Chiara Melloni

Compounds don't come easy

In this article we present an original analysis of NN compounds in Germanic and Romance, proposing that their morpho-syntactic and interpretive properties can be explained in compliance with narrow syntax conditions on Merge and Projection, crucially related to Kayne’s Antisymmetry model. In particular, we contend that root compounding represents a specific mode of syntactic computation (‘Compound Phase’), whereby two structurally identical syntactic objects – the compound members – get merged in a parallel fashion, hence yielding a symmetric configuration that prevents label projection. Compound Phase computation can thus be seen as a ‘repair strategy’ allowing the derivation to get a label and converge at the interfaces. On these theoretical grounds, the formal and interpretive contrasts between Germanic and Romance, and, within each language, the differences between compounds and prototypical syntactic constructions are essentially derived from the syntax of Compound Phases, given the independent properties of the lexical items involved in the computation.

Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task

In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0xa0years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11xa0years old). Our task, inspired by Berko’s Wug Test, had the aim of testing the subjects’ ability to apply pluralization rules to nonwords in the morphologically complex context of Italian nominal inflection. Results demonstrate that dyslexics display poorer morphological skills in comparison to controls, showing lower accuracy in the task. Furthermore, the dissimilar performances reported by the subjects in the different conditions indicate that the ability to inflect nonwords depends on factors such as the rule’s productivity, frequency, and opacity with respect to gender. Finally, the children’s performance in this task was significantly related to their reading proficiency, and it could predict accuracy in word reading independently of phonological awareness and working memory.

Inflectional morphology: evidence for an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia

It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualis...