Morfologia grammaticale in bambini di 2 anni e mezzo e 3 anni

Il presente studio esplora le produzioni degli articoli determinativi, dei pronomi clitici oggetto e della 3ª persona dell'indicativo presente. Alla ricerca hanno partecipato 78 bambini di lingua italiana suddivisi in due gruppi di età: 2;6 e 3 anni. I risultati mostrano che nessuna categoria grammaticale è acquisita ed i pronomi clitici non vengono prodotti a 2;6 anni. In accordo con la letteratura, è stata confermata una maggiore produzione dei morfemi singolari rispetto ai plurali; la morfologia verbale ha produzioni più elevate rispetto alla morfologia libera. Inoltre i risultati hanno confermato gli errori di omissione negli articoli determinativi e nei pronomi clitici e di sostituzione nei verbi

Morfologia grammaticale in bambini di 2 anni e mezzo e 3 anni.

Il presente studio esplora le produzioni degli articoli determinativi, dei pronomi clitici oggetto e della 3ª persona dell'indicativo presente. Alla ricerca hanno partecipato 78 bambini di lingua italiana suddivisi in due gruppi di età: 2;6 e 3 anni. I risultati mostrano che nessuna categoria grammaticale è acquisita ed i pronomi clitici non vengono prodotti a 2;6 anni. In accordo con la letteratura, è stata confermata una maggiore produzione dei morfemi singolari rispetto ai plurali; la morfologia verbale ha produzioni più elevate rispetto alla morfologia libera. Inoltre i risultati hanno confermato gli errori di omissione negli articoli determinativi e nei pronomi clitici e di sostituzione nei verbi

Attentional engagement during syllable discrimination: The role of salient prosodic cues in 6- to 8-month-old infants

Prosodic cues drive speech segmentation and guide syllable discrimination. However, less is known about the attentional mechanisms underlying an infant's ability to benefit from prosodic cues. This study investigated how 6- to 8-month-old Italian infants allocate their attention to strong vs. weak syllables after familiarization with four repeats of a single CV sequence with alternating strong and weak syllables (different syllables on each trial). In the discrimination test-phase, either the strong or the weak syllable was replaced by a pure tone matching the suprasegmental characteristics of the segmental syllable, i.e., duration, loudness and pitch, whereas the familiarized stimulus was presented as a control. By using an eye-tracker, attention deployment (fixation times) and cognitive resource allocation (pupil dilation) were measured under conditions of high and low saliency that corresponded to the strong and weak syllabic changes, respectively. Italian learning infants were found to look longer and also to show, through pupil dilation, more attention to changes in strong syllable replacement rather than weak syllable replacement, compared to the control condition. These data offer insights into the strategies used by infants to deploy their attention towards segmental units guided by salient prosodic cues, like the stress pattern of syllables, during speech segmentation

Real-word repetition as a predictor of grammatical competence in Italian children with typical language development

Background: Non-word repetition in children is a skill related to, but separable from grammatical ability. Lexical skill may bridge the gap between these two abilities. Aims: The main aim was to determine whether real-word-repetition tasks could be better as predictors of grammatical ability than non-word-repetition tasks in children with typical language. This proposal was pursued because lexical knowledge was assumed to make performance in repetition tasks more representative of other language abilities, whereas non-word-repetition tasks are heavily influenced by phonological short-term memory. Methods & Procedures: In order to investigate this possibility, three repetition tasks (two real-word lists characterized by different lexical knowledge and one non-word list), were compared in three groups of three- to four-year-olds with typical language (42 children). Grammatical ability was tested through probes for third-person plural inflection and direct-object clitic use. Outcomes & Results: Real words were repeated more accurately than non-words and the non-words were more sensitive to Syllable length than real words. Performance on all repetition tasks was correlated with grammatical ability, but real words predicted variance in grammatical ability to a greater extent than non-words. Conclusions & Implications: Given the lexical information contained in real words, repetition of such words was a better predictor of grammatical ability than non-word repetition. Future research should replicate and extend these results. Tasks using real words may also have considerable clinical potential; for this reason, these tasks might also be included in studies of children with language impairment

Cognitive and Linguistic components in lexical ability development of preschoolers: an explorative study

Learning to speak requires both basic and sophisticated abilities, working jointly for building formal and semantic components. The aim of the present study was to investigate lexical development in preschoolers (age range: 3- to 6 years), in a cross-age research design. In particular, we explored the relationship between two different levels of lexical ability: naming and defining the meaning of words. In order to identify the variables and the processes underlying these lexical compe- tencies, we evaluated the specific role of cognitive factors, as measured by Fluid Intelligence and Clas- sification tasks; metacognitive factors, as measured by an Explicitation task; mnemonic factors, as measured by Digit span and Phonological Memory tasks and of linguistic factors, as measured by a Receptive vocabulary task. In general, the results showed an increase in both cognitive and linguistic competencies in relation with age; naming and defining abilities revealed a partially different pattern of association with the other variables considered