Prof. dr. Ianthi Tsimpli
Professor in Psycholinguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Christopher is a polyglot-savant with exceptional language learning abilities, atypical autistic behaviour, apraxia and visuo-spatial deficits. The talk will concentrate on the asymmetric pattern of language learning attested in Christopher's British Sign Language and his various spoken languages. Although the areas where language performance is poor differ in sign and speech, it will be argued that the problems in Christopher's performance lie at levels where the modality of the language interfaces with linguistic representations.