Language Acquisition – Typical Development and Disorders: How do we acquire our native language? How does language knowledge develop in the first six years of our lives? How does language acquisition differ in typical development and in developmental language disorders? Is language non-typical in Specific Language Disorder, Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, or Autism Spectrum Disorders? In our studies, we examine the acquisition of morphological categories (e.g. grammatical gender, grammatical tense), syntactic structures (e.g. interrogative sentences, relative clauses) and semantic categories (e.g. logical and inferred meaning of quantitative elements) in typically developing children and children with developmental disorders, using timed (on line) and non-timed (off line) tests of speech production and comprehension.
Neurolinguistics – Aphasia: Aphasia is an acquired language disorder characterized by difficulties in producing and understanding speech, in word finding, in reading and in writing. It may be accompanied by difficulties in arithmetic operations, in movements and in short-term memory. Aphasia is the result of brain damage that can arise from various causes (e.g. stroke). In our studies we examine problems in naming nouns and verbs as well as in producing and understanding speech, using timed (on line) tests (e.g. eye movement studies) and non-timed (off line) tests (e.g. speech extraction, truth value judgment, image selection). Our goal is to understand the deficits in language processing in individuals with aphasia.
