The present study aimed to investigate the communicative characteristics of children with cochlear implants (CIs) and their mothers in interaction, whether and how they differ from those of mother-child dyads with normal hearing, and whether mother and child influence each other over the first year after implantation. Eighteen Italian-speaking…

Deferred imitation and early social communication skills were compared among speaking and nonspeaking children with autism and children developing typically. Overall, the children with autism showed a lower frequency on measures of deferred imitation and social communication compared with typically developing children. Deferred imitation was…

The emergence of the Down syndrome (DS) behavioural phenotype during early development may be of great importance for early intervention. The main goal of this study was to investigate the good-imitator-poor-talker developmental profile in DS at preschool age. Twenty children with Down syndrome (DS; mean nonverbal mental age NMA 1 y10 m) and 15…

This study analysed the early linguistic development of Italian pre-term children. Samples of spontaneous pre-linguistic and verbal production were recorded at 12 and 18 months of age from two groups of children: 24 pre-term children and 15 full-term children. The Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Questionnaire was administered at 24 months…

Background: It is generally assumed that children with Down syndrome (DS) present a deficit in lexical production relative to their cognitive abilities. However, the literature on this topic has recently shown several contradictory results. In addition, most studies only consider vocabulary production in its vocal modality. However it is also…