The meaning of most words in language depends on their context. Understanding how the human brain extracts contextualized meaning, and identifying where in the brain this takes place, remain important scientific challenges. But technological and computational advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence now provide unprecedented…

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…

The present research is a cross-linguistic study indicating that the timing of motor production not only depends on the shape of a letter and the activation of its motor program but also on the way the orthographic representations encode the letters for spelling retrieval. English and Italian-speaking participants wrote cognate words (e.g.,…

Prediction in language comprehension has become a key mechanism in recent psycholinguistic theory, with evidence from lexical prediction as a primary source. Less work has focused on whether comprehenders also make structural predictions above the lexical level. Previous research shows that processing is facilitated for syntactic structures which…

The majority of words in most languages consist of derived poly-morphemic words but a cross-linguistic review of the literature (Amenta and Crepaldi in Front Psychol 3:232-243, 2012) shows a contradictory picture with respect to how such words are represented and processed. The current study examined the effects of linearity and structural…

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…

Agreement is a covariation in morphological form that reflects relations between words. A series of experiments were carried out in Italian during production and comprehension where an element interferes with agreement. The likelihood of interference found in both modalities is related to the markedness of the intervener and to its grammatical…

We investigated the extent to which the literal meanings of the words forming literally plausible idioms (e.g., "break the ice") are semantically composed and how the idiomatic meaning is integrated in the unfolding sentence representation. Participants read ambiguous idiom strings embedded in highly predictable, literal, and idiomatic…

We investigate the production of subject and object "who"- and "which"-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that…

This article suggests a method to deal with cross-linguistic differences in children with Specific Language Impairment. The differences in vulnerable structures reflect typological properties of the surrounding language (e.g., Leonard 2014a, 2014b). This article adds a developmental perspective to the discussion by interpreting the vulnerable…

This article reports on the findings of an empirical study that relates translation studies and research on language acquisition/attrition by looking at the interpretation of overt pronominal subjects, previously found to be problematic in both domains. The focus is on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by two…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

First language (L1) attrition in adulthood offers new insight on neuroplasticity and the role of language experience in shaping neurocognitive responses to language. Attriters are multilinguals for whom advancing L2 proficiency comes at the cost of the L1, as they experience a shift in exposure and dominance (e.g., due to immigration). To date,…

It remains controversial whether children are able to process and integrate specific linguistic cues in their mental model to the same extent as adults. In the present study, a sentence continuation task was employed to determine how Italian speakers (4-, 5-, 6-year-olds and adults) interpret prosodic cues to decide which referent is more salient…

The study aimed at investigating the role of nominal gender in animal categorization in preschoolers. Given the regularities characterizing gender system, at both syntactical and morphological level, Italian language is suitable to address this issue. In three experiments, participants were asked to classify pictures of animals as male or female.…