DISCOM

Discourse connectives and the mind: a cross-linguistic analysis of processing and acquisition

Coordinatore	UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT    more  Organization address address: Heidelberglaan 8 city: UTRECHT postcode: 3584 CS contact info Titolo: Ms. Nome: Monique Cognome: Van Der Linden Email: send email Telefono: 31302534136
Nazionalità Coordinatore	Netherlands [NL]
Totale costo	191˙675 €
EC contributo	191˙675 €
Programma	FP7-PEOPLE Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)
Code Call	FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IEF
Funding Scheme	MC-IEF
Anno di inizio	2012
Periodo (anno-mese-giorno)	2012-09-01   -   2014-08-31

 Partecipanti

#	participant	country	role	EC contrib. [€]
1	UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT  Organization address address: Heidelberglaan 8 city: UTRECHT postcode: 3584 CS contact info Titolo: Ms. Nome: Monique Cognome: Van Der Linden Email: send email Telefono: 31302534136	NL (UTRECHT)	coordinator	191˙675.40

Mappa

 Word cloud

Esplora la "nuvola delle parole (Word Cloud) per avere un'idea di massima del progetto.

 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Discourse connectives like ‘because’ or ‘so’ in English can be used to relate various kinds of propositional contents, such as two events unfolding in the world (The temperature rises because the sun is shining) or a premise and a conclusion in the mind of a speaker (Max is ill because he didn’t come to work). The proposed study will make use of an array of state-of-the-art empirical methods such as eye-tracking, comprehension experiments, constrained elicitation and corpus analysis in order to investigate the cognitive differences between these different uses of connectives along four complementary axes: their acquisition by normally-developing children and children suffering from autism, their processing by adult speakers, and a cross-linguistic comparison between closely related languages. In addition to enriching our knowledge of the way connectives work, the planned studies will provide answers to several on-going scientific debates with far-reaching implications, both applied and theoretical. In the domain of language acquisition, they will provide important answers for the debate on the relation between language and cognition, and more specifically on the role of children’s mother tongue as a trigger for language acquisition and cognitive development. These studies will also reveal possible differences in processing between school-age children and adults, with important pedagogical implications for syllabus design and the evaluation of textual productions. In the field of autism, they will bring an important contribution to the understanding of the linguistic and communicative impairment of this population. Finally, the cross-linguistic comparisons will contribute to the development of a collaborative multilingual database of connectives, containing a more accurate representation of their meaning than the one found in bilingual dictionaries.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

Understanding how people learn language provides a window into the brain. An EU-funded project examined how children and adults learn and understand discourse connectives.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Discourse connectives are words that relate two clauses in a sentence. Examples include 'so' and 'because'. Every language has one or many discourse connectives, and they are used for many purposes, such as showing causal relationships or relating two events.

This project, 'Discourse connectives and the mind: A cross-linguistic analysis of processing and acquisition' (DISCOM), explored the cognitive differences in how people process discourse connectives in their own and second languages.

The first part of the study looked at how children process discourse connectives. The children were learning Dutch and French simultaneously. In Dutch, a causal relationship is expressed by two discourse connectives, while in French there is only one. Despite these differences, the children had a similar ability to understand objective and subjective causal relations, indicating that cognitive development sets the pace for understanding language.

In the second part of the study, DISCOM compared text processing of discourse connectives between adults and children. In this case, adults understood the text much better than children, suggesting that processing subtle cues of discourse connectives occurs later in development. When applied to people with autism, these findings suggest that some of their difficulties with communication may be linked to the structure of language.

During the final experiment, non-native Dutch and French speakers were asked to complete a reading task. Results showed that grammar judgement was weaker for non-native speakers, but their understanding of the meaning of connectives was almost the same as it was for the native speakers. While it may be more difficult to derive meaning if there is not a one-to-one translation of a particular connective, cognitive processes still allow for solid understanding.

These findings provide insight into how people learn and process second languages, which can help educators tailor how these languages are taught. Furthermore, the findings have the potential to guide treatment for disorders such as autism, which have a language deficit component.