Maria Andreou

Maria Andreou
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Maria verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
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Maria verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
University of Peloponnese | UOP · Department of Speech and Language Therapy

PhD Psycholinguistics

About

59
Publications
18,881
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752
Citations
Introduction
Dr. Maria Andreou is an Assistant Professor of Language Disorders in Children at the Department of Speech and Language Therapy of the University of Peloponnese in Greece. She holds a PhD in Psycholinguistics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research mainly focuses on the language and cognitive abilities of monolingual and bilingual children with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder and developmental language disorder.
Additional affiliations
October 2021 - present
University of Peloponnese
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
February 2017 - present
Hellenic Open University
Position
  • Lecturer
January 2017 - August 2021
University of Cologne
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (59)
Article
Full-text available
The present study compared two sentence–picture-matching tests in Greek, namely the Syntactic Proficiency Test and the sentence comprehension subtest of the Diagnostic Verbal Intelligence Quotient (DVIQ) battery, to assess complex sentence comprehension in 29 Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Crucially, the DVIQ test incl...
Article
Research on the resolution of ambiguous null and overt subject pronouns in child speakers of null subject languages has found that school-aged children do not exhibit robust preference for either subject or object referents, further suggesting that the operations underlying anaphora processing are still in development and have not yet attained adul...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In the last decades, research on the Theory of Mind (ToM) skills of children has attracted a great deal of interest. The ability to attribute mental states to others is crucial in everyday interactions and develops gradually in children. Previous studies have shown that good language skills are important for succeeding in ToM tasks. Therefore, task...
Article
Full-text available
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 proces...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the consensus that early identification leads to be er outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), recent research reveals that the average age of diagnosis in the Greek population is approximately six years. However, this age of diagnosis is delayed by an additional two years for families from lower-income or minority bac...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Reading comprehension is one of the most important skills learned in school and it has an important contribution to the academic success of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Though previous studies have investigated reading comprehension difficulties in ASD and highlighted factors that contribute to these difficulties, this...
Article
Full-text available
Intelligence profiles in autism have been characterized by great variability. The questions of how autistic children's intelligence changes over time, and what factors influence these changes deserve study as part of efforts to document child autism profiles, but also because the relationship between intellectual functioning and children's backgrou...
Article
Full-text available
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 participan...
Article
Full-text available
Citation: Peristeri, E.; Andreou, M.; Ketseridou, S.-N.; Machairas, I.; Papadopoulou, V.; Stravoravdi, A.S.; Bamidis, P.D.; Frantzidis, C.A. Abstract: Though previous studies with autistic individuals have provided behavioral evidence of animacy perception difficulties, the spatio-temporal dynamics of animacy processing in autism remain underexplor...
Chapter
It has been shown that Greek and Italian vary in the use of null subjects (Torregrossa, Bongartz & Tsimpli 2015; Torregrossa, Andreou & Bongartz, 2020): while Italian null subjects tend to refer to the subject of the preceding clause, Greek null subjects show a less restricted distribution. The aim of this study is to show how this cross-linguistic...
Poster
A tool for assessing first and second order Theory of Mind in primary school age children, verbal and nonverbal version. Data from an ongoing data collection with Greek and German typically developping children.
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents a new toolkit for assessing Theory of Mind (ToM) via performance in first and second-order false belief (FB) tasks. The toolkit includes verbal and non-verbal versions of first and second-order FB tasks; the verbal version is currently available in Greek and German. Scenarios in the toolkit are balanced for factors that may infl...
Article
Full-text available
We examined the cognitive flexibility performance of young autistic children and a group of neurotypical peers. Thirty-six autistic children (72–83 months) and 200 age-matched typically-developing children were assessed on the Children's Color Trails Test (CCTT), a semantic and a phonemic verbal fluency task. The results showed that the autistic ch...
Article
We examined the cognitive flexibility performance of young autistic children and a group of neurotypical peers. Thirty-six autistic children (72–83 months) and 200 age-matched typically-developing children were assessed on the Children's Color Trails Test (CCTT), a semantic and a phonemic verbal fluency task. The results showed that the autistic ch...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the fact that the urge to investigate bilingualism and neurodevelopmental disorders as continuous indices rather than categorical ones has been well-voiced among researchers with respect to research methodological approaches, in the recent literature, when it comes to examining language, cognitive skills and neurodivergent characteristics,...
Article
Full-text available
The prevalence of autism worldwide has risen steadily in the last two decades, while bilingualism is also becoming increasingly prevalent in today's rapidly globalizing world. The current study aimed to investigate bilingualism effects in the pronoun resolution skills of children with autism in comparison to age-matched monolingual children with au...
Article
Background: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome that is characterized by progressive deterioration of language while other cognitive domains remain relatively intact. The extent to which print exposure and cortical volume atrophy jointly influence picture naming and general language ability in individuals with PPA remains unde...
Book
This book investigates how bilingualism affects children's language, cognitive and narrative abilities. The data sample derives from 209 8-12 years old bilingual children, in three different targeted languages (Greek-English, Greek-German, Greek-Albanian) along with 100 monolingual Greek children. The children completed baseline and experimental ta...
Article
Background: Picture-word interference tasks have been used to investigate (a) the time course of lexical access in individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and (b) how these individuals resolve competition during lexical selection. Objective: To investigate the time course of Greek-speaking individuals with PPA to produce grammatical g...
Article
The present study aims to understand which factors contribute to different patterns of use of referring expressions by bilingual children, by considering the triangulation between language experience and proficiency, executive functions and cross-linguistic effects. We analyze reference use in Greek in the context of a narrative elicitation task as...
Article
Full-text available
Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been extensively employed to assess bilingual children’s linguistic and cognitive resources. The present study examined whether monoliterate bilingual children differ from their monolingual (and monoliterate) peers in SR accuracy and cognitive tasks, and investigated links between vocabulary, updating, verbal and...
Article
Full-text available
Impairments in Theory of Mind (ToM) are a core feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ToM may be enhanced by various factors, including bilingualism, executive functions (EF), and complex syntax. This work investigates the language-cognition interface in ASD by exploring whether ToM can be enhanced by bilingualism, whether such ToM boosts would...
Article
Full-text available
Several studies have observed that bilinguals tend to use and accept overspecified, redundant referring expressions in one of their two languages. This tendency has been mainly analysed as an effect of cross-linguistic influence (for instance, from a non-null-subject language to a null-subject one) or quantity and quality of language exposure. We a...
Article
Full-text available
We aim to understand whether Greek and Italian, two null subject languages, differ in the use and interpretation of null subjects, based on evidence from both a production and a comprehension experiment. The results of the two experiments show that the two languages differ in the extent to which they comply with the Position of Antecedent Strategy...
Article
This paper presents an overview of the adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives in Greek, focusing on its use in Greek academic and diagnostic settings. A summary of the properties of the Greek language and the concomitant challenges these language-specific properties posed to MAIN adaptation are presented along with a su...
Article
Although a considerable number of studies have shown D(eterminer) elements, i.e. determiners and pronominal clitics, to be particularly vulnerable to impairment in monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), little is known about the use of appropriate or/and grammatically correct referring expressions in the children's narrati...
Article
Full-text available
Theory of Mind (ToM) is a multifaceted skill set which encompasses a variety of cognitive and neurobiological aspects. ToM deficits have long been regarded as one of the most disabling features in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. One of the theories that attempts to account for these impairments is that of "broken mirror neurons". The aim...
Article
While there is ample evidence that monolingual children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) face difficulties with narrative story-telling and executive functions (EF), there is considerable uncertainty about how bilingualism impacts these skills in autism. The current study explores the effect of bilingualism on the narrative and EF skills of for...
Preprint
We investigated naming performance in a stimulus-response task creating conflict at the grammatical gender level in patients with Primary Progressive Aphasia.
Chapter
Comprehension of texts and understanding of questions is a cornerstone of successful human communication. Whilst reading comprehension has been thoroughly investigated in the last decade, there is surprisingly little research on children’s comprehension of picture stories, particularly for bilinguals. This can be partially explained by the lack of...
Chapter
It has been shown that Greek and Italian vary in the use of null subjects (Torregrossa, Bongartz & Tsimpli 2015; Torregrossa, Andreou & Bongartz, submitted): while Italian null subjects tend to refer to the subject of the preceding clause, Greek null subjects show a less restricted distribution. The aim of this study is to show how this cross-lingu...
Chapter
Language abilities in bilingual development have frequently been measured through vocabulary. However, vocabulary is causally linked to input quantity which is typically lower in bilinguals (Bialystok, 2010; Smith and Murphy, 2015). Syntactic or morpho-syntactic skills, on the other hand, usually reveal a different proficiency profile in bilinguals...
Chapter
Heritage speakers are a fascinating group of bilinguals with a unique profile. Living abroad as immigrants of the second generation, they speak the language of their own speech community (the heritage language) at home, and the societally dominant language in most other domains. What exactly they know about their heritage language continues to fasc...
Chapter
The present work investigates the acquisition of aspect in Greek by Greek-Italian and Greek-English bilingual children by means of oral narrative retelling. Previous studies suggest that perfective aspect is acquired earlier than imperfective aspect. However, morphological marking of aspect is often affected by the inherent lexical properties of th...
Chapter
Our study investigates the use of articles and object clitics in the L2-Greek of child speakers of Russian with and without Specific Language Impairment. Effects of language impairment were examined in the narratives of children whose languages differ in the expression of definiteness: Russian lacks articles and allows null objects with specific re...
Article
Full-text available
Although language impairment is commonly associated with the autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the Diagnostic Statistical Manual no longer includes language impairment as a necessary component of an ASD diagnosis (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). However, children with ASD and no comorbid intellectual disability struggle with some aspects of...
Article
Full-text available
Although language impairment is commonly associated with the autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the Diagnostic Statistical Manual no longer includes language impairment as a necessary component of an ASD diagnosis (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). However, children with ASD and no comorbid intellectual disability struggle with some aspects of...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigates the production of perfective and imperfective aspect in Greek by Greek-German and Greek-English bilingual children. Participants produced retellings of narratives (ENNI, Schneider et al. 2006), which were then coded for the use of grammatical aspect, perfective and imperfective, as well as for lexical and grammatical aspect...
Article
John Benjamins Publishing Company. Pronominal clitics are sensitive to both morphosyntax and discourse. Problems in clitic use could therefore stem from morphosyntactic or discourse management problems in children with SLI. Previous studies focused on 3rd person clitic use identifying morphosyntactic problems. We compare 1st with 3rd person clitic...
Article
Pronominal clitics are sensitive to both morphosyntax and discourse. Problems in clitic use could therefore stem from morphosyntactic or discourse management problems in children with SLI. Previous studies focused on 3rd person clitic use identifying morphosyntactic problems. We compare 1st with 3rd person clitic elicitation by monolingual and bili...
Thesis
Full-text available
The subject of the present dissertation is to investigate how bilingualism affects language, cognitive and narrative abilities in bilingual children. For the needs of the dissertation, 209 bilingual children aged from 8 to 12 years old, in three different targeted languages (i.e. Greek-English, Greek-German, Greek-Albanian) took part in the study a...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this study was to identify potential clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children with SLI by using the Greek version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Twenty-one Greek-speaking monolingual and 15 bilingual children with SLI participated, along with monolingual ( N = 21) and bilingu...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study reports on the experimental investigation of narrative production by 6-7 year-old typically developing Greek-Albanian children. The aim is to examine bilingual production in story Telling and story Retelling in order to investigate the role of priming reference tracking but also lexical and grammatical aspects of narrative production. St...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigates reference management of two groups of 8–12 year old Greek–German bilinguals, resident in Greece (Bilinguals_GR N = 38) and in Germany (Bilinguals_GE N = 39). We analyze the bilinguals’ retellings in each language and compare them with data from two monolingual control groups of Greek and German children (Monolinguals_GR and...
Article
Full-text available
We investigate narrative production of 8-10 year old typically developing bilingual children. One group of these children grow up in Germany and attend German schools with exposure to Greek in afternoon classes only, while the other group attends the German School of Thessaloniki. Biographical data were gathered through a detailed questionnaire, al...
Article
Full-text available
1 ΕΛΕΝΗ ΠΕΡΙΣΤΕΡΗ 2 ΜΑΡΙΑ ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ 3 Η αξιοποίηση της γλωσσικής επίδοσης παιδιών με Ειδική Γλωσσική Διαταραχή (ΕΓΔ) σε έργα ελέγχου παραγωγής κλιτικών αντωνυμιών ως κλινικού δείκτη της εν λόγω διαταραχής αποτελεί ένα από τα αμφιλεγόμενα διλήμματα του επιστη-μονικού πεδίου έρευνας του γλωσσικού προφίλ παιδιών με διάγνωση ΕΓΔ διαγλωσσικά. Αν και ευρήμ...

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