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1.
The atypical pattern of irony comprehension in autistic children
Francesca Panzeri, Greta Mazzaggio, Beatrice Giustolisi, Silvia Silleresi, Luca Surian, 2022, original scientific article

Abstract: Nonliteral language understanding has always been recognized as problematic in autistic individuals. We ran a study on 26 autistic children (mean age = 7.3 years) and 2 comparison groups of typically developing children, 1 matched for chronological age, and 1 of younger peers (mean age = 6.11 years) matched for linguistic abilities, aiming at assessing their understanding of ironic criticisms and compliments, and identifying the cognitive and linguistic factors that may underpin this ability. Autistic participants lagged behind the comparison groups in the comprehension of both types of irony, and their performance was related to mindreading and linguistic abilities. Significant correlations were found between first-order Theory of Mind (ToM) and both types of irony, between second-order ToM and ironic compliments, and between linguistic abilities and ironic criticisms. The autistic group displayed an interesting, and previously unattested in the literature, bimodal distribution: the great majority of them (n = 18) displayed a very poor performance in irony understanding, whereas some (n = 6) were at ceiling. We discuss these results in terms of two different profiles of autistic children.
Keywords: irony, autism spectrum disorder, experimental pragmatics, theory of mind, irony comprehension
Published in RUNG: 05.05.2022; Views: 1365; Downloads: 0
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2.
Puntata speciale dedicata a "La settimana del cervello 2019"
Sara Andreetta, radio or television event

Keywords: aphasia, brain week, language disorder
Published in RUNG: 08.11.2021; Views: 1589; Downloads: 0
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3.
Autismo e Inversione Pronominale: l’ipotesi della Teoria della Mente.
Greta Mazzaggio, invited lecture at foreign university

Keywords: autism developmental disorder, pragmatics, language development, theory of mind
Published in RUNG: 22.09.2021; Views: 1636; Downloads: 0
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4.
La comprensione dell'ironia in bambini con disturbi dello spettro autistico
Greta Mazzaggio, Francesca Panzeri, Beatrice Giustolisi, Luca Surian, 2018, published scientific conference contribution abstract

Abstract: Comprendere l’ironia è un compito complesso che i bambini a sviluppo tipico compiono a partire dai sei anni. Diversi studi hanno evidenziato il ruolo della Teoria della Mente (ToM) e delle abilità linguistiche nella comprensione dell’ironia. Gli individui con Disturbi dello Spettro Autistico ad alto funzionamento (AAF) sono caratterizzati da abilità linguistiche intatte ma deficit nella ToM e nella pragmatica, a volte compensati mediante strategie linguistiche. Obiettivo del nostro studio è indagare la comprensione dell’ironia (sia critiche che complimenti) in questa popolazione, al fine di individuare i fattori che la facilitano. I partecipanti sono 26 bambini con AAF (età media = 7,2) e 26 bambini a sviluppo tipico (ST) di pari età (p = .98), testati per QI non verbale, abilità linguistiche (sintassi e lessico), e ToM. Per la comprensione dell’ironia abbiamo creato un compito composto da 10 brevi storie che si concludono con un commento letterale (4, controllo) o ironico (3 complimenti e 3 critiche), a cui seguivano tre domande che richiedevano il riconoscimento del significato inteso, dell’atteggiamento del parlante, e del contesto (come controllo). Entrambi i gruppi non hanno dimostrato difficoltà nel comprendere le storie letterali (AAF: 99%; ST: 99.5%). Attraverso un’analisi di regressione logistica abbiamo riscontrato una maggiore accuratezza di risposte per entrambe le tipologie di ironia (complimento e critica) nel gruppo a ST rispetto al gruppo di AAF (β = 8.25, SE = 2.52, z = 3.27, p = .001). In entrambi i gruppi l’accuratezza è stata maggiore per le critiche ironiche rispetto ai complimenti ironici (β = 0.90, SE = 0.32, z = 2.83, p = .005). L’analisi di correlazione di Pearson ha individuato come nel gruppo di AAF solo la ToM correli con la comprensione dell’ ironia (p < .001) mentre nel gruppo di bambini a ST, invece, al netto del fattore età solo le abilità sintattiche correlano (p = .03). Nel gruppo di AAF si evidenzia una netta distribuzione bimodale nelle risposte alle storie ironiche: la maggioranza dei bambini (16) ha dimostrato enormi difficoltà (accuratezza < 25%) mentre alcuni bambini (6) hanno dimostrato piena comprensione. I bambini AAF mostrano un pattern atipico rispetto ai controlli a ST. Per spiegare questi dati ipotizziamo che i bambini con AAF con basse abilità di ToM, nella comprensione dell’ironia corrispondano al profilo degli individui AAF con deficit pragmatici e meta-rappresentazionali; i bambini con AAF che hanno una perfetta comprensione dell’ironia e alte abilità di ToM potrebbero utilizzare una strategia compensatoria, forse a seguito di una riabilitazione. Future ricerche di tipo
Keywords: irony, autism spectrum disorder, experimental pragmatics, theory of mind
Published in RUNG: 22.09.2021; Views: 1881; Downloads: 82
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5.
The atypical pattern of irony comprehension in children with high-functioning autism
Greta Mazzaggio, Francesca Foppolo, Beatrice Giustolisi, Luca Surian, 2018, published scientific conference contribution abstract

Abstract: Irony comprehension is a complex task that typically developing (TD) children reach around the age of six. Some scholars (Sullivan et al., 1995 a.o.) claimed that 2nd order Theory of Mind (ToM) skills are required to understand irony, but also linguistic abilities (which predict ToM development: Milligan, Astington & Dack, 2007) play a role (Filippova & Astington, 2008; Bosco & Gabbatore, 2017). Children with high-functioning autism (HFA) have intact linguistic abilities, but impaired social relations. Some children with ASD pass even 2nd order ToM tasks, even if they could be using compensatory verbalizing strategies (Fisher, Happé & Dunn, 2005; Happé, 1995; Tager-Flusberg, 2000). We tested irony comprehension in HFA children with the aim to assess the contribution of the factors that may facilitate it and disentangle their relationships. We analyzed responses to the key question to understand irony, i.e. questions on speaker’s meaning and attitude. HFA children showed a peculiar pattern: their accuracy on literal stories was at ceiling, demonstrating that they understood the task, but in irony comprehension they lag behind their TD peers matched for age and non-verbal IQ. Even if this result was not unexpected, given the impairment in social communication associated to HFA, our group of 26 HFA showed a somehow surprising bimodal distribution. Moreover, differently from the TD group, accuracy on ironic stories did not depend neither on age nor on (non-)verbal IQ in HFA participants. And conversely ToM skills played a significant role in irony understanding only for HFA children, and not for TD children.In order to account for these data, we can hypothesize that – in general – HFA children show an impairment in pragmatic inference abilities and in ToM abilities (see Loukusa & Moilanen, 2009 and Baron-Cohen, 2000 for a review), as found also in our sample of LP children. The HP children, on the other hand, might adopt a strategy, different from TD children, to respond correctly to ironic stories, as suggested by Wang et al. (2006). Interestingly, Pexman et al. (2011) found that HFA children, who did not differ in accuracy with respect to TD controls, applied a different processing strategy for irony comprehension, and hypothesized that they resort to a more rule-based strategy, with an intellectual-style approach to compensate their social deficits. Our bimodal distribution could then identify two classes of HFA participants: the LP ones correspond to the pragmatic-impaired profile of HFA, the HP ones on the other hand could be using a compensatory strategy, since they could have been trained to recognize irony and/or other persons’ states of mind (ToM) during speech therapy sessions, as reported in Persicke et al. (2013). Future research should investigate this hypothesis more in depth, with a longitudinal study of HFA participants after a training in irony comprehension, in ToM metarepresentational abilities, and without training.
Keywords: irony processing, autism developmental disorder, theory of mind, IQ, experimental pragamtics
Published in RUNG: 21.09.2021; Views: 1776; Downloads: 54
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6.
Guess what? : comparing ad-hoc and scalar implicatures in children with autism spectrum disorder
Greta Mazzaggio, Francesca Foppolo, Chiara Caretta, Remo Job, Luca Surian, 2017, published scientific conference contribution abstract

Abstract: Pragmatic abilities of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been the subject of extensive research, often considering their communicative problems as derived from their deficit in Theory of Mind (ToM). On the other hand, recent studies on the derivation of scalar implicatures (SIs)– such as some but not all that are built on certain lexical items ordered in an entailment scale based on their informativeness, e.g. "some, all" − found no differences between typical population and people with ASD. With our work we find out that TD group’s performance was significantly better in the ad-hoc condition than the ASD’s, and both groups’ performance was related to Age. With respect to the SIs condition, the TD group’s performance was numerically better than the ASD group, but the difference was not significant, which may be due to a lack of power. Moreover, there is again a positive relationship between Age and SI performance, but only for the TD group. For the ASD group, there are positive relationships between SI performance and ToM as well as the linguistic syntactic measure. These relationships suggest that there is something different underlying the two groups’ performance in the SI condition. In computing SIs, ASD children seem to rely mainly on their syntactic linguistic abilities, which in turn are strongly connected with ToM skills; this connection can be related with the syntactic complexity of ToM’s clauses that involve subordination e.g. You believe that I believe that you believe. On the other hand, given that the best predictor for ad-hoc implicatures computation in ASD children is Age, we may suggest that indeed there is a delay in the development of pragmatic abilities in ASD children, also confirmed by the lower ToM scores in the ASD group. In conclusion, it seems that the computation of SIs and ad-hoc implicatures rests on different computational mechanisms and future research should take this insight into consideration.
Keywords: theory of mind, scalar implicatures, adhoc implicatures, autism spectrum disorder
Published in RUNG: 21.09.2021; Views: 1829; Downloads: 51
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7.
Reading between the lines : conversational implicature processing in typical and atypical populations
Greta Mazzaggio, 2018, doctoral dissertation

Abstract: This thesis' aim is to add some pieces to the complex puzzle on the mechanism behind the comprehension of conversational implicatures. To do so, in a series of experiment we manipulated both the type of implicatures (scalar vs. ad-hoc) and the population under investigation (typical vs. atypical; children vs. adults).
Keywords: scalar implicatures, experimental pragmatics, autism developmental disorder, bilingualism, typically developing children, theory of mind, dissertations
Published in RUNG: 20.09.2021; Views: 2048; Downloads: 0
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8.
The production of pronouns and verb inflections by Italian children with ASD : a new dataset in a null subject language
Greta Mazzaggio, Aaron Shield, 2020, original scientific article

Abstract: The language of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by difficulties with pronouns. The underlying reasons for such difficulties are still unclear. This study is the first to test the abilities of children with ASD who speak Italian, a language in which overt subject pronouns are optional but verbs obligatorily feature person-referencing morphology. We found that Italian children with ASD were less accurate than typically-developing (TD) Italian children in the production of first-, second-, and third-person singular pronouns, avoiding pronouns in favor of nouns or names more often than controls. Moreover, children with ASD produced more overt pronouns than null pronouns in marked contexts, compared to TD children. These phenomena can be accounted for by difficulties with pragmatics.
Keywords: autism, autism spectrum disorder, pronoun production, pronoun avoidance, language development
Published in RUNG: 17.09.2021; Views: 1675; Downloads: 44
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9.
Ceramic synthesis of disordered lithium rich oxyfluoride materials
Jean-Marcel Ateba Mba, Iztok Arčon, Gregor Mali, Elena Tchernychova, Ralf Witte, Robert Kruk, Miran Gaberšček, Robert Dominko, 2020, original scientific article

Abstract: Disordered lithium-rich transition metal oxyfluorides with a general formula Li1þxMO2Fx (M being a transition metal) are gaining more attention due to their high specific capacity which can be delivered from the facecentered cubic (fcc) structure. The most common synthesis procedure involves use of mechanosynthesis. In this work, ceramic synthesis of lithium rich iron oxyfluoride and lithium rich titanium oxyfluoride are reported. Two ceramic synthesis routes are developed each leading to the different level of doping with Li and F and different levels of cationic disorder in the structure. Three different Li1þxMO2Fx samples (x ¼ 0.25, 0.3 and 1) are compared with a sample prepared by mechanochemical synthesis and non-doped LiFeO2 with fcc structure. The obtained lithium rich iron oxyfluoride are characterized by use of M€ossbauer spectroscopy, X-ray absorption spectroscopy, NMR and TEM. Successful incorporation of Li and F have been confirmed and specific capacity that can be obtained from the samples is in the correlation with the level of disorder introduced with doping, nevertheless oxidation state of iron in all samples is very similar. Conclusions obtained from lithium rich iron oxyfluoride are validated by lithium rich titanium oxyfluoride.
Keywords: Lithium batteries Face centered-cubic Oxyfluoride Li-rich Disorder
Published in RUNG: 05.06.2020; Views: 4364; Downloads: 0
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10.
Packing patterns of silica nanoparticles on surfaces of armored polystyrene latex particles
Sara Fortuna, Catheline A. L. Colard, Stefan A. F. Bon, Alessandro Troisi, 2009, original scientific article

Abstract: Fascinating packing patterns of identical spherical and discotic objects on curved surfaces occur readily in nature and science. Examples include C60 fullerenes,(1, 2)13-atom cuboctahedral metal clusters,(3) and S-layer proteins on outer cell membranes.(4) Numerous situations with surface-arranged objects of variable size also exist, such as the lenses on insect eyes, biomineralized shells on coccolithophorids,(5) and solid-stabilized emulsion droplets(6) and bubbles.(7) The influence of size variations on these packing patterns, however, is studied sparsely. Here we investigate the packing of nanosized silica particles on the surface of polystyrene latex particles fabricated by Pickering miniemulsion polymerization of submicrometer-sized armored monomer droplets. We are able to rationalize the experimental morphology and the nearest-neighbor distribution with the help of Monte Carlo simulations. We show that broadening of the nanoparticle size distribution has pronounced effects on the self-assembled equilibrium packing structures, with original 12-point dislocations or grain-boundary scars gradually fading out.
Keywords: packing patterns, silica, simulation, Monte Carlo, order, disorder, transition, armored particles, nanoparticles, Pickering emulsion
Published in RUNG: 10.10.2016; Views: 4590; Downloads: 0
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