Maria Garraffa

Canonicity effects as grammatical phenomena

The existence of a split in agrammatic Brocas aphasics’ comprehension of semantically reversible sentences with canonical vs. non-canonical word order have been explored in deep in the last decades. In this paper we present and discuss a new approach to canonicity effects that derives the asymmetry in a principled way from the Relativized Minimality approach to locality in syntax. The approach takes both processing and representational considerations into account thus avoiding problems, such as variation and complexity, encountered in non-integrated accounts. New data from a series of tests on both comprehension and production with an agrammatic Brocas aphasic patient are presented and discussed in light of the new proposal. Reduction of these asymmetries to a special case of the more general theory of locality allows generalizations to be made, which might be extended over different populations.

Effects of Immediate and Cumulative Syntactic Experience in Language Impairment: Evidence from Priming of Subject Relatives in Children with SLI

We investigated the production of subject relative clauses (SRc) in Italian pre-school children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and age-matched typically-developing children (TD) controls. In a structural priming paradigm, children described pictures after hearing the experimenter produce a bare noun or an SRc description, as part of a picture matching task. In a sentence repetition task, children repeated SRc. In the priming paradigm, children with SLI produced SRc after hearing the experimenter use SRc with the same or different lexical content; the magnitude of this priming effect was the same as in TDC. However, children with SLI showed a smaller cumulative priming effect than TDC. Children with SLI showed superior SRc performance in picture-matching than in sentence repetition. We propose that children with SLI have an abstract representation of SRc that can be facilitated by prior exposure, but exhibit impaired implicit learning mechanisms.

Linguistic and Cognitive Skills in Sardinian–Italian Bilingual Children

We report the results of a study which tested receptive Italian grammatical competence and general cognitive abilities in bilingual Italian–Sardinian children and age-matched monolingual Italian children attending the first and second year of primary school in the Nuoro province of Sardinia, where Sardinian is still widely spoken. The results show that across age groups the performance of Sardinian–Italian bilingual children is in most cases indistinguishable from that of monolingual Italian children, in terms of both Italian language skills and general cognitive abilities. However, where there are differences, these emerge gradually over time and are mostly in favor of bilingual children.

How early L2 children perform on Italian clinical markers of SLI: A study of clitic production and nonword repetition

ABSTRACT Early second language (EL2) learners generally perform more poorly than monolinguals in specific language domains, presenting similarities with children affected by specific language impairment (SLI). As a consequence, it can be difficult to correctly diagnose this disorder in EL2 children. The current study investigated the performance of 120 EL2 and 40 age-matched monolingual children in object clitic production and nonword repetition, which are two sensitive clinical markers of SLI in Italian. Results show that EL2 children underperform in comparison to monolinguals in the clitic task. However, in contrast to what is reported on Italian-speaking children with SLI, EL2 children tend not to omit clitics but instead produce the incorrect form, committing agreement errors. No differences are found between EL2 and monolingual children on nonword repetition. These results suggest that, at least in Italian, EL2 children only superficially resemble children with SLI and, on closer inspection, present a qualitatively and quantitatively different linguistic profile.

Working Memory Mechanism in Proportional Quantifier Verification

The paper explores the cognitive mechanisms involved in the verification of sentences with proportional quantifiers (e.g. “More than half of the dots are blue”). The first study shows that the verification of proportional sentences is more demanding than the verification of sentences such as: “There are seven blue and eight yellow dots”. The second study reveals that both types of sentences are correlated with memory storage, however, only proportional sentences are associated with the cognitive control. This result suggests that the cognitive mechanism underlying the verification of proportional quantifiers is crucially related to the integration process, in which an individual has to compare in memory the cardinalities of two sets. In the third study we find that the numerical distance between two cardinalities that must be compared significantly influences the verification time and accuracy. The results of our studies are discussed in the broader context of processing complex sentences.

Reading for Meaning: What Influences Paragraph Understanding in Aphasia?

Purpose The current study investigated the effect of text variables including length, readability, propositional content, and type of information on the reading comprehension of people with aphasia. Method The performance of 75 people with aphasia was compared with 87 healthy, age-matched control participants. Reading comprehension was considered in terms of both accuracy in responding to questions tapping comprehension and reading time. Participants with aphasia (PWA) were divided into 2 groups (no reading impairment [PWA:NRI] and reading impairment [PWA:RI]) depending on whether their performance fell within the 5th percentile of control participants. Results As groups, both PWA:NRI and PWA:RI differed significantly from control participants in terms of reading time and comprehension accuracy. PWA:NRI and PWA:RI differed from each other in terms of accuracy but not reading time. There was no significant effect of readability or propositional density on comprehension accuracy or reading time for any of the groups. There was a significant effect of length on reading time but not on comprehension accuracy. All groups found main ideas easier than details, stated information easier than inferred, and had particular difficulty with questions that required integration of information across paragraphs (gist). Conclusions Both accuracy of comprehension and reading speed need to be considered when characterizing reading difficulties in people with aphasia.

Linguistic and cognitive effects of bilingualism with regional minority languages: a study of Sardinian-Italian adult speakers.

This study explores the effects of bilingualism in Sardinian as a regional minority language on the linguistic competence in Italian as the dominant language and on non-linguistic cognitive abilities. Sardinian/Italian adult speakers and monolingual Italian speakers living in the same geographical area of Sardinia were compared in two kinds of tasks: (a) verbal and non-verbal cognitive tasks targeting working memory and attentional control and (b) tasks of linguistic abilities in Italian focused on the comprehension of sentences differing in grammatical complexity. Although no difference was found between bilinguals and monolinguals in the cognitive control of attention, bilinguals performed better on working memory tasks. Bilinguals with lower formal education were found to be faster at comprehension of one type of complex sentence (center embedded object relative clauses). In contrast, bilinguals and monolinguals with higher education showed comparable slower processing of complex sentences. These results show that the effects of bilingualism are modulated by type of language experience and education background: positive effects of active bilingualism on the dominant language are visible in bilinguals with lower education, whereas the effects of higher literacy in Italian obliterate those of active bilingualism in bilinguals and monolinguals with higher education.

Interference in Processing Agreement: The Impact of Grammatical Cues

Agreement is a covariation in morphological form that reflects relations between words. A series of experiments were carried out in Italian during production and comprehension where an element interferes with agreement. The likelihood of interference found in both modalities is related to the markedness of the intervener and to its grammatical nature: it occurs more frequently when the number expressed on a prepositional modifiers intervene between the subject and the verb than the number expressed on an object pronoun. Furthermore, subject agreement process with an intervener object pronoun is prone to error, with many errors reported also in the matched condition and with slower reaction timing in comprehension. The study supports the idea that agreement is a grammatical process sensitive not only to the markedness of the intervener element but also to its structural position. A unifying explanation for agreement in both production and comprehension will be adopted in line with retrieval of an agreement source from a content-addressable memory sensitive to structural positions and their implementation in different languages.

Editorial: Language Acquisition in Diverse Linguistic, Social and Cognitive Circumstances

verb root be_located and some placement affixes such as “next to” and “on top of” to encode the axial parts of the Ground entity with which the Figure sets up a spatial relation with. These crosslinguistic differences between HKSL and Cantonese pose Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org July 2018 | Volume 9 | Article 1148 190 Tang and Li Acquisition of Classifier Constructions interesting acquisition predictions especially in the context of Deaf children acquiring HKSL in a bilingual fashion. As discussed previously, the basic word order of HKSL is SVO with plain verbs, uninflected spatial and agreement verbs. Child data from Lam (2009) also confirmed an initial SVO order based on plain verbs. As such, it overlaps with the canonical SVO order in Cantonese. Under these circumstances, we predict that the initial word order of constructions involving a classifier predicate in HKSL is SVO, which may actually be doubly enhanced by the “shared” canonical SVO order of Cantonese andHKSL. Language Synthesis will predict that these DHs may initially select those morphosyntactic features pertaining to a SVO order with a lexicalized verb root, but not classifier features or locus features. Under those circumstances, it pertains to a Cantonese or a HKSLbased structure and the latter reflects the word order grammar of plain verbs and sometimes uninflected agreement verbs. As such, Vocabulary Insertion may come from Cantonese and HKSL, or both under code blending conditions. Subsequent acquisition of inflectional morphology for person and spatial agreement with agreement verbs and spatial verbs may trigger Deaf children’s reanalysis of verb morphology, in the sense that HKSL verbs are not totally uninflected, leading to a reformulation of sub-classes of verbs and one of them is classifier constructions constituted by an abstract verb root, classifier features as well as locus features for spatial and subject/object agreement. We predict that classifier features are selected earlier than locus features in the Numeration, because classifier features, said to be akin to gender features in Zwitserlood (2003), are more semantic in nature, unlike locus features which yield R-loci in space for certain formal functions of encoding referential and agreement relations. The selection of such features in the Numeration motivates projections of agreement nodes at Spell-out where the features are merged at the terminal nodes for Spec-Head agreement with the noun referents in the specifier positions, and for spelling out the R-loci of the classifiers for subject/object agreement. In other words, the acquisition of the morphosyntactic properties of classifier constructions, and the schema of the Ground preceding the Figure in classifier constructions trigger Deaf children to develop word order variation, from SVO to OSV or SOV orders. To sum up this section, we examine whether the selection of morphosyntactic features in the Numeration is a potential domain for language interaction to occur in our DHs’ production of HKSL classifier constructions. Lack of inhibition also implies that Vocabulary Insertion as a late phenomenon allows items to come from either Cantonese or HKSL.

Impaired implicit learning of syntactic structure in children with developmental language disorder: Evidence from syntactic priming:

Background and aims Implicit learning mechanisms associated with detecting structural regularities have been proposed to underlie both the long-term acquisition of linguistic structure and a short-term tendency to repeat linguistic structure across sentences (structural priming) in typically developing children. Recent research has suggested that a deficit in such mechanisms may explain the inconsistent trajectory of language learning displayed by children with Developmental Learning Disorder. We used a structural priming paradigm to investigate whether a group of children with Developmental Learning Disorder showed impaired implicit learning of syntax (syntactic priming) following individual syntactic experiences, and the time course of any such effects. Methods Five- to six-year-old Italian-speaking children with Developmental Learning Disorder and typically developing age-matched and language-matched controls played a picture-description-matching game with an experimenter. The experimenter’s descriptions were systematically manipulated so that children were exposed to both active and passive structures, in a randomized order. We investigated whether children’s descriptions used the same abstract syntax (active or passive) as the experimenter had used on an immediately preceding turn (no-delay) or three turns earlier (delay). We further examined whether children’s syntactic production changed with increasing experience of passives within the experiment. Results Children with Developmental Learning Disorder’s syntactic production was influenced by the syntax of the experimenter’s descriptions in the same way as typically developing language-matched children, but showed a different pattern from typically developing age-matched children. Children with Developmental Learning Disorder were more likely to produce passive syntax immediately after hearing a passive sentence than an active sentence, but this tendency was smaller than in typically developing age-matched children. After two intervening sentences, children with Developmental Learning Disorder no longer showed a significant syntactic priming effect, whereas typically developing age-matched children did. None of the groups showed a significant effect of cumulative syntactic experience. Conclusions Children with Developmental Learning Disorder show a pattern of syntactic priming effects that is consistent with an impairment in implicit learning mechanisms that are associated with the detection and extraction of abstract structural regularities in linguistic input. Results suggest that this impairment involves reduced initial learning from each syntactic experience, rather than atypically rapid decay following intact initial learning. Implications Children with Developmental Learning Disorder may learn less from each linguistic experience than typically developing children, and so require more input to achieve the same learning outcome with respect to syntax. Structural priming is an effective technique for manipulating both input quality and quantity to determine precisely how Developmental Learning Disorder is related to language input, and to investigate how input tailored to take into account the cognitive profile of this population can be optimised in designing interventions.