The Univesity School for Advanced Studies IUSS of Pavia has secured significant funding under the 2024 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships Call for the project "Syntactic Flexibility in Developmental Language Disorder. A Cross-Linguistic Study - SYN-CROSS," presented by Dr. Hanna Cygan, PhD in Biology at the Laboratory of Psychophysiology, Department of Neurophysiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Science, under the supervision of Prof. Cristiano Chesi. The project has received funding of €209,483.28 and will last for 24 months.

The SYN-CROSS project addresses innovative issues in the fields of psycholinguistics and developmental neuroscience, with a particular focus on Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Using an interdisciplinary approach combining computational linguistic models (Chesi, 2023) and neuropsychological assessments, the project will examine specific cognitive aspects of language learning difficulties in a clinical population of Italian and Polish children with DLD.

The originality and scientific value of the project lie in its comparative approach and experimental methodology. This will be the first study to systematically compare the cognitive mechanisms underlying morphosyntactic errors in children with DLD across Italian and Polish. Furthermore, the project represents a pioneering contribution to the detailed investigation of errors made by Polish children with DLD, an area that has received little attention so far. The integration of neuropsychological assessments, made possible by Dr. Cygan's clinical expertise, will allow for the control of non-linguistic cognitive abilities that may influence the observed deficits.

The project's outcomes will not only enrich scientific knowledge of the cognitive mechanisms underlying language disorders but may also lay the groundwork for the development of new therapeutic strategies tailored to the identified difficulties.

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships Call is a European Union funding program that supports highly qualified researchers in pursuing their training and career development in academic or industrial settings. These fellowships are intended for PhD holders who wish to conduct research within or outside the European Union.

This recognition confirms the commitment of the Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS of Pavia to promoting excellent scientific research at an international level and reinforces its position as a leading institution in the study of language disorders and cognitive neuroscience.