1,721,057 research outputs found
Interference in processing agreement: the impact of grammatical cues.
No full textAgreement 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
Il cervello bilingue
No full textChe cosa succede nel cervello di chi impara più lingue? Parlare più di una lingua può procurare dei vantaggi cognitivi nell'arco della vita? Esistono lingue più importanti di altre? È possibile imparare una lingua da adulti? Il bilinguismo può essere di ostacolo a chi soffre di patologie o disturbi specifici del linguaggio o dell’apprendimento? Che implicazioni ha per la società l’aumento della popolazione bilingue? E quali sono i fattori che possono favorire e sostenere il bilinguismo in bambini e adulti? Questi sono alcuni degli interrogativi cui il libro intende rispondere in questo viaggio nel cervello bilingue, a partire dai risultati dei più recenti studi condotti a livello internazionale
Syntactic complexity in the presence of an intervener: the case of an Italian speaker with anomia
No full textBackground: A robust finding from language acquisition, adult processing, and individuals with language impairment is that certain types of Object Relatives (ORs) and Object Questions (OQs) are more challenging in both production and comprehension compared to their Subject counterparts. Approaches informed by linguistic theory have been proposed to clarify the source of the difficulties with these sentences in people with aphasia, with recent models supporting the idea of a grammatically based resource reduction selectively affecting sentences that require the processing of an element acting as an intervener.Aims: This work presents new evidence to the study of syntactic competence in people with acquired language disorders, from a pilot study exploring in detail the morphosyntactic competence of an Italian speaker with anomia.Methods & Procedures: The clinical diagnosis of anomia in the participant revealed a deficit in lexical retrieval with no deficit at grammatical level. Morphosyntactic competence was investigated through a series of off-line tasks on both comprehension and production.Outcomes & Results: The morphosyntactic abilities of the participant turned out to be for the most part intact with no difficulties such as agrammatism. However, a selective deficit in the computation of certain ORs and OQs emerged. The deficit was selective for structures with an intervener and more specifically for structures in which the featural specification of the intervening subject is included in the specification of the displaced object.Conclusions: Syntactic asymmetries emerged in the performance of an individual with anomia, with no apparent morphosyntactic impairment or sign of agrammatism. The deficit of the syntactic computation was selective and compatible with the grammatical Featural Relativized Minimality approach to the difficulties in the computation of sentences with an intervener. The preliminary results presented in this work suggest that the analysis of sentences with an intervener may be a sensitive test for the diagnosis of a syntactic-based impairment and that formal linguistic models may offer promising tools for exploring linguistic deficits. Further investigation is necessary to strengthen these findings
Bilingualism Matters:Language Learning across the life span
No full textWhat happens in the brain when learning a second language? Can speaking more than one language provide cognitive benefits over a lifetime? What implications does an increase in bilingualism have for society? And what are the factors that can promote and support bilingualism in children and adults? This book – a translated and adapted version of Il Cervello Bilingue (2020) - answers these questions and more, providing the reader with a comprehensive yet concise guide on different topics related to bilingualism. Based on the results of the most recent studies conducted internationally, it discusses recent research findings, explains terminology, and elaborates on the current state of the field, with the aim of providing families and society with suggestions about how to encourage bilingualism. Written in an engaging and accessible style, it takes both academics and readers with no prior knowledge of the field on a journey into the bilingual brain
Listening effort for sentence comprehension in noisy classrooms: the mediating role of linguistic factors, inhibitory control, and noise sensitivity
No full textChildren learn in classrooms in the presence of background noise, mostly produced by the children themselves. Even when the acoustic conditions are favorable (i.e., low noise levels), differences in individual performance and listening effort in complex academic tasks are observed. Personal characteristics such as linguistic and cognitive skills and sensitivity to noise have been reported as factors supporting students’ performance. Moreover, the Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL) postulates the additional, individual dimension of children’s motivation should be considered when evaluating listening effort, besides task cognitive demands.
This study aims to explore the interplay of the above-mentioned individual factors for primary school children (N=120, grades 3 to 5) doing a sentence comprehension task in two-talkers background noise. Data on both accuracy and response time, as well as self-ratings of effort and motivation, were acquired. In addition, inhibitory control, linguistic competencies, and self-ratings of noise sensitivity were measured in quiet. Results first highlight the interplay of acoustic conditions and linguistic competencies in shaping the child’s motivation in performing the task, and then show how the children’s inhibitory control and noise sensitivity mediate behavioral and subjective effort. Thus, individual factors shall be taken into consideration when evaluating the effect of classroom acoustics on performance in academic tasks
Is it possible to differentiate multilingual children and children with Developmental Language Disorder?
Full text linkThe language profiles of monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typically developing multilingual children can overlap, presenting similar paths and delays in learning specific aspects of language in comparison with typically developing monolingual children of the same age.
• In an increasingly multilingual society, it is essential to develop guidelines and tools for differentiating the two populations, avoiding both under- and overdiagnosis of language disorders in multilingual children.
• Many multilingual children have a narrower vocabulary compared with monolinguals of the same age. Therefore, grammatical features are considered more reliable clinical markers of a possible disorder.
• Clinical markers for children with DLD are language-specific. For example, in English-speaking children with DLD, verb endings may be omitted, as in “*Mary cook it”. For Italian or French children with DLD, a reliable marker is the realisation of certain pronouns, as in Mary lo cucina, “Mary it cooks”, with omissions or substitution of the pronoun lo depending on age.
• Despite similarities between multilingual children and children with DLD, it is possible to distinguish between the two groups after multilingual children have at least two years of exposure to their second language (L2).
• Multilingual children can learn their L2 fully, while this is generally not the case for monolingual children with DLD; however, children’s success in learning their L2 depends on length of exposure to the language, the type of multilanguage experience, and the structural relatedness of the two languages
How early L2 children perform on Italian clinical markers of SLI: A study of clitic production and nonword repetition
Full text linkEarly 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
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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