Syncopation as structure bootstrapping: the role of asymmetry in rhythm and language.

Syncopation - the occurrence of a musical event on a metrically weak position preceding a rest on a metrically strong position - represents an important challenge in the study of the mapping between rhythm and meter. In this contribution, we present the hypothesis that syncopation is an effective strategy to elicit the bootstrapping of a multi-layered, hierarchically organized metric structure from a linear rhythmic surface. The hypothesis is inspired by a parallel with the problem of linearization in natural language syntax, which is the problem of how hierarchically organized phrase-structure markers are mapped onto linear sequences of words. The hypothesis has important consequences for the role of meter in music perception and cognition and, more particularly, for its role in the relationship between rhythm and bodily entrainment.

The comprehension of double negation in Chinese children with reading difficulties.

This study investigated the processing of double negation in Chinese children with reading difficulties. The comprehension of Mandarin affirmative, single negative and double negative sentences was tested with Chinese young poor readers and typical readers, using a sentence-picture verification task. Results showed that double negative sentences were most difficult to process for both groups; the poor readers performed significantly worse than the typical readers in comprehending double negative sentences, while no difference between the two groups was observed in comprehending affirmative and single negative sentences. Besides, morphological awareness correlated with the comprehension of double negative and single negative sentences in poor readers, while this correlation did not emerge with typical readers. Overall, our results suggest that children with reading difficulties experienced great processing difficulty in double negation, confirming that reading disorders are also characterised by oral language difficulties, in particular in the comprehension of sentences requiring high processing costs.

Disentangling sequential from hierarchical learning in Artificial Grammar Learning: Evidence from a modified Simon Task.

In this paper we probe the interaction between sequential and hierarchical learning by investigating implicit learning in a group of school-aged children. We administered a serial reaction time task, in the form of a modified Simon Task in which the stimuli were organised following the rules of two distinct artificial grammars, specifically Lindenmayer systems: the Fibonacci grammar (Fib) and the Skip grammar (a modification of the former). The choice of grammars is determined by the goal of this study, which is to investigate how sensitivity to structure emerges in the course of exposure to an input whose surface transitional properties (by hypothesis) bootstrap structure. The studies conducted to date have been mainly designed to investigate low-level superficial regularities, learnable in purely statistical terms, whereas hierarchical learning has not been effectively investigated yet. The possibility to directly pinpoint the interplay between sequential and hierarchical learning is instead at the core of our study: we presented children with two grammars, Fib and Skip, which share the same transitional regularities, thus providing identical opportunities for sequential learning, while crucially differing in their hierarchical structure. More particularly, there are specific points in the sequence (k-points), which, despite giving rise to the same transitional regularities in the two grammars, support hierarchical reconstruction in Fib but not in Skip. In our protocol, children were simply asked to perform a traditional Simon Task, and they were completely unaware of the real purposes of the task. Results indicate that sequential learning occurred in both grammars, as shown by the decrease in reaction times throughout the task, while differences were found in the sensitivity to k-points: these, we contend, play a role in hierarchical reconstruction in Fib, whereas they are devoid of structural significance in Skip. More particularly, we found that children were faster in correspondence to k-points in sequences produced by Fib, thus providing an entirely new kind of evidence for the hypothesis that implicit learning involves an early activation of strategies of hierarchical reconstruction, based on a straightforward interplay with the statistically-based computation of transitional regularities on the sequences of symbols.

Implicit Learning, Bilingualism, and Dyslexia: Insights From a Study Assessing AGL With a Modified Simon Task.

This paper presents an experimental study investigating artificial grammar learning in monolingual and bilingual children, with and without dyslexia, using an original methodology. We administered a serial reaction time task, in the form of a modified Simon task, in which the sequence of the stimuli was manipulated according to the rules of a simple Lindenmayer grammar (more specifically, a Fibonacci grammar). By ensuring that the subjects focused on the correct response execution at the motor stage in presence of congruent or incongruent visual stimuli, we could meet the two fundamental criteria for implicit learning: the absence of an intention to learn and the lack of awareness at the level of resulting knowledge. The participants of our studies were four groups of 10-year-old children: 30 Italian monolingual typically developing children, 30 bilingual typically developing children with Italian L2, 24 Italian monolingual dyslexic children, and 24 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian L2. Participants were administered the modified Simon task developed according to the rules of the Fibonacci grammar and tested with respect to the implicit learning of three regularities: (i) a red is followed by a blue, (ii) a sequence of two blues is followed by a red, and (iii) a blue can be followed either by a red or by a blue. Results clearly support the hypothesis that learning took place, since participants of all groups became increasingly sensitive to the structure of the input, implicitly learning the sequence of the trials and thus appropriately predicting the occurrence of the relevant items, as manifested by faster reaction times in predictable trials. Moreover, group differences were found, with bilinguals being overall faster than monolinguals and dyslexics less accurate than controls. Finally, an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia was found, with bilingual dyslexics performing consistently better than monolingual dyslexics and, in some conditions, at the level of the two control groups. These results are taken to suggest that bilingualism should be supported also among linguistically impaired individuals.

The Production of Clitic Pronouns: A Study on Bilingual and Monolingual Dyslexic Children.

Clitic production is reported to be challenging for impaired children, suffering from dyslexia or SLI, and for early second language learners too. On the contrary, research has not directly investigated the relation between dyslexia, bilingualism and clitic production. The aim of our study is that of addressing this topic, by analyzing the performance of 4 groups of children in a clitic elicitation task: 25 Italian monolingual dyslexic children (mean age 10;08 years old), 33 Italian monolingual typically developing children (9;99 years old), 25 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian as L2 (10;31 years old) and 31 bilingual typically developing children with Italian as L2 (10;30 years old). As inclusion criteria, bilingual children had at least 5 years of exposure to Italian, including 3 years of consecutive school attendance in Italy. Clitic production was assessed by means of an elicitation task in which the pronoun had to be produced either in the simple present or in the present perfect; higher difficulties were expected in this last condition, in which the clitic has to agree in gender and number with the past participle. Results revealed that dyslexic children, both monolingual and bilingual, performed worse than controls both in the simple present and in the present perfect, indicating that clitic production is challenging in dyslexia. As for the bilingual children, instead, differences were found between the two tasks. In the simple present, bilingual children performed very accurately and similarly to their monolingual peers, indicating that a target performance with clitics is accomplished by typically developing children with a longer exposure to Italian and suggesting that previously reported difficulties were related to linguistic immaturity and are likely to disappear as their L2 exposure and competence grow. In the present perfect, instead, both groups of bilinguals performed worse than their monolingual peers, suggesting that bilingualism could exacerbate the difficulties in the most challenging condition. Importantly, however, no negative effect of bilingualism in clitic production was found once controlling for the subjects' vocabulary, evidencing the importance of lexical competence in the target language for a native-like performance in clitic production.

Difficulties in Comprehending Affirmative and Negative Sentences: Evidence From Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties.

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth value judgment task. The results reveal that negative sentences were harder to process than affirmative ones, irrespective of the distinction between poor and typical readers. Moreover, poor readers performed worse than typical readers in comprehending sentences, regardless of whether they were affirmative or negative sentences. We interpret the results as (a) confirming the two-step simulation hypothesis, based on the result that the difficulty in processing negation has a general validity (persisting in pragmatically felicitous contexts), and (b) disconfirming that negation, as far as behavioral data are concerned, can be used as a reliable linguistic predictor of reading difficulties.

Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children's performance in a nonword pluralization task.

In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0 years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11 years old). Our task, inspired by Berko's Wug Test, had the aim of testing the subjects' ability to apply pluralization rules to nonwords in the morphologically complex context of Italian nominal inflection. Results demonstrate that dyslexics display poorer morphological skills in comparison to controls, showing lower accuracy in the task. Furthermore, the dissimilar performances reported by the subjects in the different conditions indicate that the ability to inflect nonwords depends on factors such as the rule's productivity, frequency, and opacity with respect to gender. Finally, the children's performance in this task was significantly related to their reading proficiency, and it could predict accuracy in word reading independently of phonological awareness and working memory.

The semantics of person and de se effects in free indirect discourse.

In this contribution we will address the main puzzling empirical issues that have been formulated around Free Indirect Discourse (FID): the constraints on the use of first person pronouns and of proper names (as well as of definite descriptions), the reasons why different grammatical features (person, gender, number) give rise to presuppositions that must be resolved at different levels of interpretation in FID, the factors that account for the observation that person and tense behave similarly in FID. At the same time, we will also discuss the main controversies to which the ongoing debate on FID has given rise in the literature, showing that Schlenker (Mind Lang 19(3):279-304, 2004)'s distinction between a Context of Thought (CT) and a Context of Utterance (CU) still provides a fundamentally valid insight into the nature of FID, in spite of many qualifications that are necessary and some well-motivated criticism. However, our main task here is more ambitious than simply taking a stand on the many unsettled controversies surrounding FID. In fact, we claim that Schlenker's split between CU and CT can be derived in a principled way from the inner nature of FID as a linguistic process of 'phenomenal identification', whereby a Higher Experiencer attempts at reproducing (at a distinct time) the phenomenal experience proper to a Lower Experiencer. This distinction between qualitatively identified but numerically distinct experiences provides the conceptual basis for the derivation of virtually all remarkable properties of FID (including its somehow intermediate status between Direct and Indirect Discourse), while connecting, at the same time, with some intriguing semantic properties of first-person pronouns, such as the different varieties of de se readings.