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Dit rapport is onderdeel van het onderzoek dat wordt uitgevoerd binnen het Steunpunt voor Onderwijsonderzoek (SONO). SONO heeft als doel om beleidsvoorbereidend onderzoek te voeren rond verschillende thema’s die door de Vlaamse Overheid als prioritair en relevant worden beschouwd. Een van de onderzoeksthema’s heeft betrekking op het domein ‘de lerende’. Binnen dat domein wordt er onder meer onderzoek gedaan naar taalstimulerende maatregelen in de praktijk (OL 1.5), waarvan dit rapport een product is.In dit onderzoeksrapport worden de resultaten beschreven van het kwantitatieve onderzoek dat tijdens het schooljaar 2016-2017 werd uitgevoerd in een steekproef van 30 Vlaamse lagere scholen. Aanvullend op dit kwantitatieve luik werd ook een kwalitatief onderzoek gevoerd in enkele lagere scholen. Bovendien voerden we ook onderzoek naar het talenbeleid in het secundair onderwijs. We verwijzen naar het syntheserapport dat de vier deelrapporten bundelt voor een overkoepelende beleidssamenvatting (Vanbuel, Vandommele & Van den Branden, 2020a; 2020b).

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The boundaries of natural language categories are notoriously vague. It is rarely the case that language users agree upon the extension of a particular category. In this dissertation a formal framework for the study of vagueness in natural language categories is introduced. It contends that inter-individual differences in judgments of category membership are due to the use of distinct membership criteria. These criteria are imposed on a latent scale that organizes potential referents with respect to the target category. While the membership criteria are said to differ from individual to individual, the scale is assumed to be common to all respondents. The position of a respondent's membership criterion along the scale indicates whether she takes a broad or a narrow view on what should be included in the category. The more to the left of the scale the membership criteria are positioned, the more liberal the respondents. Membership criteria that are positioned more to the right of the scale designate more conservative respondents. This is the case because the criteria behave as probabilistic thresholds. Referents that surpass a criterion have a higher probability of being endorsed than of being denounced as category members. The reverse holds for referents that fall short of the criterion. When a referent coincides with a criterion it is as likely to be endorsed as it is to be rejected. The distance between criterion and referent along the scale determines the relative probability of both categorization outcomes. The further away from the criterion a referent is located, the higher its probability of being called a category member (when it surpasses the criterion) and the higher its probability of being called a non-member (when it falls short of the criterion). The vagueness of a particular referent thus also depends on its own position along the latent scale. The further along the scale referents are positioned, the higher the probability that they will be endorsed as category members.The development of the formal framework proceeds in seven chapters. Chapter 1 identifies the proposed account of vagueness with the Rasch model (Rasch, 1960). The Rasch model is part of the family of item response models. It is argued that these models, with their emphasis on differences among both referents and respondents, constitute an appropriate formal framework for the study of vagueness. Chapters 2 and 3 embed the framework in a general theory of categorization, known as the Threshold Theory (Hampton, 2007). This allows for a substantive interpretation of the Rasch model's assumptions and establishes references for its evaluation and development. Both chapters include illustrations of how to apply the Rasch model to answer questions about categorization differences with respect to natural language categories. Chapter 4 demonstrates one of the benefits of having an explicit, formal model at one's disposal. It comes natural to put the model's assumptions to test, allowing one to gain new insights about the phenomenon of study. It appears notto suffice - as the Rasch model does - to assume that only the comparison between criterion and referent position informs the decision to include a referent as a category member or not. The decision might also depend upon the conclusions that were reached for other referents. This warrants the application of more complex models from the item response framework. Chapters 5 and 6 argue for the applicability of the proposed framework beyond the study of extension differences among adult language users. They suggest it might be used to study other aspects of semantic cognition as well. In Chapter 5 it is brought to bear on the question of how children proceed to acquire categories that do not have fixed extensions. In Chapter 6 it is employed to answer the question of how a category's extension and intension relate. The chapters employ item response models that are different from the Rasch model to answer these questions. Chapter 7 concludes with an overview of other directions to take the formal framework in to further our understanding of vagueness in particular, and semantic cognition in general.

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The general aim of the thesis is to study and compare the scientific output of countries throughout the world, in terms of publications and citations, with a policy perspective in mind. Over 130 countries with relatively high output are selected and the period of study is from 1996 to 2012. Mainly the data from the SciMago database is used, which in turn is based on the Elsevier Scopus database. More specifically, the main aims are the following: 1. To compare the countries by scientific output per capita, to study dynamics of the per capita output, and identify interesting cases particularly, where and when exceptional growth has occurred. 2. To compare and classify the countries by the structure of their scientific output i.e., the distribution of the output by subject areas. 3. To study how the structure of the output is related to the magnitude of the total output and its dynamics. Methodologically, the work also can be divided into three main directions: 1. Review and development of country-level scientometric research framework, which was necessary because the field is relatively young and not particularly intensively studied. We attempted to systematize and standardize scientometric indicators and notions relevant for our research. We also introduced a number of new indicators and notions and analyzed their properties in comparison to the older ones. 2. Application of a range of nonparametric statistical techniques (including exact randomization, unsupervised clustering methods, and bootstrapping), both for descriptive purposes and for inference. We also use multidimensional scaling for visualization. 3. Extensive use of programming at all stages, from data extraction to analysis and visualization. Some of the results and conclusions are briefly presented below: 1. The range of the per capita scientific output is very large, even compared to the range of economic parameters, such as GDP per capita. Within the countries studied, the most productive ones are producing over 10,000 times more publications per capita than the least productive ones. However, the disparity is decreasing over time. 2. The classification of the countries in terms of the structure of their scientific output largely coincides with their geopolitical classification. The structure is quite conservative. The post-Soviet countries, for instance, are grouped in a distinct cluster throughout the years. However, overall the structural disparity is also decreasing. The dominance of the 'Western' structure is diminishing in favor of the east-Asian one. 3. None of the countries whose scientific output structure (profile) is far (one third of the maximum empirical distance or more) from the world average, have an above-average total productivity. In some cases, maintenance of the structural peculiarities seems both unrealistic and unjustified, if growth of the total output is required. However, different successful profiles do exist. For many countries lagging in terms of the total output, structurally close successful profiles exist, which may serve as a guideline for the simplest growth-path.

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In deze masterproef trachten we twee categorisatiestrategieën te onderzoeken die mensen gebruiken in de beoordeling van activiteiten als BEROEPEN. Daarom werden activiteiten samengebracht waarvan we vermoeden dat er individuele verschillen zijn in de beoordeling betreffende het lidmaatschap tot de categorie BEROEPEN. We passen multidimensionele IRT modellen (Reckase, Ackerman, & Carlson, 1988) toe op de data waarbij zowel de positie van de items als de individuen kunnen worden weergegeven op twee latente dimensies. In dit onderzoek werden activiteiten onderverdeeld in vier sets waarvan de activiteiten telkens verondersteld werden te variëren langs twee prominente dimensies. Voor twee sets (VOORWERPEN & MENSEN en MANUEEL & MENTAAL) vermoedden we dat participanten een compensatorische strategie hanteren, waarbij het volstaat om op één van de dimensies een hoge positie te hebben om als beroep te worden beoordeeld. Voor de overige twee sets (MOEITE & GELD en REGELMAAT & VERANTWOORDELIJKHEID) stellen we een niet-compensatorische strategie voorop. Dit betekent dat een activiteit een hoge positie moet hebben op beide dimensies om als lid te worden beoordeeld. Er treedt met name geen compensatie op.Een categorisatietaak vormde de basis van het onderzoek. Hierbij werd aan 886 participanten gevraagd om voor 4 x 24 activiteiten de beoordeling te maken of deze als BEROEPEN konden worden gecategoriseerd. Als compensatorisch MIRT model werd gekozen voor het multidimensional two-parameter logistic model (Reckase, 1985, 1997), dat werd toegepast op de categorisatiedata van set 1 en set 2. Als niet-compensatorisch MIRT model werd het multicomponent latent trait model (Whitely, 1980) gekozen, dat werd toegepast op de categorisatiedata van set 3 en set 4. Beide modellen leverden schattingen op van de posities van de activiteiten langs twee latente dimensies. Deze werden gecorreleerd met onafhankelijke beoordelingen van de activiteiten op de veronderstelde dimensies.Er werd geen...

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This thesis explores the theoretical concept of salience and its operationalization and measurement in color categorization research. The overview of the current approaches in color studies shows that salience, defined as basicness or prototypicality, has been central to modeling the cognitive structure of color categories in the related fields of cognitive anthropology, psychology and linguistics. At the same time it is a multifaceted phenomenon defined by the theoretical framework and methods of the specific discipline. Thus, anthropological and psychological studies use experimental data from color naming and elicitation tasks which measure the salience of color categories through behavioral tests, while linguistic studies rely on linguistic salience parameters derived from frequency counts in text corpora and dictionary information. The question of the compatibility of the experimental and linguistic evidence was first addressed by Corbett and Davies (1995, 1997), who used the published data from a range of experimental studies to compare several groups of salience measures. They show that there might a distinction between linguistic measures of salience (frequency in texts and number of derived forms), color naming tasks (response time, frequency and consistency of naming) and elicitation tasks (frequency and position in the lists). The present study expands this analysis by including 58 salience parameters from published data and two available datasets of raw data. This means not only a more comprehensive set of salience measurement, but also new types of data not included in the previous studies, namely data from online color naming experiments and more modern corpora. Additionally, the larger amount of up-to-date data allows exploring an extended list of 47 color words including non-basic color names and including new types of salience parameters, e.g. the size of the color category in three-dimensional color spaces. The interrelations between salience parameters are analyzed using the method of multidimensional scaling using Smacof. The exploratory approach is used to identify the groups of salience parameters that are most similar to each other and that are most likely to represent the same underlying salience dimensions. The confirmatory approach is used to test the hypotheses regarding the dimensions of the salience space identified in the exploratory solutions and proposed in the previous research. Confirmatory MDS models are fitted using side constraints defined as external variables. The study is organized in three series of analyses, where standard and constrained MDS models are fitted to the different subsets of salience parameters. The three series of analyses reveal a relatively consistent structure of the salience space across different types of salience parameters and color names. At the most general level, we can identify three major groups of salience measurements derived from different sources: color naming, elicitation and corpus data. Salience parameters from association tasks do not form a separate group, but appear to the similar to the salience parameters from corpus data. The confirmatory part of the analysis tests two alternative structures of the salience space, revealing that it can be defined not only in terms of the 'source' of data, but also in terms of context of color word usage and the distribution of the color samples.