20 juny, 2018

Autors:
Anna Gavarró, Stephanie Durrleman (Eds.)
Títol:
Investigating grammar in Autism Spectrum DisordersEditorial: Frontiers in Psychology
Col·lecció: Frontiers in Psychology #19Data de publicació: 2018
Més informació
Text completAutism Spectrum Disorder (ASD hereafter) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by deficits in communicative and social skills. Consequently, the vast majority of research on language in ASD has focused on pragmatic difficulties, while considerably less is known about structural aspects of language in this population. Work on syntax and phonology is not only sparse, but the large heterogeneity in these grammatical domains has moreover led to conflicting reports that they are either intact or impaired. A few recent studies have thus attempted to focus instead on elucidating the different language phenotypes on the spectrum, leading to the identification of a subgroup with ASD displaying deficits reminiscent of those attested in Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Still, much more remains to be understood about variations in these grammatical profiles, as well as their relation to other abilities, such as IQ, working memory and theory of mind.
Títols de la col·lecció / Also in this series:
20 juliol, 2008

Autors:
Anna Gavarró (Ed.) and M. João Freitas (Ed.)
Títol:
Language Acquisition and DevelopmentEditorial: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Data de publicació: 2008
Pàgines: 520ISBN13: 978-1-8471-8618-8
Més informacióThis volume gathers fifty papers from the conference Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, GALA 2007, celebrated in Barcelona between the 6th and 8th of September, 2007. It covers the areas of syntax and phonology of child language from the theoretical perspective of generative grammar – the theoretical outlook which first placed language acquisition at the centre of linguistic inquiry.
16 setembre, 2019

Autors:
Jingtao Zhu i Anna Gavarró
Títol:
Testing language acquisition models: null and overt topics in MandarinEditorial: Journal of Child Language, vol.46(4). Cambridge University Press
Data de publicació: Juliol 2019
Més informacióParameter setting is either precipitous (Gibson & Wexler, 1994) or it is gradual in response to input frequency (Yang, 2002, 2004). In this study, we compare these models against the empirical domain of subject and (direct) object drop in Mandarin. We conducted a corpus-based study of the speech of 47 Mandarin-speaking children aged 1;2–6;5, and their caregivers, from the CHILDES database. The results show that before age 1;8 all the children used null subjects and null objects in a target-like fashion, which reveals that the parameter that governs null topics is set from very early on, even if the presence of disambiguating evidence for [+Null Topic] patterns is low. Besides, children's ba constructions, which require an overt object, reliably included this object from the first occurrence although its frequency was scarce in the input. Our results indicate that the setting of certain parameters occurred early independently of the input.