Nino Grillo

• Present position: Researcher (Ciência 2008)
• Nationality: Italian
• E-mail: nino.grillo at gmail.com
• Academic degree: PhD

Current Position

Investigador (equiparado a Investigador Auxiliar) / Researcher ("Auxiliar") do Centro de Linguística da Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Honorary Research Fellow at the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London.

Previous Positions

Postdoctoral Researcher,   CSIC, Madrid, Spain – 2008-2009

Assistant Professor in Neuroscience of Language, Linguistics Department, McGill University, Montreal, Canada - 2007-2008

Academic degrees:

Projects:

Publications:

* Indicates joint first authorship 

Grillo, Nino & João Costa (under review) A novel argument for the universality of parsing principles. Undergoing second round of review,  Cognition.

Grillo, Nino (2012). Local and Universal. In Bianchi V. and C. Chesi (eds.) Enjoy Linguistics. Papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the occasion of his  60th birthday, pp. 234-245 . CISCL Press, ISBN:   9788890794308. 

*   Costa, João, Nino Grillo & Maria Lobo (2012) Minimality beyond lexical restriction: Processing and acquisition of headed and free   wh-dependencies in European Portuguese.    Revue Roumaine de Linguistique    LVII, 2, 143160  .

In this paper we show that minimality effects obtain in both children and unimpaired adult speakers in the processing of object relative clauses in European Portuguese and that, while such effects are modulated by lexical restrictions on the extracted element (the boy who vs. who), a significant asymmetry is also observable in the absence of it. These results are discussed at the light of the Generalized Minimality approach (Grillo 2008). 

Grillo, Nino (2009) Generalized Minimality: Feature impoverishment and comprehension deficits in agrammatism. Lingua 119, pp. 1426–1443.

* Gehrke, Berit & Nino Grillo (2009) How to become passive. In Exploration of Phase Theory: features, arguments, and interpretation at the Interfaces, ed. K. Grohmann. Berlin: De Gruyter,  pp. 231-268.

Grillo, Nino (2008) Generalized Minimality: Syntactic Underspecification in Brocas aphasia. LOT. (ISBN: 978-90-78328-60-5)

* Gehrke, Berit and Nino Grillo (2006) Aspects on Passives. In Blaho, S., E. Schoorlemmer, and L. Vicente, (eds.) Proceedings of ConSOLE XIV, pp. 121-141.

Based on the ideas put forth in Grillo and Costa (2011): in this paper we report on a series of experiments designed to investigate to what extent Pseudo Relatives and Prepositional Infinitive Constructions (PIC), which share important structural/semantic properties, give raise to similar Attachment Preferences. This work was presented at the 18th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms AMLaP 2012.

Santi, Andrea, Nino Grillo, Yosef Grodzinsky & Michael Wagner (in preparation) Planned Production and self-paced reading of relative clause attachment. [Slides]

This paper sums up the results of a series of studies in which we compared two distinct experimental methods: Planned Production and Self-paced Reading. Self-paced Reading presents each sentence a word, or phrase, at a time at the subject’s chosen pace.  The critical measure is a difference in reading duration at minimally different points in the sentence, where longer durations are taken to reflect greater complexity.  In Planned Production, the entire sentence is displayed on the screen and the participant is instructed to read the sentence as many times as necessary and when they are ready, to produce the sentence (with the sentence remaining displayed).  The advantages of this method include that it is more natural, provides multiple dimensions (pause, pitch, duration), and appears less susceptible to spill-over effects. The goal of the study was twofold: 1. determine whether the two methods provide comparable results and 2. to further investigate the complexity of Center Embedded vs. Right Branching structures and extend the results obtained in Gibson et al. (2005). Importantly, from the methodological perspective, we show that the two methods are comparable (we replicated, and extended, the results of Gibson et al). We further propose an alternative, syntax based, explanation to the longer duration effects in Right Branching than Center Embedding within the relative clause and we provide experimental support for it and against the Information Flow account proposed in Gibson et al. 2005.  

Presentations:

2011

November. Reading clarifies acquisition: A study on subject-object asymmetry. Colóquio Internacional "Leitura, Processamento da Língua Escrita".  Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa.  With João Costa and Maria Lobo.

October. Avaliability of pseudo-relatives and crosslinguistic variation in attachment preferences. Talk given at the XXVII Encontro da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística. With João Costa.

September. Planned Production and self-paced reading of relative clause attachment. Talk given at ETAP2 (Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody 2). Montreal. With Andrea Santi, Yosef Grodzinsky and Michael Wagner. 

September. Variable Syntax, Uniform Parsing. Poster Presentation. Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody 2. Montreal. With João Costa.

April. Planned production and self-paced reading of relative clause attachment. Poster Presenation. 10th International Symposium in Psycholinguistics, San Sebastian. With Andrea Santi, Yosef Grodzinsky and Michael Wagner.

March. Planned production and self-paced reading of relative clause attachment. Poster Presentation. The 24th CUNY (Conference on Human Sentence Processing). Stanford University. With Andrea Santi, Yosef Grodzinsky and Michael Wagner. 

2010

June. An event structure approach to passives and its implications for acquisition. Talk given at Morphological Voice and its Grammatical Interfaces: Theoretic Modelling and Psycholinguistic Validation. University of Vienna. With Berit Gehrke.

2009

October. Grammaticality and Complexity. Poster Presentation. Neurobiology of Language 09, Chicago.

April. Passivization in language acquisition and breakdown. Invited Talk at McGill Linguistics Department. 

February. Event structure and the acquisition of passives. Talk given at Glow in Asia VII. With Berit Gehrke.

January. Events, Locality and Passivization. Invited Talk at Centro de Linguística da Universidade Nova de Lisboa.   

2008 

November. How to become passive. Invited talk at the GLiF Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. With Berit Gehrke.

April. Event structure and the structure of passives, with a note on acquisition and breakdown. Invited Talk at Concordia LSA Colloquium Series.

2007 

November. Canonicity and Minimality. Invited Talk at the McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series. 

February. Locality effects as evidence for minimal structure. Talk given at the workshop Experimental evidence for minimal structure, organized by Petra Burkhardt and Ulrike Janßen in occasion of the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenscahft). 

2006 

October. [A]grammatic Comprehension. Invited talk at the Experimental Linguistics Talks in Utrecht (ELiTU). 

October. Syntactic constraints on agrammatic comprehension. Poster presented at WECOL 2006. Fresno State University. 

October. Changing the perspective on passives. Talk given at WECOL 2006 conference held in Fresno, California. With Berit Gehrke. 

September. Intervenienza sintattica e canonicità: studio di un caso di afasia non fluente. Poster presented at the Congresso annuale Associazione Italiana di Psicologia, Sezione di psicologia sperimentale held in Rovereto, Italy. With Maria Garraffa. 

June. An event-structure-based account of passivization. Talk given at the Interface legibility at the edge, conference held in Bucharest, Romania. With Berit Gehrke. 

June. Agreement and Intervention in a nonfluent agrammatic speaker. Poster presented at the conference: The architecture of language, from cognitive modeling to brain mapping and back held in Pisa, Italy. With Maria Garraffa. 

May. Results at the edge. Poster presented at the Interphases conference held in Nicosia Cyprus. With Berit Gehrke. 

2005 

December. Aspects on passives. Talk given at the XIV ConSOLE conference held in Vitoria/Gasteiz Spain. With Berit Gehrke. 

August. Some remarks on locality in natural language and aphasia: a view from passives. Talk given at the 2nd LPIA (Left periphery in aphasia) meeting held in Wien. 

April. ECP, entropy and omission in language development and impairment. Talk given at the CISCL Università di Siena. 

February. Syntactic underspecification and minimality effects. Talk given at the workshop Underspecification in Morphology and Syntax, organized by Artemis Alexiadou and Gereon Müller in occasion of the 27th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenscahft). 

2004 

December. Minimality effects in agrammatic comprehension. Talk given at the XIII ConSOLE conference held in Trømso, Norway. 

November. Agrammatic aphasia and minimality effects. Talk given at the first LPIA (Left Periphery in Aphasia) meeting held in Greifswald, Germany.