Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (Italian 'o') in negative sentences by Italian monolingual and bilingual (L1 Italian - L2 English) children and Italian adults. Participants were asked to judge Italian sentences corresponding to the English sentence 'This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper'. According to the…

For children, Object Relative (OR) clauses can be late acquired across a number of languages (e.g., this is the goat that the cows are pushing), and production of non-standard ORs that include resumption is often attested (e.g., Italian; French; English). In addition, starting at age 6, children start adopting passive subject relatives (SRs)…

In this article, we present kindergarten children's ideas about thermal phenomena before any educational intervention took place. In order to capture and account for the heterogeneity of the kindergarten group in this study, first teachers observed children's exploration behavior, task orientation, science interest, and language comprehension in…

The present study aimed at investigating whether L2 learning affects phonological short-term and working memory and first language (L1) development. The performance of a group of 31 4- to-5-year-old sequential bilinguals attending an International School on tasks assessing phonological short-term and working memory and linguistic performance in L1…

The present study examined whether full access to sign language as a medium for instruction could influence performance in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks. Three groups of Italian participants (age range: 6-14 years) participated in the study: Two groups of deaf signing children and one group of hearing-speaking children. The two groups of deaf…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the attentional mechanisms of multilingual children with differential degrees of language competence. For this purpose, 118 children (61 female/57 male; mean age 10.9 years (SD = 0.29); early acquisition multilinguals) from the Ladin valleys in South Tyrol, Italy, performed the Attentional Network…

Although developmental dyslexia is often referred to as a cross-modal disturbance, tests of different modalities using the same stimuli are lacking. We compared the performance of 23 children with dyslexia and 42 chronologically matched control readers on reading versus repetition tasks and visual versus auditory lexical decision using the same…

We investigated the role of number agreement on verb and of animacy in the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in 51 monolingual Italian-speaking children, mean age 9:33, tested through a self-paced listening experiment with a final comprehension question. A "digit span test" and a "listening span test" were…

Few studies have explored the development of the gesture-speech system after the two-word stage. Aim of the present study is to examine developmental changes in speech and gesture use, in the context of a simple naming task. Fifty-one children (age range: 2;3-7;6) were divided into five age groups and requested to name pictures representing…

Purpose: The authors studied the effect of the cochlear implant (CI) on language comprehension and production in deaf children who had received a CI in the 2nd year of life. Method: The authors evaluated lexical and morphosyntactic skills in comprehension and production in 17 Italian children who are deaf (M = 54 months of age) with a CI and in 2…

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers…

Comparison of the performance of 25 deaf Italian adolescents and hearing controls on written grammatical tests found that the deaf subjects showed normal development in pluralization tasks, delayed development in pronoun tasks, and a qualitatively different pattern in an article task. (Author/CB)

Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms ("some", "might", "or") (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981; Smith, 1980). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou…

Background: The discovery of clinical markers for specific language impairment (SLI) in children can assist in the accurate identification of children with this disorder, and in a description of the disorder's phenotype for genetic study. One challenge to this type of research is the fact that languages vary in the most salient symptoms of SLI.…