Significato e dislessia: uno studio su pronomi, aspetto e quantificazione

In this dissertation, I attempt at defining some properties of the cognitive deficit underlying dyslexia by looking at the ability of dyslexic subjects to understand certain aspects of language. I argue in favor of the Verbal Working Memory Deficit Hypothesis (v-WMDH) according to which dyslexia is associated with a verbal WM deficit. Working Memory (WM, for short) is the cognitive system responsible for the temporary storage of the outcomes of intermediate computations when required in order to perform further computations (Baddeley 1986). It features two broad subsystems: a visuo-spatial WM, responsible for the storage of visuo-spatial information, and a verbal WM, responsible for the storage of verbal information. The v-WMDH maintains that this latter component, the verbal WM system, is affected in dyslexia. I show that the v-WMDH hypothesis accounts not only for the reading impairment typically associated with dyslexia, but also for a number of language related difficulties attested among dyslexic subjects. In particular, I will show that the hypothesis accounts for the dyslexics’ difficulties in comprehending tough-sentences (e.g. the bird is tasty to bite), object-extracted relative clause sentences, pronouns in condition B configurations, imperfective aspect, scalar implicatures, universally quantified NPs in quantifier spreading contexts, and structurally ambiguous sentences.