Category: News

Meeting 17-Apr-2019: Kleanthes Grohmann (UCY)

Written by CAT in News on Wed 17 April 2019. Tags: Meetings,

Join us for the last (scheduled) talk of the semester next week, April 17th, in room A110 (Kallipoleos 75). Kleanthes K. Grohmann will give an invited talk on `Knowledge of Language: Innateness, Modularity and the Mind/Brain’ as part of the Demonactian Lectures of Philosophy 2018-19. The abstract of his talk can be found below.

Abstract

When linguists talk about the language faculty, they often employ metaphors such as language as a ‘mental organ’. What this means is that the human capacity for language is something deeply engrained in our species, namely as part of our physical organism (possibly hardwired in the brain). At the same time, it denotes something less physical (the more ethereal mind). In this talk I will return to the various arguments that have been brought to the innateness of knowledge of language vis-à-vis a language faculty, that is, a module dedicated to language alongside other modules within the larger cognitive system. I expect to raise more questions than provide answers, and these questions range from biology (genetics, evolution) and neuroscience (cognitive computations) to the philosophy of mind and beyond (such as other innate systems).


Meeting 10-Apr-2019: Demetris Karayiannis (UCY)

Written by CAT in News on Wed 10 April 2019. Tags: Meetings,

Join us on Wednesday, April 10th, at 6:30pm at the CAT lab (E004) , when
Demetris Karayiannis will discuss Linguistic Impairment in Cypriot Greek
Aphasia Case Studies: Exploring the Role of Micro-Variation
. You can also
attend this talk remotely at: https://meet.jit.si/CATLAB.


Meeting 03-Apr-2019: Vasiliki Erotokritou (UCY)

Written by CAT in News on Wed 03 April 2019. Tags: Meetings,

Join us on Wednesday, April 3rd, at 4:30pm at the CAT lab (E004), when Vasiliki Erotokritou will discuss Prosody vs Word Order in distinguishing (non-)predicative sentences cross-linguistically. You can also attend this talk remotely at: https://meet.jit.si/CATLAB


Upcoming CAT meetings- Spring Semester 2019

  • Apr 10- Demetris Karayiannis, TBA
  • Apr 17- Kleanthes K. Grohmann, `Knowledge of Language: Innateness, Modularity, and the Mind/Brain’

Meeting 20-Mar-2019: Elena Theodorou (CUT)

Written by CAT in News on Wed 20 March 2019. Tags: Meetings,

Important Update

Due to unexpected reasons, this week’s CAT lab meeting will NOT take place at the CAT lab, but on the first floor of the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences building (CUT)* (Vragadinou street 15) in Lemesos at 6:30pm. You can find the abstract below.


Join us on Wednesday, March 20th, at 6:30pm in room E004 on the first floor of the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences building (CUT)* (Vragadinou street 15) in Lemesos for a presentation by Elena Theodorou (Cyprus University of Technology) on Language disfluencies and speech rate in children with DLD. You can also attend this talk remotely at: meet.jit.si/CATLAB

Abstract

Fluency as well as speech rate are associated with the ability of producing speech quickly and easily. Literature strongly states that language production, fluency and rate of speech are highly interrelated processes. The term linguistic dysfluencies determines the whole set of pauses and self-repairs found in oral speech. In fact, they are part of normal production and serve the function of self-correction. As for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), linguistic dysfluencies differ from those produced by Typically Language Developing (TLD) children.
This study examines the types and frequency of dysfluencies, as well as speech rate that appear in narrations of Cypriot-Greek children with DLD and typical language development.
Our findings suggest that preschool children with DLD use the same types and amount of disfluencies as TLD children do. Significant differences were yielded when school aged children with LI were compared with their TLD peers. No difference observed between preschool children might be related to the language acquisition process that happens rapidly at this age. Significant differences were detected when children with DLD were compared with their TLD peers in terms of speech rate.
Concluding, this study represents the very first study examining the linguistic dysfluencies and speech rate articulated by Greek speaking children (in this case Cypriot-Greek), and it could be characterized as exploratory.


Upcoming CAT meetings- Spring Semester 2019

  • Mar 27- Vasiliki Erotokritou, TBA
  • Apr 3- TBA
  • Apr 10- Demetris Karayiannis, TBA
  • Apr 17- Kleanthes K. Grohmann, `Knowledge of Language: Innateness, Modularity, and the Mind/Brain’

Meeting 06-Mar-2019: Natalia Pavlou (UCY)

Written by CAT in News on Wed 06 March 2019. Tags: Meetings,

Join us this Wednesday, March 6th, at 6:30pm at the CAT lab (E004). I will present my work on Cross-clausal subject-verb agreement in Greek. A short abstract can be found below.

Abstract

In this talk, I will examine cross-clausal subject-verb agreement in Greek, where the subject in the embedded clause agrees with both the embedded and the matrix verb. I argue that the subject is truly structurally in the embedded clause given evidence from temporal adverbials and on the basis of previous related work (Potsdam and Polinsky 2008, among others). The discussion will unfold to examine how cross-clausal agreement appears in different types of structures and to explain the phenomenon in terms of both a non-local and local theory of agreement.


Upcoming CAT meetings- Spring Semester 2019

  • Mar 13- Svetlana Karpava, `The effect of bilingualism on the development of literacy skills:Evidence from Cyprus’
  • Mar 20- Elena Theodorou, TBA
  • Mar 27- Vasiliki Erotokritou, TBA
  • Apr 3- TBA
  • Apr 10- Demetris Karayiannis, TBA
  • Apr 17- Kleanthes K. Grohmann, `Knowledge of Language: Innateness, Modularity, and the Mind/Brain’


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