@article{MarimonTarterHofmannVerissimoetal.2021,
  author    = {Marimon Tarter, Mireia and Hofmann, Andrea and Ver{\´i}ssimo, Joao Marques and M{\"a}nnel, Claudia and Friederici, Angela Dorkas and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Wartenburger, Isabell},
  title     = {Children's Learning of Non-adjacent Dependencies Using a Web-Based Computer Game Setting},
  series = {Frontiers in Psychology},
  volume    = {12},
  journal   = {Frontiers in Psychology},
  publisher = {Frontiers},
  address   = {Lausanne, Schweiz},
  issn      = {1664-1078},
  doi       = {10.3389/fpsyg.2021.734877},
  pages     = {1 -- 15},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often coded via non-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g., is singing). It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs, Lammertink et al. (2019) recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time (SRT) task and could show that 6-11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times (RTs) increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4-8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting (whack-a-mole). Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a "Stem Completion" task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4-8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{PanedaLagoVaresetal.2020,
  author    = {Pa{\~n}eda, Claudia and Lago, Sol and Vares, Elena and Ver{\´i}ssimo, Jo{\~a}o Marques and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Island effects in Spanish comprehension},
  series = {Glossa : a journal of general linguistics},
  volume    = {5},
  journal   = {Glossa : a journal of general linguistics},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Open Library of Humanities},
  address   = {London},
  issn      = {2397-1835},
  doi       = {10.5334/gjgl.1058},
  pages     = {30},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants' working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{RubergRothweilerVerissimoetal.2019,
  author    = {Ruberg, Tobias and Rothweiler, Monika and Ver{\´i}ssimo, Jo{\~a}o Marques and Clahsen, Harald},
  title     = {Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment},
  series = {Bilingualism: Language and Cognition},
  volume    = {23},
  journal   = {Bilingualism: Language and Cognition},
  number    = {3},
  publisher = {Cambridge Univ. Press},
  address   = {Cambridge},
  issn      = {1366-7289},
  doi       = {10.1017/S1366728919000580},
  pages     = {668 -- 680},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish-German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not.},
  language  = {en}
}