Maria Teresa Guasti

maria_teresa_guasti_885x432pxMaria Teresa Guasti studies language acquisition in different population of children. In addition to monolingual and bilingual children, she also studies language acquisition in children with cochlear implant, children with specific language impairment and children with dislexia.

She has partecipated in various European (EDUGATE, LACA, Trilinguismo nella scuola dell’infanzia) and Italian projects and she is nowadays in the MultiMind project (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2017) and the ERC-Synergy Leibnizdream with Artemis Alexiadou and Uli Sauerland.

She is the vicepresident of the Marica De Vincenzi Onlus Foundation, invited professor at the international center for the child health, foreign expert at the school for special education, Haidan, Beijing and referent for the English linguistic education at the kindergarten Bambini Bicocca.

She is author of several articles on international journals and three recent books: The acquisition of Italian: Different modes. Benjiamin with Adriana Belletti (2015), Language acquisition. The Growth of grammar. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press (2017) second edition and Imparare la lingua giocando con frasi e parole. (with Silvia Silleresi and Mirta Vernice) published by Raffaello Cortina.

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Upcoming Events

September 17, 2024
  • BIL Seminar: Margreet Vogelzang September 17, 2024 @ 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Aula 3143 U6 Bicocca

    Introducing the concept of (bilingual) reference profiles: A cluster-analysis approach

    Empirical studies on bilingual children’s reference production have often focussed on comparisons with monolingual peers. In this talk, I will introduce the concept of “reference profiles”: Speakers may exhibit similar or different behaviours in reference production, independently of whether they belong to a specific group (e.g., monolinguals or bilinguals) or whether their production adheres to some norm.
    As an empirical example, I will present data from thirty-seven Greek-Italian bilingual children (Mage = 9;4, range 7;10-11;6) who performed narrative retelling tasks in both of their languages, as well as vocabulary tasks and various cognitive tasks. The data show that the children had a good mastery of reference (i.e. appropriately using null pronouns, full pronouns, or full nouns) in both of their languages. Using cluster analyses, two distinct reference profiles were identified. Further investigation showed that these profiles differed in both their sustained attention and in the use of overspecified REs in contexts where reference to the same referent was maintained. These results are interpreted in light of current cognitive theories of (bilingual) reference processing and emphasise the potential of (reference) profiles for the study of other domains beyond bilingual reference production.

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