Tracking Eye Movements as a Window on Language Processing: The Visual World Paradigm

This entry overviews the pioneering experimental studies exploiting eye movement data to investigate language processing in real time. After examining how vision and language were found to be closely related, herein focus the discussion on the evolution of eye-tracking methodologies to investigate children’s language development. To conclude, herein provide some insights about the use of eye-tracking technology for research purposes, focusing on data collection and data analysis

Multiple sclerosis management during the COVID-19 pandemic

Altres ajuts: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The development of standardized data collection as part of routine clinical care through Multiple Sclerosis Partners Advancing Technology and Health Solutions (MS PATHS) was developed and implemented at CC, JH, and CEMCAT in partnership with Biogen. Biogen did not have involvement in study design, data analysis or interpretation, or manuscript preparation.People with multiple sclerosis (MS) may be at higher risk for complications from the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic due to use of immunomodulatory disease modifying therapies (DMTs) and greater need for medical services. To evaluate risk factors for COVID-19 susceptibility and describe the pandemic's impact on healthcare delivery. Surveys sent to MS patients at Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and Vall d'Hebron-Centre d'Esclerosi Múltiple de Catalunya in April and May 2020 collected information about comorbidities, DMTs, exposures, COVID-19 testing/outcomes, health behaviors, and disruptions to MS care. There were 3028/10,816 responders. Suspected or confirmed COVID-19 cases were more likely to have a known COVID-19 contact (odds ratio (OR): 4.38; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.04, 18.54). In multivariable-adjusted models, people who were younger, had to work on site, had a lower education level, and resided in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas were less likely to follow social distancing guidelines. 4.4% reported changes to therapy plans, primarily delays in infusions, and 15.5% a disruption to rehabilitative services. Younger people with lower socioeconomic status required to work on site may be at higher exposure risk and are potential targets for educational intervention and work restrictions to limit exposure. Providers should be mindful of potential infusion delays and MS care disruption

On vision and language interaction in negation processing. The real-time interpretation of sentential negation in typically developed and dyslexic adults.

This dissertation has a two-fold aim. First, it intends to contribute to the broad theoretical debate on the processing of sentential negation by providing new relevant insights on how visual and linguistic sources of information jointly determine the real-time sentence comprehension of negative sentence. Second, it aims to deepen the relationship between working memory resources, developmental dyslexia, and negative sentence interpretation. The work includes a robust critical review of the psycholinguistic literature on negation and on developmental dyslexia, as well as a thorough discussion of the various experimental methodologies that have been used over the last decades to investigate language comprehension. The core part of the dissertation consists in the implementation and running of two eye-tracking studies to study negation processing in Italian speaking adults with and without a diagnosis of developmental dyslexia. The final outcomes of this work provide significant insights into core aspects of the processing of sentential negation, and shed light on which aspects of language comprehension dyslexics do experience greater limitations

The cycle in language change: Insights from diachronic phonology and syntax of negation

Language change can be conceptualized as a cyclical process of continuous renewal of the involved elements which somehow change their nature, with respect to phonological or lexico-grammatical features. A crucial aspect of such diachronic evolution is that cyclical change takes place systematically and follows regular and unidirectional patterns of development. Once the change is complete, the same developmental path will be undertaken by new linguistic items in the same cyclical fashion. In this paper, we illustrate the concept of cyclical change by discussing two examples of linguistic cycles. A first instance of cyclical development is displayed at the phonological level by the diachronic changes in the obstruent consonant system taking place from Indo-European to German through the First and the Second Sound Shift: the cycle is completed in the Cimbrian dialects. A second instance is provided by the diachronic process known as Jespersen’s cycle ([1917] 1966): sentential negation, initially expressed through a single negative marker, is later reinforced by an additional one; eventually, this second element becomes the only negative marker available in the sentence while the original marker is deleted. The discussion of the negative cycle takes also into consideration the results of an empirical research conducted on two varieties of an Italo-Romance dialect spoken in northern Italy

The acquisition of Negation

Although negation in natural languages is a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon, the first instances of linguistic negation appear in children’s speech quite early, by 18 and 24 months of life. Nevertheless, its acquisition is a gradual and challenging process, as it takes time for children to fully grasp the semantic meanings of the different negative words to be able to use them correctly across different sentential contexts. Moreover, in order to understand how to negate a sentence, children must also learn how negation can have scope over different parts of the sentences, leaving the others unaffected. The picture becomes even more complicated for children when multiple negative structures come into play, in which the negative meaning is conveyed by the combination of two (or more) negative elements. The interpretation of these complex syntactic constructions is indeed not always straightforward since a different arrangement of the same negative elements may yield different semantic interpretations of the same sentence

Object relatives with postverbal subject in Italian-speaking children and adults: The role of encyclopedic knowledge in detecting sentence ambiguity

talian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma \u2018the child that kisses the mom\u2019 are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigat- ing the role of semantic (im)plausibility in processing these ambiguous constructions. Italian children\u2019s (7;01\u201310;00 years old) and adults\u2019 (21;08\u2013- 31;02 y.o.) comprehension is tested through a picture selection task. The test sentences contain lexical verbs whose interpretation can be modulated by encyclopedic knowledge (e.g., to spoon-feed). In the ambiguous sentence Il bambino che imbocca la mamma \u2018the child that spoon-feeds the mom,\u2019 the object reading is more plausible: Moms rather than children are expected agents of the spoon-feeding. Nonetheless, word order and morphosyntactic and prosodic cues prompt the subject interpretation. Results indicate that semantic plausibility cues alone are not robust enough to discard the subject reading. However, adults are sensitive to these cues, which can modulate their comprehension of ambiguous relatives. Conversely, children are unable to exploit encyclopedic knowledge in sentence processing. This can be explained with children\u2019s reluctance to integrate contextual and encyclope- dic semantic cues during processing, and with their limited processing resources, which could constrain their capacity of sentence reanalysis

The Acquisition of Negation in Italian

The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the literature. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained picture of the acquisition process in this Romance language by considering production data and exploring three specific aspects of negation development: (a) the emergence and subsequent development of negators and negative constructions, (b) the acquisition of negative functions and their varying proportion of use and (c) the emergence of negative concord constructions. Using the CHILDES database, the longitudinal data of four monolingual Italian children for an observation period from 1;07 to 3;04 years of age were extracted, and the negative utterances attested in their speech production were analyzed for both the single- and the multiword utterance period. Results show a consistent and progressive form–function development of negation, mainly in line with previous cross-linguistic literature but with some language-related features. Minor differences across children are also attested, which are arguably related to their language development, as measured by their mean length of utterance (MLU) in the age intervals considered

The VinKo Corpus. Oral data from Romance and Germanic local varieties of Northern Italy

The VinKo corpus is a parallel corpus with audio recordings from German and Italian dialects and minority languages spoken in the Italian regions Trentino-South Tyrol and Veneto. The data has been crowdsourced via the online platform of the VinKo project and was produced in response to a pronunciation and translation task targeted at eliciting phonological and morpho-syntactic phenomena for language contact studies. The VinKo corpus V1.1 contains over 125.000 audio files from 11 language varieties. The project strives towards a ‘open science’ approach with an integral ‘citizen science’ component by active collaboration with local institutions and freely sharing the data with different stakeholders, e.g. speech communities, scientific community. All collected data can be accessed via the admin interface of the VinKo website or downloaded from the online repository, and a selection of the data is represented via an online map targeted at a non-specialist audience