Pragmatic abilities of high-functioning Greek-speaking children with autism

This paper reports on the findings of the pragmatic abilities of Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Twenty high functioning children with ASD and their typically developing age and vocabulary controls were administered a pragmatics task. The task was based on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV) in the context of a larger study targeting the grammar of Greek-speaking children with autism, and assessed the children’s abilities in communicative role taking, narrative, and question asking. The children with ASD showed an uneven profile in their pragmatic abilities. The two groups did not differ in communicative role taking and question asking. However, the children with ASD had difficulties on the narrative task, and more specifically, on the items assessing reference contrast and temporal links. Yet, they performed similarly on the mental state representations and the false beliefs items. Despite their good performance on mental states and false beliefs, the ASD children’s lower performance on reference contrast can be interpreted via Theory of Mind deficits if we assume that the former involve an additional level of complexity; namely, quantifying the amount of information available to the listener. Lower performance on temporal links is in line with the ASD children’s attested difficulties in organizing events into a coherent gist. Their overall profile, and, in particular, the dissociation between the different sections of the task, does not support single deficit accounts. It rather indicates that the deficits of individuals with ASD stem from distinct deficits in core cognitive processes (Happé & Frith, 2006).

A reappraisal of Baskerville's Greek types

Ιn the eighteenth century the printing of Greek texts continued to be central to scholarship and discourse. The typography of Greek texts could be characterised as a continuation of French models from the sixteenth century, with a gradual dilution of the complexity of ligatures and abbreviations, mostly through printers in the Low Countries. In Britain, Greek printing was dominated by the university presses, which reproduced conservatively the continental models – exemplified by Oxford's Fell types, which were Dutch adaptations of earlier French models. Hindsight allows us to identify a meaningful development in the Greek types cut by Alexander Wilson for the Foulis Press in Glasgow, but we can argue that in the middle of the eighteenth century Baskerville was considering Greek printing the typographic environment was ripe for a new style of Greek types. The opportunity to cut the types for a New Testament (in an twin edition that included a generous octavo and a large quarto version) would seem perfect for showcasing Baskerville's capacity for innovation. His Greek type maintained the cursive ductus of earlier models, but abandoned complex ligatures and any hint of scribal flourish. He homogenised the modulation of the letter strokes and the treatment of terminals, and normalised the horizontal alignments of all letters. Although the strokes are in some letters too delicate, the narrow set of the style composes a consistent, uniform texture that is a clean break from contemporaneous models. The argument is made that this is the first Greek typeface that can be described as fully typographic in the context of the technology of the time. It sets a pattern that was to be followed, without acknowledgement, by Richard Porson nearly a century and a half later. The typeface received little praise by typographic historians, and was condemned by Victor Scholderer in his retrospective of Greek typography. A survey of typeface reviews in the surrounding decades establishes that the commentators were mostly reproducing the views of an arbitrary typographic orthodoxy, for which only types with direct references to Renaissance models were acceptable. In these comments we detect a bias against someone considered an arriviste in the scholarly printing establishment, as well as a conservative attitude to typographic innovation.

Processing coordinate subject-verb agreement in L1 and L2 Greek

The present study examines the processing of subject-verb (SV) number agreement with coordinate subjects in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions in Greek. Greek is a language with morphological number marked on nominal and verbal elements. Coordinate SV agreement, however, is special in Greek as it is sensitive to the coordinate subject's position: when pre-verbal, the verb is marked for plural while when post-verbal the verb can be in the singular. We conducted two experiments, an acceptability judgment task with adult monolinguals as a pre-study (Experiment 1) and a self-paced reading task as the main study (Experiment 2) in order to obtain acceptance as well as processing data. Forty adult monolingual speakers of Greek participated in Experiment 1 and a hundred and forty one in Experiment 2. Seventy one children participated in Experiment 2: 30 Albanian-Greek sequential bilingual children and 41 Greek monolingual children aged 10–12 years. The adult data in Experiment 1 establish the difference in acceptability between singular VPs in SV and VS constructions reaffirming our hypothesis. Meanwhile, the adult data in Experiment 2 show that plural verbs accelerate processing regardless of subject position. The child online data show that sequential bilingual children have longer reading times (RTs) compared to the age-matched monolingual control group. However, both child groups follow a similar processing pattern in both pre-verbal and post-verbal constructions showing longer RTs immediately after a singular verb when the subject was pre-verbal indicating a grammaticality effect. In the post-verbal coordinate subject sentences, both child groups showed longer RTs on the first subject following the plural verb due to the temporary number mismatch between the verb and the first subject. This effect was resolved in monolingual children but was still present at the end of the sentence for bilingual children indicating difficulties to reanalyze and integrate information. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that (a) 10–12 year-old sequential bilingual children are sensitive to number agreement in SV coordinate constructions parsing sentences in the same way as monolingual children even though their vocabulary abilities are lower than that of age-matched monolingual peers and (b) bilinguals are slower in processing overall.