Visual recursion develops in absence of linguistic recursion. A case-report

Joana Rosselló*, Alexandre Celma-Miralles, Mauricio Dias Martins

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to book/anthology/report/proceedingConference abstract in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Recursion is a cognitive capacity, potentially unique to humans, which allows the generation of hierarchies with multiple levels of embedding. This capacity is thought to primarily underlie syntactic structures in language (Berwick & Chomsky, 2016), but is also available in other domains such as vision (Martins, 2012). An open question is whether a purportedly primary linguistic capacity is used in other domains, or whether visual recursion can develop in the absence of language. If the latter, is recursion a domain-general or multi-domain-specific? Here we further test the hypothesis that linguistic and visual recursion are independent, in the framework of a case study. Its subject is Álex (AX), a 12-yearold autistic child (ADI-r and ADOS assessed) with an oral open-ended but almost exclusively nominal lexicon in three languages, which he has learned mainly by reading, with nouns as captions of bi-dimensional images.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 13th International Conference Evolution of Language
Place of publicationBrussels
Publication date2020
Pages371-373
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event13th Evolution of Language Conference - Brussels, Belgium
Duration: 14 Apr 202017 Apr 2020
https://brussels.evolang.org/

Conference

Conference13th Evolution of Language Conference
Country/TerritoryBelgium
CityBrussels
Period14/04/202017/04/2020
Internet address

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