Guasti Maria Teresa | Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (original) (raw)
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Papers by Guasti Maria Teresa
Languages, 2018
Subject and object relative clauses have been studied from the point of view of language acquisit... more Subject and object relative clauses have been studied from the point of view of language acquisition and adult sentence processing. In the adult sentence processing literature, subject relative clauses (RCs) are read faster than object RCs (e.g., Frauenfelder et al. 1980 for French; King and Kutas 1995 for English; Schriefers et al. 1995 for Dutch). Similarly, children understand and produce subject RCs earlier and with greater accuracy than object RCs in a variety of languages with head-initial relative clauses, as English, Hebrew and Italian. These findings cannot be a coincidence but reflect the fact that what children acquire first is also easier to process by adults. In this article, we support this observation by investigating subject and object RCs in children and adults speaking French and Italian. These languages display subject and object relatives as in (1), but they also have a type of object relative in which the subject is postverbal. We replicate the observation that subject relatives are easier than object and show that object relatives as in (1b), with the embedded subject in preverbal position are easier than those with the embedded subject in postverbal position, both for children and adults. We offer an account of these findings in terms of Fodor and Inoue's (2000) diagnosis model in light of the fact that acquisition involves processing.
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2005
Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretat... more Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms (some, might, or) (cf. Smith, 1980; Braine and Rumain, 1981). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). Although previous studies involved children of different ages as well as different tasks, and are thus not directly comparable, nevertheless a common finding is that children do not seem to derive scalar implicatures to the same extent as adults do. The present article describes a series of experiments that were conducted with Italian speaking subjects (children and adults), focusing mainly on the scalar term some. Our goal was to carefully examine the specific conditions that allow the computation of implicatures by children. In so doing, we demonstrate that children as young as seven (the youngest age of the children who participated in the Noveck study) are able to compute implicatures in experimental conditions that properly satisfy certain contextual prerequisites for deriving such implicatures. We also present further results that have general consequences for the research methodology employed in this area of study. Our research indicates that certain tasks mask children's understanding of scalar terms, not only including the task used by Noveck, but also tasks that employ certain explicit instructions, such as the training task used by Papafragou & Musolino (2003). Our findings indicate further that, although explicit training apparently improves children's ability to draw implicatures, children nevertheless fail to achieve adult levels of performance for most scalar terms even in such tasks, 2 and that the effects of instruction do not last beyond the training session itself for most children. Another relevant finding of the present study is that some of the manipulations of the experimental context have an effect on all subjects, whereas others produce effects on just a subset of children. Individual differences of this kind may have been concealed in previous research because performance by individual subjects was not reported. Our general conclusions are that even young children (7-year-old) have the prerequisites for deriving scalar implicatures, although these abilities are revealed only when the conversational background is natural.
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 2015
Typically the utterance in (1) carries with it a scalar implicature. More precisely, upon hearing... more Typically the utterance in (1) carries with it a scalar implicature. More precisely, upon hearing (1) one infers that John learned either English or German, but not both languages. Intuitively, the implicature of exclusivity arises because, if the speaker meant to say that John learned both English and German, a more effective means of expression would be (2). (2) John learned English and German. According to the Principle of Cooperation, the speaker is expected to convey the intended message as accurately as possible. Since the speaker did not use (2), the utterance in (3) is interpreted as: (3) John learned English or German, but not both.
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2014
We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with speci... more We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in order to investigated whether the failure to produce third person direct object clitics (DO clitics) is a persistent clinical marker of SLI in Italian; we examined whether this failure also extends to reflexive clitics. Results show that Italian children with SLI aged 6 to 9;11 years fail to produce DO clitics and tend to produce a lexical noun introduced by a determiner (full DP) in the argument postverbal position instead of the pronoun; the production of reflexive clitics is preserved in the same population. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and computation of likelihood ratios show that the failure to produce DO clitics is a persistent good clinical marker of SLI in Italian. We argue that DO clitic production requires complex morphosyntactic operations that are hardly achieved by children with SLI; our findings are compatible with theories considering SLI as a deficit of processing complex linguistic relations.
Language Learning and Development, 2009
Across languages, there is a tight coupling between nouns and object categories, but the coupling... more Across languages, there is a tight coupling between nouns and object categories, but the coupling between adjectives and object properties reveals more variation. Previous work has established that the link between nouns and object categories is evident in preschool-aged children acquiring English, French, or Spanish but has revealed differences in how these children acquire adjectives across these languages. We pursue
Science of Aphasia 5. Cross Linguistic Aspects of Aphasia, 2004
Article omission is a common feature of agrammatic and child speech, but is not unique to these p... more Article omission is a common feature of agrammatic and child speech, but is not unique to these peculiar conditions, as it is a widespread option in a register of the normal language: headlines. Our aim is to show that article omission is not arbitrary, but is regulated by syntactic constraints.
Probus, 2000
Natural languages dispose of two ways of realizing syntactic negation: (1) functional projection ... more Natural languages dispose of two ways of realizing syntactic negation: (1) functional projection in the extended projection ofthe verb (NegP); (2) "adverbi-al " negation in small clauses and nominals, adjoined to AP and NP, respectively. Relevant evidedence concernc the co-...
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2005
Languages, 2018
Subject and object relative clauses have been studied from the point of view of language acquisit... more Subject and object relative clauses have been studied from the point of view of language acquisition and adult sentence processing. In the adult sentence processing literature, subject relative clauses (RCs) are read faster than object RCs (e.g., Frauenfelder et al. 1980 for French; King and Kutas 1995 for English; Schriefers et al. 1995 for Dutch). Similarly, children understand and produce subject RCs earlier and with greater accuracy than object RCs in a variety of languages with head-initial relative clauses, as English, Hebrew and Italian. These findings cannot be a coincidence but reflect the fact that what children acquire first is also easier to process by adults. In this article, we support this observation by investigating subject and object RCs in children and adults speaking French and Italian. These languages display subject and object relatives as in (1), but they also have a type of object relative in which the subject is postverbal. We replicate the observation that subject relatives are easier than object and show that object relatives as in (1b), with the embedded subject in preverbal position are easier than those with the embedded subject in postverbal position, both for children and adults. We offer an account of these findings in terms of Fodor and Inoue's (2000) diagnosis model in light of the fact that acquisition involves processing.
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2005
Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretat... more Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms (some, might, or) (cf. Smith, 1980; Braine and Rumain, 1981). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). Although previous studies involved children of different ages as well as different tasks, and are thus not directly comparable, nevertheless a common finding is that children do not seem to derive scalar implicatures to the same extent as adults do. The present article describes a series of experiments that were conducted with Italian speaking subjects (children and adults), focusing mainly on the scalar term some. Our goal was to carefully examine the specific conditions that allow the computation of implicatures by children. In so doing, we demonstrate that children as young as seven (the youngest age of the children who participated in the Noveck study) are able to compute implicatures in experimental conditions that properly satisfy certain contextual prerequisites for deriving such implicatures. We also present further results that have general consequences for the research methodology employed in this area of study. Our research indicates that certain tasks mask children's understanding of scalar terms, not only including the task used by Noveck, but also tasks that employ certain explicit instructions, such as the training task used by Papafragou & Musolino (2003). Our findings indicate further that, although explicit training apparently improves children's ability to draw implicatures, children nevertheless fail to achieve adult levels of performance for most scalar terms even in such tasks, 2 and that the effects of instruction do not last beyond the training session itself for most children. Another relevant finding of the present study is that some of the manipulations of the experimental context have an effect on all subjects, whereas others produce effects on just a subset of children. Individual differences of this kind may have been concealed in previous research because performance by individual subjects was not reported. Our general conclusions are that even young children (7-year-old) have the prerequisites for deriving scalar implicatures, although these abilities are revealed only when the conversational background is natural.
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 2015
Typically the utterance in (1) carries with it a scalar implicature. More precisely, upon hearing... more Typically the utterance in (1) carries with it a scalar implicature. More precisely, upon hearing (1) one infers that John learned either English or German, but not both languages. Intuitively, the implicature of exclusivity arises because, if the speaker meant to say that John learned both English and German, a more effective means of expression would be (2). (2) John learned English and German. According to the Principle of Cooperation, the speaker is expected to convey the intended message as accurately as possible. Since the speaker did not use (2), the utterance in (3) is interpreted as: (3) John learned English or German, but not both.
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2014
We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with speci... more We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in order to investigated whether the failure to produce third person direct object clitics (DO clitics) is a persistent clinical marker of SLI in Italian; we examined whether this failure also extends to reflexive clitics. Results show that Italian children with SLI aged 6 to 9;11 years fail to produce DO clitics and tend to produce a lexical noun introduced by a determiner (full DP) in the argument postverbal position instead of the pronoun; the production of reflexive clitics is preserved in the same population. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and computation of likelihood ratios show that the failure to produce DO clitics is a persistent good clinical marker of SLI in Italian. We argue that DO clitic production requires complex morphosyntactic operations that are hardly achieved by children with SLI; our findings are compatible with theories considering SLI as a deficit of processing complex linguistic relations.
Language Learning and Development, 2009
Across languages, there is a tight coupling between nouns and object categories, but the coupling... more Across languages, there is a tight coupling between nouns and object categories, but the coupling between adjectives and object properties reveals more variation. Previous work has established that the link between nouns and object categories is evident in preschool-aged children acquiring English, French, or Spanish but has revealed differences in how these children acquire adjectives across these languages. We pursue
Science of Aphasia 5. Cross Linguistic Aspects of Aphasia, 2004
Article omission is a common feature of agrammatic and child speech, but is not unique to these p... more Article omission is a common feature of agrammatic and child speech, but is not unique to these peculiar conditions, as it is a widespread option in a register of the normal language: headlines. Our aim is to show that article omission is not arbitrary, but is regulated by syntactic constraints.
Probus, 2000
Natural languages dispose of two ways of realizing syntactic negation: (1) functional projection ... more Natural languages dispose of two ways of realizing syntactic negation: (1) functional projection in the extended projection ofthe verb (NegP); (2) "adverbi-al " negation in small clauses and nominals, adjoined to AP and NP, respectively. Relevant evidedence concernc the co-...
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2005