CLINICAL LINGUISTICS 1

This course aims at discussing monolingual and bilingual atypical language acquisition by children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Specific Learning Disability (SLD) from the viewpoint of contemporary linguistic research. Students will develop analytic skills for the analysis of comprehension and elicited and spontaneous productions and the basic knowledge for the construction of experimental designs. They will also acquire teaching tools to promote language development in children with specific developmental disorders.

1. Knowledge and understanding
The student knows the recent hypotheses on atypical first and bilingual language acquisition.
The student knows the tests to assess language acquisition: comprehension, elicited productions, repetition, truth value judgments tasks.
The student has full understanding of the technical terminology and the main methodologies that allow to do research on data from language acquisition.
2. Applying knowledge and understanding
The student knows how to use the hypotheses of formal linguistics to describe and understand aspects of atypical first language acquisition, also in bilingual contexts.
The student knows how to use the technical terminology in all stages of application, e.g. when analysing new data or when explaining syntactic theory.
The student knows how to collect new acquisition data, e.g. collect comprehension data or judgments.
The student knows how to discuss different hypotheses on the same language acquisition data.
3. Making judgements
The student is able to formulate empirically and theoretically grounded hypotheses on language acquisition data.
The student is able to provide relevant language acquisition data in favour or against different hypotheses.
4. Communication skills
The student is able to write with sound argumentation and appropriate terminology about the topics discussed during the course.
The student is able to elaborate on one of the topics discussed during the course.
During class, the student is able to ask questions and discuss with peers and professors in a critical and respectful manner.
5. Learning skills:
The student is able to develop critical thinking.
The student is able to share information, hypotheses, linguistic problems and solutions on atypical language acquisition data.
The student is able to look for and select bibliographical resources to study atypical language acquisition data.

Good knowledge of linguistics and syntactic theory.

The comprehension and production by SLI and SLD subjects of some complex syntactic phenomena will be discussed, such as interrogative and relative clauses, verbal inflection, clitic pronouns, determiners. A comparative approach will be used between Italian and other languages.
The students will also be familiarised with some experiments of language treatment built on generative syntactic theory.

The following texts will be discussed in class:
- Adani, F., M. Forgiarini, M.T. Guasti, H. K. J. van der Lely (2014) Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment, Journal of Child Language 41, 811–841
- Bottari P., Cipriani P, Chilosi A.M., Pfanner L. 1998, The determiner system in a group of Italian children with SLI, Language acquisition 7, 285-315.
- Contemori C. and Garraffa M. 2010, Comparison of modalities in SLI syntax: A study on the comprehension and production of non-canonical sentences. Lingua 120.8, 1940-1955.
- Fleckstein 2018, P. Prevost, L. Tuller, E, Sizaret, R. Zebib (2018) How to identify SLI in bilingual children: A study on sentence repetition in French, Language acquisition 25.1, 85-101.
- Friedmann N., Novogrodsky R. 2007, Is the movement deficit in syntactic SLI related to traces or to thematic role tranfer?, Brain & Language 101, 50-63.
- Friedmann N., Novogrodsky R. 2008, Subtypes of SLI, in A. Gavarro, M. Joao Freitas (eds.), Language acquisition and development, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Press, 205-217
- Guasti M.T. 2004, Language Acquisition, MIT Press, Ch.11.1-2.
- Hamann, C., & Belletti, A. (2006). Developmental patterns in the acquisition of complement clitic pronouns: Comparing different acquisition modes with an emphasis on French. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, 31, 39-78.
- Jakubowicz C., L. Nash, C. Rigaut, Ch.-L. Gerard (1998), Determiners and Clitic Pronouns in French-Speaking Children With SLI, Language Acquisition 7:2-4, 113-160.
- Levi H., Friedmann N. 2009, Treatment of syntactic movement in syntactic SLI: A case study, First language 29, 15-50.
- Marinis, T., Armon Lotem, S., Pontikas, G. (2017), Language impairment in bilingual children: state of the art 2017. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7 (34). 265-276.
- Pozzan, Lucia. 2007. A dissociation between clitics and determiners in a group of Italian SLI children. In Proceedings of the 8th CUNY-SUNY-NYU Mini-conference, LIBA (Linguistics in the Big Apple: CUNY/NYU Working Papers in Linguistics).
- Tsimpli, I. M., Peristeri, E. & Andreou, M. (2016). Narrative production in monolingual and bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 37, 195-216.
- Tuller L., Hélène Delage, Cécile Monjauze, Anne-Gaelle Piller Marie-Anne Barthez 2011, Clitic pronoun production as a measure of atypical language development in French, Lingua 121.3.
- Vender, M., Garraffa, M., Sorace, A., & Guasti, M. T. (2016). How early L2 children perform on Italian clinical markers of SLI: A study of clitic production and nonword repetition. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 30.2, 150-169

Written exam, consisting of 10 questions (2 hours) with the aim of verifying the acquisition of abilities to analyze data coming from studies on atypical language acquisition.
Written term paper (10 pages) on one of the topics discussed in the course.

Face-to-face lessons;
collaborative learning with peers;
individual tutoring by the teacher.

Italian

written

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Human capital, health, education" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development