Chiara Dal Farra

IMG_0717Chiara Dal Farra is a research fellow at the University of Milano-Bicocca. In 2020, she obtained her PhD in Language Sciences at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with a thesis entitled “To be or not to be an island. The status of adjuncts” under the supervision of Alessandra Giorgi.

Her main research interests include different aspects of syntax, such as the establishment of dependencies and cases in which these are blocked: islands. During her PhD she mainly focused on adjuncts, from both and experimental and a theoretical point of view. She is also interested in focalization, the topic of her MA thesis in Theoretical Linguistics at Ca’ Foscari, and in syntax-pragmatics interface, as in the case of special questions. For the latter, she focused also on co-speech gesture and on prosodic properties.

Since 2021, Chiara is part of the European project LeibnizDream (Realizing Leibniz’s Dream: Child Language sas Mirror of the Mind).

Upcoming Events

February 3, 2025
February 10, 2025
  • BIL Seminar "What does atypicality really mean? Language acquisition in autism" - Mikhail Kissine February 10, 2025 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm U6, Sala Lauree, Terzo piano

    Abstract
    "Research on language in autism mostly explores delayed acquisition or atypical use, the reference point being language in non-autistic individuals. Such approaches focus on language disability, but somewhat downplay the acquisition routes that may be specific to autism. More specifically, typical language development is known to be intimately linked to socio-pragmatic, joint communicative experiences. Early-onset and life-long atypicality in the socio-communicative domain are core characteristics of autism, and likely explain why language onset is often significantly delayed in autistic children. However, it is also usually assumed that language trajectories in autism should be correlated with an increase of socio-communicative skills, such as joint attention. In this talk, I will review evidence that some autistic individuals may, in fact, acquire language in spite of persisting strong socio-communicative disabilities. I will also present new results that show that some autistic children are interested in language in and of itself, independently of its communicative function, and display enhanced sensitivity to the acoustic and structural properties of the linguistic input."

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