Metaphor comprehension and production in verbally able children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Research in the field of figurative language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has demonstrated that autistic individuals experience systematic difficulties in the comprehension of different types of metaphors. However, there is scarce evidence regarding metaphor production skills in ASD. Importantly, the exact source of metaphor processing difficulties in ASD remains largely controversial.

Being a heritage speaker matters: the role of markedness in subject-verb person agreement in Italian.

This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. To this end, 54 adult HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed a self-paced reading task (SPRT) and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). Markedness was manipulated by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects.

Figurative language processing in autism spectrum disorders: A review.

Impairments in the broader domain of pragmatics are considered to be a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A challenging aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to process nonliteral language. Interestingly, previous studies in figurative language comprehension in ASD have demonstrated conflicting results regarding participants' performance.

Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions.

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity.

Multiple wh-interrogatives in child heritage Romanian: On-line comprehension and production.

This study compared the online comprehension and the production of multiple interrogatives in 18 Romanian-English bilingual children aged 6;0-9;2 (  = 8;0) living in the UK who have Romanian as heritage language (L1) and English as majority language (L2) and 32 Romanian monolingual children aged 6;11 to 9;8 (  = 8;3). We examined whether differences emerge between heritage and monolingual children in the online comprehension and in the production of multiple interrogatives in Romanian, which requires fronting of all wh-phrases, contrary to English. The main aim was to uncover to which extent similarities or differences in morphosyntactic properties between the L1 and the L2 systems affect the acquisition and processing of the heritage language/L1.

Effects of markedness in gender processing in Italian as a heritage language: A speed accuracy tradeoff.

This study examined potential sources of grammatical gender variability in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with a focus on morphological markedness. Fifty-four adult Italian HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed an online Self-Paced Reading Task and an offline Grammaticality Judgment Task. Both tasks involved sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical noun-adjective agreement, manipulating markedness.

Online processing of which-questions in bilingual children: Evidence from eye-tracking.

An emergent debate surrounds the nature of language processing in bilingual children as an extension of broader questions about their morphosyntactic development in comparison to monolinguals, with the picture so far being nuanced. This paper adds to this debate by investigating the processing of morphosyntactically complex which-questions (e.g.

Experimentally Induced Language Modes and Regular Code-Switching Habits Boost Bilinguals' Executive Performance: Evidence From a Within-Subject Paradigm.

Bilingualism may modulate executive functions (EFs), but the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are poorly understood. In this study, we investigated two potential sources of variability in bilinguals' EF performance: (1) interactional contexts and code-switching, and (2) dominance profiles. Previous research on code-switching often relied on self-reports of regular code-switching habits.

Lexical and Cognitive Underpinnings of Verbal Fluency: Evidence from Bengali-English Bilingual Aphasia.

Research in bilingual healthy controls (BHC) has illustrated that detailed characterization of verbal fluency along with separate measures of executive control stand to inform our understanding of the lexical and cognitive underpinnings of the task. Such data are currently lacking in bilinguals with aphasia (BWA). We aimed to compare the characteristics of verbal fluency performance (semantic, letter) in Bengali-English BWA and BHC, in terms of cross-linguistic differences, variation on the parameters of bilingualism, and cognitive underpinnings.

Narrative Abilities of Adults' With Down Syndrome as a Window to Their Morphosyntactic, Socio-Cognitive, and Prosodic Abilities.

Down syndrome (DS) is the most common developmental disorder characterized by mild to moderate intellectual disability. Several studies have reported poor language and prosodic skills and contradictory results regarding individuals' with DS socio-cognitive skills, whereas most of them have focused on children with DS. The present study attempts to explore adults' with DS language, socio-cognitive and prosodic abilities via the use of story-retellings.

Assessing Complex Working Memory in Turkish-Speaking Children: The Listening Span Task Adaptation Into Turkish.

The aim of this study was to adapt the Listening Span Task (Gaulin and Campbell, 1994; Pickering and Gathercole, 2001) into Turkish (LST-T), to administer it to children in order to measure how children of different ages perform on the task and to measure its psychometric properties by providing correlations with other cognitive measures: the Word Span Test that measures phonological WM capacity, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test that measures both categorization ability and executive WM functions, and the Categorical Free Recall Test that examines both the development of the release from proactive interference pattern and the categorization ability during childhood. The results indicate that the LST-T scores increased in a significant stepwise manner without any gender difference between boys and girls. Measures of convergent validity showed significant correlations with a working memory test: the Word Span Test, and.

Gender Agreement Attraction in Greek Comprehension.

This work explores gender agreement attraction in comprehension. Attraction occurs when an agreement error (such as, "the key to the cabinets are rusty") goes unnoticed, leading to the illusion of grammaticality due to a mismatch between the value of the head and the value of a local intervening phase (attractor). According to retrieval accounts, these errors occur during cue retrieval from memory and predict illusions of grammaticality.

Subject and Object Pronouns in High-Functioning Children With ASD of a Null-Subject Language.

Although the use of pronouns has been extensively investigated in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), most studies have focused on English, and no study to date has investigated the use of subject pronouns in null subject languages. The present study aims to fill this gap by investigating the use of subject and object pronouns in 5- to 8-year-old Greek-speaking high-functioning children with ASD compared to individually matched typically developing age and language controls. The "Frog where are you" (Mayer, 1969) narrative task was used to elicit subject and object pronouns as well as Determiner Phrases (DPs).

Comprehending Non-literal Language: Effects of Aging and Bilingualism.

A pressing issue that the twenty-first century is facing in many parts of the developed world is a rapidly aging population. Whilst several studies have looked at aging older adults and their language use in terms of vocabulary, syntax and sentence comprehension, few have focused on the comprehension of non-literal language (i.e.

On-line processing of English which-questions by children and adults: a visual world paradigm study.

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and wh-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and non-syntactic information to resolve syntactic ambiguity by extending our understanding of number features as a cue for interpretation to which-subject and which-object questions. We compared children's and adults' eye-movements to understand how this information shapes children's commitment to and revision of possible interpretations of these questions.

Processing Coordinate Subject-Verb Agreement in L1 and L2 Greek.

The present study examines the processing of subject-verb (SV) number agreement with coordinate subjects in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions in Greek. Greek is a language with morphological number marked on nominal and verbal elements. Coordinate SV agreement, however, is special in Greek as it is sensitive to the coordinate subject's position: when pre-verbal, the verb is marked for plural while when post-verbal the verb can be in the singular.

The Interface of Syntax with Pragmatics and Prosody in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with ASD fell behind typically developing children in comprehending and producing simple clitics and producing noun phrases in focus structures. The two groups performed similarly in comprehending and producing clitics in clitic left dislocation and in producing noun phrases in non-focus structures.

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs.

FMRI evidence for the involvement of the procedural memory system in morphological processing of a second language.

Behavioural evidence suggests that English regular past tense forms are automatically decomposed into their stem and affix (played  = play+ed) based on an implicit linguistic rule, which does not apply to the idiosyncratically formed irregular forms (kept). Additionally, regular, but not irregular inflections, are thought to be processed through the procedural memory system (left inferior frontal gyrus, basal ganglia, cerebellum). It has been suggested that this distinction does not to apply to second language (L2) learners of English; however, this has not been tested at the brain level.

Grey matter volume in the cerebellum is related to the processing of grammatical rules in a second language: a structural voxel-based morphometry study.

The experience of learning and using a second language (L2) has been shown to affect the grey matter (GM) structure of the brain. Importantly, GM density in several cortical and subcortical areas has been shown to be related to performance in L2 tasks. Here, we show that bilingualism can lead to increased GM volume in the cerebellum, a structure that has been related to the processing of grammatical rules.

The impact of number mismatch and passives on the real-time processing of relative clauses.

Language processing plays a crucial role in language development, providing the ability to assign structural representations to input strings (e.g., Fodor, 1998).

Production of tense marking in successive bilingual children: when do they converge with their monolingual peers?

Children with English as a second language (L2) with exposure of 18 months or less exhibit similar difficulties to children with Specific Language Impairment in tense marking, a marker of language impairment for English. This paper examines whether L2 children with longer exposure converge with their monolingual peers in the production of tense marking. Thirty-eight successive bilingual Turkish-English speaking (L2) children with a mean age of 7;8 and 33 monolingual English-speaking (L1) age-matched controls completed the screening test of the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI).