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Home RTGs Language and Literacy Studies Staff Ludovica Serratrice

Language and Literacy Studies

Dr. LUDOVICA SERRATRICE. Ph.D. (Edinburgh), M.A. (Essex), Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere (Milan).

I joined the RTG in September 2002 after a two-year appointment in Human Communication and Deafness (HCD), University of Manchester. In HCD I worked as a Research Associate with Gina Conti-Ramsden on the ESRC-funded project "The acquisition of verbs and verb morphology in young children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)". I have recently completed an ESRC-funded project with Antonella Sorace to investigate transfer effects in bilingual first language acquisition.

Before joining the University of Manchester I completed a PhD in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. My doctoral thesis was a case study of the early stages of morphosyntactic acquisition in one English-Italian bilingual child. Prior to my PhD I received a MA in Language Acquisition from the University of Essex, and a Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere from the Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne in Milan, Italy.

My research interests include cognitive and functional approaches to first language acquisition with specific reference to Italian and English, childhood bilingualism, and the interface between syntax and pragmatics in monolingual and bilingual acquisition.

In 2002-2003 I teach a Year 2 course on language acquisition in Semester 1 (ED2101), and a Year 1 course on the structure of English in Semester 2 (ED1602).

Refereed Publications

Serratrice, L. (under review). Pragmatic constraints on the acquisition of subjects in Italian. Applied Psycholinguistics.

Conti-Ramsden, G., Joseph, K., Pine, J., Lieven, E. and Serratrice, L. (under review). Tense Over Time?: Asynchronous development of tense markers in children with normal language and children with Specific Language Impairment. Child Development.

Serratrice, L. and Sorace, A. (2003). Overt and null subjects in monolingual and bilingual Italian acquisition. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 739-750.

Serratrice, L., Joseph, K. and Conti-Ramsden, G. (2003). The acquisition of past tense in pre-school children with Specific Language Impairment and unaffected controls: Regular and irregular forms. Special Issue of Linguistics, 41. 321-349.

Serratrice, L. (2002). Overt subjects in English: evidence for the marking of person in an English-Italian bilingual child. Journal of Child Language, 29. 327-355.

Joseph, K., Serratrice, L. and Conti-Ramsden, G. (2002). Development of copula and auxiliary BE in children with Specific Language Impairment and younger unaffected controls. First Language, 22.137-172.

Hick, R., Joseph, K., Conti-Ramsden, G., Serratrice, L. and Farragher, B. (2002). Vocabulary profiles of children with Specific Language Impairment. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 18.165-180.

Serratrice, L. (2001). The emergence of verbal morphology: an English-Italian case study. In Cenoz, J. & F. Genesee (eds.), Trends in Bilingual Acquisition, 43-70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Serratrice, L. (2000). Comparing like with like: the acquisition of person deixis in an English-Italian bilingual child. In O. Arika & J. Boyle (eds.), The Proceedings from the Panels of the Chicago Linguistic Society's 36th Meeting, vol. 36-2, pp. 461-474.

Reviews

Serratrice, L. (2002). Review of Guasti, M.T. (2002). Language Acquisition: The Growth of Grammar. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23. 482-486.

Serratrice, L. (2002). Review of Lebeaux, D. (2000). Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar. Journal of Child Languae, 29.

Serratrice, L. (2000). Review of MacWhinney, B. (2000). The Childes Project. First Language, 20, 331-339.

Conference papers

Conservative learners and language mixing. Fourth International Symposium on Bilingualism. Arizona State University, 30/4/2003-3/5/2003.

Transfer at the syntax-pragmatics interface: the case of overt subject. Fourth International Symposium on Bilingualism. Arizona State University, 30/4/2003-3/5/2003.

Overt and null subjects in bilingual and monolingual Italian acquisition. 27th Annual Meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston University, 1-3/11/2002 (with Antonella Sorace).

Syntax and pragmatics and the acquisition of subjects in Italian. IX Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Language. University of Madison, 16-21/7/2002.

Referential subjects in the acquisition of Italian. XXXII Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages. University of Toronto, 19-21/4/2002.

Tense over time: naturalistic data from children with SLI and MLU controls. Child Language Seminar. University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, 9-11/7/2001 (with K. Joseph and G. Conti-Ramsden).

A crosslinguistic study of the acquisition of subjects in null and non-null subject languages. Child Language Seminar. University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, 9-11/7/2001.

Form and function in early bilingual acquisition. Third International Symposium on Bilingualism. University of West England, Bristol, 18-20/4/2001.

Tense over time? Evaluating Composite Tense in children with Specific Language Impairment and MLU controls. Third Annual Conference on Child Language. University of Wales, Gregynog, 30/3-1/4/2001 (with K. Joseph and G. Conti-Ramsden).

Early grammatical development in children with Specific Language Impairment: A detailed longitudinal study. International Conference on Infant Studies. Brighton, 15-19/7/00 (with K. Joseph and G. Conti-Ramsden).

Comparing like with like: the acquisition of person deixis in a bilingual English-Italian child. The 36th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. University of Chicago, 27-29/4/00.

Making sense of over: a study in acquisition. International Conference in Cognitive Linguistics '99. University of Stockholm, 10-16/7/99 (with Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano).

Strategies in the acquisition of verbal morphology: a bilingual case study. Second International Symposium on Bilingualism. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 14-17/4/99.

Access to functional categories: evidence from bilingual first language acquisition, LAGB Spring Meeting. University of Lancaster, UK, 14-16/4/98.

Functional categories in bilingual first language acquisition, XXIV Generative Grammar Meeting. University of Verona, Italy, 26-28/2/98.

The acquisition of determiners: a bilingual English-Italian case study, International Symposium on Bilingualism. University of Vigo, Spain, 22-24/10/97.

The acquisition of Italian questions: what choice do children have?, XXIII Generative Grammar Meeting. Scuola Normale, Pisa, Italy, 25-27/2/97.

Invited talks

The use of Tense in pre-school children with SLI. University of Toronto, Speech and Language Pathology Department, 28/11/01.

The acquisition of Tense: crosslinguistic evidence from Italian and English. University of Toronto, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 5/11/01.

Early stages of morphosyntactic development in bilingual acquisition. University of Wales at Bangor, Department of Psychology, 30/11/00.

Lexical specificity in the emergence of verbal morphology: A bilingual case study. University of Hamburg, Romanisches Seminar, 23/11/00.

Contact information

Ludovica Serratrice
Faculty of Education
University of Manchester
Oxford Road,
Manchester M13 9PL

Email: Serratrice@man.ac.uk