This study investigated bilingualism effects on language, executive functions and Theory of Mind (ToM) in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The performance of these clinical groups was compared to that of children with typical… read more
Has language developed to serve as a system of communication or one of thought? While language is clearly an excellent tool for communication, the possible contribution of higher order cognitive processes other than language to communication may provide insights on how we think about language… read more
Pagliarini, Crain, & Guasti (2018) showed that children acquiring Italian start to attribute a “neither” interpretation to negative disjunctive sentences, but converge to the adult “at least one” interpretation earlier than children acquiring Japanese or Mandarin. This earlier convergence is… read more
Narrative comprehension is a complex process that requires the ability to integrate language information from the speech signal with visual and contextual knowledge, while drawing also from social cognition and executive functions. Although many studies have examined narrative comprehension in… read more
The performance of 122 children on syntactic awareness of clitics and articles in French was examined. Three clinical groups (21 children with ASD, 22 children with SLI, 23 children with DD) and a group of 56 younger children with TD were studied. On the article task, children with ASD obtained… read more
This study investigates formal language abilities in French-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We report on the usefulness of the LITMUS-Sentence-Repetition-French task in distinguishing children with impaired language (ASD-LI) from children with normal language (ASD-LN). We… read more
Our study shows that the extended projection of nominals in Jamaican Creole (JC) is composed of a rich array of hierarchically organized functional projections, in line with cartographic research (Cinque 2002, Rizzi 2004, Belletti 2004). The functional material identified strikes parallelisms with… read more
French has several optional strategies for the formation of wh-interrogatives, whereas relative clauses (RCs) do not display this optionality. In a comprehension study with French-speaking children aged 5 to 8, we show that two factors interact in the processing of object A’-dependencies in child… read more