Aparna Nadig
Assistant Professor
School of Communication Sciences and Disorders
McGill University
1266 Pine Avenue West
Montreal, Quebec H3G 1A8
tel: 514-398-4141
Membership Status
Principal Member
Research Themes
Language Acquisition
Visual Language Processing
Areas of Expertise
Processing of discourse and pragmatics, communication in autism spectrum disorders
Current Research Interests
I am interested in how we use multiple sources of information (visual, prosodic, from previous discourse, partner specific) to arrive at a speaker’s intended meaning, and how we compute pragmatic inferences in real time.
My research investigates these processes in different populations:
1) How does pragmatic processing become more robust over the course of typical development?
2) Does reduced multimodal language processing contribute to the pragmatic impairments observed in people with autism spectrum disorders?
3) Do sequential bilinguals rely on discourse cues more than linguistic cues when processing speech in their 2nd language?
Another line of my work concerns social communication in infancy, and detecting early markers of autism and language disorders.
Selected Publications
- Vivanti, G., Nadig, A., Ozonoff, S. & Rogers, S. (Submitted). What do children with autism look at during imitation tasks?
- Nadig, A., Ozonoff, S., Young, G., Rozga, A., Sigman, M. & Rogers, S. (2007). A prospective study of response-to-name in infants at risk for autism. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Theme issue on Autism, 161(4), 378-383.
- Nadig, A., Ozonoff, S., Singh, L., Young, G. & Rogers, S. (2007). Do 6-month-old infants at risk for autism display an infant-directed speech preference? Proceedings of the 31st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
- Nadig, A., Sedivy, J., Joshi, A. & Bortfeld, H. (2003). The development of discourse constraints on the interpretation of adjectives. Proceedings of the 27th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
- Nadig, A. & Sedivy, J. (2002). Evidence of perspective-taking constraints in children's on-line reference resolution. Psychological Science, 13(4), 329-336.
