Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profles in autism, three main groups are identifed, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difculties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specifc aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders

Acquisition of Direct Object Scrambling and Clitic Placement Syntax and pragmatics

This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the "real time acquisition" of grammar in First Language Acquisition Theory. It combines detailed and quantitative observations of object placement in Dutch and Italian child language with an analysis that makes use of the Modularity Hypothesis. Real time development is explained by the interaction between two different modules of language, namely syntax and pragmatics. Children need to build up knowledge of how the world works, which includes learning that in communicating with someone else, one must realize that speaker and hearer knowledge are always independent. Since the syntactic feature referentiality can only be marked if this (pragmatic) distinction is made, and assuming that certain types of object placement (such as scrambling and clitic placement) are motivated by referentiality, it follows that the relevant syntactic mechanism is dependent on the prior acquisition of a pragmatic distinction.THE ACQUISITION OF DIRECT OBJECT SCRAMBLING AND CLITIC PLACEMENT -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Table of Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Object Scrambling and Cliticization -- Chapter 3. Methodology -- Chapter 4. Results and Discussion -- Chapter 5. Some Further Results -- Chapter 6. Conclusion -- Appendix -- References -- Subject IndexThis book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the "real time acquisition" of grammar in First Language Acquisition Theory. It combines detailed and quantitative observations of object placement in Dutch and Italian child language with an analysis that makes use of the Modularity Hypothesis. Real time development is explained by the interaction between two different modules of language, namely syntax and pragmatics. Children need to build up knowledge of how the world works, which includes learning that in communicating with someone else, one must realize that speaker and hearer knowledge are always independent. Since the syntactic feature referentiality can only be marked if this (pragmatic) distinction is made, and assuming that certain types of object placement (such as scrambling and clitic placement) are motivated by referentiality, it follows that the relevant syntactic mechanism is dependent on the prior acquisition of a pragmatic distinction.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries

Nouns are both mass and count: Evidence from unclassified nouns in adult and child Mandarin Chinese

This paper examines the interpretation of unclassified nouns in Mandarin Chinese from the perspective of three theoretical approaches to the mass-count distinction in Mandarin: a lexico-syntactic approach (Doetjes 1997; Cheng & Sybesma 1998), a syntax-driven approach (Borer 2005), and a hybrid approach (Pelletier 2012). Employing a Quantity Judgment Task (Barner & Snedeker 2005), we examined the interpretation of unclassified nouns of different ontological types ('count, mass, flexible, object-mass') in both adult and child Mandarin. In order to explain possible interpretational preferences, we also analysed the distributions of the tested nouns in the Chinese Internet Corpus (Sharoff 2006). The results of 27 adults and 55 children (2;11–5;09), together with the corpus data provide strong support for Pelletier. We therefore conclude that Mandarin nouns are semantically both count and mass, and receive a number-based or a volume-based interpretation according to the type of classifier they appear with. However, we argue for one exception in this respect: following Bale & Barner (2009) we assume that nouns of the 'object-mass 'type (e.g., 'furniture') are marked for individualization in the lexicon. Finally, the emergence of adultlike preferences for number-based or volume-based interpretations in child Mandarin is argued to be linked to the acquisition of the classifier system

On Children’s Knowledge of Scalar Implicatures : Evidence from Hebrew coordination

"There has been much discussion about children’s knowledge of scalar implicatures. Some researchers have found evidence for early knowledge of these implicatures, i.e. Papafragou and Musolino (2003) for numerical scales, Chierchia, et al. (1998) for . Other researchers have argued that this skill is late developing, i.e. Papafragou (to appear) for scalar implicatures associated with the scales , and , Papafragou and Musolino (2003) for , , Noveck (2001) for and , Musolino and Lidz (2002) for , Chierchia , et al. (2001) for

The interpretation of the mass-count distinction across languages and populations: Introduction

In this special collection we bring together experimental studies on the semantic and cognitive correlates of the syntactic mass-count distinction in different (learner) populations and typologically diverse languages. Although the theoretical distinction between mass and count has been investigated extensively in many different adult languages, experimental research on how this distinction is interpreted by different types of learners and speakers is far rarer. The aim of the current special collection is thus to provide a unique set of highly controlled cross-linguistic and cross-population data that helps us further examine various theories of the syntactic mass-count distinction and the interactions between language, cognition and the world