Agenda

Interview

1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity.

I am a professor of linguistics at the Université libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium. I am an experimental and
theoretical linguist, with a focus on pragmatics and language acquisition. My current research mainly
centres on language and communication in autism, and is conducted within my lab ACTE
(https://acte.ulb.be). For the past decade, I have been combining linguistic theory with rigorous
experimental methods to show how fundamental questions about human language may be illuminated by,
but also illuminating for the study of autism. Studying how autistic children acquire language provides a
unique opportunity to disentangle communication and domain-general mechanisms from domain-specific
constraints on language learnability; carefully characterising how autistic individuals, children and adults,
use language yields crucial evidence for revising and refining our theoretical pragmatic models. I do not
identify myself with a particular subfield of linguistics: I firmly believe that only a genuinely interdisciplinary
approach can help us to better understand language acquisition and communication in autism. I am also
active in the field of experimental pragmatics, where I am mostly interested in the multifaceted nature of
pragmatic processing, as well as in suggestibility to false information. More information about me and my
work can be found on my personal website (https://mikhail.kissine.web.ulb.be).

2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and teaching stay.

Language in autism is often reduced to a delayed acquisition or to atypical use, the reference point being
language in neurotypical individuals. Such approaches focus on language disability, and somewhat
downplay the acquisition routes that may be specific to autism and exert a durable influence across the
life-span. The hypothesis which I will explore during my stay at ‘Ca Foscari is that language in autism may
be shaped by atypical and idiosyncratic contexts of acquisition, in which non-communicative sources play a
much more predominant role than in typical development. Such an atypical acquisition path may result in
dialectal divergence between autistic children and their proximal linguistic community. The Venetian
linguistic landscape is the perfect place to design a study on this intriguing, but drastically understudied
phenomenon. The overarching idea of my research project for the next year is thus that language
acquisition in autism can be qualitatively atypical, in a way that raises crucial theoretical issues about the
constraints on and the possible shapes of the human language capacity. The expertise of many members in
the Department will be crucial to better delineate both the theoretical and the clinical implications of this
project. I will also teach a course on Language and Communication in Autism, as well as an advanced
Seminar on Experimental Methods in Linguistics.

3. Have you ever had a research collaboration with the teaching staff of Department of Linguistics and
Comparative Cultural Studies in the past?

This is my first active collaboration with this outstanding Department.