Linguistic structure modulates attention in reading: Evidence from negative concord in Italian.

We report the reading performance of an Italian speaker with egocentric Neglect Dyslexia on sentences with Negative Concord structures, which contain a linguistic cue to the presence of a preceding negative marker and compare it to sentences with no such cue. As predicted, the frequency of reading the whole sentence, including the initial negative marker , was higher in Negative Concord structures than in sentences which also started with , but crucially, lacked the medially positioned linguistic cue to the presence of . These data support the claim that the presence of linguistic cues to sentence structure modulates attention during reading in Neglect Dyslexia.

Multilingual Competence Influences Answering Strategies in Italian-German Speakers.

The present study aims at analyzing the role of nativeness, the amount of input in L1 acquisition and the multilingual competence in the performance of Italian-German bilingual speakers. We compare novel data from the performance of adult L2 learners (L1: Italian; late L2: German) and that of heritage speakers (heritage language: Italian; majority language: German) to previous data from monolingual speakers of Italian. The comparison deals with the produced word order at the syntax-discourse interface in sentences containing New Information Subjects in answers to questions that prompt the identification of the clausal subject.