As part of our celebration of 20 years of ACLC, our members have held duo-interviews to get to know more about each other’s work. Throughout 2021 these duo-interviews will feature in the ACLC 20th Anniversary news special.
Excerpt of e-mail conversation end of December 2020 between Jeannette Schaeffer and Dunja Wackers.
—————————————————————————————————————— What is your position at the UvA?
Jeannette: Professor of Language Acquisition
Dunja: PhD candidate
What interesting findings did you make in your research recently?
Jeannette: 1) That, although many studies find group correlations between grammar abilities and working memory scores in children with DLD, there are many children with DLD who have good WM skills, but still problems with grammar. This suggests that grammar problems cannot always be due to weak WM.
2) That certain pragmatic problems in children with autism (e.g., article choice, scrambling) are not correlated with working memory or Theory of Mind or syntactic problems, and either constitute a problem in pragmatics in and of itself, or may be due to some other cognitive problem, perhaps in the area of central coherence.
Dunja: Metaphors of violence can have negative implications for patients with cancer; for the purpose of circumventing these implications it is sometimes argued that these metaphors should be avoided. But this seems an infeasible approach given that violence metaphors are highly conventionalised in discourse about cancer – it is very common to talk about a patient who “fights against cancer” or society being “at war with the disease”, to name just a few examples.
In my current research project I try to find out if and how language users can make use of a metaphor extension strategy to counter the negative effects of a metaphor. This strategy retains the metaphor but extends it by drawing attention to different features of the source (in this case, violence) to reinterpret the target issue (cancer). By means of metaphor extension, less obvious implications of the metaphor are brought to the fore while aspects of the source domain that are commonly highlighted disappear to the background.
I recently found out that language users sometimes employ (variations on) such a metaphor extension strategy when they express resistance to violence metaphors for cancer. I use these examples in order to gain a better understanding of language users’ arguments for resistance, and I hope to be able to use these insights to develop recommendations about how to improve communication about cancer.
What research would you conduct if you were granted three months sabbatical?
Jeannette: Experimental research on different types of pragmatics in children with autism and on reading comprehension in autism, which is often a problem in this population. But also: creating an online test battery testing different linguistic and other cognitive skills in children with autism, that doesn’t take too long.
Dunja: I would like to spend some more time on my side project about the straw man fallacy. For my MA thesis I studied occurrences of this fallacy in scientific reports on climate change and I would love to publish the results.
Who have you spoken to lately outside of academia/linguistics about your research (e.g. the media) and has this led to anything new?
Jeannette: I recently talked to the teacher of a Syrian child who I help with her homework. The child has poorer Dutch language skills than her class mates, and the teacher thinks this may be a consequence of the fact that Dutch is her L2. I think that the child may have dyslexia. I am thinking of a way to tease these two potential causes apart, based on research that has been done on bilingual children and DLD. The past few years I also talked to practitioners working with children with autism, and it became very clear to me that language plays a minimal role in the diagnosis and intervention/therapy of autism. If it features in intervention, sentences and phrases have to be learnt by heart by the child, rather than making the structure and rules of certain linguistic expressions explicit. As children with autism are often good at rules, it seems to me that they would benefit much more from learning rules explicitly than from plainly memorizing sentences and phrases verbatim.
Dunja: I recently spoke with a researcher from another university who studies representations of happiness in contemporary literature. Her findings turned out to demonstrate surprising parallels with my observations about cancer narratives. Our conversation has not (yet) led to anything new, but this question reminds me that it would be very interesting to do something more with this.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Jeannette: Reading, taking walks on the beach with our dogs, sewing, cooking, traveling.
Dunja: I love going out for a coffee with friends or having friends over for dinner. I also like reading and cycling. Moreover: at this moment I am preparing for two big life events, as my husband and I are expecting our first child in February and we will move house just before my due date. Exciting times ahead!
