题  目:Language, Learning, and Dyslexia 

　　主讲人:Frank Wijnen(教授) 

　　时  间:2015年11月23日(周一)上午10:00 

　　地  点:中国社科院语言所大会议室 

　　提  要: 

Language, Learning, and Dyslexia 

Frank Wijnen 

Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University 

　　Dyslexia is defined as a disorder in learning to read and spell in the absence of other cognitive deficiencies. Evidence is mounting, however, that dyslexia is often associated with a subtle delay in primary language acquisition. It has been hypothesized that reading and writing difficulties are related to a (meta-)phonological processing deficit, but the developmental delay in dyslexic children goes beyond phonology, reaching into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Work from the UIL OTS babylab shows that children in the pre-school age with a familial risk of dyslexia show language development delays, and may even present a profile close to that of specific language impairment. We are currently exploring the hypothesis that language delays in children with (a familial risk of) dyslexia are related to a deficit in (implicit) statistical and distributional learning. I will present results from ongoing experiments with babies and toddlers on phonological discrimination, grammatical category induction and non-adjacent dependency learning that support this hypothesis. Furthermore, I will explore the suggestion that statistical learning in language acquisition is a specific implementation of a domain general mechanism. I will focus on relations between language acquisition and other learning processes that rest on the extraction of statistical patterns from sequences of events, notably in the domain of perceptual-motor skills.