Newcastle University

Research associate - Reading Comprehension in Aphasia Project

Degrees Awarded

PhD in Cognitive Science (2007)

University of Siena, Italy (distinction) Supervisor Prof. Luigi Rizzi                                  

MA in Linguistics (2004)

University of Siena, Italy (distinction) 

  My research focuses on Syntax in acquired and developmental language disorders.  

I am currently interested in how syntax interacts with cognitive capacities (such as Working Memory and Executive functions) in people with acquired language disorders.

Current researches:

- Working Memory and Comprehension of Relative Clauses in people with Aphasia (with Gemma Learmonth, University of Edinburgh);

- Syntactic Priming in children with SLI (with Holly Branigan and Moreno Coco, University of Edinburgh);

- Cross modal priming in Language and Maths (with Chiara Caruso, Università di Chieti);

- Processing of Agreement during attraction with different pronominal classess (with Alberto Di Domenico, Università di Chieti)

• Garraffa M. Different stage of processing in agrammatic comprehension: a specification of the minimal chain condition. In: Di Matteo, R., Tommasi, L, ed. Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Language Processing. John Benjamins, 2013. In Press.
• Contemori C, Garraffa M. Subject Relatives clauses as a clinical marker for SLI: evidence from Italian. In: Stavrakaki, S., Konstantinopoulou, P., Lalioti, M, ed. Advances in Language Acquisition. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2013. In Press.
• Coco M, Garraffa M, Branigan H. A Bayesian Analysis of Subject Relative Production in SLI Children during Syntactic Priming and Sentence Repetition. In: 34th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci). 2012, Sapporo Japan: Cognitive Science Society.
• Caruso C, Garraffa M. Cross-domain Structural Priming from Mathematics to Language: Relative Clause Attachment in Italian. In: Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLAP). 2012, Riva dal Garda, Italy.
• Garraffa M, Coco M, Branigan H. Processing of Subject Relatives in SLI Children during Structural Priming and Sentence Repetition. In: 25th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (CUNY). 2012, New York, USA.
• Garraffa M. Impoverishment of grammatical features in a non-fluent aphasic speaker: the grammatical nature of minimal structure. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2011.
• Contemori C, Garraffa M. Comparison of modalities in SLI syntax: a study on the comprehension and production of non-canonical sentences. Lingua 2010, 120(8), 1940-1955.
• Contemori C, Garraffa M. Linguistic vulnerability and clinical perspective: a study of the comprehension and production of relative clauses in children with Specific Language Impairment. In: II International Conference on Clinical Linguistics. 2009, Madrid: Euphonia ediciones.
• Garraffa M. Minimal structures in aphasia: a study on agreement and movement in a non-fluent aphasic speaker. Lingua 2009, 119(10), 1444-1457.
• Garraffa M, Grillo N. Canonicity effects as a grammatical phenomenoa. Journal of Neurolinguistics 2008, 21(2), 177-197.