Research

Research projects

Summary: This project aims to explore voice acquisition and processing in Greek children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Non-active voice morphology has been found to be acquired relatively late (around age 5;0) in typical monolingual acquisition. On the other hand, children with DLD show persistent and unresolved difficulties even at ages 11;0-13;0 accompanied with lower grammar, vocabulary, and working memory skills (but normal non-verbal intelligence and intellectual ability). These difficulties can hinder fluent communication and can impact performance in school. They are also more persistent in languages with complex voice systems and a high degree of ambiguity, where the same grammatical form is used to mark various verb categories and not only passive verbs, such as in Greek. Within a psycholinguistic framework, this project aims to test the acquisition and online processing of voice in the comprehension of Greek children with DLD. Furthermore, in line with research on clinical markers in DLD production, this project will explicitly address whether voice can be considered a potential clinical marker for DLD in Greek, both in terms of sensitivity and in terms of specificity. Finally, the project aims to compare voice with other phenomena which are vulnerable in DLD and are often considered to be clinical markers. Thus, more thorough knowledge and insights will be gained into where performance on voice stands for DLD children across the range of various morphosyntactic phenomena.

Collaborators: Theodoros Marinis, Despina Papadopoulou, Artemis Alexiadou, Spyridoula Varlokosta

Summary: Although the acquisition of Greek voice consists a debatable research topic with important theoretical implications, it remains understudied, especially in bilingual populations. Psycholinguistically, its ambiguity and/or optionality are good examples for the study of its online processing and the corresponding strategies the (bilingual) parser employs, which may further influences the developmental path of (bilingual) acquisition. The current study explores the interaction between Greek voice morphology and certain verb categories (passives, reflexives, and anticausatives) in Greek monolingual and Greek-German bilingual children in online and offline comprehension.

Collaborators: Theodoros Marinis, Fotini Karkaletsou, Nikolas Tsokanos, Artemis Alexiadou


Summary: Child acquisition of verbal aspect in Greek has been extensively investigated in various bilingual groups. This is the first project to test verbal aspect in adult (second generation) heritage speakers of Greek, born and raised in Germany and the US in production and comprehension. The main goals are to investigate cross-linguistic influence and the overgeneralizing aspectual patterns (if any) in the heritage grammar.

Collaborators: Vasiliki Rizou, Artemis Alexiadou

Summary: The current project investigates intra-sentential code-mixed NPs in the minority language of early (heritage) bilinguals with the aim to address how grammatical gender and gender agreement are resolved in the bilingual mind. To date, very few studies have examined the strategies bilinguals employ for gender resolution in code-mixed phrases in production or comprehension. This is the first study to test how speakers of two languages with fully symmetrical gender systems, namely Greek and German, produce and comprehend gender and gender agreement in configurations where the noun is in German, and the determiner in Greek. The study employs both speech data from a currently developed corpus of Greek heritage speakers and online data by means of a self-paced reading task to shed light on the retrieval strategies of early bilinguals in code-mixed cases. 

Collaborators: Fotini Karkaletsou


Summary: A growing body of literature explores grammatical illusions such as attraction errors (i.e. agreement violations in the presence of an intervening phrase) which might occur during production and might go undetected in comprehension. Most of work on the processing of attraction errors focuses on number agreement in English and mainly tests monolingual adult speakers. However, only few studies have explored agreement attraction with gender. At the same time research on heritage bilingual acquisition has pointed out that gender agreement errors are more robust in production. This study explores the processing of gender agreement and attraction by Greek monolingual and Greek-German heritage bilingual adults. The aim is to explore how the two groups process gender violations and whether they are sensitive to attraction manipulations. The project contributes to the online, but still scarce, literature on the processing of gender agreeement in Greek and it extends the empirical basis of gender agreement attraction in the psycholinguistic literature. It also contributes to the study of the adult heritage bilingual grammar, which is quite limited for Greek, by adding a series of online and offline experiments in both comprehension and production, thus, offering a thorough picture of grammar and processing in heritage populations.  

Collaborators: Theodoros Marinis


Summary: The project investigates filler integration by adult native speakers of Greek and it is the first one to test the online processing of wh-dependencies in Modern Greek. The study tests current processing strategies which have been proposed in the psycholinguistic literature and extends both the empirical and the theoretical discussion on the topic. Furthermore, the study's methodolgoical contribution lies in the application of two distinct methodologies across the same experimental items and research questions.

Collaborators: Theodoros Marinis