Mirta Vernice

persone_0001_mirta_verniceMirta Vernice is a research fellow in the Department of Psychology of the University of Milano-Bicocca. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 at the University of Pavia, Italy. During here PhD she was a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh, UK and at Ghent University.

Her primary interests are (1) language acquisition in typically developing children as well as in children with Dyslexia, SLI and bilinguals and (2) syntactic processing in both normal and brain-damaged populations.

In 2011 she co-authored the National Guidelines for the assessment, diagnosis and clinical interventions for Specific Learning Disabilities, promoted by the ISS (Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Roma). Since 2012 she collaborates with the Italian branch of ‘Bilingualism Matters’ (Bilinguismo conta), an information and consultancy service devoted to disseminating the findings of research on bilingualism outside academia.

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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