross-language errors as a function of stimulus sentence type (co…
Codeswitching within prepositional phrases
Aims and Research Questions: Codeswitching (CS) was investigated among English-Hebrew bilingual preschool children in a sentence repetition task focusing on switching at different points in prepositional phrases (PPs). We asked the extent to which sentence repetition accuracy differed (1) as a function of the switch site in the PP and (2) as a function of directionality, English-to-Hebrew versus Hebrew-to-English CS. Design/Methodology: English/f…
Story Grammar Elements and Mental State Terms in the Expression of Enabling Relations in Narratives of Bilingual Preschool Children
The present research analyzes causal relations between events in the narratives of bilingual preschool children with typical development (BiTD) and with developmental language disorder (BiDLD). The analyses focused on story grammar elements (attempts and goals) and mental state terms between events in Enabling relations as features contributing to narrative discourse coherence. Narratives, collected from 48 bilingual children (14 with DLD) aged 5…
Some wheres and whys in bilingual codeswitching
Aims and objectives: Differences in directionality, motivations and locus of codeswitching have been reported for children’s codeswitching, but these constructs have not been subjected to experimental study in order to examine how they may interact. This study investigated these variables in bilingual preschool children’s codeswitching. Methodology: Thirty-two Russian-Hebrew bilingual children (mean age 6;3) performed two tasks: Retelling of narr…
Main
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was designed in order to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. MAIN is suitable for children from 3 to 10 years and evaluates both comprehension and production of narratives. Its design allows for the assessment of several languages in the same child, as well as for different elicitation modes: Model Story, Retelling, and Tel…
Main
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is part of LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings). LITMUS is a battery of tests that have been developed in connection with the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (2009-2013)
Narrative Production in Arabic-speaking Adolescents with and without Hearing Loss
The present study investigated oral personal narratives elicited from Arabic speaking adolescents with and without hearing loss. Analyses focused on macrostructure, microstructure, and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). For macrostructure, narratives were examined for structural components (abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda) and narrative patterns: classic (a high point followed by a resolution), high point ending, …
Bi-directional cross-linguistic influence in bilingual Russian-Hebrew children
This study examines cross-linguistic influence of L1 on L2 and L2 on L1 and the extent to which age of L2 onset (L2 AoO) is linked to the acquisition of morpho-syntactic properties in both languages of bilingual children who acquire L1-Russian as a heritage language and L2-Hebrew as a majority language. Our investigation of L1-L2 influence focuses on morpho-syntactic features, whose configurations vary in Russian and Hebrew. Definiteness is reali…
Disentangling SLI and bilingualism using sentence repetition tasks
The current study investigated performance on morpho-syntax in Russian–Hebrew sequential bilingual preschool children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) in both languages (L1 Russian and L2 Hebrew) using sentence repetition (SRep) tasks with a fundamental aim to disentangle the language abilities of bilingual children with typical language development (biTLD) from those of bilingual children with SLI (biSLI). Four groups of child…
Family language policies, reported language use and proficiency in Russian – Hebrew bilingual children in Israel
The relationship between family language policy (FLP) and language choice, language use, proficiency in Russian and Hebrew, codeswitching (CS) and linguistic performance was studied in Russian-speaking immigrant parents and their Russian–Hebrew bilingual preschool children. By means of Glaser's Grounded Theory, the content of sociolinguistic interviews with 65 parents was classified to form families with strict-Russian, mild-Russian and pro-bilin…
The impact of internal and external factors on linguistic performance in the home language and in L2 among Russian-Hebrew and Russian-German preschool children
This paper evaluates the contribution of external background factors which pertain to the child’s environment (e.g., parents’ education, parents’ occupation, family size, etc.), and internal ones which reflect the child’s time related experience with language (e.g., chronological age, age of L2 onset, etc.) to the development of linguistic skills in the two languages of bilingual children. 65 Russian-German (Mean age: 66mo, Range: 47-86mo) and 78…
Definite articles in the context of literary and scientific writings
Some pragmatics of definite articles
Deeper processing for better EFL reading comprehension
Multilingualism and Nation Building
This paper focuses on language choice in the newest nation in the Horn of Africa within a broader context of language policy in multilingual states. Pre-colonial and post-colonial language policies in Eritrea are surveyed in relation to evolving linguistic and political nationalism. Language contact and its social consequences are discussed in an attempt to shed light on language policies pursued during different periods in the colonial history o…
Language awareness in non‐native writers
Ninety‐three subjects participated in a series of experiments investigating how the number of errors from different linguistic sources affects evaluative judgments about the need for revision in a non‐native language. In the first three experiments, groups of non‐native and native writers of English as well as EFL teachers were exposed to bifactorial combinations of syntactic and lexical errors incorporated in passages from an English composition…
Modularity in moral judgment by police officers
Classical theories of moral judgment (e.g., Piaget, 1965; Kohlberg, 1983) were tested against a modularity hypothesis in police officers. Patrol and investigation officers were compared in a series of experiments using functional measurement in which policemen were asked to make judgments, from both objective and subjective perspectives, about the severity of acts involving verbal or physical aggression. Information in the incidents included just…
Family language policies, reported language use and proficiency in Russian – Hebrew bilingual children in Israel
The relationship between family language policy (FLP) and language choice, language use, proficiency in Russian and Hebrew, codeswitching (CS) and linguistic performance was studied in Russian-speaking immigrant parents and their Russian–Hebrew bilingual preschool children. By means of Glaser's Grounded Theory, the content of sociolinguistic interviews with 65 parents was classified to form families with strict-Russian, mild-Russian and pro-bilin…
Strategies for Requesting in Spanish and English Structural Similarities and Pragmatic Differences
This paper reports on recent work in the acquisition of pragmatic competence in a second language. It centers on the speech act of requesting and the semantic strategies for conveying that speech act. First, a contrastive analysis of Spanish and English strategies is undertaken to show that basically the same strategies are available in both languages. The paper goes on to describe an experiment in which native speakers of each language were aske…
Heritage language maintenance and shift of three languages across three generations of Mountain Jews in Israel
Mountain Jewish immigrants to Israel from the Eastern Caucasus used two heritage languages, Juhuri (Judeo-Tat) and Russian. Juhuri was their home and Russian the societal languages prior to migration. In Israel, Juhuri and Russian are Heritage Languages and Hebrew is the societal language. The present study reports on frequency of use and codeswitching behaviour across three generations of Mountain Jewish speakers in order to account for patterns…
Multilingualism and Nation Building
This paper focuses on language choice in the newest nation in the Horn of Africa within a broader context of language policy in multilingual states. Pre-colonial and post-colonial language policies in Eritrea are surveyed in relation to evolving linguistic and political nationalism. Language contact and its social consequences are discussed in an attempt to shed light on language policies pursued during different periods in the colonial history o…
The effect of language attitudes on proficiency in two heritage languages of Mountain Jews in Israel and the US
Mountain Jews (MJs), native of the eastern Caucasus, mass immigrated in the 1990s to Israel and the US. MJs brought with them two heritage languages (HLs): Russian, the language of wider communication in the former Soviet Union, and Juhuri, their traditional home language. The present study explores the effects of HL attitudes on proficiency among 146 Israeli and 138 American MJs differing in age (M = 35.42) and in education level. A questionnair…
Language Proficiency, Text Content and Order Effects in Narrative Recall
An analysis of the major goals of the story grammar paradigm and some of the controversy surrounding them has led to a challenge of the robustness of this paradigm's findings. The effects of text content and order of presentation on narrative recall were investigated in groups of intermediate and advanced readers of English as a foreign language. Subjects were asked to recall three narratives presented either in a standard, partially-mixed or ful…
Jewish styles of worship
Perceptions of identity, language abilities and language preferences among Russian-Hebrew and English-Hebrew bilingual children and their parents
Israel’s population includes over a million Russian-speaking immigrants and more than 300,000 native English speakers. These groups differ in social integration and in the status of their heritage languages in Israel. We compared children’s and parents’ perceptions of children’s identities, language abilities, and language preferences among Russian-Hebrew and English-Hebrew bilinguals via sociolinguistic questionnaires. Forty-six Russian-Hebrew (…
Story Grammar Elements and Mental State Terms in the Expression of Enabling Relations in Narratives of Bilingual Preschool Children
The present research analyzes causal relations between events in the narratives of bilingual preschool children with typical development (BiTD) and with developmental language disorder (BiDLD). The analyses focused on story grammar elements (attempts and goals) and mental state terms between events in Enabling relations as features contributing to narrative discourse coherence. Narratives, collected from 48 bilingual children (14 with DLD) aged 5…
Culture-specific heritage language vocabulary and collective identity among three generations of Mountain Jews
Culture-specific vocabulary denotes objects that bear cultural weight and are not readily translatable or understood in other languages. The present study explores cultural items in an endangered language, Juhuri (Judeo-Tat), the traditional language of Mountain Jews (MJ) who immigrated to Israel and the United States. A set of ten items, five cultural and five neutral, served as stimuli for a picture recognition task inserted in a questionnaire …
The Impact of Ethnic Identity on Language Attitudes
Deeper processing for better EFL reading comprehension
Immigrant student identities and classroom engagement
Integration of semantic and structural constraints in narrative comprehension
The original debate between semantic and syntactic approaches to issues in reading comprehension has lost some of its appeal as psycholinguistics has embraced various interactive models of reading comprehension. This study, based on Information Integration Theory (Anderson, 1981, 1982) and its methodological counterpart, Functional Measurement, investigates whether semantic and structural information may be integrated during the comprehension pro…
Variation in the requesting behavior of bilingual children
Strategies for Requesting in Spanish and English Structural Similarities and Pragmatic Differences
This paper reports on recent work in the acquisition of pragmatic competence in a second language. It centers on the speech act of requesting and the semantic strategies for conveying that speech act. First, a contrastive analysis of Spanish and English strategies is undertaken to show that basically the same strategies are available in both languages. The paper goes on to describe an experiment in which native speakers of each language were aske…
Variation in the requesting behavior of bilingual children
Jewish styles of worship
Language Proficiency, Text Content and Order Effects in Narrative Recall
An analysis of the major goals of the story grammar paradigm and some of the controversy surrounding them has led to a challenge of the robustness of this paradigm's findings. The effects of text content and order of presentation on narrative recall were investigated in groups of intermediate and advanced readers of English as a foreign language. Subjects were asked to recall three narratives presented either in a standard, partially-mixed or ful…
Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading (Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series)
Integration of semantic and structural constraints in narrative comprehension
The original debate between semantic and syntactic approaches to issues in reading comprehension has lost some of its appeal as psycholinguistics has embraced various interactive models of reading comprehension. This study, based on Information Integration Theory (Anderson, 1981, 1982) and its methodological counterpart, Functional Measurement, investigates whether semantic and structural information may be integrated during the comprehension pro…
Language awareness in non‐native writers
Ninety‐three subjects participated in a series of experiments investigating how the number of errors from different linguistic sources affects evaluative judgments about the need for revision in a non‐native language. In the first three experiments, groups of non‐native and native writers of English as well as EFL teachers were exposed to bifactorial combinations of syntactic and lexical errors incorporated in passages from an English composition…
Modularity in moral judgment by police officers
Classical theories of moral judgment (e.g., Piaget, 1965; Kohlberg, 1983) were tested against a modularity hypothesis in police officers. Patrol and investigation officers were compared in a series of experiments using functional measurement in which policemen were asked to make judgments, from both objective and subjective perspectives, about the severity of acts involving verbal or physical aggression. Information in the incidents included just…
Multilingualism and Nation Building
This paper focuses on language choice in the newest nation in the Horn of Africa within a broader context of language policy in multilingual states. Pre-colonial and post-colonial language policies in Eritrea are surveyed in relation to evolving linguistic and political nationalism. Language contact and its social consequences are discussed in an attempt to shed light on language policies pursued during different periods in the colonial history o…
Definite articles in the context of literary and scientific writings
Some pragmatics of definite articles
Deeper processing for better EFL reading comprehension
The impact of internal and external factors on linguistic performance in the home language and in L2 among Russian-Hebrew and Russian-German preschool children
This paper evaluates the contribution of external background factors which pertain to the child’s environment (e.g., parents’ education, parents’ occupation, family size, etc.), and internal ones which reflect the child’s time related experience with language (e.g., chronological age, age of L2 onset, etc.) to the development of linguistic skills in the two languages of bilingual children. 65 Russian-German (Mean age: 66mo, Range: 47-86mo) and 78…
Family language policies, reported language use and proficiency in Russian – Hebrew bilingual children in Israel
The relationship between family language policy (FLP) and language choice, language use, proficiency in Russian and Hebrew, codeswitching (CS) and linguistic performance was studied in Russian-speaking immigrant parents and their Russian–Hebrew bilingual preschool children. By means of Glaser's Grounded Theory, the content of sociolinguistic interviews with 65 parents was classified to form families with strict-Russian, mild-Russian and pro-bilin…
Disentangling SLI and bilingualism using sentence repetition tasks
The current study investigated performance on morpho-syntax in Russian–Hebrew sequential bilingual preschool children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) in both languages (L1 Russian and L2 Hebrew) using sentence repetition (SRep) tasks with a fundamental aim to disentangle the language abilities of bilingual children with typical language development (biTLD) from those of bilingual children with SLI (biSLI). Four groups of child…
Bi-directional cross-linguistic influence in bilingual Russian-Hebrew children
This study examines cross-linguistic influence of L1 on L2 and L2 on L1 and the extent to which age of L2 onset (L2 AoO) is linked to the acquisition of morpho-syntactic properties in both languages of bilingual children who acquire L1-Russian as a heritage language and L2-Hebrew as a majority language. Our investigation of L1-L2 influence focuses on morpho-syntactic features, whose configurations vary in Russian and Hebrew. Definiteness is reali…
Some wheres and whys in bilingual codeswitching
Aims and objectives: Differences in directionality, motivations and locus of codeswitching have been reported for children’s codeswitching, but these constructs have not been subjected to experimental study in order to examine how they may interact. This study investigated these variables in bilingual preschool children’s codeswitching. Methodology: Thirty-two Russian-Hebrew bilingual children (mean age 6;3) performed two tasks: Retelling of narr…
Main
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was designed in order to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. MAIN is suitable for children from 3 to 10 years and evaluates both comprehension and production of narratives. Its design allows for the assessment of several languages in the same child, as well as for different elicitation modes: Model Story, Retelling, and Tel…
Main
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is part of LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings). LITMUS is a battery of tests that have been developed in connection with the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (2009-2013)
Narrative Production in Arabic-speaking Adolescents with and without Hearing Loss
The present study investigated oral personal narratives elicited from Arabic speaking adolescents with and without hearing loss. Analyses focused on macrostructure, microstructure, and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). For macrostructure, narratives were examined for structural components (abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda) and narrative patterns: classic (a high point followed by a resolution), high point ending, …
Codeswitching within prepositional phrases
Aims and Research Questions: Codeswitching (CS) was investigated among English-Hebrew bilingual preschool children in a sentence repetition task focusing on switching at different points in prepositional phrases (PPs). We asked the extent to which sentence repetition accuracy differed (1) as a function of the switch site in the PP and (2) as a function of directionality, English-to-Hebrew versus Hebrew-to-English CS. Design/Methodology: English/f…
Story Grammar Elements and Mental State Terms in the Expression of Enabling Relations in Narratives of Bilingual Preschool Children
The present research analyzes causal relations between events in the narratives of bilingual preschool children with typical development (BiTD) and with developmental language disorder (BiDLD). The analyses focused on story grammar elements (attempts and goals) and mental state terms between events in Enabling relations as features contributing to narrative discourse coherence. Narratives, collected from 48 bilingual children (14 with DLD) aged 5…
The impact of language dominance on Russian-Hebrew bilingual children’s narrative production
The study explores the effect of language dominance on microstructure, macrostructure, and Internal State Terms (ISTs) in narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children and examines within-language and cross-language associations between narrative elements in two dominance groups. Narratives were collected from 38 Russian-Hebrew bilingual children aged 5;5–6;7 using the LITMUS-MAIN retelling procedures. The children were divided into L1-dominant…
Reference to characters in narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual and Russian and Hebrew monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and typical language development
This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51 children using a storytelling procedure ( MAIN – Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives).…
Language Control and Intra-Sentential Codeswitching among Bilingual Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
The present study investigated bilingual language control among preschool children in a sentence repetition task containing unilingual stimuli and codeswitched stimuli within prepositional phrases (PPs). Cross-language errors, that is, codeswitches that were not part of the stimulus sentences, were taken as evidence of difficulties in language control. Specifically, we investigated cross-language errors as a function of stimulus sentence type (co…
Linguistics (29 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Language Development and Disorders (15 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (14 works) · Hebrew (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · History (8 works)