TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES SEMINARS (SL) - MOD. 1

The curriculum in Language Sciences is aimed at the acquisition of theoretical knowledge and the development of critical skills that allow doctoral students to understand linguistic phenomena in all their complexity, developing the ability to plan research aimed at the acquisition of new data and their analysis, as well as at proposing applicative interventions with social and cultural impact. The curriculum includes a wide range of linguistic research perspectives (formal, synchronic and diachronic, philological, sociolinguistic, computational, language teaching analysis, also applied to bilingual and bimodal contexts), also addressed with experimental methodologies that use sophisticated instruments (eye-tracker, fNIRS) and advanced statistical analysis models.
The training objective of this module is to contribute to the development of methodological research skills in linguistics, including theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistics applied to language disorders and typical and atypical language acquisition, and linguistics computational.

- in-depth understanding of the most recent models of formal analysis concerning the gender category,
- mastery of advanced experimental methodologies, including eye-tracking
- knowledge of experimental research methods in the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic fields;
- ability to conceive, plan, implement and adapt a research process in the specific linguistic field with the probity required of the scholar, as in the collection of data and their processing;
- ability to critically analyze, evaluate and synthesize new and complex ideas, which allow one to contribute to the refinement of theoretical models and application methodologies of specific linguistic fields;
- ability to communicate with peers, and with the wider community of linguistics scholars, presenting their research in oral and written form in the semester tests of the current year.

knowledge and skills verified during the selection:
good knowledge of formal linguistics, socio-linguistics, psycho-linguistics, Italian linguistics.
basic statistical analysis knowledge
excellent knowledge of the teaching languages ​​(Italian and English)

The seminars, aimed at the acquisition and consolidation of research methodologies and tools, are structured into three macro-areas, directed by three experts of the different subfields:

Prof. Giuliana Giusti (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia)
Language and gender, interdisciplinary approaches: formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and social psychology. 9 hours (1st semester)
Gender is a linguistic and cultural category that allows us to investigate the interaction between linguistic form and meaning and between linguistic meaning and the representation of the self at individual and societal levels.
Linguistic variation in the denotation of the female gender and more recently of the non-binary gender presents a new frontier in the interaction between cultural stereotypes, psycholinguistic processes, linguistic attitudes, and social psychology.
This sub-module is structured in 3 seminars addressing three different methodologies to study the gender category
- The formal analysis of gender as a functional and semantic feature, with particular regard to Italian.
- Psycholinguistic methodologies that allow us to distinguish how cultural stereotype impacts language form and interpretation
- How direct and indirect sociolinguistic methodologies can be applied to linguistic attitudes regarding the adaptations to non-binary gender designation recently proposed for the Italian language.

Prof. Mikhail Kissine (Université Libre de Bruxelles; Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, visiting professor)
Experimental methods in linguistics, with a specific focus on eye-tracking 15 ore, I e II semestre
This interactive seminar will consist of a collaborative, hands-on introduction to experimental methods in linguistics. A first meeting, in fall 2024, will help delineate one or two research questions, based on the PhD students’ research interests (these may stem from their dissertation or be side projects); a targeted reading list will be provided after this meeting. In the second semester, we will collectively design one or two experimental paradigms, most likely involving eye-tracking, pilot different versions of the tasks, pre-register the final design and analytical plan on OSF and prepare the code for data visualisation. If time permits, students will collect the data before the end of the academic year and post the results on OSF.

Prof. Anna Cardinaletti (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
Complexity and simplification, 6 hours, 2nd semester
The concepts of syntactic complexity and processing difficulty and their consequences in linguistic comprehension and production by people with and without linguistic difficulties will be analysed. Studies on L1 acquisition emphasize the complexity of long-distance dependencies, the hierarchies of complexity between syntactic features with different effects on different populations and the beneficial role of complexity in interventions. In light of these considerations, text simplification strategies will be introduced.

Particular attention will be paid to the ability to set up and structure the research process, to the evaluation of implications, feasibility and results.

This basic bibliography will be enriched in the course of the seminars

On Language and Gender
Acquaviva P. (2021) Gender as a property of words and as a property of structures Catalan Journal of Linguistics 14(3):49-74
De Cesare, A.-M. e G. Giusti (a cura di) in corso di pubblicazione. Lingua inclusiva: Forme, funzioni, atteggiamenti, percezioni. Edizioni Ca’ Foscari.
Giusti, G. (2022), Inclusività della lingua italiana, nella lingua italiana: come e perché. Fondamenti teorici e proposte operative, in Deportate, Esuli, Profughe, 48 https://iris.unive.it/retrieve/caa6d14d-fd68-454c-904b-535463c29682/05_Giusti%20%282%29.pdf
Misersky, J., Gygax, P. M., Canal, P., Gabriel, U., Garnham, A., Braun, F., Chiarini, T., Englund, K., Hanulikova, A., Öttl, A., Valdrova, J., Von Stockhausen, L., & Sczesny, S. (2014). «Norms on the gender perception of role nouns in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak». Behavior Research Methods, 46(3), 841–871. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0409-z
Richy, C. & Burnett, H. (2021). «Démêler les effets des stéréotypes et le genre grammatical dans le biais masculin: une approche expérimentale». GLAD!, 10. https://doi.org/10.4000/glad.2839

Experimental Methods / Eye-tracking
Edlund, J. E., & Nichols, A. L. (2019). Advanced Research Methods for the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Cambridge University Press.
Podesva, R. J., & Sharma, D. (2013). Research Methods in Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

On Complexity and Semplification
Adani et al 2014 Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment, J Child Language
Cardinaletti et al 2021 Dyslexia and Syntactic Deficits: Overview and a Case Study of Language Training of Relative Clauses. In Cappelli-Noccetti (a cura di) A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Dyslexia, Multilingual Matters
Friedmann et al 2009 Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies, Lingua 119
Gibson 1998 Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition
Jakubowicz 2011 Measuring derivational complexity, Lingua
Levy-Friedmann 2009 Treatment of syntactic movement in syntactic SLI, First language
Miestamo et al (eds) 2008 Language complexity: typology, contact, change. Benjamins
Pallotti 2015 A Simple View of Linguistic Complexity. Second Language Research
Thompson-Shapiro 2005 Treating agrammatic aphasia within a linguistic framework, Aphasiology
Tuller et al 2011 Clitic pronoun production as a measure of atypical language development in French, Lingua
Voghera 2001 Riflessioni su semplificazione, complessità e modalità di trasmissione: sintassi e semantica, in Dardano , Pelo e Stefinlongo (a cura di) Scritto e parlato. Metodi, testi e contesti, Aracne.

The acquisition of the abilities and capacities will be checked through oral and written presentations and reports that students must hand in at the end of the semester

interactive seminars in person

not present

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Poverty and inequalities" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development