题 目：Language, Learning, and Dyslexia（语言、学习和失语症）

报告人：Frank Wijnen

Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University

主要内容：

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 baby lab shows that children in the preschool 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 nonadjacent 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.

http://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/FNKWijnen （Frank Wijnen 教授个人网页链接）