Agenda

Interview

1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity.
I am a professor of linguistics at the Université libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium and University College London,
UK. I am an experimental and theoretical linguist, with a focus on pragmatics and language acquisition. My
current research mainly centres on language and communication in autism. For the past decade, I have
been combining linguistic theory with rigorous experimental methods to show how fundamental questions
about human language may be illuminated by, but also illuminating for the study of autism. Studying how
autistic children acquire language provides a unique opportunity to disentangle communication and
domain-general mechanisms from domain-specific constraints on language learnability; carefully
characterising how autistic individuals, children and adults, use language yields crucial evidence for revising
and refining our theoretical pragmatic models. I do not identify myself with a particular subfield of
linguistics: I firmly believe that only a genuinely interdisciplinary approach can help us to better understand
language acquisition and communication in autism. I am also active in the field of experimental pragmatics,
where I am mostly interested in the multifaceted nature of pragmatic processing, as well as in suggestibility
to false information. More information about me and my work can be found on my personal website
(https://mikhail.kissine.web.ulb.be).

2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and teaching stay.
Language in autism is often reduced to a delayed acquisition or to atypical use, the reference point being
language in neurotypical individuals. Such approaches focus on language disability, and somewhat
downplay the acquisition routes that may be specific to autism and exert a durable influence across the life-
span. The hypothesis which I will explore during my stay at ‘Ca Foscari is that language in autism may be
shaped by atypical and idiosyncratic contexts of acquisition, in which non-communicative sources play a
much more predominant role than in typical development. Such an atypical acquisition path may result in
dialectal divergence between autistic children and their proximal linguistic community. The Venetian
linguistic landscape is the perfect place to design a study on this intriguing, but drastically understudied
phenomenon. The overarching idea of my research project is thus that language acquisition in autism can
be qualitatively atypical, in a way that raises crucial theoretical issues about the constraints on and the
possible shapes of the human language capacity. The expertise of many members in the Department will be
crucial to better delineate both the theoretical and the clinical implications of this project.

3. Have you ever had a research collaboration with the teaching staff of Department of Linguistics and
Comparative Cultural Studies in the past?
Last year, I was already visiting the Department, and I taught an MA course Language and Communication
in Autism, as well as an advanced seminar on Experimental Methods in Linguistics for PhD students. I have
been greatly impressed by the quality and the dedication of the students in the Department, and I was very
pleased to take part in several exciting and ongoing experimental projects. I am looking forward to building
even stronger collaborations this year.