Marina Nespor

Prof. Marina Nespor
Professore ordinario
Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca
Dipartimento di Psicologia

Edificio U6, Stanza 3141
Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milano, Italia

tel: ++39-02-6448 3747
fax: ++39 02-6448 0
e-mail: marina.nespor@unimib.it

Aree di ricerca:
Most of my research has focussed on the phonological interpretation of syntax, that is, on how the phonological shape of an utterance conveys information about its syntactic structure, the so-called theory of prosodic phonology. The prosodic phonology of language includes segmental rules that apply across words, thus reflecting different degrees of cohesion of the elements of a string, rhythm and intonation. I have been investigating also how prosody can be used in comprehension and during language acquisition. It is plausible, in fact, that those signals that are present in speech to make it comprehensible to listeners, for example by resolving ambiguities, are exploited by infants to acquire the grammar of the language they are exposed to. Since by the time a child starts combining word s/he appears to have learned the appropriate order of words of the language s/he is acquiring, s/he must have understood the main properties of the language of exposure long before then. In order for information about grammar to be available to infants, it must be present in the signal, since infants are not born with knowledge of segmentation or of the words and structures of the language they will eventually speak. It is thus especially perception that must be investigated. I have thus been collaborating with laboratories where experimental work on neonates can be carried out: LSCP in Paris first and SISSA in Trieste presently.
We have investigated the different functions of Vowels and Consonants in speech perception and language acquisition: Vowels are mainly devoted to the interpretation of grammar and Consonants to the lexicon (Nespor et al. 2002; Bonatti et al. 2005; Toro et al. 2008).
We worked on the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) and its signalling of word order (Nespor et al. 2008; Bion et al. in press). And are presently working on the ITL in the visual modality.
More recently, I have investigated the cognitive bases responsible for different word orders in the languages of the world. With PhD student A. Langus (Langus and Nespor 2010), we have shown that syntax is responsible for SVO and communication efficacy for SOV. Thus the two most common word orders (accounting for over 80% of the world's languages) are the result of the struggle between different cognitive systems, rather than, as commonly thought, of a choice within the syntactic component of grammar.