Francesca Foppolo
Biographic Data
| ID | 1569375 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francesca Foppolo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francesca |
| FAMILY NAME | Foppolo |
| SIGNATURE | FOPPOLO F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Milano-Bicocca |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5044-7834 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Neutralizing gender in role nouns
In languages like Italian, all nouns have grammatical gender, which in most cases can be inferred from word endings. Nouns that refer to people may also convey information about the referent’s gender (i.e., semantic gender), as in the case of transparent gender-marked nouns (e.g., maestro [MASC] / maestra [FEM] , ‘male/female school teacher’). Gender remains unspecified in the case of bigender nouns (e.g., cantante [MASC, FEM] , ‘singer’), though…
How do teachers view multilingualism in education? Evidence from Greece, Italy and The Netherlands
As an increasing number of multilingual children are enrolled in European schools, it is important to gain more insight into teachers’ attitudes towards multilingual approaches in education. The goal of this study is to investigate the attitudes of primary school teachers in Greece, Italy and the Netherlands, three countries that have a highly multilingual student population but differ with respect to the migration context and language policies. …
On the rescuing of some -indefinites
The experimentally backed and hitherto overlooked empirical observation of the paper is a contrast among indefinite Positive Polarity Items regarding their possibility of being rescued under certain operators with different rescuing potential. If / surprise / only / don’t think can rescue some -indefinites, suspending their anti-licensing (i.e., their impossibility to occur in the scope of a clausemate negation): while some -pronouns (in English …
Prediction during spoken language processing in monolingual and multilingual children
Listeners use linguistic cues to anticipate upcoming words, but not all do so to the same extent. While we know that monolingual children use prediction during spoken language processing from a young age and that adult L2 speakers may sometimes be slower, very few studies have focused on bilingual or multilingual children. Moreover, previous research suggests that literacy boosts anticipation in spoken language processing, but this has not been t…
Scalar and ad-hoc pragmatic inferences in children
Several studies investigated preschoolers’ ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 ( N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children's pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection t…
Avoiding Gaps in Romance
Existing evidence suggests that the parser avoids positing a movement dependency if the grammar does not require doing so. By investigating the processing of two syntactic ambiguities that have not been the subject of processing studies before, we provide more conclusive evidence for this parsing bias in two Romance languages: French and Italian. In two acceptability-judgment experiments and two self-paced-reading studies, we found that sentences…
The puzzle of number agreement with disjunction
Whatever His Arguments, Whatever -Relatives Are Not Free Relatives
This is a reply to Caponigro 2019, which argues that the phrase structure theory proposed in Donati and Cecchetto 2011 and Cecchetto and Donati 2015 falls short of accounting for the attested patterns of free relative clauses. Caponigro questions the reliability of the data supporting D&C’s hypothesis that ever-relatives introduced by a phrase (ever+NP relatives) should not be assimilated to free relatives. This reply reports the findings of four…
Reasoning about alternative forms is costly
Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are …
Scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties
This study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8 months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension of sentences with scalar items yixie ‘some’ and suoyou ‘all’. The pattern of children with RD was similar to that of si…
No Delay for Some Inferences
We present an eye-tracking study on the incremental derivation of the some-but-not-all scalar implicature (SI) associated to the scalar quantifier some. This question has been the matter of a vivid debate, both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics (Chemla & Singh 2014a,b). Experimentally, it was addressed by means of eye-tracking and different results were obtained: while Huang & Snedeker (2009) found evidence for a delay of some with respect …
The only one strategy in context
Scalar Implicatures in Child Language
Children's pragmatic competence in deriving conversational implicatures (and scalar implicatures in particular) offers an intriguing standpoint to explore how developmental, methodological, and purely theoretical perspectives interact and feed each other. In this paper, we focus mainly on developmental and methodological issues, showing that children from age 6 on are adult-like in deriving the scalar implicature related to the scalar quantifier …
Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures
Noveck (2001 Noveck, I. 2001. When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicatures. Cognition, 78: 168–188. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms (some, might, or) (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981 Braine, M. and Roumain, B. 1981. Children's comprehension of “or”: Evidence for a sequence of competencies. Journal …
Reasoning about alternative forms is costly
Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are …
Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures
Noveck (2001 Noveck, I. 2001. When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicatures. Cognition, 78: 168–188. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms (some, might, or) (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981 Braine, M. and Roumain, B. 1981. Children's comprehension of “or”: Evidence for a sequence of competencies. Journal …
Scalar Implicatures in Child Language
Children's pragmatic competence in deriving conversational implicatures (and scalar implicatures in particular) offers an intriguing standpoint to explore how developmental, methodological, and purely theoretical perspectives interact and feed each other. In this paper, we focus mainly on developmental and methodological issues, showing that children from age 6 on are adult-like in deriving the scalar implicature related to the scalar quantifier …
The only one strategy in context
No Delay for Some Inferences
We present an eye-tracking study on the incremental derivation of the some-but-not-all scalar implicature (SI) associated to the scalar quantifier some. This question has been the matter of a vivid debate, both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics (Chemla & Singh 2014a,b). Experimentally, it was addressed by means of eye-tracking and different results were obtained: while Huang & Snedeker (2009) found evidence for a delay of some with respect …
Scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties
This study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8 months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension of sentences with scalar items yixie ‘some’ and suoyou ‘all’. The pattern of children with RD was similar to that of si…
The puzzle of number agreement with disjunction
Whatever His Arguments, Whatever -Relatives Are Not Free Relatives
This is a reply to Caponigro 2019, which argues that the phrase structure theory proposed in Donati and Cecchetto 2011 and Cecchetto and Donati 2015 falls short of accounting for the attested patterns of free relative clauses. Caponigro questions the reliability of the data supporting D&C’s hypothesis that ever-relatives introduced by a phrase (ever+NP relatives) should not be assimilated to free relatives. This reply reports the findings of four…
Reasoning about alternative forms is costly
Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are …
Scalar and ad-hoc pragmatic inferences in children
Several studies investigated preschoolers’ ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 ( N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children's pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection t…
Avoiding Gaps in Romance
Existing evidence suggests that the parser avoids positing a movement dependency if the grammar does not require doing so. By investigating the processing of two syntactic ambiguities that have not been the subject of processing studies before, we provide more conclusive evidence for this parsing bias in two Romance languages: French and Italian. In two acceptability-judgment experiments and two self-paced-reading studies, we found that sentences…
Prediction during spoken language processing in monolingual and multilingual children
Listeners use linguistic cues to anticipate upcoming words, but not all do so to the same extent. While we know that monolingual children use prediction during spoken language processing from a young age and that adult L2 speakers may sometimes be slower, very few studies have focused on bilingual or multilingual children. Moreover, previous research suggests that literacy boosts anticipation in spoken language processing, but this has not been t…
Neutralizing gender in role nouns
In languages like Italian, all nouns have grammatical gender, which in most cases can be inferred from word endings. Nouns that refer to people may also convey information about the referent’s gender (i.e., semantic gender), as in the case of transparent gender-marked nouns (e.g., maestro [MASC] / maestra [FEM] , ‘male/female school teacher’). Gender remains unspecified in the case of bigender nouns (e.g., cantante [MASC, FEM] , ‘singer’), though…
How do teachers view multilingualism in education? Evidence from Greece, Italy and The Netherlands
As an increasing number of multilingual children are enrolled in European schools, it is important to gain more insight into teachers’ attitudes towards multilingual approaches in education. The goal of this study is to investigate the attitudes of primary school teachers in Greece, Italy and the Netherlands, three countries that have a highly multilingual student population but differ with respect to the migration context and language policies. …
On the rescuing of some -indefinites
The experimentally backed and hitherto overlooked empirical observation of the paper is a contrast among indefinite Positive Polarity Items regarding their possibility of being rescued under certain operators with different rescuing potential. If / surprise / only / don’t think can rescue some -indefinites, suspending their anti-licensing (i.e., their impossibility to occur in the scope of a clausemate negation): while some -pronouns (in English …
Linguistics (14 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Mathematics (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Interpretation (philosophy (3 works)