Maria Teresa Guasti

• PH.H Linguistics
• Professor (Full) at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Anticipatory planning, that is, the ability to process information in advance to prepare to act, underpins activities that unfold in time, such as spoken language, reading and handwriting. One key, though not the only, mechanism that may facilitate anticipatory planning is rhythm, which is understood as the structured grouping of events in time. Re...

This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (Italian ‘o’) in negative sentences by Italian monolingual and bilingual (L1 Italian – L2 English) children and Italian adults. Participants were asked to judge Italian sentences corresponding to the English sentence ‘This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper’. According to the...

In questo articolo, discuteremo due aspetti dell'acquisizione bilingue: il meccanismo del transfer e il tempo di esposizione effettiva alla seconda lingua. Il primo consiste nel fatto che una proprietà linguistica acquisita nella prima lingua (L1) possa facilitare l'acquisizione della stessa anche nella seconda lingua (L2). In altri termini, nell'a...

Sentences with a plural subject receive a distributive reading if the predicate refers to the atomic members or a collective one if it relates to the whole group. Previous accounts suggest that the distributive representation includes an additional semantic operator, and comprehension experiments show that adults interpret an ambiguous sentence as...

In this article, we will discuss two aspects of bilingual acquisition: the mechanism of transfer and the time of actual exposure to the second language. The first consists in the fact that a linguistic property acquired in the first language (L1) can facilitate the acquisition of the same property in the second language (L2). In other words, when a...

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have been shown to struggle with the acquisition of complex structures requiring structural embedding and movement of a sentential element from its original position. This study examines the production of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) by Italian children, investigating whether: i) seve...

While many theoretical proposals about the relationship between language and music processing have been proposed over the past 40 years, recent empirical advances have shed new light on this relationship. Many features are shared between language and music, inspiring research in the fields of linguistic theory, systematic musicology, and cognitive...

In this study, we validated the “ReadFree tool”, a computerised battery of 12 visual and auditory tasks developed to identify poor readers also in minority-language children (MLC). We tested the task-specific discriminant power on 142 Italian-monolingual participants (8–13 years old) divided into monolingual poor readers (N = 37) and good readers (...

Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) have impaired morphosyntactic abilities despite age-appropriate nonverbal cognitive abilities and no hearing disorders or brain injury. The persistent omission of third-person object clitic pronouns (3DO clitics) has been proven to be a clinical marker of developmental language disorders (DLD) fo...

The Meaning First Approach offers a model of the relation between thought and language that includes a Generator and a Compressor. The Generator build non-linguistic thought structures and the Compressor is responsible for its articulation through three processes: structure-preserving linearization, lexification, and compression via non-articulatio...

Due to the difficulties in differentiating bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) from bilingual children with temporary language difficulties that may be caused by heterogeneous language input, language assessments of bilingual children are challenging for clinicians. Research demonstrates that assessments of bilingual child...

Whilst the vast majority of the Maldivian population speak Dhivehi at home, English typically serves as the only medium of instruction (MoI) starting from primary school. Teachers have expressed their concerns regarding educational quality, as many children are taught in a language they do not master sufficiently. The present study aimed to investi...

This study investigates the linguistic processing and non-linguistic cognitive abilities of monolingual and bilingual children with and without reading difficulties and examines the relationship between these skills and reading. There were 72 Italian-speaking children: 18 monolingual good readers (MONO-GR, Mage = 10;4), 19 monolingual poor readers...

The increasing number of primary students with different degrees of exposure to a family minority language requires a reflection on whether and how specific aspects of their daily language experience influence their learning skills. Indeed, Minority Language Children (MLC) often report difficulties in fluent and accurate reading that must be better...

The study aims to investigate the performance of monolingual and bilingual children with and without reading difficulties on language-dependent and language-independent tasks, and examine the relationship between the performance on these tasks and reading. There were 72 Italian-speaking children: 18 monolingual good readers (MONO-GR, Mage = 10;4),...

This study attempted to bring together the investigation of reading and writing, which have been traditionally considered separately. In particular, our cross-sectional study aimed at outlining the developmental trajectory of reading abilities and handwriting kinematic aspects of children in their first years of school. We collected reading, phonol...

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is considered a universal marker of developmental dyslexia (DD) and could also be helpful to identify a reading deficit in minority-language children (MLC), in which it may be hard to disentangle whether the reading difficulties are due to a learning disorder or a lower proficiency in the language of instruction. We t...

In this study, we validated the “ReadFree tool”: a computerized battery of 12 hierarchically organized tasks in the visual and auditory modalities, which do not imply reading. The tool has been developed to identify poor readers irrespective of their specific language background, thus, to be also suitable for Minority-Language Children (MLC).Each t...

In this paper, we investigate the use of commissive causative morphology in child French, whereby children use faire tuer ‘make kill’ to convey the exact same meaning as tuer ‘kill’. We conduct a corpus study on child French causatives in CHILDES corpora, showing that children produce commissive faire ‘make’ when the embedded verb has causative sem...

The ability of assessing any type of linguistic complexity of any given contents could potentially improve knowledge reproduction, especially tacit knowledge which can be expensive during a pandemic. In this paper, we develop a simple and crosslinguistic model of complexity which considers formal accounts on the study of linguistic systems, but can...

Gender as a morphosyntactic feature is arguably “an endlessly fascinating linguistic category” (Corbett 2014: 1). One may even say it is among “the most puzzling of the grammatical categories” (Corbett 1991: 1) that has raised probing questions from various theoretical and applied perspectives. Most languages display semantic and/or formal gender s...

Ideally, language and reading skills in bilingual children are assessed in both languages spoken in order to avoid misdiagnoses of communication or learning disorders. Due to limited capacity of clinical and educational staff, computerized screenings that allow for automatic evaluation of the children’s performance on reading tasks (accuracy and sp...

In English, a sentence like “The cat didn’t eat the carrot or the pepper” typically receives a “neither” interpretation; in Japanese it receives a “not this or not that” interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the “neither” interpretation (strong reading) asymmetrically entails the “not this or not tha...

We present cross-sectional research to verify whether learning to read in Italian (the participants’ mother language and majority language) is delayed when simultaneously learning to read in English (a second language not spoken in the country). Available evidence considering the specific combination of bilingual orthographies being acquired sugges...

Research dialogue between Maria Teresa Guasti, Università di Milano-Bicocca and Duncan Astle, University of Cambridge on the topic of atypical language development in children. Maria Teresa Guasti presents her research on 'Dyslexia as a Window into Language', followed by Duncan Astle's presentation 'Beyond the label: A transdiagnostic approach to u...

This volume includes fourteen papers on the acquisition of Romance languages, eleven of which were presented at the Romance Turn 9, held in Bucharest in September 2018. The studies offer new insights into central issues in the literature, such as syntactic complexity in both typical and impaired language settings, intervention effects, the acquisit...

Background. Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is frequent in childhood and may have long-term sequelae. By employing an evidence-based approach, this scoping review aims at identifying (a) early predictors of DLD; (b) the optimal age range for the use of screening and diagnostic tools; (c) effective diagnostic tools in preschool children. Metho...

Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity of a form and the prominen...

The present study investigates third language (L3) learners’ processing of Chinese subject and object relative clauses in a supportive context. Using a self-paced reading task, we tested native Italian L3 learners of Mandarin Chinese and native Chinese speakers. The results showed that the L3 learners read significantly more slowly than the native...

In English, the sentence Mary didn’t eat pizza or sushi is assigned the neither interpretation (both disjuncts must be false). In Mandarin Chinese, the equivalent sentence is assigned the at least one interpretation (at least one disjunct must be false). The cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction has...

Major concerns still surround literacy education in a foreign language during primary school. In this study, we aim to establish (1) whether bilinguals perform worse in Italian literacy tests than monolinguals; (2) whether literacy skills transfer from Italian to English. We tested 97 Italian–English bilingual first, third and fifth graders (attend...

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a learning disorder characterized by specific difficulties in learning to read accurately and fluently, which has been generally explained in terms of phonological deficits. Recent research has shown that individuals with DD experience timing difficulties in the domains of language, music perception and motor control,...

A large number of children worldwide are only exposed to their L2 around 3 years of age and can exhibit linguistic behaviours that resemble those of a child with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). This can lead to under- or over-identification of DLD in this population. This study endeavors to contribute to overcoming this problem, by determini...

Previous research has shown that the production of third-person singular accusative object clitics (3DO clitics) might be taxing in Italian-speaking pre-school children with cochlear implants (CIs). We investigated this topic by assessing 3DO clitic production in 14 children with an average age of 8 years, who had received CI between age 1 and 4. T...

The acquisition of languages by children using two languages is a matter of debate as many factors contribute to the success of this type of acquisition. We focus on how the competence of dual-language children changes in their two languages as a function of length of exposure and establish whether there are reciprocal influences during language de...

Previous research has shown that the production of third-person singular accusative object clitics (3DO clitics) might be taxing in Italian-speaking preschool children with cochlear implants (CIs). We investigated this topic by assessing 3DO clitic production in 14 children with an average age of 8 years, who had received a CI between age 1 and 4....

In this commentary on the Special Issue, I will address the question of what memory spans measure concerning language, as language has, at least, a linear and a hierarchical dimension. I suggest that if anything what is measured has to do with the linear dimension. Then, I will discuss the welcome results on bilingual children with language problem...

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as w...

Full text: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GGJBn42Kd8ensTrJKJ4f/full?target=10.1080/0163853X.2019.1591127 Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and proces...

It is widely believed that intensive music training can boost cognitive and visuo-motor skills. However, this evidence is primarily based on retrospective studies; this makes it difficult to determine whether a cognitive advantage is caused by the intensive music training, or it is instead a factor influencing the choice of starting a music curricu...

Questo libro contiene la descrizione di giochi con parole e frasi che hanno lo scopo di promuovere l’acquisizione del linguaggio in contesti educativi e clinici. I giochi qui riportati sono stati inventati e utilizzati nel corso degli anni dalle autrici per svolgere le loro ricerche con i bambini, e hanno permesso di ricavare molte informazioni cir...

This study presents a web-based sentence comprehension test aimed at identifying high school students who are at risk for a language delay. By assessing linguistic skills on a sample of high school students with Italian as an L2 and their monolingual peers, attending a vocational school, we were able to identify a subgroup of L2 students with consi...

http://www.meits.org/policy-papers/paper/is-it-possible-to-differentiate-multilingual-children-and-children-with-dld

There is a debate as to whether topic structures in Chinese involve A’-movement or result from base-generation of the topic in the left periphery. If Chinese topicalization was derived by movement, under the assumptions of Friedmann et al.’s Relativized Minimality (Lingua 119:67–88, 2009), we would expect children’s comprehension of object topicali...

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al., i...

The performance of 122 children on syntactic awareness of clitics and articles in French was examined. Three clinical groups (21 children with ASD, 22 children with SLI, 23 children with DD) and a group of 56 younger children with TD were studied. On the article task, children with ASD obtained lower scores than all the other groups and on the clit...

We aim at determining whether 7-year-old Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): (1) have problems with the production of wh- questions; (2) display a subject/object asymmetry in producing which- and who questions; (3) attempt to simplify questions, especially which- questions; (4) have difficulties with movement and verb...

This paper is the first investigation of relative clauses (RCs) in Wenzhounese (a variety of Wu spoken in Southern Zhejiang province, China). We provide a raising analysis of Wenzhounese RCs and discuss two main families of hypotheses for the subject preference observed in postnominal RCs, namely the linear intervention hypothesis and the hierarchi...

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)...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

The handwriting of Italian children follows two rhythmic principles: isochrony and homothety. Unlike oral rhythm, which varies across languages, the rhythm of handwriting remains consistent.

Analytical causatives, in Romance languages, are of two types, one called faire‐infinitif and the other faire‐par . They are similar in that they comprise a finite verb, the causative verb, selecting an infinitive complement, and they share properties with monoclausal structures. They differ in their structure and in their meaning. After having sur...

The dysgraphic disorder is usually underestimated and belatedly diagnosed. The need of prevention and early intervention focused on prewriting exercises emerges from the literature. We explore exergames to supply this need, together with an adequate assessment module of the training results. The exergames were designed in collaboration with clinici...

Although much research has been concerned with the development of kinematic aspects of handwriting, little is known about the development along with age of two principles that govern its rhythmic organization: Homothety and Isochrony. Homothety states that the ratio between the durations of the single motor events composing a motor act remains inva...

The study investigates the comprehension of Mandarin and Italian relative clauses in sequential Mandarin–Italian bilingual children aged 6–9 and their age-matched monolingual counterparts. We tested 153 children through character-sentence matching tasks. The results showed that bilingual children comprehended subject relatives much better than obje...

Two omission phenomena in a variety of child languages are discussed: omission of articles and third person direct object clitic pronouns. I show that omission is not a unitary phenomenon across child languages. Omission of articles is observed in production from age 2;0 through about age 3;0, in spite of the fact that around 11 months infants are...

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual Italian-speak...

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) have problems comprehending relative clauses (RCs) and find object RCs more difficult than subject RCs, as do typically developing children. Few studies have compared these groups directly, leaving it unclear whether the problems observed in children with...

Intervention effects arise in object relative clauses (RCs) when both the object and the subject share a (lexical) NP feature, but can be modulated by a featural mismatch between the two DPs (Friedmann et al., 2009, Adani et al., 2010, Belletti et al., 2012). Featural mismatch has a selective impact cross-linguistically, depending on whether or not...

The present work investigates the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction by Italian-speaking children and adults. The main purpose is to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretations to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain, Ni & Conway, 19...

Significance Although much research has been devoted to the acquisition of number words, relatively little is known about the acquisition of other expressions of quantity. We propose that the order of acquisition of quantifiers is related to features inherent to the meaning of each term. Four specific dimensions of the meaning and use of quantifier...

Third-person direct object (DO) clitic pronoun production is examined through an elicited production method in pre-school- and primary school-aged groups of Italian children with specific language impairment (SLI) to establish whether there is an improvement from age 5 years to age 7 years and whether there are qualitative differences in the two gr...

In the present work, we argue that the mechanism at the basis of sensory temporal prediction may be compromised in children and adults with Developmental Dyslexia (DD). A breakdown of this mechanism may be the cause of reading impairments in individuals with DD as well as of subtle language (e.g., Cantiani et al., 2013, 2015; Rispens et al., 2006)...

The study investigated morphosyntactic abilities and semantic-pragmatic competence in 24 children with developmental dyslexia aged 7 -12 years. Morphosyntactic abilities were investgated in a direct object clitic production task, semantic-pragmatic competence in a quantifier comprehension task. Children with dyslexia produced fewer clitics than the...

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 di...

This study aimed to characterize neuropsychological and linguistic skills in children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) with and without Language Impairment (LI). Behavioral tests of short-term memory, phonemic awareness, and morphosyntactic processing and electrophysiological responses to agreement violations were administered to 32 DD children (16...

A major contribution to the study of language acquisition and language development inspired by theoretical linguistics has been made by research on the acquisition of Italian syntax. This book offers an updated overview of results from theory-driven experimental and corpus-based research on the acquisition of Italian in different modes (monolingual...

This study investigated the effect of morphological case and number marking on the comprehension of relative clauses by Greek children with Specific Language Impairment and Language Age controls. An agent selection task and experimental materials consisting of 12 subject and 12 object relative clauses were employed. There were two experimental cond...

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”),...

This study examines the comprehension of relative clauses by Chinese-speaking children, and evaluates the validity of the predictions of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the Relativized Minimality approach (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi, 2009). One hundred and twenty children from three to eight years of age were tested by usin...

We explored the acquisition of relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese, a subject–verb–object language with head-final relatives. One hundred and twenty-five children (aged 3 years to 8 years, 11 months) and 20 adults participated in an elicitation task. The results revealed a subject advantage at all ages and a large production of relative clauses wi...

It remains controversial whether children are able to process and integrate specific linguistic cues in their mental model to the same extent as adults. In the present study, a sentence continuation task was employed to determine how Italian speakers (4-, 5-, 6-year-olds and adults) interpret prosodic cues to decide which referent is more salient i...

Early second language (EL2) learners generally perform more poorly than monolinguals in specific language domains, presenting similarities with children affected by specific language impairment (SLI). As a consequence, it can be difficult to correctly diagnose this disorder in EL2 children. The current study investigated the performance of 120 EL2...

While language skills are generally not assessed in children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD), it is known that 50% of them manifests some of the symptoms that we find in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This is confirmed in this study for Italian: 50% of the children with DD scores 1.5 SD below the mean of their peers with typical...

Previous studies have found that the early fitting of cochlear implants in children has beneficial effects on their expressive and receptive language. However, different ages are identified in different studies, and some studies present contradictory results. Starting from these observations, our study suggests that at least two additional factors...

Abstract 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...

ABSTRACT In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four- and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized on...

The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory and more specifically relate to the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made in this connection over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all either former students of Rizzi’s or colleagues and friends who have collaborated with him closely over...

The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory and more specifically relate to the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made in this connection over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all either former students of Rizzi’s or colleagues and friends who have collaborated with him closely over...